Abstract:Epistemic paternalism occurs when evidence is withheld or shaped in particular ways in order to help an agent arrive at the truth, but this is done without their consent (and sometimes without their knowledge). While general defenses of epistemic paternalism are garnering more attention in the recent literature, little has been said regarding the practice in religious contexts. We explore a defense of epistemic paternalism in religious settings inspired by the work of the medieval Islamic philosopher Averroes. According to Averroes, (...) epistemic paternalism is permissible in cases where it would help a layperson arrive at religious knowledge via imagination because they are incapable of arriving at it by demonstration. We conclude by explaining how the distinction between imagination and demonstration can be used to justify epistemic paternalism in contemporary settings. (shrink)

Readers familiar with the luminous scholarly contributions of Harry Austryn Wolfson will welcome this rich collection of essays that have been previously published in widely dispersed journals and books, The articles range over Aristotle and Plato; Philo; the Church Fathers; and Arabic, Jewish, and Christian philosophers of the Middle Ages: Averroes and Avicenna, Maimonides, and Thomas Aquinas. The twenty-eight pieces are arranged in such a manner that ideas develop and are pursued from one article to the next, forming a (...) coherent whole. According to the editors, "This volume reflects the most basic biographical fact about Wolfson: his life has been one of unflagging commitment, uninterrupted creativity, and truly remarkable achievement...Wolfson's scholarship will be viewed with awe and admiration and his impact will be durable. He has added new dimensions to philosophical scholarship and illuminated wide areas of religious thought, plotting the terrain, blazing trails, and erecting guideposts for scores of younger scholars.". (shrink)

In his seminal 1935 study of the internal senses in medieval2 thought, Harry Austryn Wolfson presented a detailed account of the development of the "classification and terminology" of the Greek, Arabic, Hebrew and Latin traditions on sensory powers which he called, "post-sensationary faculties,"~ that is, powers which are posterior to the five external senses. In explaining the complex development of teachings on the internal senses from Aristotle's texts, Wolfson recounted the Aristotelian understanding of Galen who specifically locates the OHXVOTl'ttKOV (...) or cogitative faculty in the middle ventricle of the brain and John of Damascus whose equally Aristotelian account follows the Stagirite in attributing judgments of goodand bad as well as combination and separation of ideas to the omvoTl'ttKTJ 'lfUXTt or the cogitative soul and to ouxvma or cogitation.4 One of the many fruits of Wolfson's discussion was an explanation of the development of the Avicennian doctrine of estimation as arising"out of a desire to supplement a deficiency which seemed to exist in Aristotle's account of the actual motion of pursuit and avoidance which is observed in both man and animal. "5 With wahm used to describe instinctive behavior consequent upon non-rational animal imagination analogous to human reasoning or deliberation, Wolfson wrote, the Arabic fikr now was tobe associated with imagination and no longer was to be seen as simply the power of combining and separating ideas. "In the case of ouivotcx combined with imagination, it is the combination and separation of images, i.e., the construction out of images of things existent, new composite images of things nonexistent, or the breaking up of images of things existent into images of things nonexistent."6 From this moment on, and not without some foundation in Aristotle's own texts as indicated, fikr/ cogitatio and their related derivative terms are used to characterize human rational powers which are essentially activities involving the bodyand bodily instruments insofar as imagination is necessarily bodily. (shrink)

This article elaborates the interactional freedom of friendship and its limits. It shows that friendship is marked by a normative freedom that makes it relatively resistant to reification, especially when compared to erotic love. It argues further, however, that due to friendship’s embeddedness in the contemporary gender order, this freedom is limited. Having first outlined the freedom hypothesis, the article goes on to argue that friendship’s normative freedom is made possible by its weak ‘institutional connectivity’. To clarify that point, the (...) article illustrates friendship’s resistance to the reifying tendencies of therapy culture and then draws the gendered boundary of friendship’s freedom with reference to the position of heterosexual cross-sex friendship in the heteronormative social imaginary. The article concludes by way of argument for a differentiated approach to friendship and suggests that the analysis of its freedom provides significant clues concerning the work that remains to be done towards equal gender relations. (shrink)

‘Interactional expertise’ is developed through linguistic interaction without full scale practical immersion in a culture. Interactional expertise is the medium of communication in peer review in science, in review committees, and in interdisciplinary projects. It is also the medium of specialist journalists and of interpretative methods in the social sciences. We describe imitation game experiments designed to make concrete the idea of interactional expertise. The experiments show that the linguistic performance of those well socialized in the language of a specialist (...) group is indistinguishable from those with full blown practical socialization but distinguishable from those who are not well socialized. The imitation game can also be used to indicate whether an individual can enter an esoteric domain and master the interactional expertise, a skill required by interpretative sociologists of science, anthropologists, ethnographers, and the like.Keywords: Expertise; Interactional expertise; Imitation game; Turing test; Colour blindness; Interpretative methods. (shrink)

On the face of it, the directors of new large scientific projects have an impossible task. They have to make technical decisions about sciences in which they have never made a research contribution—sciences in which they have no contributory expertise. Furthermore, these decisions must be accepted and respected by the scientists who are making research contributions. The problem is discussed in two interviews conducted with two directors of large scientific projects. The paradox is resolved for the managers by their use (...) of interactional and referred expertise. The same analysis might be applicable to management in general. An Appendix, co-authored with Jeff Shrager, compares the notion of referred expertise with contributory expertise.Keywords: Management; Referred expertise; Interactional expertise; LIGO; Thirty Meter Telescope; Big science. (shrink)

The use of a reporter gene in transgenic mice indicates that there are many local mutations and large genomic rearrangements per somatic cell that accumulate with age at different rates per organ and without visible effects. Dissociation of the cells for monolayer culture brings out great heterogeneity of size and loss of function among cells that presumably reflect genetic and epigenetic differences among the cells, but are masked in organized tissue. The regulatory power of a mass of contiguous normal cells (...) is expressed in its capacity to normalize the appearance and growth behavior of solitary homophilic neoplastic cells, and to redirect differentiation of solitary heterophilic stem‐like cells. Intimate contact between the interacting cells is required to induce these changes. The normalization of the neoplastic phenotype does not require gap junctional communication between cells, though transdifferentiation might. These varied relationships are manifestations of the unifying biological principle of “order in the large over heterogeneity in the small”. BioEssays 28: 515–524, 2006. © 2006 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. (shrink)

We examine a crucial question for the World Wide Web: What does a Uniform Resource Identifier (URI) mean? Crucial for the next-generation Semantic Web, can it refer to things outside web-pages? The Web is a universal information space for naming and accessing information via URIs. However, the classical philosophical problems of meaning and reference that have been the source of debate within the philosophy of language return when the Web is given as the foundation for a knowledge representation with the (...) Semantic Web. Debates on the Semantic Web about the meaning and referential status of a URI are explored as analogues to debates about the meaning and reference of names in the philosophy of language. Three main positions are inspected: the logical position, as exemplified by the descriptivist theory of reference, the direct reference position, as exemplified by Putnam and Kripke’s causal theory of reference, and a Wittgensteinian position that views URIs as a public language, as exemplified by Web search engines. These positions show that debates within the philosophy of language are alive and well on the Web, and so in the philosophy of computer science. (shrink)

"Introduces the issues and controversies of contemporary moral philosophy. It gets students to struggle with the big questions of morality while it also relates these questions to practical issues, especially racism, global warming, moral education, and abortion. Providing a practical method for thinking about moral issues--a method based largely on the golden rule--it is written simply and clearly throughout."--Provided by publisher.