ABSTRACT:A wide range of research uses patterns of genetic variation to infer genetic similarity between individuals, typically referred to as genetic ancestry. This research includes inference of human demographic history, understanding the genetic architecture of traits, and predicting disease risk. Researchers are not just structuring an intellectual inquiry when using genetic ancestry, they are also creating analytical frameworks with broader societal ramifications. This essay presents an ethics framework in the spirit of virtue ethics for these researchers: rather than focus on (...) rule following, the framework is designed to build researchers’ capacities to react to the ethical dimensions of their work. The authors identify one overarching principle of intellectual freedom and responsibility, noting that freedom in all its guises comes with responsibility, and they identify and define four principles that collectively uphold researchers’ intellectual responsibility: truthfulness, justice and fairness, anti-racism, and public beneficence. Researchers should bring their practices into alignment with these principles, and to aid this, the authors name three common ways research practices infringe these principles, suggest a step-by-step process for aligning research choices with the principles, provide rules of thumb for achieving alignment, and give a worked case. The essay concludes by identifying support needed by researchers to act in accord with the proposed framework. (shrink)

The paper reviews a number of approaches for handling restricted quantification in relevant logic, and proposes a novel one. This proceeds by introducing a novel kind of enthymematic conditional.

The Liar paradox raises foundational questions about logic, language, and truth. A simple Liar sentence like 'This sentence is false' appears to be both true and false if it is either true or false. For if the sentence is true, then what it says is the case; but what it says is that it is false, hence it must be false. On the other hand, if the statement is false, then it is true, since it says that it is false.How, (...) then, should we classify Liar sentences? Are they true or false? A natural suggestion would be that Liars are neither true nor false; that is, they fall into a category beyond truth and falsity. This solution might resolve the initial problem, but it beckons the Liar's revenge. A sentence that says of itself only that it is false or beyond truth and falsity will, in effect, bring back the initial problem. The Liar's revenge is a witness to the hydra-like nature of Liars: in dealing with one Liar you often bring about another.JC Beall presents fourteen new essays and an extensive introduction, which examine the nature of the Liar paradox and its resistance to any attempt to solve it. Written by some of the world's leading experts in the field, the papers in this volume will be an important resource for those working in truth studies, philosophical logic, and philosophy of language, as well as those with an interest in formal semantics and metaphysics. (shrink)

In this essay I contrast Freud’s account of mourning in Mourning and Melancholia to that of Merleau-Ponty in Phenomenology of Perception. In suggesting a somatic as well as a psychic response, Merleau-Ponty, I argue, more accurately accounts for the ways in which we experience loss and why, contrary to Freud’s suggestion, mourning’s work is never completed.

The epistemic-basing relation is the relation that holds between a reason, or one’s grounds, and one’s belief when the belief is held for that reason. As I will explain, understanding this relation is crucial for epistemology since basing a belief on a reason seems necessary for epistemic justification to obtain. But what is the nature of this relation? Is it, at least in part, causal as one might assume? Or, due to problems with causal accounts, are rival accounts of the (...) basing relation motivated? That depends whether causal theories are really subject to the standard objections made against them. I will discuss what I take to be the most fundamental objection here. (shrink)

What does it take for a positive epistemic status to obtain? I argue throughout my thesis that if a positive epistemic status obtains, this is not a brute fact. Instead, if for example a belief is justified, it is justified in virtue of some further condition(s) obtaining. A fundamental topic in epistemology is the question of what sorts of factors can be relevant to determining the positive epistemic status of belief. Epistemic Internalism holds that these factors must be “internal” (in (...) a sense that needs to be specified). Epistemic Externalism is the denial of internalism. My thesis is an explanation and defense of an internalist theory of epistemic justification. -/- The central claim of my thesis is that something is “internal” in this sense only if it is, or can easily be, the object of the agent’s conscious awareness. By considering key cases, I show that without an awareness requirement on justification, the subject cannot avoid what I call the Subject’s Perspective Objection. In developing this objection I examine and respond to an argument against the awareness requirement which claims that such awareness either leads to a vicious regress of requiring higher order beliefs of increasing complexity (if any beliefs are to be justified), or else requiring such awareness is unmotivated. This regress is generated because it is assumed that the relevant kind of awareness must be doxastic. My solution invokes what I call ‘strong non-doxastic awareness’ that grounds non-inferential justification and thereby avoids this dilemma, while meeting the Subject’s Perspective Objection. -/- I also argue that external factors, such as the reliability (actual or conditional) of the mechanism supporting the belief, are not necessary for justification. I argue for this conclusion by comparing what constitutes justified belief in the actual world with one’s counterpart in a ‘demon world’. I argue that this intuition, correctly interpreted, counts in favour of internalism. As I explain, many philosophers moved by arguments presented by externalists about mental content deny that such a case is possible. In opposition I argue that the awareness requirement remains substantially unaffected, no matter which view of content turns out to be correct. What is key is that the two worlds are completely subjectively indistinguishable from each other for those who inhabit them in all the ways of which they are consciously aware. -/- If neither the obtaining of truth nor reliability is necessary for epistemic justification, what makes justification genuinely epistemic? In the final chapter I argue against recent work that assimilates justification with knowledge, as well as for a positive account of the truth connection. As to the former question, I defend the orthodoxy that they are distinct epistemic statuses; as to the latter, I argue that the connection between justification and truth is conceptual. That is, epistemic justification is epistemic because it turns on evidence; evidence is epistemic because it is conceptually linked with truth. Epistemic justification, therefore, is conceptually linked with the truth (via evidence), which is what makes it distinctively epistemic. -/- In short, this thesis is an explanation and defense of an internalist theory of epistemic justification. The central claim of the thesis is that something is “internal” in this sense only if it is, or can easily be, the object of the agent’s conscious awareness. I argue that conscious awareness is a necessary condition of epistemic justification obtaining, and that factors external to consciousness play no justificatory role. (shrink)

I do not approach the question of free will as a scientist, like Colin Blakemore, or a lawyer, like David Hodgson, or philosopher, like Daniel Dennett, but as a priest -- someone who feels responsible for my own actions and who is called upon to counsel and absolve such as come to me with their shame and their guilt. Should I say that their sense of responsibility is illusory? Or should I encourage them to accept responsibility, and then to deal (...) with it in the various ways -- religious, psychological and practical -- that are open to them? (shrink)

The paper begins by considering David Armstrong's beautiful paper 'The Headless Woman Illusion and the Defence of Materialism', which conjectures how we get the illusion that there are non-physical qualia. There are discussions of other metaphysical illusions, that there is a passage of time, that we have libertarian free will, and that consciousness is ineffable (which last also relates to Armstrong), and of their possible explanations. Moral: avoid appeal to so called intuition or phenomenology.

Nous introduisons une extension aux points fixes de la logique IF (faite pour l’indépendance) de Hintikka et Sandu. Nous donnons des résultats sur sa complexité et son pouvoir expressif. Nous la relions aux jeux de parité à information imparfaite, et nous montrons une application à la définition d’un mu-calcul modal fait pour l’indépendance.

Like the public political sphere, the world of the workplace contains literary works offering analysis, advice and philosophy to those in positions of command. In this article, I read business management advice manuals as works of political theory, focusing on their treatment of the problem of legitimacy in the relationship between employer and employee. I highlight and analyze key strategies of legitimation, draw their connections to discussions of legitimacy in the history of political thought and examine changes in workplace legitimation (...) in the context of macroeconomic transformation. (shrink)