That Oakeshott and Arendt's political works contain Augustinian references is well known. What historians of political thought have had difficulty in is assessing the consistency and importance of the Augustinian themes within their work. It transpires that the traces of existentialism and personalism in Augustine are amplified and clarified by their use in Oakeshott and Arendt, to the extent that they form an important subtext to their work. One stumbling block for scholars attempting to link the ?mature? works of Oakeshott (...) and Arendt to Augustine has been a sense of disparity between the eschatological character of Augustine's writings and the civic worldliness of Oakeshott's associations and Arendt's public realm. Returning to several strands of twentieth-century Augustinianism, from the personalist to the existentialist to the liberal, reveals an Augustinianism that is much more credibly linked to the whole of Oakeshott and Arendt's writings. (shrink)

Much work performed under the banner of social epistemology still centers the problems of the individual cognitive agent. AU distinguishes multiple senses of "social," some of which are more social than others, and argues that different senses are at work in various contributions to social epistemology. Drawing on work in history and philosophy of science and addressing the literature on testimony and disagreement in particular, this paper argues for a more thoroughgoing approach in social epistemology.

In Studying Human Behavior, Helen E. Longino enters into the complexities of human behavioral research, a domain still dominated by the age-old debate of “nature versus nurture.” Rather than supporting one side or another or attempting..

The Habits of Racism examines some of the complex questions raised by the phenomenon and experience of racism. Helen Ngo argues that the conceptual reworking of habit as bodily orientation helps to identify the more subtle but fundamental workings of racism, exploring what the lived experience of racism and racialization teaches about the nature of the embodied and socially-situated being.

Making a Difference presents fifteen original essays on causation and counterfactuals by an international team of experts. Collectively, they represent the state of the art on these topics. The essays in this volume are inspired by the life and work of Peter Menzies, who made a difference in the lives of students, colleagues, and friends. Topics covered include: the semantics of counterfactuals, agency theories of causation, the context-sensitivity of causal claims, structural equation models, mechanisms, mental causation, causal exclusion argument, free (...) will, and the consequence argument. (shrink)

In this paper I argue that there is an urgent need for more empirical research into everyday experiences of living with datafication, something that has not been prioritised in the emerging field of data studies to date. As a result of this absence, the knowledge produced within data studies is not as aligned to the aims of data activism as it might be. Data activism seeks to challenge existing, unequal data power relations and to mobilise data in order to enhance (...) social justice, yet data studies has focused primarily on identifying the former and not on imagining the latter. To build a picture of what more just conditions of datafication might look like, I argue that it is important to take account of everyday experiences of datafication, of what people themselves say would enable them to live better with data and would constitute more just data arrangements, based on their experiences. I explore two possible approaches to this endeavour, both of which suggest the need for a vocabulary of emotions in researching everyday living with data. (shrink)

The role of the ‘ideal’ in political philosophy is currently much discussed. These debates cast useful light on Mill's self-designation as ‘under the general designation of Socialist’. Considering Mill's assessment of potential property-relations on the grounds of their desirability, feasibility and ‘accessibility’ (disambiguated as ‘immediate-availability’, ‘eventual-availability’ and ‘conceivable-availability’) shows us not only how desirable and feasible he thought ‘utopian’ socialist schemes were, but which options we should implement. This, coupled with Mill's belief that a socialist ideal should guide social reforms (...) (as the North Star guides mariners), reveals much more clearly the extent of his socialist commitments (even if he thought political economists would be concerned with forms of individual property for some time to come). Moreover, this framework for assessments of ‘ideal’ institutions makes a useful contribution to an ongoing contemporary debate. (shrink)

How nursing as a profession is valued may be changing and needs to be explored and understood in a global context. We draw on data from two empirical studies to illustrate our argument. The first study explored the value of nursing globally, the second investigated the experiences of overseas trained nurses recruited to work in a migrant capacity in the UK health care workforce. The indications are that nurses perceive themselves as devalued socially, and that other health care professionals do (...) not give nursing the same status as other, socially more prestigious professions, such as medicine. Organizational and management structures within the NHS and the independent care home sector devalue overseas nurses and the contribution they make to health care. Our conclusions lead us to question the accepted sociocultural value of the global nursing workforce and its perceived contribution to global health care, and to consider two ethical frameworks from which these issues could be discussed further. (shrink)

This paper explores one way in which the meta-problem may shed light on existing debates about the hard problem (though not directly on the hard problem itself). I'll argue that the possibility of a suitable agent without problem intuitions would undercut the dialectical force of arguments against physicalism. Standard antiphysicalist arguments begin from intuitions about what's ideally conceivable, and argue from there to the falsity of physicalism. For these arguments to be dialectically effective, there must be a shared conception of (...) what ideal conceivability consists in. Unfortunately, proposed accounts of ideal conceivability all make reference to an unexplained 'intuitive' notion of idealization. Consideration of the meta-problem reveals that, when it comes to the hard problem, intuitions about idealization are essentially theory-laden. There is no neutral basis for determining whether agents with or without problem intuitions are more rationally ideal. (shrink)

The arts provide openings for symbolic expression by engaging the sensory experience in the body they become a source of insight through embodied cognition and emotion, enabling meaning-making, and acting as a catalyst for change. This synthesis of sensation and enactive, embodied expression through movement and the arts is capitalized on in The BodyMind Approach®. It is integral to this biopsychosocial, innovative, unique intervention for people suffering medically unexplained symptoms applied in primary healthcare. The relevance of embodiment and arts practices (...) in TBMA are discussed in relation to the views of participants in the pursuit of self-management. If widely employed TBMA could have an enormous impact, reach, and significance for patients and global health services. This original pre-clinical trial of qualitative research reports on the perceptions of participant patients with generic MUS, a world-wide issue usually treated by either psychological therapy or physiotherapy. TBMA is not a therapy but a health education program founded upon the concept of an integration of psychological elements with physiological, bodily, and sensory experiences. Thematic analysis of qualitative data sets from open-ended questions in semi-structured interviews and a written questionnaire post intervention is presented. Five aspects which appear to be key to learning self-management were derived from analyzing the data: body with mind connections; importance of facilitation; potential benefits; preparedness for change; self-acceptance/compassion. This article advances the discourse on the nature of self-management for MUS through changing the mind-set and the relationship participants have with their bodily symptom/s through employing embodied methods and arts practices, challenging current, and solely verbal, psychological conceptual frameworks. Rigor lies in the method of data analysis using cross verification of credibility between reported findings and scrutiny by stakeholders. We conclude that facilitated TBMA groups employing embodied methods and arts practices can act as a method for developing the self-management of MUS and improving wellbeing. (shrink)

Biological research on aggression is increasingly consulted for possible answers to the social problems of crime and violence. This paper reviews some contrasting approaches to the biological understanding of behavior—behavioral genetic, social-environmental, physiological, developmental—as a prelude to arguing that approaches to aggression are beset by vagueness and imprecision in their definitions and disunity in their measurement strategies. This vagueness and disunity undermines attempts to compare and evaluate the different approaches empirically. Nevertheless, the definitions reveal commitments to particular metaphysical views concerning (...) behavior. Alternative understandings of aggression suggest even different research approaches than those most commonly found in the literature. (shrink)

John Martin Fischer argues that a version of the Consequence Argument that invokes a principle he calls the ‘Principle of the Fixity of the Past and Laws’ is immune to the broadly Lewisian response that the compatibilist can make to the ‘conditional’ version of the argument. In his contribution to this volume, he argues—in part by appealing to backtracking counterfactuals—that denying PFPL leads to trouble, specifically, for the fixed-laws compatibilist. I argue on behalf of the fixed-laws compatibilist that his argument (...) fails: true backtrackers of the kind Fischer’s argument needs are harder to come by than Fischer supposes, and in any case their truth is not something that can be known, prior to decision, by the deliberating agent. (shrink)

Practice-centric and theory-centric approaches in philosophy of science are described and contrasted. The contrast is developed through an examination of their different treatments of the underdetermination problem. The practice-centric approach is illustrated by a summary of comparative research on approaches in the biology of behavior. The practice-centric approach is defended against charges that it encourages skepticism regarding the sciences.

The aim of this article is to analyse environmental reporting in the Australian broadsheet newspaper The Sydney Morning Herald. The focus is on a particular kind of new, multisemiotic news story genre that appears regularly in this newspaper, and that makes use of word-image play. Using a social semiotic framework and employing Appraisal theory, we analyse a corpus of 40 stories in terms of evaluative meanings in heading, image and caption, and interpret the significance of our findings in terms of (...) both Critical Discourse Analysis and Positive Discourse Analysis. In particular, we question whether the playing with environmental stories in the news, and the resulting clash between the humorousness of the play and the seriousness of the reported environmental event, is good or bad practice. With its multisemiotic focus, this article aims to make a significant and innovative contribution to the emerging field of ecolinguistics, and the development of Appraisal theory. (shrink)

This paper defends the Limited Use View of our duties to save. The Limited Use View holds that the duty to save is a duty to treat oneself, and perhaps one’s resources, as a means for preventing harm to others. But the duty to treat oneself as a means for the sake of others is limited. One need not treat oneself as a means when doing so is either very costly, or conflicts with one’s more stringent duties to others. This (...) provides an agent-neutral account of the duty to save. When the cost of saving passes a certain threshold, one is permitted to fail to save, and it is impermissible for others to force one to save, if doing so will force one to incur an equal or greater cost. I argue that the Limited Use View is to be preferred to agent-relative accounts of the duty to save, which hold that the limit on our duty to save is grounded in an agent-relative prerogative to weight our own interests (and those of special others) more heavily than other people’s interests. (shrink)

Adam Hosein has recently proposed that a sufficient degree of intervening agency between a person’s contribution to an unjust lethal threat and the posing of that threat can exempt the contributor from liability to defensive killing. Hosein suggests that this will exempt most civilians from liability to lethal defence even if they contribute to unjust killings. I argue that intervening agency does not bear on a person’s responsibility for a threat, and does not exempt her from liability to defensive killing.

The control of action has traditionally been described as "automatic". In particular, movement control may occur without conscious awareness, in contrast to normal visual perception. Studies on rapid visuomotor adjustment of reaching movements following a target shift have played a large part in introducing such distinctions. We suggest that previous studies of the relation between motor performance and perceptual awareness have confounded two separate dissociations. These are: (a) the distinction between motoric and perceptual representations, and (b) an orthogonal distinction between (...) conscious and unconscious processes. To articulate these differences more clearly, we propose a new measure of motor awareness, based on subjects' ability to reproduce the spatial details of reaching movements they have just made. Here we focus on the dissociation between motor awareness and perceptual awareness that may occur when subjects make rapid visuomotor adjustments to reaching movements following a target shift. In experiment 1, motor awareness was dissociated from perceptual awareness of a target shift during reaching movement. Participants' reproduction of movement endpoints following visuomotor adjustment was independent of whether they saw the target shift or not. Experiment 2 replicated this result, and further showed that neither motor awareness nor motor performance were disrupted by TMS over the parietal cortex. The neural mechanisms underlying motor awareness, and the implications for theories of consciousness, are discussed. (shrink)

‘Natural kind essentialism’—here defined as the view that (i) the existence of natural kinds is a mind- and theory-independent matter, (ii) their essences are intrinsic, and (iii) they have a hierarchical structure—is commonly thought to be justified by appeal to Kripke–Putnam semantics, according to which propositions like ‘water is H20’ are necessary a posteriori. This chapter argues that the Kripke–Putnam semantics is in fact compatible with the denial of each of the three tenets of natural kind essentialism. The basic argument (...) is that, assuming the range of natural kinds goes beyond those kinds for which we have vernacular names, deference to scientific theories is required in fixing the reference of natural kind terms. That those theories describe mind- and theory-independent reality, and that they do not admit a non-hierarchical structure for the categories they deploy, are theses that are independent of anything derivable from Kripke–Putnam semantics itself. (shrink)

Biological sex should be “acknowledged” and “accepted”—but which responses to gender dysphoria might this preclude? Trans-identified people may factually acknowledge their biological sex and regard transition as purely palliative. While generally some level of self-deception and even a high level of nonlying deception of others are sometimes justified, biological sex is important, and there is a nontrivial onus against even palliative, nonsexually motivated cross-dressing. The onus is higher against co-opting the body, even in a minor and/or reversible way, to make (...) a false communication concerning one’s sex. Hardest to defend is the destruction of sexual–reproductive functions and causally downstream functions such as lactation: due to the transcendent nature of sexual–reproductive functions, an appeal to the “principle of totality” here is misplaced. This is not to say that social, and milder medical, transition is absolutely excluded even for severe unmanageable dysphoria, nor that subsequent to any transition, detransition is necessarily required. (shrink)

The US Supreme Court’s abortion decisions over the past forty years have helped to shape cultural beliefs and practices concerning heterosexual relationships, marriage, and parenting. This is true both in the practical and in the legal senses. Practically speaking, definitively separating sex from childbearing, as only abortion can do (given how often contraception fails), inevitably changes the meaning of sex, and therefore of heterosexual relationships. Legally speaking, the Court’s influence was mediated significantly by its decision to locate the right of (...) abortion in an area of constitutional law—substantive due process—which claims to contain only those rights that are indispensable to our national understanding of freedom, both at the level of the individual and respecting our overarching democratic order. In particular, over the course of forty years of abortion opinions, the Court’s reflections on a claimed link between abortion and freedom have led it to conclusions broadly reflected in modern American beliefs and practices insofar as sex, marriage, and parenting are concerned. These include, inter alia, a suspicion of motherhood on the grounds of its risks and harms, the dispensable roles and violent characters of men, the great importance of adults’ wishes, and the importance of sexual expression for individual identity, divorced from consequences for partners or children. (shrink)

Making us whole : avoiding split personalities -- The purpose of business : working together for the common good -- The virtues : human development in the corporate community -- Job design : prudence and subsidiarity in operations -- Just wages : justice and the subjective dimension of work in human resources -- Corporate ownership : temperance and common use in finance -- Marketing communication and product development : courage and solidarity in marketing -- Faith, hope and charity : authentic (...) habits of a Christian spirituality of work -- Liturgy : the source and summit of our work. (shrink)

Representational art, when it first emerges in the archaeological record between 30,000-40,000 years ago, is seen as a watershed. It is upheld as one of the defining characteristics that makes us 'human', argued as the 'gold standard'by which cultural modernity is measured and identified and intimately linked with the development of language. In the past decade it has been suggested that the emergence of representational art in prehistory and the concomitance of language are assumptions that may need reviewing. This enquiry (...) looks to recent neuroscientific research, particularly in the area of neural connectivity that may provide some valuable insights between drawing and language. The significance of neural interconnectivity in this enquiry is that the emotional content of our lives may lie at the core of what makes us unique in the animal world and a significant contributory factor to our cognitive evolution, particularly in terms of cultural development. (shrink)

Is the “act itself” of separating a pregnant woman and her previable child neither good nor bad morally, considered in the abstract? Recently, Maureen Condic and Donna Harrison have argued that such separation is justified to protect the mother’s life and that it does not constitute an abortion as the aim is not to kill the child. In our article on maternal–fetal conflicts, we agree there need be no such aim to kill (supplementing aims such as to remove). However, we (...) argue that to understand “abortion” as performed only where the death of the child is intended is to define the term too narrowly. Respect for the mother, the fetus, and the bond between them goes well beyond avoiding any such aim. We distinguish between legitimate maternal treatments simply aimed at treating or removing a damaged part of the woman and illegitimate treatments that focus harmfully on the fetal body and its presence within the mother’s body. In obstetrics as elsewhere, not all side effects for one subject of intervention can be outweighed by intended benefits for another. Certain side effects of certain intended interventions are morally conclusive. (shrink)

An agent A morally coerces another agent, B, when A manipulates non-epistemological facts in order that B’s moral commitments enjoin B to do what A wants B to do, and B is motivated by these commitments. It is widely argued that forced choices arising from moral coercion are morally distinct from forced choices arising from moral duress or happenstance. On these accounts, the fact of being coerced bears on what an agent may do, the voluntariness of her actions, and/or her (...) accountability for any harms that result from her actions. This paper does not provide an account of the wrongness of moral coercion. Rather, I argue that, whatever the correct account of its wrongness, the mere fact of being coerced has no bearing on what the agent may do, on the voluntariness of her action, or her accountability for any resultant harm, compared to otherwise identical cases arising from duress and happenstance. (shrink)

State of nature or Eden? -- Hobbes' state of nature as an account of the fall? -- Hobbes' own belief or unbelief -- The contemporary reaction to Leviathan -- Hobbes and commentaries on Genesis -- A note on method and chapter order -- Good and evil -- Hobbes on good and evil -- The 'seditious doctrines' of the schoolmen -- The contemporary reaction -- The scriptural account -- The state of nature as an account of the fall? -- Equality and (...) unsociability -- Hobbes and natural equality -- The contemporary reaction -- The scriptural account -- Hobbes on natural unsociability -- The contemporary reaction -- The scriptural account -- State of nature as Eden? -- The war of all against all -- Hobbes' war of all against all -- The contemporary reaction -- The scriptural account -- State of nature as fallen condition? -- The right and law of nature -- Hobbes and natural right -- The contemporary reaction -- Hobbes and natural law -- The contemporary reaction -- The scriptural account -- Hobbes as reformed theologian? -- The creation of society -- Hobbes on the escape from the state of nature -- The contemporary reaction : Hobbes versus divine right -- The scriptural account of Cain building a city -- Hobbes on the creation of the commonwealth -- The contemporary reaction : Hobbes versus the patriarchalists -- The scriptural account of the relationship between Adam and Eve -- State of nature as Eden, the process of the fall, and the fallen condition? -- Reading Hobbes' state of nature -- Anti-aristotelianism -- Hobbes' Protestantism. (shrink)

This special issue of Angelaki sets out to curate a range of literary and philosophical perspectives on how the sea is currently thought, felt and theorized across the theoretical humanities. Drawi...

The term “value of life” can refer to life’s intrinsic dignity: something nonincremental and time-unaffected in contrast to the fluctuating, incremental “value” of our lives, as they are longer or shorter and more or less flourishing. Human beings are equal in their basic moral importance: the moral indignities we condemn in the treatment of e.g. those with dementia reflect the ongoing human dignity that is being violated. Indignities licensed by the person in advance remain indignities, as when people might volunteer (...) their living, unconscious bodies for surrogacy or training in amputation techniques. Respect for someone’s dignity is significantly impacted by a failure to value that person’s very existence, whatever genuine respect and good will is shown by wanting the person’s life to go well. Valuing and respecting life is not, however, vitalism: there can be good and compelling reasons for eschewing some means of prolonging life. (shrink)

: In this paper I address the vexed question of secondary causation in René Descartes' physics, and examine several influential interpretations, especially the one recently proposed by Dennis Des Chene. I argue that interpreters who regard Cartesian bodies as real secondary causes, on the grounds that the modes of body include real forces, contradict Descartes' account of modes. On the other hand, those who deny that Descartes affirms secondary causation, on the grounds that forces cannot be modes of extension, commit (...) Descartes to the problematic view that the undetermined and immutable will of God is the sole cause of determinate and variable motions. Des Chene's contextualist approach to Descartes' texts leads him to an intermediate position that combines elements of both interpretations. However, in my view, Des Chene's interpretation likewise fails to resolve apparent tensions in Descartes' claims. I thus propose to separate the issue of secondary causation from what Des Chene dubs 'the problem of force'. On the basis of this approach, and a study of Jesuit commentaries familiar to Descartes, I develop a new interpretation which takes seriously Descartes' claim that the laws of nature are the secondary and particular causes of particular motions and changes in motion. (shrink)