Causation is a central topic in many areas of philosophy. In metaphysics, philosophers want to know what causation is, and how it is related to laws of nature, probability, action, and freedom of the will. In epistemology, philosophers investigate how causal claims can be inferred from statistical data, and how causation is related to perception, knowledge and explanation. In the philosophy of mind, philosophers want to know whether and how the mind can be said to have causal efficacy, and in (...) ethics, whether there is a moral distinction between acts and omissions and whether the moral value of an act can be judged according to its consequences. And causation is a contested concept in other fields of enquiry, such as biology, physics, and the law. This book provides an in-depth and comprehensive overview of these and other topics, as well as the history of the causation debate from the ancient Greeks to the logical empiricists. The chapters provide surveys of contemporary debates, while often also advancing novel and controversial claims; and each includes a comprehensive bibliography and suggestions for further reading. The book is thus the most comprehensive source of information about causation currently available, and will be invaluable for upper-level undergraduates through to professional philosophers. (shrink)

What makes a biological entity an individual? Jack Wilson shows that past philosophers have failed to explicate the conditions an entity must satisfy to be a living individual. He explores the reason for this failure and explains why we should limit ourselves to examples involving real organisms rather than thought experiments. This book explores and resolves paradoxes that arise when one applies past notions of individuality to biological examples beyond the conventional range and presents an analysis of identity and (...) persistence. The book's main purpose is to bring together two lines of research, theoretical biology and metaphysics, which have dealt with the same subject in isolation from one another. Wilson explains an alternative theory about biological individuality which solves problems which cannot be addressed by either field alone. He presents a more fine-grained vocabulary of individuation based on diverse kinds of living things, allowing him to clarify previously muddled disputes about individuality in biology. (shrink)

A theory intended to bridge social constructionist and cognitive constructivist thought is presented, and some of its implications for psychotherapy and education are considered. The theory is mostly concerned with understanding the emergence and development of the psychological from its biological and sociocultural origins. It is argued that the psychological is underdetermined by the biological and sociocultural, and possesses a shifting, dynamic ontology that emerges within a developmental context. Increasingly sophisticated capabilities of memory and imagination mediate and support the emergence (...) of genuinely agentic psychological phenomena from appropriated sociocultural forms and practices. (shrink)

Geoengineering is defined as the ‘deliberate and large-scale intervention in the Earth’s climatic system with the aim of reducing global warming’. The technological proposals for doing this are highly speculative. Research is at an early stage, but there is a strong consensus that technologies would, if realisable, have profound and surprising ramifications. Geoengineering would seem to be an archetype of technology as social experiment, blurring lines that separate research from deployment and scientific knowledge from technological artefacts. Looking into the experimental (...) systems of geoengineering, we can see the negotiation of what is known and unknown. The paper argues that, in renegotiating such systems, we can approach a new mode of governance—collective experimentation. This has important ramifications not just for how we imagine future geoengineering technologies, but also for how we govern geoengineering experiments currently under discussion. (shrink)

The growing demand for societal impact of teaching, research, and operations necessitates fresh approaches to our analysis of business school rankings. I discuss the Financial Times’ approach and the need for fresh methods, metrics, and standards.

Does Henry Thoreau have a positive politics? Depending on how one conceives of politics, answers will vary. Hannah Arendt famously portrayed Thoreau's commitment to the sanctity of individual conscience as distinctly unpolitical. More recent commentators grant that Thoreau has a politics, but they characterize it as profoundly negative in character. This essay argues that Thoreau indeed sponsors a positive politics-a politics of performing conscience. The performance of conscience before an audience transforms the invocation of consciencefrom a personally political act into (...) a publicly political one. The aim of the performance is to provoke one's neighbors into a process of individual self-reform that will make them capable of properly vigilant democratic citizenship and conscientious political agitation. I establish this claim through a sustained reading of a relatively neglected text that deserves wider attention in political theory: Thoreau's 1859 lecture defending insurrectionary activities by radical abolitionist John Brown. (shrink)

In his 2011 book Justice for Hedgehogs, Ronald Dworkin makes a case for the view that genuine values cannot conflict and, moreover, that they are necessarily mutually supportive. I argue that by prioritizing coherence over the conceptual authenticity of values, Dworkin’s ‘interpretivist’ view risks neglecting what we care about in these values. I first determine Dworkin’s position on the monism/pluralism debate and identify the scope of his argument, arguing that despite his self-declared monism, he is in fact a pluralist, but (...) unusual in denying conflict between plural values. I then set out the structure of his interpretive theory of value relations and present a case of value conflict which I think interpretivism cannot deal with. Following this I argue that there are structural reasons why cases like this are liable to occur and suggest that interpretivism will frequently fail to properly reflect people’s moral commitments because reinterpretation of values has the side effect of excluding important moral commitments from our conceptions of values. While, as Dworkin argues, there are no brute moral facts concerning values, moral psychology constrains the range of acceptable conceptions of values. Given the shortcomings of interpretivism I conclude that we should acknowledge that values may conflict. (shrink)

Many liberal philosophers view elite education as a virtue of political leaders and, in addition, hold that an important role of a just education system is to create better elites. A compelling and influential articulation of this view has been offered by Elizabeth Anderson. However, this view is in conflict with a commitment to substantive democracy, given the background conditions of the United States today. This article will argue, contra Anderson, that having the highly educated disproportionately represented in political leadership (...) is incompatible with egalitarian principles of democracy. The key reason for this is that it systematically shuts out the working class from full political participation. Therefore, in order to satisfy the constraints of democracy, we must sever the connection between elite education and political office. (shrink)

ABSTRACT Philosophy of religion has recently made a turn to lived religion, an approach which seeks to understand lived religion as it is experienced concretely by individual practitioners. However, this turn to lived religion has seen limited engagement with the notion of belonging. Belonging here refers to the felt sense of being part of a group – of insidership – along with the development of positive social ties and mutual affective concern. It is my contention in this paper that reflection (...) on this experience of belonging can improve our understanding of lived religion. In particular, I argue that human beings have an affective need to belong – a fundamental and affective need for belonging and positive social relationship which is felt in the body and rooted in human biology and evolutionary history. This paper makes the case for the affective need to belong, before examining its implications for understanding religion. It finds that the affectivity of belonging is capable of raising the affective salience of certain in-group beliefs, as well as creating affective hurdles to dissent, and in so doing can help to explain processes of religion conversion, sustained religious adherence, and religious disaffiliation. (shrink)

The modern era has witnessed an extraordinary and unprecedented growth in our empirical knowledge regarding the human body. This raises the question: what, if anything, can phenomenology teach us about the body that the empirical sciences cannot? Whereas common sense and empirical sciences begin from the body as straightforwardly and obviously given and go on from there to think about what this thing is, what it is made up of, and how it originated, phenomenology steps back from the straightforward fact (...) in order to ask: what is the structure of the body as an appearance? This chapter considers how some of the main figures in phenomenology have tried to answer this question. The body is not explicitly discussed in what might be thought of as the two foundational works of phenomenology: Husserl’s Logical Investigations and Heidegger’s Being and Time. Nevertheless, these works set the stage for the subsequent phenomenology of the body by describing the phenomena of multidimensionality and horizontality. Our first task will be to sketch out how these phenomena were described in the foundational works. This sets up our exposition of the body as a multidimensional phenomenon. We consider Husserl’s treatment of the body in Ideas II. We also examine how the Husserlian insights were taken up and developed by Jean-Paul Sartre and Maurice Merleau-Ponty. In conclusion we raise some critical questions regarding a phenomenological focus on the body and its multidimensionality. (shrink)

Are humans naturally predisposed to religion and supernatural beliefs? If so, does this naturalness provide a moral foundation for religious freedom? This volume offers a cross-disciplinary approach to these questions, engaging in a range of contemporary debates at the intersection of religion, cognitive science, sociology, anthropology, political science, epistemology, and moral philosophy. The contributors to this original and important volume present individual, sometimes opposing points of view on the naturalness of religion thesis and its implications for religious freedom. Topics include (...) the epistemological foundations of religion, the relationship between religion and health, and a discussion of the philosophical foundations of religious freedom as a natural, universal right, drawing implications for the normative role of religion in public life. By challenging dominant intellectual paradigms, such as the secularization thesis and the Enlightenment view of religion, the volume opens the door to a powerful and provocative reconceptualization of religious freedom. (shrink)

‘Without exaggeration and oversimplification little progress is made in most fields of humanistic investigation.’ With this disarming quotation from A. D. Nock, Albert Henrichs begins his book-length interpretation of P. Colon, inv. 3328. In the same spirit of humanistic progress, I would like to reconsider some aspects of the text and to offer a different assessment of its place in the history of religion and literature.The fragments are from three pages of a hitherto unknown Greek novel, Lollianos'Phoinikika. Frags A and (...) B luckily include book-ends, from whose subscriptions we know the author and title of the work. Frag. C is just scraps which yield no continuous sense. Frag. A brokenly and confusedly mentions youths, women dancing, being thrown off the roof, sobriety, kissing, and then, in a slightly more intelligible scene, the male narrator's loss of virginity with a woman named Persis, her gift to him of a gold necklace which he refuses, the assistance of one Glauketes in taking the necklace elsewhere, and finally what seems to be a confrontation between Persis' mother and the two lovers. This last is similar to Achilles Tatius ii 23–5. Achilles Tatius also offers the closest parallel to frag. B, a ghastly description of human sacrifice and cannibalism. This scene is the focus of most of Henrichs' interpretation and I will limit myself to it in the present article.The central question raised by this new novel fragment is how to assess the relative importance of religious and literary parallels. Is thePhoinikikato be regarded as a document in religious or in literary history, or perhaps somewhere on the borderland of both? There has been a lively discussion in the last half century of the thesis that the ancient novels were written and read as religious documents, deriving their basic structure and many details from the myths and cults of particular religions. Henrichs devotes most of his book to arguing that the sacrifice scene in Lollianos is inspired by an actual rite, probably of a Dionysian character, and that thePhoinikikaserves to illuminate a little-known corner of religious history. His views are based on an extensive collection of liturgical, mythical and ethnological parallels concerning oath rituals, the sacrifice of children, cannibalism, and face-painting. Of all the parallels cited, the two which are closest in every way to Lollianos are Achilles Tatius iii 15 and Cassius Dio lxxi 4. On the strength of these Henrichs asserts that Lollianos' description of a ritual murder represents, more or less directly, the cultic practice of the Egyptian Boukoloi. Without postulating a religious message for thePhoinikikaas a whole, Henrichs does claim that this scene yields valuable information about the structure of ancient mystery rituals and that these new fragments support the methodological correctness of Kerenyi's and Merkelbach's approach to the ancient novels. (shrink)

F. A. Hayek’s The Sensory Order (1952) is often considered to be a theory of cognitive psychology. While it contains a theory on the psychology of perception, it has the function of illustrating Hayek’s solution to the mind–body problem. The solution, which has been strongly influenced by Moritz Schlick’s epistemology, takes the form of a physicalist identity theory. An attempt is made to trace Schlick’s influence on Hayek to the latter’s stay in Zürich, which resulted in a manuscript (1920) that (...) contains the main features of the 1952 book. One of the consequences of Hayek’s theory is that we cannot describe the functioning of our mind completely without using expressions that refer to subjective experiences. For Hayek this is not a fundamental problem but a practical one that does not jeopardize his physicalist identity theory. Unlike the manuscript, The Sensory Order contains a rudimentary sketch of an evolutionary research program. When Hayek elaborated that program later, though, he focused on cultural evolution rather than on the evolution of the mind. (shrink)

Commentators have long been fascinated by the problem of freedom in Leibniz's system. Many of the recent studies begin with Leibniz's views on modality, truth, and so-called superessentialism, and then investigate whether these doctrines are compatible with freedom and contingency. There is, however, another dimension to Leibniz's thinking about freedom that has been largely overlooked in the recent literature. ;Leibniz inherited a medieval debate about God's foreknowledge of and providence over human free actions, and unlike the other great philosophers of (...) the early modern period, set out to solve it. This means the problem of human freedom for Leibniz was nested in the larger problem of God's creation, preservation, and governance of the entire created order. ;In this dissertation I set out the late medieval debate and Leibniz's adjudication of it. I argue that Leibniz offers a strong notion of providence that is a via media between the two competing paradigms of the late seventeenth century, Molinism and Banezianism. In light of these theological commitments, I offer a new assessment of Leibniz's views of divine and human freedom. (shrink)

While there is a great diversity of treatments of other minds and inter-subjectivity within both analytic and continental philosophy, this article specifies some of the core structural differences between these treatments. Although there is no canonical account of the problem of other minds that can be baldly stated and that is exhaustive of both traditions, the problem(s) of other minds can be loosely defined in family resemblances terms. It seems to have: (1) an epistemological dimension (How do we know that (...) others exist? Can we justifiably claim to know that they do?); (2) an ontological dimension that incorporates issues having to do with personal identity (What is the structure of our world such that inter-subjectivity is possible? What are the fundamental aspects of our relations to others? How do they impact upon our self-identity?); and (3) A conceptual dimension in that it depends on one's answer to the question what is a mind (How does the mind – or the concept of 'mind'– relate to the brain, the body and the world?). While these three issues are co-imbricated, I will claim that analytic engagements with the problem of other minds focus on (1), whereas continental philosophers focus far more on (2). In addition, this article will also point to various other downstream consequences of this, including the preoccupation with embodiment and forms of expressivism that feature heavily in various forms of continental philosophy, and which generally aim to ground our relations with others in a pre-reflective manner of inhabiting the world that is said to be the condition of reflection and knowledge. (shrink)

In this chapter, I revisit the question of the philosophical significance of the Great War upon the trajectory of philosophy in the twentieth century. While accounts of this are very rare in philosophy, and this is itself symptomatic, those that are given are also strangely implausible. They usually assert one of two things: that the War had little or no philosophical significance because most of the major developments had already begun, or—at the opposite extreme—they maintain that nothing was ever the (...) same in philosophy. On the latter view, the creation of the so-called analytic-continental ‘divide’ is but one notable philosophical consequence of the Great War. I want here to steer a middle-way between these positions, both having a grain of truth but over-playing their respective hands. (shrink)

Without proposing anything quite so grandiose as a return to existentialism, in this paper we aim to articulate and minimally defend certain core existentialist insights concerning the first-person perspective, the relationship between theory and practice, and the mode of philosophical presentation conducive to best making those points. We will do this by considering some of the central methodological objections that have been posed around the role of the first-person perspective and “lived experience” in the contemporary literature, before providing some neo-existentialist (...) rejoinders. We will suggest that the dilemma that contemporary philosophy poses to existentialism, vis-à-vis methodology, is that it is: a) committed to lived experience as some sort of given that might be accessed either introspectively or retrospectively (with empirical science posing prima facie obstacles to the veridicality of each); and/or b) it advocates transformative experiences, and the power of philosophy in connection with such experiences, to radically revise our doxastic and inter-connected web of beliefs. In short, the charge is conservatism on the one hand, radicalism on the other. Each of these concerns will be addressed in turn, utilizing ideas from Kierkegaard (as the source for many existentialist themes, methodological concerns, and formal practices) and from the German and French twentieth century versions of existentialism. (shrink)

The potential for the occurrence of multiple-role relationships is increased when professors also consult with athletic teams on their campuses. Such multiple-role relationships have potential ethical implications that are unclear and largely unexplored, and consultants may find multiple-role relationships both difficult to deal with and unavoidable. Therefore, the purpose of this study was to explore the nature of teacher–practitioner multiple-role relationships. Participants (N = 35) were recruited from Association for the Advancement of Applied Sport Psychology (AAASP) certified consultants (CCs) who (...) were also affiliated with a university (N = 68). All participants completed a 28-item survey exploring the incidence and relevant issues pertaining to multiple-role relationships. Chi-square analyses revealed that licensed mental health practitioners (i.e., psychologists and counselors) were more likely than nonlicensed AAASP CCs to believe that multiple-role relationships were never appropriate in sport psychology, χ2(1, N = 30) = 12.80, p <.001, and to have never taken part in a multiple-role relationship, χ2(1, N = 33) = 12.44, p <.001. Independent samples t tests revealed that mental health practitioners also reported that they would have higher levels of concern for both the practitioner, t(30) = –2.77, p =.009, and the client, t(30) = –2.50, p =.018, in such a relationship. (shrink)

This paper is both a response to the four reviewers in a special symposium on my book Adam Smith’s Pluralism and a substantive discussion of philosophy of education. In it, I introduce what I call “the educative critique,” a mode of analysis similar to Marxist, feminist, or postcolonial critiques, but focusing on the educative role of a text. I argue that choosing education as a theme is itself a solution to interpretive difficulties, not an add-on that only concerns pedagogues and (...) policy-makers. (shrink)

This article attempts to find grounds for agreement and tolerance among environmentalists, as well as all persons of good will who are reasonable and scientifically informed. It beguis by taking stock of where we are today in ethics in general, and then hi environmental ethics in particular. What are the major theories, their central ideas, and problems? Is there a way forward? Explained and defended throughout is the thesis that moral pluralism is the best way forward.