This study looked at personality trait and personality disorder correlates of self-rated altruism. In two studies over 4,000 adult British managers completed a battery of tests including a ‘bright side’ personality trait measure ; a ‘dark side’/disorders measure, and a measure of their Motives and Values which included Altruism. The two studies showed similar results revealing that those who were low on Adjustment but high on Interpersonal Sensitivity, Prudence and Inquisitiveness were more likely to value Altruism and be motivated to (...) commit altruistic acts which concerns helping others and creating an environment that places emphasis on customer service. Those more interested in “Getting Along” with others were more Altruistic than those more interested in “Getting Ahead” of others. Implications for the selection and management of altruistic people in a business are considered. Limitations and future directions of this research are also noted. (shrink)

By executive order, the US adopted an immigration policy that looks remarkably similar to a Muslim ban, and threatened to deport long-settled residents, such as the so-called Dreamers. Our defunct refugee system has not dealt adequately with increased refugee flows, forcing desperate people to undertake increasingly risky measures in efforts to reach safe havens. Meanwhile increased migration flows over recent years appear to have contributed to a rise in right-wing populism, apparently driving phenomena such as Brexit and Trumpism. In this (...) original and insightful book Gillian Brock offers answers and tools that assist us in evaluating current migration policy and in helping to determine which policies may be permissible and which are normatively indefensible. She offers a comprehensive framework for responding to the many challenges which have recently emerged, and for delivering justice for people on the move along with those affected by migration. (shrink)

A radical new assessment of Hegel revealing the problems and limitations of sociological method.

Many of the most skilled and educated citizens of developing countries choose to emigrate. How may those societies respond to these facts? May they ever legitimately prevent the emigration of their citizens? Gillian Brock and Michael Blake debate these questions, and offer distinct arguments about the morality of emigration.

My target in this paper is a view that has sometimes been called the ‘ Linguistic Doctrine of Necessary Truth ’ and sometimes ‘Conventionalism about Necessity’. It is the view that necessity is grounded in the meanings of our expressions—meanings which are sometimes identified with the conventions governing those expressions—and that our knowledge of that necessity is based on our knowledge of those meanings or conventions. In its simplest form the view states that a truth, if it is necessary, is (...) necessary because it is analytic. It is widely recognized that this simple version of the view faces a prima facie problem with the existence of the necessary a posteriori. Assuming that all analytic truths are a priori, if there are necessary a posteriori truths then there are necessary synthetic truths—contradicting the view’s claim that all necessary truths are analytic. Contemporary L-DONTers have things to say about the problem, but in this paper I want to suggest that there is a different, more serious, problem which arises from the phenomenon of indexicality, which L-DONTers have not taken account of. Though there are many versions of the problem, a simple one is this. Consider Kaplan’s celebrated sentence. (shrink)

Gillian Brock develops a model of global justice that takes seriously the moral equality of all human beings notwithstanding their legitimate diverse identifications and affiliations. She addresses concerns about implementing global justice, showing how we can move from theory to feasible public policy that makes progress toward global justice.

This book fundamentally challenges the radical credentials of post-structuralism. Though Derrida, Foucault and Deleuze claim to have 'deconstructed' metaphysics, their work has much in common with previous attempts to 'end' the metaphysical tradition, from Kant to Nietzshe and Heidegger, and by sociology in general. Gillian Rose shows that this anti-metaphysical writing always appears in historically specific jurisprudential terms, which themselves found and recapitulate metaphysical categories. She reconsiders post-structuralism in this light and assesses the relationship between deconstruction and the earlier (...) structuralism of Saussure and Levi-Strauss. She argues in conclusion that the choice between post-structuralist nihilism and Hegelian and Marxist dialectic is spurious. (shrink)

This paper presents the central theory from my book Truth in Virtue of Meaning: a defence of the Analytic/Synthetic Distinction (2008) in a more concise form.

Could it ever be right to say that a language---as opposed to a speaker of the language---makes, or presupposes or somehow commits itself to certain claims? Such as that certain kinds of objects exist, or that things are a certain way? It can be tempting to think not, to think that languages are just the neutral media through which speakers make claims. Yet certain, surprisingly diverse, phenomena---analyticity, racial epithets, object-involving direct reference, arithmetic, and semantic paradoxes like the Liar---have pushed philosophers (...) towards views according to which languages can have presuppositions or commitments of their own---to things like the existence of numbers, the marital status of bachelors, the existence of water, and even to contradictions or morally abhorrent views. In this paper I want to present some recent data from linguistics that supports a less commonly discussed, and rather surprising version of this idea: namely that English presupposes the existence of locations or places. In section one I do some work to clarify what this claim could possibly mean by identifying some central ways in which languages have been thought to presuppose various things about the world. In section two I present the core of the linguistic data and theory from the work of Susan Rothstein. In section three I compare it to some older work by David Kaplan, arguing that the significance of the new results is greater for the issue at hand, and then in the final section I examine the philosophical significance of this work. One might attempt to draw quite impressive conclusions: such as that the existence of space is analytic, and hence a priori. I will argue that such a conclusion here would be over hasty, and that what we really have is just a surprising fact about our not-so-neutral natural language. (shrink)

The Broken Middle offers a startlingly original rethinking of the modern philosophical tradition and fundamentally rejects the anti-philosophy and anti-theory of post-modernity. Extending across the disciplines from philosophy to theology, Judaica, law, social and political theory, literary criticism, feminism and architecture, this book stakes itself on a renewed potential for sustained critique. Against the grain of much contemporary thought, this work of criticism offers the reader a way beyond the spurious alternatives of "totalization" or acknowledgement of the "other". The Broken (...) Middle expounds the phenomenology of the diremption of law and ethics. By reconstructing the suppressed political history of modernity, it shows that contemporary thought belongs to a tradition which has become ancient. Following this drama in the configuration of anxiety of beginning, equivocation of the ethical, and agon of authorship, the logos opens out of the pathos of the concept. (shrink)

An important part of learning to fight is learning to overcome psychological barriers against harming others. Though there are some interesting exceptions, most human beings experience signi cant internal resistance to doing harm to other people. (Marshall 1947, Grossman 1995, Morton 2004, Jensen 2012) Whatever its moral properties, this reluctance to harm can compromise the ability to fight effectively. Hence one might think that combat training should help trainees overcome such barriers. -/- However, on one compelling theory of evil, what (...) makes an action evil, as opposed to merely wrong, is that it is made possible by the agent's use of learned or innate strategies to overcome the natural barriers to harming others. (Morton 2004: 34{68) If this is right, it poses a prima facie moral challenge to these aspects of fight-training. The challenge is a special case of a more general one, namely, how it could be morally permissible to make people better at harming others? That is a question that martial artists rarely take seriously. Indeed, it is commonly thought that becoming a martial artist, and teaching the martial arts, are morally supererogatory. This paper takes the special challenge seriously, and looks at what can be said in response. (shrink)

This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work was reproduced from the original artifact, and remains as true to the original work as possible. Therefore, you will see the original copyright references, library stamps (as most of these works have been housed in our most important libraries around the world), and other notations in the work. This work is in the public domain (...) in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work. As a reproduction of a historical artifact, this work may contain missing or blurred pages, poor pictures, errant marks, etc. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant. (shrink)

Santa Constanza est une des deux églises qui font partie de la première architecture chrétienne à Rome. Il ne reste aujourd'hui qu'un bâtiment circulaire de 29 m de diamètre. Il est probable que Santa Constanza fut à l'origine le mausolée impérial de la Via Nomentana à l'époque de l'empereur Julien. La mort de sa femme fut l'occasion de la construction de l'édifice. Nous possédons des preuves documentaires sur la sépulture de sa femme qui repose à côté de sa soeur. La (...) décoration de Santa Constanza semblait représenter et saluer l'ensemble des dieux, les païens et le chrétien. (shrink)

The main theme of this book is the complex relationship between government servants and the world around them and this is explored in a number of ways. The essays include studies of the people who played an important part in the development of 19 th century government: there is a chapter on the transmission of Benthamite ideas, an ccount of John Stuart Mill and his views on utilitarianism and bureaucracy, and of the work of Charles Trevelyan on the Northcote-Trevelyan Report. (...) The Treasury, the Colonial and Foreign Offices, the Labour Department of the Board of Trade are also examined in relation to government growth in the period. (shrink)

Some writers object to logical pluralism on the grounds that logic is normative. The rough idea is that the relation of logical consequence has consequences for what we ought to think and h...

Socioeconomic differences in behaviour are pervasive and well documented, but their causes are not yet well understood. Here, we make the case that a cluster of behaviours is associated with lower socioeconomic status, which we call “the behavioural constellation of deprivation.” We propose that the relatively limited control associated with lower SES curtails the extent to which people can expect to realise deferred rewards, leading to more present-oriented behaviour in a range of domains. We illustrate this idea using the specific (...) factor of extrinsic mortality risk, an important factor in evolutionary theoretical models. We emphasise the idea that the present-oriented behaviours of the constellation are a contextually appropriate response to structural and ecological factors rather than a pathology or a failure of willpower. We highlight some principles from evolutionary theoretical models that can deepen our understanding of how socioeconomic inequalities can become amplified and embedded. These principles are that small initial disparities can lead to larger eventual inequalities, feedback loops can embed early-life circumstances, constraints can breed further constraints, and feedback loops can operate over generations. We discuss some of the mechanisms by which SES may influence behaviour. We then review how the contextually appropriate response perspective that we have outlined fits with other findings about control and temporal discounting. Finally, we discuss the implications of this interpretation for research and policy. (shrink)

The sorites paradox is the name given to a class of paradoxical arguments, also known as little by little arguments, which arise as a result of the indeterminacy surrounding limits of application of the predicates involved. For example, the concept of a heap appears to lack sharp boundaries and, as a consequence of the subsequent indeterminacy surrounding the extension of the predicate ‘is a heap’, no one grain of wheat can be identified as making the difference between being a heap (...) and not being a heap. Given then that one grain of wheat does not make a heap, it would seem to follow that two do not, thus three do not, and so on. In the end it would appear that no amount of wheat can make a heap. We are faced with paradox since from apparently true premises by seemingly uncontroversial reasoning we arrive at an apparently false conclusion. (shrink)

This state-of-the-art guide to some of the most exciting work in current linguistics explores how the core components of the language faculty interact. It examines how these interactions are reflected in linguistic and cognitive theory, considers what they reveal about the operations of language within the mind, and looks at their reflections in expression and communication. Leading international scholars present cutting-edge accounts of developments in the interfaces between phonetics, phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics, and pragmatics. They bring to bear a rich (...) variety of methods and theoretical perspectives, focus on a broad array of issues and problems, and illustrate their arguments from a wide range of the world's languages. After the editors' introduction to its structure, scope, and content, the book is divided into four parts. The first, Sound, is concerned with the interfaces between phonetics and phonology, phonology and morphology, and phonology and syntax. Part II, Structure, considers the interactions of syntax with morphology, semantics, and the lexicon, and explores the status of the word and its representional status in the mind. Part III, Meaning, revisits the syntax-semantics interface from the perspective of compositionality, and looks at issues concerned with intonation, discourse, and context. The authors in the final part of the book, General Architectural Concerns, examine work on Universal Grammar, the overall model of language, and linguistic and associated theories of language and cognition. All scholars and advanced students of language will value this book, whether they are in linguistics, cognitive science, philosophy, artificial intelligence, computational science, or informatics. (shrink)

Logical monists and pluralists disagree about how many correct logics there are; the monists say there is just one, the pluralists that there are more. Could it turn out that both are wrong, and that there is no logic at all?

In a period of rapid internationalization of trade and increased labor mobility, is it relevant for nations to think about their moral obligations to others? Do national boundaries have fundamental moral significance, or do we have moral obligations to foreigners that are equal to our obligations to our compatriots? The latter position is known as cosmopolitanism, and this volume brings together a number of distinguished political philosophers and theorists to explore cosmopolitanism: what it consists in, and the positive case which (...) can be made for it. Their essays provide a comprehensive overview of both the current state of the debate and the alternative visions of cosmopolitanism with which we can move forward, and they will interest a wide range of readers in philosophy, political theory, and law. (shrink)

An argument defending the view that one cannot derive an ought from an is against the usual (suspect) counterexamples.

Take a correct sequent of formal logic, perhaps a simple logical truth, like the law of excluded middle, or something with premises, like disjunctive syllogism, but basically a claim of the form \.Γ can be empty. If you don’t like my examples, feel free to choose your own, everything I have to say should apply to those as well. Such a sequent attributes the properties of logical truth or logical consequence to a schematic sentence or argument. This paper aims to (...) answer the question of how beliefs in such attributions are justified, on both its descriptive and normative interpretations; I aim to say when we generally take ourselves to be justified in forming such beliefs, and to make it plausible that beliefs formed this way really are justified.We can ask such questions about many domains but there are special difficulties for answering them in logic. Some of the difficulties stem from the fact that logic is thought t.. (shrink)

A barrier to entailment exists if you can't get conclusions of a certain kind from premises of another. One of the most famous barriers in philosophy is Hume's Law, which says that you can't get normative conclusions from descriptive premises, or in slogan form: you can't get an ought from an is. This barrier is highly controversial, and many famous counterexamples were proposed in the last century. But there are other barriers which function almost as philosophical platitudes: no Universal conclusions (...) from Particular premises, no Future conclusions from premises about the Past, and no claims that attribute Necessity from premises that merely tell us how things happen to be in the Actual world. Barriers to Entailment proposes a unified logical account of five barriers that have played important roles in philosophy, in the process showing how to diagnose proposed counterexamples and arguing that the case for Hume's Law is as strong as that for the platitudinous barriers. -/- The first two parts of the book employ techniques from formal logic, but present them in an accessible way, suitable for any reader with some background in first-order model theory (of the kind that might be taught in a first class in logic). Gillian Russell introduces tense, modal, indexical, and deontic formal logics, but always avoids unneeded complexity. Each barrier is connected to broader philosophical topics: universality, time, necessity, context-sensitivity, and normativity. Russell brings out under-recognised connections between the domains and lays the groundwork for further work at the intersections. -/- The last part of the book transposes the formal work to informal barrier theses in the philosophy of language, in the process doing new work on the concept of logical consequence, and providing new responses to proposed informal counterexamples to Hume's Law which employ hard-to-formalise tools from natural language, such as speech acts and thick normative expressions. (shrink)

Corruption is a pervasive problem across the world and is regularly ranked as among the greatest global challenges. Considering the role that corruption plays in exacerbating deprivation and fuelling social tension, peaceful and just societies are unlikely to come about without tackling corruption. Addressing corruption should be a high priority for those concerned with poverty eradication, peace, security, and justice. Yet, curiously, corruption has not yet been the focus of any books by philosophers working on global justice topics. Corruption and (...) Global Justice does so. Author Gillian Brock offers a normatively justified account of how to allocate responsibilities for addressing corruption across the many agents who can and should play a role. In order to know who should take responsibility and how they should do so, we need to understand multiple forms of corruption, the corruption risks associated with various activities, the interventions that tackle corruption effectively, and current policy and legal frameworks in place for addressing corruption. In addition, Brock proposes a new framework for navigating responsibility to address injustice, one that is action-oriented and forward-looking. Adopting an agent-empowering approach and harnessing the power of joining forces in effective collective action, Corruption and Global Justice addresses a significant global problem in a comprehensive way, providing the tools we need for progress as we collaborate to tackle this global scourge. (shrink)

: This paper examines the nature of the harm-benefit tradeoff in early clinical research for interventions that involve remote possibility of direct benefit and likelihood of direct harms to research participants with fatal prognoses, by drawing on the example of gene transfer trials for glioblastoma multiforme. We argue that the appeal made by the component approach to clinical equipoise fails to account fully for the nature of the harm-benefit tradeoff—individual harm for social benefit—that would be required to justify such research. (...) An analysis of what we label "collateral affective benefits," such as the experience of hope or exercise of altruism, shows that the existence of these motivations reinforces rather than mitigates the necessity of justification by reference to social benefit. Evaluations of social benefit must be taken seriously in the research ethics review process to avoid the exploitation of research participants' motivations of hope or altruism and to avoid the possibility of inadvertent exploitation of high-risk research participants and the harms that would associate with such exploitation. (shrink)

& Behavioral and brain imaging research indicates that human infants, humans adults, and many nonhuman animals represent large nonsymbolic numbers approximately, discriminating between sets with a ratio limit on accuracy. Some behavioral evidence, especially with human infants, suggests that these representations differ from representations of small numbers of objects. To investigate neural signatures of this distinction, event-related potentials were recorded as adult humans passively viewed the sequential presentation of dot arrays in an adaptation paradigm. In two studies, subjects viewed successive (...) arrays of a single number of dots interspersed with test arrays presenting the same or a different number; numerical range (small numerical quantities 1–3 vs. large numerical.. (shrink)

This paper argues for the significance of Kaplan's logic LD in two ways: first, by looking at how logic got along before we had LD, and second, by using it to bring out the similarity between David Hume's thesis that one cannot deduce claims about the future on the basis of premises only about the past, and the so‐called "essentiality" of the indexical.

Leon Kass's often-cited essay, “Death with Dignity and the Sanctity of Life,” provides the basis for a case study in the rhetorical function of definition in debates concerning bioethics. The study examines the way a particular definition of “human dignity” is used to maintain an advantage of power in the debate over the morality of physician-assisted suicide. It also considers sources of human dignity that are deflected from attention by the rhetoric of Kass's formulation.

The analytic/synthetic distinction looks simple. It is a distinction between two different kinds of sentence. Synthetic sentences are true in part because of the way the world is, and in part because of what they mean. Analytic sentences - like all bachelors are unmarried and triangles have three sides - are different. They are true in virtue of meaning, so no matter what the world is like, as long as the sentence means what it does, it will be true. -/- (...) This distinction seems powerful because analytic sentences seem to be knowable in a special way. One can know that all bachelors are unmarried, for example, just by thinking about what it means. But many twentieth-century philosophers, with Quine in the lead, argued that there were no analytic sentences, that the idea of analyticity didn't even make sense, and that the analytic/synthetic distinction was therefore an illusion. Others couldn't see how there could fail to be a distinction, however ingenious the arguments of Quine and his supporters. -/- But since the heyday of the debate, things have changed in the philosophy of language. Tools have been refined, confusions cleared up, and most significantly, many philosophers now accept a view of language - semantic externalism - on which it is possible to see how the distinction could fail. One might be tempted to think that ultimately the distinction has fallen for reasons other than those proposed in the original debate. -/- In Truth in Virtue of Meaning, Gillian Russell argues that it hasn't. Using the tools of contemporary philosophy of language, she outlines a view of analytic sentences which is compatible with semantic externalism and defends that view against the old Quinean arguments. She then goes on to draw out the surprising epistemological consequences of her approach. (shrink)

Paraconsistent responses to vagueness are often thought to represent a revision of logical theory that is too radical to be defensible. The paracomplete logic of supervaluationism, SpV, is not only taken to be more conservative but is also commonly said to 'preserve classical logic'. This chapter argues that this is wrong on both counts. The paraconsistent logic SbV, or subvaluationism, is no less conservative than SpV nor more so. In the end both logics offer equally compelling theoretical approaches to vagueness. (...) Each approach is also equally objectionable, with neither providing an adequate account of vagueness, but this criticism arises from a feature shared by each approach that is independent of their paracompleteness or paraconsistency per se. For all that has been said, a paraconsistent approach, and the associated recourse to truth-value gluts, remains a contender in accounting for vagueness. (shrink)

A survey of contemporary work on logical pluralism.

Judaism and Modernity: Philosophical Essays challenges the philosophical presentation of Judaism as the sublime Other of modernity. Gillian Rose continues to develop a philosophical alternative to deconstruction and post-modernism by critically re-engaging the social and political issues at stake in every reconstruction. The chapters cover Judaism and philosophy, ethics and law (Halacha), 'The Future of Auschwitz', post-modern theology, Judaism and architecture, Judaism in Hegel, Nietzsche, Adorno and Derrida, and modern Jewish thinkers - Cohen, Rosenzweig, Buber, Benjamin, Strauss, Arendt, Weil (...) and Levinas. The opposition between philosophical reason and Judaic ethics is shown to ruin the possibility of critical reflection and of political action. The risks of critical rationality are reformulated for modern philosophy and for modern Jewish thought. (shrink)

In the thousand years from the end of the Roman Empire to the Renaissance and Reformation of the Sixteenth century the discussion of the great questions of philosophy and religion was intense. Does God exist? What is he like? What is the purpose of human life and how does God show concern for the future of mankind? This is an introduction to the debates which did more than anything else to transform the ancient into the modern world of thought.