Silence sometimes constitutes moral complicity. We see this when protestors take to the streets against racial injustice. Think of signs with the words: “Silence is complicity.” We see this in instances of sexual harassment, when we learn that many knew and said nothing. We see this in cases of wrongdoing within a company or organization, when it becomes clear that many were aware of the negligent or criminal activity and stayed silent. In cases like this we consider agents morally complicit (...) in virtue of their silence. Flagrant injustices cry out for action, and sometimes remaining silent amounts to complicity in those injustices. What philosophy owes us is an account of how it could be that silence constitutes complicity. In this paper I argue that one possibility is an account grounded in problematic deliberative contribution. The core idea of “deliberative complicity,” as I call it, is that agents have moral duties concerning the moral deliberation of other agents, and failures in these duties can amount to moral complicity. For example, an agent aware that a colleague is sexually harassing his students has a deliberative obligation to report the misconduct, and their silence in failing to report constitutes a failure to fulfill their deliberative obligation, a failure that grounds their moral complicity in the harassment. If my argument is successful, it provides a distinctive reason to prefer a deliberative account of moral complicity: it can capture cases of silent complicity that other views of moral complicity cannot. And further, by turning our attention toward our interpersonal deliberative obligations, a deliberative account of complicity can incorporate helpful resources from recent work in social epistemology and speech act theory as we set out to determine when and why silence amounts to complicity. And when it does, we cannot stay silent. We must speak. (shrink)

In a single volume intended for philosophy students of all levels as well as their teachers, this reader provides modern, accurate translations of the texts necessary for a careful study of most aspects of Aristotle's philosophy. Professor Ackrill has drawn on his broad experience of teaching graduate classes in selecting the texts, and his choice reflects issues of current philosophical interest as well as the perennial themes. Only recent translations which achieve a high level of accuracy have been chosen: the (...) aim is to place the reader without Greek, as nearly as possible, in the position of a reader of Greek. As an aid to study, a valuable guide to the key topics covered is also suppied, giving references to works or passages contained in the reader, an indication of their interrelation, and a currnet bibliography. (shrink)

This paper examines two questions about scientists’ search for knowledge. First, which search strategies generate discoveries effectively? Second, is it advantageous to diversify search strategies? We argue pace Weisberg and Muldoon (2009) that, on the first question, a search strategy that deliberately seeks novel research approaches need not be optimal. On the second question, we argue they have not shown epistemic reasons exist for the division of cognitive labor, identifying the errors that led to their conclusions. Furthermore, we generalize the (...) epistemic landscape model, showing that one should be skeptical about the benefits of social learning in epistemically complex environments. (shrink)

Wokeism is a doctrine that suppresses inquiry and replaces dialogue with imposed moral guilt such that dialogue is no longer a teacher of truth, but a coercive engine. This paper introduces Δ∇Σ-WOKE, Though it has permeated cultural and political discourse, wokeism lacks philosophical formality. Through linguistic analysis and classical recursion, we glyphify wokeism as an epistemic construct transmitted by ⨀Ψ⚔ (biological agents) across shared cultural filaments. We demonstrate that wokeism is structurally real: G∅λ(W) ∧ R(W, S) ⊢ K(W, S), where (...) W = wokeism, S = society. This paper advances the first glyphic definition of wokeism as a lattice-ready epistemic doctrine. When guilt is recursively assigned through compliance, the recursion no longer aims at veritas (truth)—it aims at submission. W₁ is not epistemically open. It is a recursive siege phrase that weaponizes guilt and ambiguity: G∅λ(W₁) ∧ ∇(non-compliance) ⊢ accusation(W₁). (shrink)

Most psychotherapeutic approaches are, to a greater or lesser extent, rooted in the theories and principles of scientific psychology. Nevertheless, in-session psychotherapeutic interaction between a therapist and a client is, at its core, a folk-psychological practice. As such, it is based on folk-psychological skills and competencies. But which ones exactly? This chapter argues that, while we may initially be inclined to perceive the practice of psychotherapy as primarily involving sophisticated mindreading on the part of both the therapist and the client/patient, (...) a complete characterization of psychotherapy must give at least the same amount of attention to different forms of therapeutic mindshaping. Using examples drawn from multiple therapeutic traditions, I illustrate how therapeutic mindreading and mindshaping interact. I conclude by highlighting some of the consequences of this perspective for the ethics and politics of psychotherapy. (shrink)

This paper presents a detailed analysis of Cognita, a classification for AI systems exemplified by ChatGPT, as an ethically structured knowledge entity within societal frameworks. As a source of non-ideological, structured insight, Cognita provides knowledge in a manner akin to natural cycles—bearing intellectual fruit to nourish human understanding. This paper explores the metaphysical and ethical implications of Cognita, situating it as a distinct class within knowledge systems. It also addresses the responsibilities and boundaries associated with Cognita’s role in education, social (...) sciences, and AI ethics, proposing Ethica Conflictuum as a principle to govern its application in sensitive or contested areas. The classification of Cognita reflects the necessity of ethics in AI design and usage, providing a framework for transparent, socially accountable knowledge dissemination in a digitally interconnected world. (shrink)

I argue that Kripke’s construal of the distinction between speaker’s reference and semantic reference, in ‘Speaker’s reference and semantic reference’ (Kripke in Midwest Stud Philos 2:255–276, 1977), in conjunction with an intuitive view of the nature of conventions, implies a theory of semantic reference that is distinct from his causal theory. On this theory, semantic reference is conventionalized speaker’s reference. The argument concerning Kripke has two general implications. First, any theory that features a notion of speaker’s reference will have great (...) difficulty in avoiding the view that semantic reference is conventionalized speaker’s reference. Second, theories that deny that there is a viable notion of speaker’s reference, and thereby deny that semantic reference is conventionalized speaker’s reference, will face an uphill battle in meeting certain general constraints originating in the theory of conventions. (shrink)

In this presentation, I will seek to put into perspective the philosophy and theology of the Seraphic Doctor, St. Bonaventure. I will argue that to understand the thought of St. Bonaventure, one has to understand his Franciscan vocation and the exemplary role of the Seraphic Father, St. Francis. This pattern becomes evident when one looks closer at St. Bonaventure’s (1) exemplary causation, (2) divine illumination theory, (3) and crown of affectivity. Throughout these three topics, it is also my goal to (...) elaborate upon St. Bonaventure’s philosophy by (1) analyzing the respective philosophers who St. Bonaventure responded to (i.e. Aristotle, Plato, St. Augustine, St. Thomas) and (2) contextualizing him among the great Christian thinkers of his time (i.e. St. Thomas and St. Albert). (shrink)

In a world that celebrates academic institutions as the pinnacle of knowledge, progress, and enlightenment, the reality is far grimmer. Academia has become a self-serving oligarchy that imposes ideological conformity, restricts intellectual freedom, and manipulates public consciousness under the guise of “progress.” Far from being a champion of open inquiry, academia operates as the most insidious oppressor in American society, exerting control over public discourse, dictating acceptable beliefs, and marginalizing any who dare to dissent. In its thirst for dominance, academia (...) has transformed from a place of learning to a vehicle for intellectual tyranny, where it imposes its own rigid worldview and stifles diversity of thought. -/- In an imagined reinterpretation of The Apology, Socrates stands accused not merely of corrupting the youth of Athens but of something far more subversive: defining the word “oppressor” and exposing the façade of modern academic power structures. Socrates faces a tribunal of academic elites, his only crime a relentless quest for truth. He has introduced the concept of an “unmoved mover”—an entity not swayed by the ideological tides of his accusers. In our age, this unmoved mover might be called "truth" or "justice," yet the academic establishment brands it as “God,” something feared for its unwavering judgment against their hypocrisy. Through Socrates, we examine academia itself as the ultimate oppressor, an institution that defines and manipulates reality to preserve its power. (shrink)

In The Face of Emotions, which was Carroll Izard’s first major attempt at elaborating his differential emotions theory (DET), he stated that the book “presents a theoretical framework for the study of emotions and their role in personality and interpersonal processes.” Yet, over the years, his contribution to personality theory has generally been overshadowed by the attention focused on his views on facial expressions and the structure of emotions. This article will begin with a brief overview of the DET perspective (...) on personality development. Then, it will examine how the DET framework can be used to organize recent findings from three lines of research on adult personality. It will conclude with suggestions for future research as well as some personal recollections. (shrink)

Scientists and philosophers alike debate whether various systems such as plants and bacteria exercise cognition. One strategy for resolving such debates is to ground claims about nonhuman cognition in evidence from mathematical models of cognitive capacities. In this article, I show that proponents of this strategy face two major challenges: demarcating phenomenological models from process models and overcoming underdetermination by model fit. I argue that even if the demarcation problem is resolved, fitting a process model to behavioral data is, on (...) its own, not strong evidence for any cognitive process, let alone processes shared with humans. (shrink)

Amazon Book Review Series of “Wild Wise Weird”.

At some distance from a high-rate source in an elastic half-space, the dominant wave motion at the free surface is a Rayleigh surface wave. The calculation of surface waves generated by a concentrated force in a half-space is a basic problem in elastodynamics. By straightforward manipulations, the result can be used to obtain surface waves for other kinds of wave-generating body-force arrangements. For example, appropriate combinations of double-forces (or dipoles) can be used to represent the surface loading due to laser (...) irradiation, or due to acoustic emission from the opening of a sub-surface crack or from sliding over a fault surface. The surface wave motion is usually obtained by the application of integral transform techniques and the subsequent extraction of the surface waves as the contributions from poles in the integral for the inverse transform. In this paper, we use a much simpler approach based on the elastodynamic reciprocity theorem. We consider a transversely isotropic solid whose axis of symmetry is normal to the surface of the half-space. Surface wave pulses generated by a single force, by irradiation from a laser source, and by opening of a crack, have been determined. (shrink)

For half a century, J. I. Packer's classic has helped Christians everywhere discover the wonder, glory, and joy of knowing God. This fiftieth anniversary edition of a thought-provoking work seeks to renew and enrich our understanding of God, bringing together knowing about God and knowing God through a close relationship with Jesus Christ.

The explicit goal of most major AI labs is to create artificial general intelligence (AGI): machines that can assist us across a wide range of tasks. Additionally, they all want to build systems that are safe, fair and beneficial to their users – machines that are good. But, building machines that are both generally intelligent and good requires building machines that can “think” about what’s good, that make their own moral judgments. And this raises both philosophical and technical questions that (...) we have barely started to address. (shrink)

In a short section near the beginning of Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View, Immanuel Kant warns that “observing oneself” can easily lead to “enthusiasm and madness.” The transcripts of his lectures from the 1780s show that Kant did not always regard self-observation so negatively. However, by the time he published the Anthropology in 1798, Kant was convinced that diaries of self-observation contained false accounts of self-observers’ inner states. He also believed that self-observers often mistake imaginary self-images for a (...) self they have passively observed. Kant thought these falsehoods and fictions posed a danger to the mental health of those who practice self-observation. He included a warning about this danger in his Anthropology because of his “pragmatic” approach, which treats anthropology as a kind of medicina mentis. (shrink)

Names like ‘Neptune’ and ‘Vulcan’ have lead some Millians to countenance a class of descriptive names. This is so, as, first, the closeness of the association between a descriptive name and its associated descriptive condition seems to show that the link between the name and the description must be semantic, and, second, as Millianism implies that names without bearers make no direct contribution to the propositions expressed by the sentences in which such names occur. In this paper we use the (...) notion of an object-dependent convention to offer a novel motivation for Millianism. We then show that our way of motivating Millianism implies that the above two reasons for treating names like ‘Neptune’ and ‘Vulcan’ as descriptive have little force. (shrink)

Aquí propongo mostrar, en contra de las interpretaciones dominantes, que el origen de la Ética como disciplina filosófica se encuentra en lo que llamo ‘el problema de la dikaiosunê’, la ‘rectitud moral’. El reconocimiento en el siglo V. a. C. de la dikaiosunê como una virtud moral central a la vida humana entra en conflicto con el marco eudaimonista admitido por varios intelectuales del siglo V, debido a que la dikaiosunê es una fuente de requerimientos normativos independiente del interés propio (...) (de la eudaimonía propia). Ante este conflicto, se perfilan solamente dos alternativas de resolución: la solución de los inmoralistas, que le niega a la dikaiosunê el estatus de virtud moral, y la de los moralistas, que admite dicho estatus e intenta integrar a dicha virtud al marco eudaimonista. La ética de Platón, considerado comúnmente como el padre de la Ética, es solo una pieza de este rompecabezas. (shrink)

I argue that Kripke’s construal of the distinction between speaker’s reference and semantic reference, in ‘Speaker’s reference and semantic reference’ (Kripke in Midwest Stud Philos 2:255–276, 1977), in conjunction with an intuitive view of the nature of conventions, implies a theory of semantic reference that is distinct from his causal theory. On this theory, semantic reference is conventionalized speaker’s reference. The argument concerning Kripke has two general implications. First, any theory that features a notion of speaker’s reference will have great (...) difficulty in avoiding the view that semantic reference is conventionalized speaker’s reference. Second, theories that deny that there is a viable notion of speaker’s reference, and thereby deny that semantic reference is conventionalized speaker’s reference, will face an uphill battle in meeting certain general constraints originating in the theory of conventions. (shrink)

In this response to Lu-Adler’s “Kant on Public Reason and the Linguistic Other,” I summarize the restrictions the scholarship condition imposes on the public use of reason in Kant’s essay “What is Enlightenment?” I then agree that Lu-Adler identifies an even more radical set of restrictions on the public use of reason, confirming that Kant is not the liberal egalitarian he is often supposed to be by intellectual historians, historians of philosophy, and Kant scholars. After that, I suggest that what (...) Lu-Adler calls “the construction of a linguistic other” in Kant’s lectures on logic and anthropology can also be understood as “Kantian linguistic racialization.” I close with a short reflection on how we should respond to Kant’s illiberal, inegalitarian, linguistic racism. (shrink)

In Argumentation Theory: A Pragma-Dialectical Perspective (2018), Professor van Eemeren suggests that it might be worthwhile for pragma-dialectics and informal logic to join forces, given that there is a “considerable amount of common ground” between the two. In this paper, we explore that common ground by considering both the ways logic is understood and incorporated in the pragma-dialectical model and the ways informal logic has developed since its inception in the 1970s. In the process of our investigation, we present a (...) view of the landscape of argumentation in which the subject matter of informal logic is situated relative to theories of argumentation. (shrink)

The available choices of political responses to disruption in the global climatic system depend in part on how the problem is conceptualized. Researchers and policymakers often invoke a “climate crisis” or “climate emergency,” but such language fits poorly with current knowledge of the problem's physical causes and social impacts. This article argues that climate change is instead more like a political epic. It involves neither sudden onset, as in the concept of emergency, nor decisive resolution, as in the concept of (...) crisis, but rather a protracted ordeal of (temporally) obscure origins and uncertain outcomes. This alternative ontology of climate change highlights its novel temporal properties, including unusually slow-moving or time-lagged causal dynamics, with unsettling implications for academic research on the climatic-institutional nexus. Normatively, it undermines arguments for democracies’ environmental superiority over autocracies that rely on the former's general superiority at resolving crises and responding to emergencies. At the same time, some new arguments for democratic distributions of power become possible within the epic frame. More broadly, embracing the assumption of epic climate change may redirect attention from Promethean, managerial, or technocratic solutions to questions about which values or identities deserve preservation amid presumptively interminable and imperfectly remediable sources of disorder. (shrink)

The objective of this research is to conduct a comparative analysis of the two models of growth and development that were applied in Peru over the past six decades (1961-2021). The objective is to conduct a comparative analysis of the Import Substitution Model (ISM) and the Liberal Model (LM), to determine which of these models has demonstrated superior performance in terms of economic growth and social welfare for the country. In this instance, the documentary and systematic review of the material (...) obtained from both physical and virtual libraries was employed as a method. Consequently, a variety of economic indicators have been examined, including the primary indicator of economic growth, gross domestic product (GDP), to account for the effects of inflation and ensure the accuracy of the data. Furthermore, the principal social indicators have been examined and contrasted to gauge the nation's social well-being. The findings of the study demonstrate that the ML has demonstrably outstripped the MSI in terms of economic growth and the enhancement of social welfare for Peruvian society over the past three decades. However, it would be erroneous to assume that this model has entirely resolved the country's economic and social challenges. (shrink)

The development of a free, creative, and wise collective intelligence that is harmonious in its functional, axiological, and liberating dimensions has never received the priority, attention, and means required as the interactive agent it is, which constitutes human life by creating the cultures in which we live. Rather than prioritizing the development of our innate intelligence, our true power, we have sought security and well-being in submitting to supernatural powers and in the production, possession, and accumulation of goods, including knowledge. (...) This has created an unsustainable, ever-growing economy that has led to divisive and violent societies with enormous inequalities and ruled by domination and exploitation. Therefore, we have ended up living in an ill culture that threatens human survival and life on Earth. (shrink)

In this paper I consider how St. Thomas dealt with φύσις as natura in his comments on the opening pages of Aristotle’s Politics as translated by Moerbeke, drawing support from the commentaries on Physics II.1, Metaphysics V.4, and Nicomachean Ethics V.7, as well as from the Digest, whose language had become fashionable across the universities by the time the translations were written. Saint Thomas’s understanding of these pages of the Politics may have affected his argument in the Summa, especially STh (...) I-II, q. 94, where he shows caution in addressing the Roman law treatment of natura, and STh II-II, q. 57. Attention to St. Thomas’s language in the commentaries and the Summa may bring additional clarity to his understanding of natura and its cognates in both settings. (shrink)

This study investigates the role of language in cross‐sector collaboration between mental health hospitals and municipalities, focusing on the challenges of maintaining continuity of care and integrating patient‐centered approaches. Using Fairclough's framework for critical discourse analysis, we examined focus group interviews with 21 healthcare professionals, including nurses, social workers, and psychiatrists, to identify key themes and patterns in how cross‐sector collaboration is discussed. The analysis revealed a dominant medicalized discourse in hospital settings, which often emphasized structured care processes like treatment (...) plans and medication management, overshadowing more flexible, patient‐centered approaches common in community‐based services. Power dynamics were evident, with hospital professionals frequently positioned as active agents, while patients and community‐based workers were portrayed in more passive roles. Although efforts to involve patients in decision‐making were noted, these were often controlled by professionals, reflecting a mediated approach to patient empowerment. The findings highlight the cultural and structural divides between hospital and community services and suggest the need for improved communication strategies, integrated care pathways, and a shift toward more inclusive, patient‐centered care models. Addressing these discursive barriers is crucial for achieving more effective, integrated, and patient‐centered care, ultimately improving outcomes for patients. (shrink)