Chinese medicine (CM) is one ofseveral ancient systems of medical care basedupon a different worldview than the prevailingbiomedical model; it employs its own language,systems of logic, and criteria forunderstanding health and diagnosing illness.Medicinal herbs play a central role in the CMsystem of practice and knowledgeable CMpractitioners have extensive clinicalexperience using them. However, the establishedscientific and regulatory organizations thatrely upon biomedical understandings ofpathology do not accept the definitions formedicinal herb quality used by CMpractitioners. Furthermore, local medicinalherb growers within the upper Midwest (...) are in aposition to grow many herbs, but are unclearabout the demand for and desired qualities ofthe medicinal herbs they produce. Given thissituation, the Medicinal Herb Network wasfounded as a partnership effort of small-scalemedicinal herb growers and practitioners of CMto develop more appropriate standards ofmedicinal herb quality and to encourage locallygrown, high quality medicinal herbs consistentwith these standards. An overview of CM servesas grounding from which to articulate thedilemmas experienced by CM practitioners ofperceiving medicinal herb quality andintegrating knowledge across divergent medicalsystems. A Network initiative designed toovercome these dilemmas illustrates thepossibility of developing a lexicon of qualitydescriptors for medicinal herbs using Chinesemedical theory, while drawing from descriptivesensory analysis procedures currently practicedby a sub-group of food scientists. (shrink)

An important issue in epistemology concerns the source of epistemic normativity. Epistemic consequentialism maintains that epistemic norms are genuine norms in virtue of the way in which they are conducive to epistemic value, whatever epistemic value may be. So, for example, the epistemic consequentialist might say that it is a norm that beliefs should be consistent, in that holding consistent beliefs is the best way to achieve the epistemic value of accuracy. Thus epistemic consequentialism is structurally similar to the family (...) of consequentialist views in ethics. Recently, philosophers from both formal epistemology and traditional epistemology have shown interest in such a view. In formal epistemology, there has been particular interest in thinking of epistemology as a kind of decision theory where instead of maximizing expected utility one maximizes expected epistemic utility. In traditional epistemology, there has been particular interest in various forms of reliabilism about justification and whether such views are analogous to—and so face similar problems to—versions of consequentialism in ethics. This volume presents some of the most recent work on these topics as well as others related to epistemic consequentialism, by authors that are sympathetic to the view and those who are critical of it. (shrink)

Representational and embodied approaches to cognitive science are often presented in opposition to one another, with Merleau-Ponty serving as a historical precursor to embodied approaches. We argue that the two approaches are compatible and complementary, and that both can be used to interpret Merleau-Ponty's (and Husserl's) work. To support our arguments, we describe two forms of representation associated with two distinct processes. Motor intentionality is a process of direct embodied interaction (reflexes, habits, skilled behaviors) which use mediating representations to bind (...) sensory information together and guide behavior. These internal states reliably indicate specific stimuli (even if just during a transient episode), are associated with a determinate phenomenal character (a “typical physiognomy”), and correspond to what Husserl describes as passive synthesis. Higher-level processes like reasoning make use of more explicit representations (what Husserl calls active processes), which are associated with focused attention and “explicated” propositional contents. The two kinds of process can occur independently, but are often fully woven together, as for example when a friend makes explicit suggestions while the two of you cook. We also discuss Merleau-Ponty’s famous Schneider case, which makes vivid what happens when both types of processes (motor intentionality and high-level reasoning; passive and active synthesis) are intact, but when some explicit representations are damaged. A certain stratum of virtual or projected space is lost, and so a certain kind of abstractly guided behavior is unavailable to him. (shrink)

Vector-based models of word meaning have become increasingly popular in cognitive science. The appeal of these models lies in their ability to represent meaning simply by using distributional information under the assumption that words occurring within similar contexts are semantically similar. Despite their widespread use, vector-based models are typically directed at representing words in isolation, and methods for constructing representations for phrases or sentences have received little attention in the literature. This is in marked contrast to experimental evidence (e.g., in (...) sentential priming) suggesting that semantic similarity is more complex than simply a relation between isolated words. This article proposes a framework for representing the meaning of word combinations in vector space. Central to our approach is vector composition, which we operationalize in terms of additive and multiplicative functions. Under this framework, we introduce a wide range of composition models that we evaluate empirically on a phrase similarity task. (shrink)

The evidential argument from evil seeks to show that suffering is strong evidence against theism. The core idea of the evidential argument is that we know of innocent beings suffering for no apparent good reason. Perhaps the most common criticism of the evidential argument comes from the camp of skeptical theism, whose lot includes William Alston, Alvin Plantinga, and Stephen Wykstra. According to skeptical theism the limits of human knowledge concerning the realm of goods, evils, and the connections between values, (...) undermines the judgment that what appears as pointless evil really is pointless. For all we know the suffering of an innocent being, though appearing pointless, in fact leads to a greater good. In this paper I argue that no one who accepts the doctrines of skeptical theism has a principled way of avoiding moral skepticism. (shrink)

The ongoing explosion of interest in artificial intelligence is fueled in part by recently developed techniques in machine learning. Those techniques allow automated systems to process huge amounts of data, utilizing mathematical methods that depart from traditional statistical approaches, and resulting in impressive advancements in our ability to make predictions and uncover correlations across a host of interesting domains. But as is now widely discussed, the way that those systems arrive at their outputs is often opaque, even to the experts (...) who design and deploy them. Is it morally problematic to make use of opaque automated methods when making high-stakes decisions, like whether to issue a loan to an applicant, or whether to approve a parole request? Many scholars answer in the affirmative. However, there is no widely accepted explanation for why transparent systems are morally preferable to opaque systems. We argue that the use of automated decision-making systems sometimes violates duties of consideration that are owed by decision-makers to decision-subjects, duties that are both epistemic and practical in character. Violations of that kind generate a weighty consideration against the use of opaque decision systems. In the course of defending our approach, we show that it is able to address three major challenges sometimes leveled against attempts to defend the moral import of transparency in automated decision-making. (shrink)

Although the belief that killing is normally wrong is as universal and uncontroversial a moral belief as we are likely to find, no one, to my knowledge, has ever offered an account of why killing is wrong that even begins to do justice to the full range of common sense beliefs about the morality of killing. Yet such an account would be of considerable practical significance, since understanding why some killings are wrong should help us to determine the conditions in (...) which killing is not wrong. For, in those cases in which the reasons why killing is wrong do not apply, killing may be permissible or, if there are positive reasons that favour it, even morally required. (shrink)

In Sounds, Ecologies, Musics, authors pose exciting challenges and provide fresh opportunities for scholars, scientists, environmental activists, and musicians to consider music and sound from ecological standpoints. The book covers topics such as how environment enables music and sound, how music and sound relate to Western environmental science, and mutidisciplinary collaborations among scholars.

Michael Walzer presents the theory of the just war that he develops in Just and Unjust Wars as a set of principles governing the initiation and conduct of war that are entailed by respect for the moral rights of individuals. I argue in this essay that some of the principles he defends do not and cannot derive from the basic moral rights of individuals and indeed, in some cases, explicitly permit the violation of those rights. I argue, further, that it (...) does not follow, at least in some cases, that the principles are false. Even if some of the principles are not adaptations of a theory of rights to the problems of war, they may still be rational, pragmatic accommodations to epistemic and institutional constraints under which we must now act. Yet I also argue that respect for the rights that Walzer claims that individuals have requires us to try to overcome the epistemic and institutional impediments that restrict us at present. As those impediments are removed, the reasons for acknowledging and following some of the central principles Walzer espouses will diminish and, perhaps, disappear. (shrink)

"We often find that the state of not-knowing can be a precursor to moments of rich discovery which possess a dynamic, transformative power that exceeds any prior expectation." From the Introduction In daily life, when we see, hear or touch something that we don't recognise, we are instantly at our most alert. In that condition of 'not-knowing' we are in a state of alive, lithe awareness: asking questions, inviting input, open to learning, looking for significance and meaning... These essays, most (...) by practising psychotherapists, some of them Buddhists, take as their starting point the idea that not-knowing is fundamental to conscious reflection and the desire to know must always arise in the first instance from the self-awareness of not-knowing. Read in any order, on waking, before sleeping or when in doubt... they will be of interest to anyone who has ever sat in either chair in a psychotherapist's or counsellor's room - as well as anyone troubled or intrigued by what it takes to live comfortably and well in a condition of not knowing all (or even any) of the answers. (shrink)

ABSTRACT William Cooney has recently argued (The Journal of Applied Philosophy, Vol. 6, pp. 201–204) that the social programme of affirmative action, though controversial, can be supported by the doctrine of double effect in that, according to the doctrine, responsibility falls on the side of intended consequences and not on that of unintended consequences. The point of affirmative action is to include certain disadvantaged groups; it is not to exclude other groups, though this is an inevitable and foreseeable by‐product. In (...) this article I contend that Cooney's argument ignores two important conditions of the doctrine of double effect; namely, that the good which results from the intended effect must be at least commensurate with the harm that results from the unintended effect; and, that the intended good effect is causally separate from the unintended harmful effect. Any use of the doctrine which neglects these conditions leads to morally problematic cases. Further, once we take the conditions into account, we have good reason to think that the doctrine of double effect has no relevance to the affirmative action debate. (shrink)

Imagine this scenario: a bank customer walks up to an ATM to withdraw cash from her account. While entering her PIN, she accidentally presses the '3' key at the same time as the 'Clear' key. Instantly $100 comes out of the cash dispenser! Curious, she checks the receipt and seeing that the money did not from her account, she tries the same operation. Again, $100 comes out of the cash dispenser. At this point she has two options, A: she can (...) continue to take advantage of this obvious flaw and tell her friends, or B: she can report this problem to the bank, telling no one else. While Kantian ethics might require the latter, the issue becomes much grayer when it comes to computer software vulnerabilities. Many variables exist to cloud the ethical judgment of a software flaw's discoverer. The question becomes: is it better to report any vulnerability that could cause catastrophic problems or to make the vulnerability information public in order to simultaneously compel the software vendor to address the problem while giving the vendor's customers a chance to prepare for potential exploitation? Software companies are facing this dilemma on a regular basis. There are dozens of websites, newsgroups, and e-mail lists dedicated to the task of sharing vulnerability information, whether condoned by the software company or not. The issue increases in severity as vulnerable software becomes ubiquitous across global networks. The public release of vulnerability information is often the first drop of the monsoon that is the malicious network worm. How this information is controlled and disseminated is critical to the stable operation of millions of computer systems and networks across the globe.Modern software with network capability is fundamentally complex and can span thousands of lines of source code for one small part of the package. Without proper testing and quality assurance, many bugs and errors slip through. Software development requires these iterations of coding and bug fixing to produce stable and polished final products. Larger and more complex software gives a greater chance for a bug to remain undiscovered. Yet, since major vulnerabilities have appeared in relatively smaller projects, proper code audit and testing are critical regardless of the size of a software package or the amount of source code required to produce it. If bugs or security vulnerabilities are not discovered and fixed by the software manufacturers, it is inevitable that they will be discovered by outside researchers.This breeds the ethical conundrum of what the researchers do with the information once it has been discovered. Foundational to disclosure, regardless of the ideology, is the notion of providing useful protective information to the most appropriate audience. Many suggest that disclosure is about doing the 'greatest good' for the greatest number of people, which is an obvious adherence to the ethical principle of Utilitarianism. There are numerous parties involved in the network security process such as software vendor, security researcher, system administrator, and even malicious attacker: all whose intentions reflect on the ethical principles behind their actions. (shrink)

John Macmurray's philosophy of "the form of the personal" is examined with particular interest in his emphasis on persons as agents, his account of psychological development, his claim that our self-awareness as persons is acquired from the mutuality of personal relations, and his important contribution in placing personhood at the center of inquiries into the human condition. Subsequently, it is argued that the reality of psychologically capable personhood so construed is irreducible to physical, biological, or social categories frequently deemed by (...) psychologists as more fundamental and, further, that psychological capacities and their development are best understood in terms of the personal. 2012 APA, all rights reserved). (shrink)

This article suggests that nature awareness and panpsychic gratitude transform a wounded mechanistic reductionist worldview into creative regenerative participation with the more-than-human world. Four practical keys are shared that have proven to be helpful in resuscitating the indigenous heart and cultivating greater empathy, love, compassion, and insight into the metaphoric resonance and teachings of the natural world. This inquiry situates the human family as vital consciousness tendrils of the living planet in this critical time of shifting climate patterns, loss of (...) biodiversity due to human presence, geopolitical conflicts, and other challenges as we step into the Ecozoic Era. (shrink)

Grice is often taken to have delivered a decisive blow against the tendency on the part of ordinary language philosophers to suspect that the presence of particular circumstances is requisite for philosophically interesting expressions to be in order, even to make sense, when deployed in particular cases. Grice’s attack has three parts. He argues that the presence of those particular circumstances isn’t bound up with the meaning of the expressions in question—the suggestion that those circumstances are present is merely a (...) “conversational implicature”. He offers examples designed to show that utterances of the expressions at issue may be true or false even when the circumstances alleged to be requisite are nowhere to be found. And he identifies what he sees as a collection of rules of conversation the violation of which accounts for the oddity attending those expressions uttered in the absence of the circumstances in question. Here I try to show that each of these parts of Grice’s attack against the ordinary language philosophers fails and that Grice’s blow isn’t decisive at all. (shrink)

In these pages I resurrect a dispute that has, sadly I think, now gone by the wayside in current thinking about knowledge, among other things. I mean the dispute that we find Wittgenstein entertaining in certain sections of _On Certainty_ and the dispute that led John Searle to argue that there is such a thing as the assertion fallacy. The dispute turns on what lessons we can draw from the fact that in certain examples it would be fishy or odd (...) or puzzling to say that we know. One party in the dispute, I’ll call them "saying philosophers", has it that those examples in which it would be odd to say we know aren’t examples of knowledge or of knowing. The other party, I’ll call them "meaning philosophers", agrees about the oddity but insists that the examples are still obviously examples of knowledge or of knowing and that what we say in those examples, fishy or not, is still true. I investigate this disagreement and to try and make some headway in providing support for the saying philosophers. (shrink)

Through the work of Isaac Levi and others, a tension that lies at the heart of Peirce’s doubt-belief theory of inquiry has received significant attention in recent years. Scholars have struggled to explain on Peirce’s behalf how inquirers are to strike an appropriate balance between believing and doubting. We must acknowledge the breadth and depth of our fallibility without countenancing paper doubts that are at best idle and at worst pernicious. We must rely on our beliefs in inquiry while nevertheless (...) remaining ready to drop them when experience speaks sufficiently against them. Overconfidence threatens to block the road of inquiry via excessive tenacity, while underconfidence threatens to impede inquiry via a... (shrink)

An essay exploring the failure of the Freethought Movement to repell the Religious Right in American politics.

Key Enlightenment minds are often juxtaposed with their iconic foes, religious conservatives. When discussing the subject of women’s rights, however, this comparison creates a false impression that Enlightenment male thinkers held ideas very much opposed to a dogmatic institution such as the Catholic Church. Ironically, and damaging to their legacy of prejudice-free rationalism, nearly all of the philosophes, many of whom were “freethinking” atheists, viewed woman’s intellectual nature and societal purpose through a prejudice-tainted glass, not unlike the most conservative establishments (...) of their time. Indeed, when it came to the perception of women, the philosophes had less in common with a virulently secular feminist such as Nicholas de Caritat, marquis de Condorcet, than they do with modern conservative Christians who believe women should be treated more fairly, but still cling to gender stereotypes. (shrink)

In this author-meets-critics dialogue, Sanjay Lal, author of, argues that Gandhian values of nonviolence raise aspirations of liberal democracy to a higher level. Since Gandhian values of nonviolence are closely associated with religious values, liberal democracy should make public commitments to religions on a non-sectarian basis, except for unreasonable religions. Critic Jeff Shawn Jose agrees that Gandhian values can strengthen liberal democracy. However, Jose finds a contradiction in Lal’s proposal that a liberal state should support reasonable religions only. A (...) more consistent Gandhian approach would focus on everyday interactions between citizens and groups rather than state-directed preferences. Critic Douglas Allen also welcomes Lal’s project that brings Gandhian philosophy into relation with liberal democratic theory; however, he argues that universalizing the Absolute Truth of genuine religion is more complicated than Lal acknowledges. D. Allen argues for a Gandhian approach of relative truths, which cannot be evaluated apart from contingency or context, and he offers autobiographical evidence in support of his critical suspicion of genuine religion. Critic Michael Allen argues that Lal’s metaphysical approach to public justification violates a central commitment of political liberalism not to take sides on any metaphysical basis. M. Allen argues that democratic socialism is closer to Gandhi’s approach than is liberalism. Lal responds to critics by arguing that Gandhi’s evaluation of unreasonable religions depends upon an assessment of violence, which is not as problematic as critics charge, either from a Gandhian perspective or a liberal one. Furthermore, by excluding unreasonable or violent religions from state promotion, Lal argues that he is not advocating state suppression. Finally, Lal argues that Gandhian or Kingian metaphysics are worthy of support by liberal, democratic states seeking to educate individuals regarding peaceful unity in diversity. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Nietzsche’s Case: Philosophy as/and LiteratureJeff MitchellNietzsche’s Case: Philosophy as/and Literature, by Bernd Magnus, Jean-Pierre Mileur and Stanley Stewart; 284 pp. New York: Routledge, Chapman & Hall, 1993, $16.95.In their “Pre(post)faces,” which open and conclude Nietzsche’s Case, the authors explain that the essay was primarily motivated by a problem they perceived in English-speaking Nietzsche criticism. Critical discussion of Nietzsche has suffered, they argue, from institutionalized “mutual shunning” which creates (...) a neat divide between literary and philosophical discourses. From within the safety of their professional keep, philosophers have generally adjudged literary treatments of Nietzsche’s writings negatively, assigning them a place on a scale ranging from “inaccurate” to “inept.” Viewed from the walls surrounding the literary stronghold, philosophical analyzes of Nietzsche have appeared naive and/or uninteresting. The authors assert that especially in the case of Nietzsche this turf mentality in the humanities has impoverished our cultural imagination, since he presents us with a sort of writing which defies mutually exclusive pigeon-holing as either philosophical or literary.Philosophy, the authors maintain, arises “out of the possibilities of idealization” (p. 138). Literary criticism, on the other hand, is “based on the possibilities of textualization” (p. 138). Philosophers studying Nietzsche tend to look for coherent meaning and, even more importantly, for logical rigor, whereas literary critics generally read “for novel new ideas, new insights, for fractures, fissures, and ambiguities in Nietzsche’s texts, for opportunities or connections missed” (p. 4). Nietzsche’s Case is an experiment in genre-mixing, [End Page 164] incorporating as it does all of these concerns into its critical perspective. The authors argue that Nietzsche’s work demands such criticism since his texts are informed by a conceptual rigor whose logic involves exploitation of the literary and rhetorical possibilities of the written word.The book’s project—undertaken, appropriately enough, by a philosopher (Magnus) and two literary theorists (Mileur and Stewart)—sets out to establish a new mode of criticism by carefully tracing the ways in which Nietzsche’s texts exceed traditional boundaries. The book’s extended argument aims at showing that Nietzsche’s transgression of hoary epistemic borders was directly motivated by his own genealogy of Western knowledge. “I, Plato, am the truth”—Nietzsche’s quip from the Twilight of the Idols ironically exposes the philosophical will to truth, and it is this claim to be primarily concerned with truth that the authors say can be seen “with only slight exaggeration,” as “the founding gesture of philosophy as it has been delivered over to us” (p. 4). They helpfully recall that part of Nietzsche’s genealogy which traces the origins of philosophy to religion and the priestly caste. Claims to the possession of knowledge were tied very early on to priestly strategies of asceticism and social domination, which cleverly highlighted the salvational nature of “true” knowledge as well as the discipline and self-renunciation required to attain it. On Nietzsche’s analysis, the dedication of philosophers to truth for truth’s sake and the supposedly disinterested character of their ideas and observations are the descendants of priestly asceticism.Magnus, Mileur and Stewart suggest that the philosophers’ assumption of a wholly objective and definitive access to truth was a pipedream, and that it helped seduce philosophers into a blindness vis-à-vis the interested and personal nature of their own theories, the textuality of their interpretations of world and humankind. If one grants this thesis, then the self-evident contemporary division between philosophy and literary criticism becomes, effectively, much less self-evident.The book’s originality and strength comes out best in the detailed analyses to which the authors’ new critical mode gives rise. In addition to displaying an impressive command of the enormous secondary literature on Nietzsche, the research team draws a series of novel and interesting comparisons between Nietzsche’s texts and texts from the English Renaissance and Romantic periods. Their emphasis on understanding the rhetorical aspects of Nietzsche’s writing—such as his continual use of hyperbole—should prove to be a genuine resource in interpreting his writings in the future. By pointing out and investigating the various rhetorical devices Nietzsche employs, they... (shrink)

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Bruno Latour has had a tremendous impact on the field of science studies. Yet, it is not always easy to say what he stands for. Indeed, Latour has often claimed that his work lacks any overall unity. In this essay, I suggest that at least one concept remains constant throughout Latour’s diverse studies of modern science and technology, namely, mediation. I try to make good this claim by focussing on Latour’s numerous attempts over the years to distance himself from, so (...) as to discredit, the philosopher Martin Heidegger. I argue that Latour’s repeated denunciations of Heidegger amount to a systematic tactic of dissimulation: by suppressing the substance of Heidegger’s critique of modern technoscience, Latour directs attention away from the not insignificant weaknesses in his own theory of mediation. Against the backdrop of an appropriately reconstructed Heidegger, Latour’s self-promotion as a radically progressive non-modern thinker cannot be sustained. (shrink)

Is it reasonable to believe in God even in the absence of strong evidence that God exists? Pragmatic arguments for theism are designed to support belief even if one lacks evidence that theism is more likely than not. Jeff Jordan proposes that there is a sound version of the most well-known argument of this kind, Pascal's Wager, and explores the issues involved - in epistemology, the ethics of belief, decision theory, and theology.

In 2020, COVID-19, the Australia bushfires, and other global threats served as vivid reminders that human and nonhuman fates are increasingly linked. Human use of nonhuman animals contributes to pandemics, climate change, and other global threats which, in turn, contribute to biodiversity loss, ecosystem collapse, and nonhuman suffering. Jeff Sebo argues that humans have a moral responsibility to include animals in global health and environmental policy. In particular, we should reduce our use of animals as part of our pandemic (...) and climate change mitigation efforts and increase our support for animals as part of our adaptation efforts. Applying and extending frameworks such as One Health and the Green New Deal, Sebo calls for reducing support for factory farming, deforestation, and the wildlife trade; increasing support for humane, healthful, and sustainable alternatives; and considering human and nonhuman needs holistically. Sebo also considers connections with practical issues such as education, employment, social services, and infrastructure, as well as with theoretical issues such as well-being, moral status, political status, and population ethics. In all cases, he shows that these issues are both important and complex, and that we should neither underestimate our responsibilities because of our limitations, nor underestimate our limitations because of our responsibilities. Both an urgent call to action and a survey of what ethical and effective action requires, Saving Animals, Saving Ourselves is an invaluable resource for scholars, advocates, policy-makers, and anyone interested in what kind of world we should attempt to build and how. (shrink)

Jeff McMahan urges us to reject the view, dominant throughout history, that mere participation in an unjust war is not wrong.