Um die Beziehung zwischen Männern und dem physischen sowie phantasierten Vaginalen zu untersuchen, zielt dieser Beitrag auf die Lokalisierung und Erhellung der Transgender-Schwelle von Cisgender-Männern, statt auf die augenfälligen Phänomene des Transgender-Erlebens zu fokussieren. Indem der Autor das Vaginale als Pendant zum Phallischen postuliert, koppelt er vaginale psychische und verkörperlichte Zustände vom Weiblichen im strengen Sinn ab, um sie, ebenso wie das Phallische, Menschen sämtlicher Gender und biologischen Geschlechter zugänglich zu machen. Dieser Begriff weist über das Konzeptuelle hinaus auf die (...) fleischliche, verkörperlichte Erfahrung vieler Transgender-Männer, die in ganzen, partiellen und/oder temporär »weiblichen« Körpern leben. Es kann auch auf die physio-psychische Realität zahlreicher Cisgender-Männer Anwendung finden. Vorstellung und Diskussion eines schwulen Cisgender-Patienten, der seinen Anus als Vagina erlebt und phantasiert, sind ebenfalls Teil des Beitrags. (shrink)

Edited by Svetla S. Griffin and Ilaria L.E. Ramelli. Harvard University Press, Hellenic Studies 88, 2019, ca 600 pages. ISBN-10: 0674241320; ISBN-13: 978-0674241329. Contributors: Luc Brisson, Kevin Corrigan, John Dillon, Harold Tarrant, John Turner, John Finamore, Ilaria Ramelli, Karla Pollmann, Carlos Lévy, Lenka Karfíková, Pauliina Remes, Mark J. Edwards, Pier Franco Beatrice, Svetla Slaveva-Griffin, Aaron Johnson, Dimka Gocheva, Olivier Dufault, and Robert Hannah.

In the third and subsequent editions of Principles of Biomedical Ethics, Tom Beauchamp and James Childress articulate a series of ethical norms that they regard as “derived” from, and hence carrying, the “authority” of the common morality. Although Beauchamp and Childress do not claim that biomedical norms they derive from the common morality automatically become constituents of the common morality, or that every detail of their account carries the authority of the common morality, they regard these derived norms as provisionally (...) binding in a way that does not apply to the norms of mere “particular” moralities. Whereas particular moralities “do not bind other persons or communities,” Beauchamp and Childress have designed the norms of Principles of Biomedical Ethics to be “extensions” of the common morality that universally binds other persons and communities. Beauchamp and Childress seem to hold that (1) the norms they articulate in Principles of Biomedical Ethics are derived in an objective way from the common morality, and also that by virtue of being so derived (2) they carry a moral authority that objectively exceeds the authority of norms constituting particular moralities. My thesis in this essay is that both of these claims are false. (shrink)

In an attempt to respond effectively to the COVID-19 pandemic, policy makers and scientific experts who advise them have aspired to present a unified front. Leveraging the authority of science, they have at times portrayed politically favored COVID interventions, such as lockdowns, as strongly grounded in scientific evidence—even to the point of claiming that enacting such interventions is simply a matter of “following the science.” Strictly speaking, all such claims are false, since facts alone never yield moral-political conclusions. More importantly, (...) attempts to present a unified front have led to a number of other actions and statements by scientists and policy makers that erode the authority of science. These include actions and statements that: (1) mislead the public about epidemiological matters such as mortality rates, cause of death determinations, and computerized modeling, or fail to correct mainstream media sources that interpret such concepts in misleading ways; (2) incorporate moral-political opinions into ostensible statements of fact; and (3) misrepresent or misuse scientific expertise. The fundamental thesis of the paper is not primarily that such actions and statements have proliferated during the COVID-19 epidemic (though I think they have), but rather that they are unscientific and that presenting them as science undermines the authority of science. In the moral-political realm, the great power of science and the source of its authority derives from its agnosticism about fundamental moral-political claims. Science, for instance, has no built-in presumption that we should respect life, promote freedom, or practice toleration; nor does it tell us which of these values to prioritize when values conflict. Because of this agnosticism, science is recognized across a broad diversity perspectives as morally and politically impartial, and authoritative within its proper sphere. When it is infused with partisan bias, it loses that authority. (shrink)

Ethics appears early in the life of a culture. It is not the creation of philosophers. Many philosophers today think that their job is to take the ethics of their society in hand, analyse it into parts, purge the bad ideas, and organize the good into a systematic moral theory. The philosophers' ethics that results is likely to be very different from the culture's raw ethics and, they think, being better, should replace it. But few of us, even among philosophers, (...) settle real-life moral questions by consulting the Categorical Imperative or the Principle of Utility, largely because, if we do, we often do not trust the outcome or cannot even reliably enough decide what it is. By contrast, James Griffin explores the question what philosophers can reasonably expect to contribute to normative ethics or to the ethics of a culture. Griffin argues that moral philosophers must tailor their work to what ordinary humans' motivational capabilities, and he offers a new account of moral deliberation. (shrink)

Leibniz states that 'metaphysics is natural theology', and this is especially true of his metaphysics of modality. In this book, Michael V. Griffin examines the deep connection between the two and the philosophical consequences which follow from it. Grounding many of Leibniz's modal conceptions in his theology, Griffin develops a new interpretation of the ontological argument in Leibniz and Descartes. This interpretation demonstrates that their understanding God's necessary existence cannot be construed in contemporary modal logical terms. He goes (...) on to develop a necessitarian interpretation of Leibniz, arguing that Leibniz, like Spinoza, is committed to the thesis that everything actual is metaphysically necessary, but that Leibniz rejects Spinoza's denial of God's moral perfection. His book will appeal to scholars of early modern philosophy and philosophers interested in modal metaphysics and the philosophy of religion. (shrink)

In this paper we consider the arguments Russell uses in The principies of mathematics, §55 to establish the view that all relations are universals. These arguments are shown to be defective. Finally, we consider the connection between Russell's view of relations and wider aspects of his philosophy—in particular, his theories of reference and truth and the gradual break-down of his absolute realism.

Madison Powers raises the difficult problem of repugnant desires. The problem is not only difficult but pervasive, more pervasive even than Powers says. He notes that it affects hedonist, eudaimonist, and desire-fulfilment forms of utilitarianism; but it also affects the form of utilitarianism that uses a list of irreducibly plural values, so long as one of the values on the list is pleasure or happiness, and it can affect non-utilitarian positions as well for the same reason.

As reproductive freedoms in the U.S. undergo significant rollbacks, vital reproductive health services — and the care teams delivering them — face escalating legal threats and complexity. This qualitative case-control community-based participatory research study describes how legal problem-solving supports for reproductive care teams serving mothers with opioid use disorder are protective for both patients and care team members. We describe how medical legal partnerships (MLPs) can promote Reproductive Justice and argue for wider adoption of care-team facing legal supports.

Many have taken Sellars’s critique of empiricism in “Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind” (EPM) to be aimed at his teacher C. I. Lewis. But if so, why do the famous arguments of its opening sections carry so little force against Lewis’s views? Understandably, some respond by denying that Lewis’s epistemology is among the positions targeted by Sellars. But this is incorrect. Indeed, Sellars had earlier offered more trenchant (if already familiar) critiques of Lewis’s epistemology. What is original about EPM (...) is that it criticizes empiricist positions like Lewis’s not because of their foundationalism, but because of their psychologism about meaning. Since psychologism turns out to be unacceptable by Lewis’s own lights, EPM has a compelling (if implicit) critique of Lewis to offer after all, one that strikes at the heart of his philosophical system. (shrink)

This volume studies the origin and evolution of philosophical interest in Aristotle's Categories, and illuminates the earliest arguments for Aristotle's approach to logic as the foundation of higher education.

Charles Sanders Peirce has commonly been interpreted as a proponent of an epistemic theory of truth. Such a theory has the apparent advantage of directly undercutting radical skepticism, but the disadvantage of implausibly entailing that there are no truths concerning irretrievably lost facts. Recently Andrew Howat has defended Peirce’s epistemic constraint on truth by recasting Peirce’s claim that all truths would be believed following sufficient inquiry, not as constitutive of truth, but as a Wittgensteinian hinge proposition. I begin with a (...) twofold historical reply to Howat: first, Peirce can at least plausibly be read as claiming that the claim in question is analytic of the concept <truth>; and second, while Peirce did think we must accept without evidence the further claim that there are any truths (so characterized), he regarded this further claim not as a Wittgensteinian hinge but as a reasonable hope. I then substantively defend the latter Peircean proposal, arguing that hopes, as against beliefs, are chiefly warranted pragmatically, and so can be warranted even to a sufficient level to render them properly action-guiding in cases where belief in the same proposition would remain unjustified. I conclude by suggesting, first, that this proposal is superior to Wittgenstein’s own epistemology in evading psychologism, and second, that it attractively vindicates the reasonableness of inquiry on Peircean grounds that don’t require an appeal to an implausible epistemic theory of truth. (shrink)

In this article, I expound and defend an interpretation of Sellars as a metaethical quasi-realist. Sellars analyzes moral discourse in non-cognitivist terms: in particular, he analyzes “ought”-statements as expressions of collective intentions deriving from a collective commitment to provide for the general welfare. But he also endorses a functional-role theory of meaning, on which a statement’s meaning is grounded in its being governed by semantical rules concerning language entry, intra-linguistic, and language departure transitions, and a theory of truth as correct (...) assertibility relative to such semantical rules. On these non-representationalist theories, even though moral statements are expressions of intentions and not fundamentally descriptive, they nevertheless count as assertorically meaningful, and some count as positively true. I further argue that this interpretation is capable not only of explaining Sellars’ explicitly metaethical writings, but also of unifying his scientific realism with his commitment to the ineliminable and indispensable role of the language of intentions: if this linguistic framework does not play an explanatory role, but only an expressive role, this explains both why Sellars’ commitment to it does not contravene his naturalism, as well as why, given the necessity of such language for our practical engagement with the world, the scientific image of humans in the world will only be completed once such language supplements it to enable us to relate practically to it. (shrink)

Regardless this will have the following points: if we want to solve global problems , we need to - the global ethics. The ethics can not be the last of the modern world view provided by the world view to the material - the ultimate energy as the true occasion of the universe, because the view is nihilism, the denial code of ethics is part of the universe was constructed. The ethics can not learn from the Western tradition provide nervous, (...) because the traditional occasion of neural science regarded as the ultimate truth is only one never to create the world nervous. According to this view, apart from the scientific method and with the fact that malignant evil conflict, and promote individual traditional classic can correct the flexibility to stimulate the heart, resulting in another of its special moral admonition should be universal. a global ethics of the philosophical foundation provided by Whitehead's view of the world, because the argument for God and the creation of the ultimate. I will argue the following theses: If we are to solve our global problems , we need a global ethic. Such an ethic cannot be provided by the late modern worldview, according to which matter-energy is the only ultimate reality, because this view is nihilistic, denying that moral norms belong to the fabric of the universe. Such an ethic also cannot be provided by traditional Western theism, according to which the only ultimate reality is a deity who created the world ex nihilo, because this view, besides conflicting with scientific method and the fact of evil, promotes the idea that the scriptures of one's tradition are infallibly inspired, so that its particularistic moral injunctions should be universally enforced. The philosophical foundation for a global ethic can be provided by Whitehead's worldview, with its two ultimates: God and creativity. (shrink)

Instrumental CSR perspectives suggest that selective investments in prosocial, voluntary behaviors are largely profit-driven, whereas institutional theory emphasizes legitimacy-seeking as a significant mechanism for explicit CSR disclosure. We test both profit-seeking and legitimacy-seeking mechanisms, derived from empirical findings of Western-oriented firms, in a unique setting to understand voluntary CSR disclosure in an Eastern context: South Korea. By examining voluntary disclosure of the 500 largest South Korean firms’ social contributions from 2006 to 2012, a time period purposefully encompassing the global financial (...) crisis, we highlight the limitations of corporate social responsibility theorizing when East meets West. Our findings suggest profitability is not significantly related to voluntary disclosure as predicted by Western, instrumental CSR literature. Overall, we found support for legitimacy-seeking mechanisms as the likelihood of disclosure increased for publicly listed firms and those employing a larger number of workers for all years between 2006 and 2012. Further, firms affiliated with chaebols are more likely to disclose prosocial behaviors prior to, and after, the GFC compared to firms that are not affiliated with chaebols regardless of profitability further suggesting that legitimacy-seeking mechanisms may underlie CSR reporting in Korean firms. (shrink)

This chapter analyzes the relationship between number and substance in the intelligible realm. Plotinus formulates three hypotheses about the existence of number in the intelligible: 1) number is posterior to the Forms; 2) number is simultaneous with the Forms; and 3) number is anterior to the Forms. He proves that the last hypothesis is true. Based on the distinction between substance as ontological actualization of beings and quantity as the countability of individual units, he defines two kinds of number: Substantial (...) Number, which is the activity of substance and a power of being; and Monadic Number, which enumerates individual things. As an activity of substance, the former enacts the limiting role of the Monad, while, as a power of substance, it enacts the role of the Indefinite Dyad as potentiality, limited into existence by the Monad. While substantial number actualizes the existence of that which has separated from the One in the intelligible, monadic number expresses quantitatively that which has been already defined by substantial number. Plotinus also pioneers the view of the substantial number as henad and, in turn, shapes the development of later Neoplatonic theory of number. (shrink)

Chapter six examines the relationship between Plotinus’ concepts of number and multiplicity, and Porphyry’s organization of the Enneads. Porphyry’s thematical arrangement of the Enneads is traditionally considered to be more detrimental than beneficial for understanding Plotinus’ thought. The chapter re-examines this issue and discovers that Porphyry fuses Plotinus’ philosophy with Neopythagorean numerical symbolism to reveal the central organizing theme of Plotinus’ universe. In the Neopythagorean tradition, the number six is considered to be the first perfect number and the hexad is (...) identified as the number of Soul, while the completion of the universe is represented by the number nine, which is “called ‘ennead’ as if it were the ‘henad’ of everything within it, by derivation from the ‘one’.” The individual treatises are consequently grouped in nines, because they enclose the numerical essence of the universe from “henad” to “ennead.” Porphyry’s arrangement of the Enneads encrypts numerically the perfect unity of Plotinus’ universe, for which Ennead VI.6 provides the conceptual blueprint. (shrink)

Pragmatist responses to skepticism about empirical justification have mostly been underwhelming, either presupposing implausible theses like relativism or anti-realism, or else showing our basic empirical beliefs to be merely psychologically inevitable rather than rationally warranted. In this paper I defend a better one: a modified version of an argument by Wilfrid Sellars that we are pragmatically warranted in accepting that our perceptual beliefs are likely to be true, since their likely truth is necessary for the satisfaction of our goal of (...) effective agency. On the version of the argument I defend, the great good for human life of control over our empirical circumstances renders our goal of effective agency reasonable. But only if our perceptual beliefs are likely to be true—and only if we accept that this is so, assuming it as a premise for inference and a guide for action—will the success of our actions be due to our effective agency, not mere luck. Since we’re warranted in taking the necessary means to our reasonable ends, we’re warranted in accepting that our perceptual beliefs are generally justified, and so that skepticism about empirical justification is false. (shrink)

While C. I. Lewis was traditionally interpreted as an epistemological foundationalist throughout his major works, virtually every recent treatment of Lewis's epistemology dissents. But the traditional interpretation is correct: Lewis believed that apprehensions of "the given" are certain independently of support from, and constitute the ultimate warrant for, objective empirical beliefs. This interpretation proves surprisingly capable of accommodating apparently contrary textual evidence. The non-foundationalist reading, by contrast, simply cannot explain Lewis's explicit opposition to coherentism and his insistence that only apprehensions (...) of the given enable us to answer the regress problem -- and so vindicate the possibility of empirical justification. (shrink)

The past two decades have seen an outpouring of work in legal theory that is self-consciously critical of aspects of American law and the institutions of the liberal state. In this lively volume, eminent scholars in philosophy, law, and political science respond to this recent scholarship by exploring what constitutes a "radical" critique of the law, examining such theories as critical legal studies, feminist theory and theories of "difference," and critical race theory. The authors consider whether the critiques advanced in (...) recent legal theory can truly be called radical and what form a radical critique of American law should take. Writing at the cutting edge of the critique of critical legal theory, they offer insights first on critical legal scholarship, then on feminist political and legal theory. A third group of contributions questions the radicalness of these approaches in light of their failure to challenge fundamental aspects of liberalism, while a final section focuses on current issues of legal reform through critical views on criminal punishment, including observations on rape and hate speech. Each major essay describes the underlying principles in the development of a radical legal theory and addresses unresolved questions relating to it, while accompanying commentaries present conflicting views. The resulting dialogue explores wide-ranging issues like equity, value relativism, adversarial and empathic legal advocacy, communitarianism and the social contract, impartiality and contingency, "natural" law, and corrective justice. A common thread for many of the articles is a focus on the social dimension of society and law, which finds the individualism of prevailing liberal theories too limiting. Radical Critiques of the Law is particularly unique in presenting critical and feminist approaches in one volume-along with skeptical commentary about just how radical some critiques really are. Proposing alternative critiques that embody considerably greater promise of being truly radical, it offers provocative reading for both philosophers and legal scholars by showing that many claims to radicalism are highly problematic at best. (shrink)

The concept of number is the troublemaker in the history of Platonism. It separated the followers of Plato and Aristotle into two camps for generations. For Plotinus, however, the concept becomes the peacemaker, which reconciles the camps. The importance of this reconciliation is central to Plotinus’ philosophical system because it not only uses Aristotle to defend Plato from Aristotle himself, but establishes Plotinus’ concept of number as the fundamental link between the number theories of the Neopythagoreans and the later Neoplatonists.This (...) book demonstrates that the subject of number should be considered among the most important concepts for understanding Plotinus’ philosophy and therefore deserves greater scholarly attention than it has received. Plotinus adopts and adapts Platonic and Neopythagorean cosmology to place number in the foundation of the intelligible realm and the construction of the universe. Throughout the Enneads and especially in Ennead VI.6, he systematically peels off the layers of mathematical and quantitative perception from the concept of number to reveal that real intelligible number is the primary activity of substance, which orders the unfolding of the universe from its absolute source into a finite multiplicity. (shrink)

Were terrorists ever to effectively deploy weapons of mass destruction, medical practice would be quickly transformed. Many ordinary clinicians would be asked or required to treat unfamiliar yet serious medical conditions in a setting of overwhelming urgency and impossible odds. Clinical focus would shift from doing good things for a succession of individual patients to considering many patients at once, a change that could beget loss of trust and rapport with patients. Clinicians might also experience restrictions in personal liberties and (...) appropriation of their property. The purpose of this essay is to develop a teleological framework for undertaking this transformation. In ordinary clinical medicine, the elusiveness of the individual telos (i.e., the good for the individual) is acknowledged in procedures (such as social history taking, informed consent and outpatient scheduling) designed to protect patients' (and clinicians') prerogatives to interpret the telos for themselves. In mass casualty scenarios, on the other hand, the telos is standardized and regarded as an Immediate Object (usually as a state of affairs in which survival is maximized and permanent disability is minimized). Clinicians who provide mass casualty care will face a number of ethical challenges that can be negotiated by appealing to the political and ethical rationale, and limits, pertaining to the pursuit of aggregate survival as an Immediate Object. (shrink)

This essay examines the management of ventilatory failure in disaster settings where clinical needs overwhelm available resources. An ethically defensible approach in such settings will adopt a “sufficiency of care” perspective that is: (1) adaptive, (2) resource-driven, and (3) responsive to the values of populations being served. Detailed, generic, antecedently written guidelines for “ventilator triage” or other management issues typically are of limited value, and may even impede ethical disaster response if they result in rescuers’ clumsily interpreting events through the (...) lens of the guideline, rather than customizing tactics to the actual context. Especially concerning is the tendency of some expert planners to mistakenly assume that medical treatment of respiratory failure: (1) always requires full-feature mechanical ventilators, (2) will always occur in hospitals, and (3) can be planned in advance without sophisticated public consultation about likely ethical dilemmas. (shrink)

Due to the controversy surround his political war-time writings, Nishida Kitarō and his entire corpus has been accused of promoting and supporting Japanese imperialism. Despite the valid criticisms of his writings during the war-time period, Nishida’s early work in An Inquiry into the Good is not so easily interpreted as supporting nationalism. In fact, depending on the lens through which one reads Nishida’s early writings, one can even find the germs of emancipatory ideas that can easily be put in dialogue (...) with other liberatory thinkers such as Marx, Kropotkin, and Adorno. In this article, by considering the pluripotentiality of the text rather than a hermetically sealed off nationalist reading of it, I reread the ethical politics in An Inquiry into the Good through an emancipatory lens, considering how Nishida’s thought could have been taken up in a very different post-1911 Japan that did not move toward authoritarian militarism. Furthermore, I argue that the ambiguity surrounding his early political writings is consistent with his resistance to authoritarian ethics and his emphasis on the autonomy of the individual. (shrink)

Ioannidis [Why most published research findings are false. PLoS Med 2: e124 ] identifies six factors that contribute to explaining why most of the current published research findings are more likely to be false than true, and argues that for many current scientific fields, claimed research findings may often be simply accurate measures of the prevailing bias. In this article, we argue that three “hot” areas in current biological research, viz., agent-based modeling, evolutionary developmental biology , and systems biology, are (...) especially prone to the flaws. (shrink)

Over the past four decades, stakeholder research has united a chorus of voices from different disciplines using different terminology for different audiences all related to a seemingly similar topic: those that affect and are affected by business. By juxtaposing a comprehensive review of the early years of stakeholder research against more recent stakeholder research, we identify areas of common convergence as well as emergent scholarship. We develop an organizing framework consisting of three stakeholder-related themes: who or what is a stakeholder; (...) mechanisms underlying stakeholder relationships; and outcomes-oriented stakeholder research. Future research opportunities include: simultaneously examining multiple stakeholders at multiple levels; multiplier effects along the value chain and across geographies; and net impacts. We conclude by identifying how stakeholder research can “move the needle” on important business issues such as: income inequality and CEO pay; human rights and building community inclusion; disease alleviation; and food security in firms’ continuous quest to create value. (shrink)

This paper offers a critical interpretation and evaluation of Wilfrid Sellars’s treatment of skepticism about empirical justification. It defends three central claims. First, against the suggestion that Sellars’s work simply bypasses traditional skeptical problems, I make the novel interpretive claim that Sellars not only addresses skepticism about empirical justification, but offers two independent (albeit sketchy) arguments against it: a transcendental argument that the likely truth of our perceptual beliefs is a necessary condition of the possibility of empirical content, and a (...) pragmatic argument that we’re warranted in accepting their likely truth in virtue of our aim of being effective agents. To the extent these have previously been distinctly formulated by commentators, the transcendental argument has been regarded as forceful, while the pragmatic argument has been dismissed as non-responsive. My second and third claims challenge this understanding. I argue, second, that examination of the literature relating to transcendental arguments from semantic externalism like Sellars’s (especially concerning the McKinsey paradox) suggests that such arguments are unpromising, while, third, a modified version of his pragmatic argument represents a powerful skeptical solution to skepticism about empirical justification, one that answers the worry that such skepticism would undermine the rationality of all our practical commitments. (shrink)