As part of a larger study, predictors of self-blame were investigated in a sample of 149 undergraduate sexual assault survivors. Each participant completed questionnaires regarding their preassault, peritraumatic, and post assault experiences and participated in an individual interview. Results confirmed the central hypothesis that, although several established correlates independently relate to self-blame, only cognitive content and process variables—negative self-cognitions and counterfactual-preventability cognitions—uniquely predict self-blame in a multivariate model.

This paper explores the prospects for using the notion of a primitive normative attitude in responding to the sceptical argument about meaning developed in chapter 2 of Saul Kripke’s Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language. It takes as its stalking-horse the response to Kripke’s Wittgenstein developed in a recent series of important works by Hannah Ginsborg. The paper concludes that Ginsborg’s attempted solution fails for a number of reasons: it depends on an inadequate response to Kripke’s Wittgenstein’s ‘finitude’ objection to (...) reductive dispositionalism; it erroneously rejects the idea that a speaker’s understanding of an expression guides her use; it threatens to collapse into either full-blown non-reductionism or reductive dispositionalism; and there is no motive for accepting it over forms of non-reductionism such as those developed by Barry Stroud and John McDowell. (shrink)

An important disagreement in contemporary debates about free will hinges on whether an agent must have alternative possibilities to be morally responsible. Many assume that notions of alternative possibilities are ubiquitous and reflected in everyday intuitions about moral responsibility: if one lacks alternatives, then one cannot be morally responsible. We explore this issue empirically. In two studies, we find evidence that folk judgments about moral responsibility call into question two popular principles that require some form of alternative possibilities for moral (...) responsibility. Survey participants given scenarios involving agents that fail to satisfy these principles nonetheless found these agents to be morally responsible, blameworthy, deserving of blame, and at fault for morally bad actions and consequences. We defend our interpretation of this evidence against objections and explore some implications of these findings for the free will debate. (shrink)

Neuroscientific studies have shown that brain activity correlated with a decision to move can be observed before a person reports being consciously aware of having made that decision . Given that a later event cannot cause an earlier one , such results have been interpreted as evidence that decisions are made unconsciously . We argue that this interpretation depends upon an all-or-none view of consciousness, and we offer an alternative interpretation of the early decision-related brain activity based on models in (...) which conscious awareness of the decision to move develops gradually up to the level of a reporting criterion. Under this interpretation, the early brain activity reflects sub-criterion levels of awareness rather than complete absence of awareness and thus does not suggest that decisions are made unconsciously. (shrink)

Serena Olsaretti brings together new essays by leading moral and political philosophers on the nature of desert and justice, their relations with each other and with other values.

This chapter contains sections titled: Introduction Quine on Indeterminacy of Translation: The Argument from Below Quine on Indeterminacy of Translation: The Argument from Above Kripke's Wittgenstein's Attack on Meaning Conclusion.

There have only been three articles in mainstream philosophy journals going back at least to the 1970s on generosity. In this paper, I hope to draw attention to this neglected virtue. By building on what work has already been done, and trying to advance that discussion along several different dimensions, I hope that others will take a closer look at this important and surprisingly complex virtue. More specifically, I formulate three important necessary conditions for what is involved in possessing the (...) virtue of generosity, and consider other contenders as well. (shrink)

At 435c-d and 504b ff., Socrates indicates that there is a "longer and fuller way" that one must take in order to get "the best possible view" of the soul and its virtues. But Plato does not have him take this "longer way." Instead Socrates restricts himself to an indirect indication of its goals by his images of sun, line, and cave and to a programmatic outline of its first phase, the five mathematical studies. Doesn't this pointed restraint function as (...) a provocation, moving us to want to begin the "longer way" and to make use of its conceptual resources to rethink Socrates' images? I begin by finding a double movement in the complex trajectory of the five studies: they both guide the soul in the "turn away from what is coming to be ... [to] what is" (518c) and, at the same time, lead the soul back, albeit in the medium of pure intelligibility, to the sensible world; for the pure figures and ratios that they disclose constitute the core structures of sensible things. I then draw on what Socrates says about geometry and harmonics to address three fundamental questions that he leaves open: the nature of the Good in its responsibility for truth and for the being of the forms; the relations of forms, mathematicals, and sensibles as these are disclosed by dialectic; and the bearing of the philosopher's discovery of the Good on his disposition towards his community and the task of ruling. I close by marking six sets of further questions that these reflections bequeath for dialogues to come. (shrink)

In this book Marx is revealed as a powerful contributor to the debates that now dominate philosophy and political theory.

He draws on recent philosophy, but assumes no knowledge of the texts or terminology. Paper edition (unseen), $14.95. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR.

We investigate expansions of the ordered field of real numbers equipped with a family of real power functions. We show in particular that the theory of the ordered field of real numbers augmented by all restricted analytic functions and all real power functions admits elimination of quantifiers and has a universal axiomatization. We derive that every function of one variable definable in this structure, not ultimately identically 0, is asymptotic at + ∞ to a real function of the form x (...) cxr, c ≠ 0; in particular, this structure is polynomially bounded. Furthermore, given any definable function f:U → with U open in n, if α ε U and f is infinitely differentiable at α, then f is real analytic in a neighborhood of α. (shrink)

The ArgumentThis paper argues that science and technology studies need to adopt a much wider view of what counts as a laboratory. The factory, it is suggested, is as much a site of invention and intervention as the laboratory. As a site for the government of economic life, the factory is a laboratorypar excellence. One particular factory is studied — the Decatur, Illinois, plant of Caterpillar Inc. — as it is rethought and remade in accordance with ideals of cellular manufacturing, (...) Just-In-Time systems, customer-driven manufacturing, and competitor benchmarking. But it is not just the changes at the factory itself that are studied. The paper analyzes the linkages and relays between the redesign of a particular manufacturing plant and the plethora of calls for a revitalization of North American manufacturing industry and a new form of economic citizenship. The paper examines the remaking of a factory as anassemblage, a historically specific and temporarily stabilized complex of relations among ways of problematizing the factory in a multiplicity of locales. There are four steps to the changes analyzed here: a problematizing of the factory at the level of North American manufacturing as a whole in the 1980s; a problematizing of the notion of competitiveness at Caterpillar Inc, through the calculative practices of competitor benchmarking and related expertises; a diagraming of the ideal factory in systems terms; and the embedding of notions of the product, of competitiveness, and of a new economic citizenship in the “Assembly Highway” at the Decatur plant. Rethinking the factory took place within this assemblage of relations, rether than at any one site. (shrink)

Rethinks the soul in plant-like terms rather than animal, drawing from nineteenth-century philosophy of nature.

Bernard Williams charges that the moral psychology built into R. M. Hare’s utilitarianism is incoherent in virtue of demanding a bifurcated kind of moral thinking that is possible only for agents who fail to reflect properly on their own practical decision making. I mount a qualified defence of Hare’s view by drawing on the account of the ‘reactive attitudes’ found in P. F. Strawson’s ‘Freedom and Resentment’. Against Williams, I argue that the ‘resilience’ of the reactive attitudes ensures that our (...) taking an instrumental view of our dispositions to experience guilt and compunction, as Hare calls for us to do while engaged in ‘critical’ moral thinking, will not prevent us from experiencing these feelings as people ordinarily do while we are thinking ‘intuitively’. I also consider the implications of my argument for consequentialism more generally and (briefly) Kantianism. (shrink)

-/- For I have to remind you, somewhat bluntly and simply, that my most constant interest, coming even before my philosophical interest I should say, if this is possible, has been directed towards literature, towards that writing which is called literature. -/- What is literature? –Jacques Derrida, “The Time of a Thesis, Punctuations” -/- Literature is everywhere in Jacques Derrida's writing. It is there from one end to the other of his work, even in essays or books that superficially do (...) not seem to involve “literature.” If Derek Attridge had not already invented or borrowed the phrase “Acts of Literature” as the title for his fine anthology of Derrida's writings about literature I might have called this chapter “Derrida's Acts of Literature.” The phrase “acts of literature” is a double genitive, subjective and objective at once. It names acts performed by literature, and at the same time acts that create or comment on literature. In what sense can literature, or writing about literature, or writing literature, or reading literature be an “act”? That is one of my main questions here. -/- Derrida, along with all the other things he is (as this volume testifies), is one of the great literary critics of the twentieth century. (shrink)

It is a distinctive and unprecedented feature of modern societies that the idea of equality should hold a central place in their political thinking. I want to begin my enquiry by considering why this should be and what its significance is. For if there is indeed an important sense in which egalitarianism is written in to contemporary conditions of life, it makes no sense to think of oneself as taking a stand for or against equality. Now to say this is (...) not to deny the equally inescapable fact that the issue of equality rouses fierce ideological passions between those who might describe themselves on one side as its friends and on the other as its enemies. But my suggestion is that both sides may misunderstand their contest. Their conflict is not about the value of equality as such, but about competing specifications of that value, about different versions of what it means to treat people as equals. (shrink)

From computerized medical records to databases of pharmacological interactions and automated provisional EKG readings, the emergence of information technology has significantly altered the practice of medicine. Information technology has been widely used to enhance diagnosis and treatment and to improve communication between providers. The advent of the Internet also brings far-reaching implications for patient–physician communication, challenging physicians, patients, and policymakers to consider its impact on the delivery of medical care and the therapeutic relationship. A new set of practices by patients (...) and physicians is unfolding in cyberspace, ranging from the use of e-mail to communicate between physicians and patients in an existing relationship to one-to-one consultations with an anonymous physician and ongoing online treatment, such as psychotherapy. These practices are emerging in both the for-profit and not-for-profit spheres. (shrink)

The question of whether chemical structure is reducible to Everettian Quantum Mechanics (EQM) should be of interest to philosophers of chemistry and philosophers of physics alike. Among the three realist interpretations of quantum mechanics, EQM resolves the measurement problem by claiming that measurements (now interpreted as instances of decoherence) have indeterminate outcomes absolutely speaking, but determinate outcomes relative to emergent worlds (Maudlin, 1995). Philosophers who wish to be sensitive to the practice of quantum chemistry (e.g. Scerri, 2016) should be interested (...) in EQM because Franklin and Seifert (2020) claim that resolving the measurement problem also resolves the reducibility of chemical structure, and EQM is the interpretation which involves no mathematical structure beyond that used by practicing scientists. Philosophers interested in the quantum interpretation debate should be interested in the reducibility of chemistry because chemical structure is precisely the kind of determinate three-dimensional fact which EQM should be able to ground if it is to be empirically coherent (see Allori, 2023). The prospects for reduction of chemical structure are poor if it cannot succeed in EQM; the prospects for EQM as a guide to ontology are poor if it cannot reduce chemical structure. -/- Unfortunately for proponents of chemical reduction and EQM, there are three serious barriers to the reduction of chemistry to EQM. The first concern is that quantum treatments of chemical structure rely on the Born-Oppenheimer approximation, which holds nuclear locations fixed while minimizing the energy of the electronic configuration (Hendry, 2022), but this approximation is not licensed by EQM. The Born-Oppenheimer approximation relies on nuclei and molecular orbitals being simultaneously present, but in the three-dimensional ontology following from the Everett interpretation these only emerge at different energy scales and are not simultaneously present (Miller, 2023). The second concern is that the emergent worlds of EQM are supposed to be decoherent at the macro-scale (A. Wilson, 2020), but the recent development of superchemistry suggests that chemical reactions can occur in coherent states (Zhang et al., 2023). The third concern is that emergent worlds are only pragmatic pseudo-processes (Wallace, 2012b), but this means EQM trades realist physics for mere instrumentalism about chemistry. Absent a commitment to chemical realism, reduction is an empty promise. The prospects for reduction of chemical structure to EQM are therefore poor. (shrink)