In some of the most important recent work in religious epistemology, Paul Moser (2002, 2004, 2008) develops a multifaceted reply to a prominent attack on belief in God—what we’ll call the Hiddenness Argument. This paper raises a number of worries about Moser’s novel treatment of the Hiddenness Argument. After laying out the version of that argument Moser most explicitly engages, we explain the four main elements of Moser’s reply and argue that it stands or falls with two pieces in particular—what (...) we call the Purposively Available Evidence Argument and the Cognitive Idolatry Argument. We then show that the Cognitive Idolatry Argument fails, leaving the Purposively Available Evidence Argument as Moser’s only potentially viable objection to the Hiddenness Argument. We conclude that Moser’s treatment of the Hiddenness Argument depends crucially on some controversial epistemological claims about certain of our moral beliefs, and is thus considerably more vulnerable than many have recognized. (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.

This book provides a sustained and penetrating critique of a wide range of views in modern cognitive science and philosophy of the mind, from Turing's famous test for intelligence in machines to recent work in computational linguistic theory. While discussing many of the key arguments and topics, the authors also develop a distinctive analytic approach. Drawing on the methods of conceptual analysis first elaborated by Wittgenstein and Ryle, the authors seek to show that these methods still have a great deal (...) to offer in the field of the cognitive theory and the philosophy of mind, providing a powerful alternative to many of the positions put forward in the contemporary literature. Amoung the many issues discussed in the book are the following: the Cartesian roots of modern conceptions of mind; Searle's 'Chinese Room' thought experiment; Fodor's 'language of thought' hypothesis; the place of 'folk psychology' in cognitivist thought; and the question of whether any machine may be said to 'think' or 'understand' in the ordinary senses of these words. Wide ranging, up-to-date and forcefully argued, this book represents a major intervention in contemporary debates about the status of cognitive science an the nature of mind. It will be of particular interest to students and scholars in philosophy, psychology, linguistics and computing sciences. (shrink)

Social studies of science have often treated natural field sites as extensions of the laboratory. But this overlooks the unique specificities of field sites. While lab sites are usually private spaces with carefully controlled borders, field sites are more typically public spaces with fluid boundaries and diverse inhabitants. Field scientists must therefore often adapt their work to the demands and interests of local agents. I propose to address the difference between lab and field in sociological terms, as a difference in (...) style. A field style treats epistemic alterity as a resource rather than an obstacle for objective knowledge production. A sociological stylistics of the field should thus explain how objective science can co-exist with radical conceptual difference. I discuss examples from the Canadian North, focussing on collaborations between state wildlife biologists and managers, on the one hand, and local Aboriginal Elders and hunters, on the other. I argue that a sociological stylistics of the field can help us to better understand how radically diverse agents may collaborate across cultures in the successful production of reliable natural knowledge. (shrink)

We argue in favour of identifying one aspect of rational choice with the tendency to conform to the choice you expect another like-minded, but non-communicating, agent to make and study this idea in the very basic case where the choice is from a non-empty subset K of 2 A and no further structure or knowledge of A is assumed.

One of the longest standing objections levied against virtue ethics is the Self-Absorption Objection. Proponents of this objection state that the main problem with neo-Aristotelian accounts is that the virtuous agent’s motive is to promote her own eudaimonia. In this paper, I examine Christopher Toner’s attempt to address this objection by arguing that we should understand the virtuous agent as acting virtuously because doing so is what it means to live well qua human. I then go on to defend Toner’s (...) view from two of Anne Baril’s criticisms: that his account is un-Aristotelian, and that his account does not take seriously the importance of the virtuous agent organizing her life in a way that is good for her. In doing so, I pave the way for neo-Aristotelian virtue ethicists to develop an adequate response to the self-absorption objection along Toner’s lines. (shrink)

Coral bleaching has attracted considerable study, yet one central question remains unanswered: given that corals and their Symbiodinium symbionts have co‐evolved for millions of years, why does this clearly maladaptive process occur? Bleaching may result from evolutionary conflict between the host corals and their symbionts. Selection at the level of the individual symbiont favors using the products of photosynthesis for selfish replication, while selection at the higher level favors using these products for growth of the entire host/symbiont community. To hold (...) the selfish lower‐level units in check, mechanisms of conflict mediation must evolve. Fundamental features of photosynthesis have been co‐opted into conflict mediation so that symbionts that fail to export these products produce high levels of reactive oxygen species and undergo programmed cell death. These mechanisms function very well under most environmental conditions, but under conditions particularly detrimental to photosynthesis, it is these mechanisms of conflict mediation that trigger bleaching. (shrink)

Words sound slightly different each time they are said, both by the same talker and across talkers. Rather than hurting learning, lab studies suggest that talker variability helps infants learn similar sounding words. However, very little is known about how much variability infants hear within a single talker or across talkers in naturalistic input. Here, we quantified these types of talker variability for highly frequent words spoken to 44 infants, from naturalistic recordings sampled longitudinally over a year of life (from (...) 6 to 17 months). We used non‐contrastive acoustic measurements (e.g., mean pitch, duration, harmonics‐to‐noise ratio) and holistic measures of sound similarity (normalized acoustic distance) to quantify acoustic variability. We find three key results. First, pitch‐based variability was generally lower for infants' top talkers than across their other talkers, but overall acoustic distance is higher for tokens from the top talker versus the others. Second, the amount of acoustic variability infants heard could not be predicted from, and thus was not redundant with, other properties of the input such as the number of talkers or tokens, or proportion of speech from particular sources (e.g., women, children, electronics). Finally, we find that patterns of pitch‐based acoustic variability heard in naturalistic input were similar to those found with in‐lab stimuli that facilitated word learning. This large‐scale quantification of talker variability in infants' everyday input sets the stage for linking naturally occurring variability “in the wild” to early word learning. (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.

The Manhattan Project, the allies' project during the Second World War to build the atomic bomb, did not represent a radical break in the development of twentieth-century science but rather an acceleration of developments already underway, ...

This book engages the perspective of public reason and the position of religious believers through a mutual confrontation of Rawlsian political liberalism and Gandhian ideas. By teasing out concords and discords between Rawls and Gandhi, Jeff Shawn Jose innovatively advances the debate about the role of religion in the public sphere.

Heidegger scholars consider the philosopher's recently published notebooks, including the issues of Heidegger's Nazism and anti-Semitism. For more than forty years, the philosopher Martin Heidegger logged ideas and opinions in a series of notebooks, known as the “Black Notebooks” after the black oilcloth booklets into which he first transcribed his thoughts. In 2014, the notebooks from 1931 to 1941 were published, sparking immediate controversy. It has long been acknowledged that Heidegger was an enthusiastic supporter of the Nazi Party in the (...) early 1930s. But the notebooks contain a number of anti-Semitic passages—often referring to the stereotype of “World-Jewry”—written even after Heidegger became disenchanted with the Nazis themselves. Reactions from the scholarly community have ranged from dismissal of the significance of these passages to claims that the anti-Semitism in them contaminates all of Heidegger's work. This volume offers the first collection of responses by Heidegger scholars to the publication of the notebooks. In essays commissioned especially for the book, the contributors offer a wide range of views, addressing not only the issues of anti-Semitism and Nazism but also the broader questions that the notebooks raise. Contributors Babette Babich, Andrew Bowie, Steven Crowell, Fred Dallmayr, Donatella Di Cesare, Michael Fagenblat, Ingo Farin, Gregory Fried, Jean Grondin, Karsten Harries, Laurence Paul Hemming, Jeff Malpas, Thomas Rohkrämer, Tracy B. Strong, Peter Trawny, Daniela Vallega-Neu, Friedrich-Wilhelm von Herrmann, Nancy A. Weston, Holger Zaborowski. (shrink)

Roughly three years after the creation of his mandate, United Nations Special Rapporteur Maina Kiai reflects on the global state of assembly and association rights. Although the mandate was created against the backdrop of shrinking space for civil society, a massive and growing global protest movement has grabbed most of the headlines since 2011. Kiai argues that the mandate has made a measurable impact – it has helped raise awareness of repressive NGO laws, provided technical assistance to governments to strengthen (...) assembly and association rights and developed soft law. But perhaps, the most important work of the mandate has been its contribution to a better understanding of just how important the rights to freedom of peaceful assembly and association are. Assembly and association rights are a powerful tool to promote dialog, pluralism, broadmindedness, tolerance and civic participation; they satisfy people's fundamental desire to take control of their own destinies. And if anything, the past few years have taught us that the worst turmoil comes when this desire is suppressed. When people are denied something so fundamental, rage inevitably follows. When people have no outlet for that rage, it can ultimately manifest itself as something much more chaotic than a street protest. (shrink)

This study addresses how moral judgment development, authenticity, and nonprejudice account for variance in scores pertaining to various motivational functions underlying volunteerism in order to clarify certain problems associated with previous research that has considered such relationships. In the study, 127 participants completed measurements that pertain to these constructs. Correlations revealed that moral judgment had a negligible relationship with both authenticity and nonprejudice, thereby affirming that the former construct is distinct from the latter two. Linear regression analyses supported that moral (...) judgment development and nonprejudice provided the strongest contributions to the variance of the considered indices of volunteer motivation. The motivational function underlying volunteerism was also recognized as an important factor that pertains to the observed contributions of variance. Findings are discussed in concert with and compared to prior considerations of relationships between moral judgment development and considerations of the moral self. Implications where moral education is concerned are also considered. (shrink)

ArgumentThis article documents the reasoning in a mathematical work by Mei Wending, one of the most prolific mathematicians in seventeenth-century China. Based on an analysis of the mathematical content, we present Mei’s systematic treatment of this particular genre of problems,fangcheng, and his efforts to refute the traditional practices in works that appeared earlier. His arguments were supported by the epistemological values he utilized to establish his system and refute the flaws in the traditional approaches. Moreover, in the context of the (...) competition between the Chinese and Western approaches to mathematics, Mei was motivated to demonstrate that the genre offangchengproblems was purely a “Chinese” achievement, not discussed by the Jesuits. Mei’s motivations were mostly expressed primarily in the prefaces to his works, in his correspondence with other scholars, in synopses of his poems, and in biographical records of some of his contemporaries. (shrink)

This article describes the emergence of a new category of actors in the social arbitration field, namely third-party financiers, with a focus on the possible ethical implications for investment arbitration proceedings. Third-party financiers are actors-service providers specialized in the financing of procedures in which they are associated with the result and the redemption of arbitral awards which they ensure the execution. The emerging phenomenon of third-party financing in the social field of international arbitration raises various ethical concerns, which have not (...) been regulated by the legal framework of most arbitral institutions. By exploring the various interactions between third-party funders and other actors in the social field of international arbitration, the article intends to highlight the ethical implications that the phenomenon of third-party funding may have on both the lawyer-client relationship and the independence and impartiality of arbitrators. It is argued that the introduction of the new phenomenon of third-party funding into the dispute may disrupt the arbitral process. Third-party funding is particularly likely to lead to situations of conflict of interest for arbitrators, which may affect the final award and exacerbate the crisis of legitimacy of the arbitral process. This article explores the various ethical concerns that it raises, and proposes some thoughts on the need for precise regulation of this emerging phenomenon in the contemporary arbitration panorama. It argues that, for ethics to prevail, disclosure of the identity of the third-party funder and the funding agreement should be encouraged in certain circumstances. This is the way to preserve the integrity of the proceedings and the impartiality and independence of the arbitrators. (shrink)

In recent decades, huge technological changes have opened up possibilities and potentials for new socio-technological forms of violence, violation and abuse, themselves intersectionally gendered, that form part of and extend offline intimate partner violence (IPV). Digital IPV (DIPV)—the use of digital technologies in and for IPV—takes many forms, including: cyberstalking, internet-based abuse, non-consensual intimate imagery, and reputation abuse. IPV is thus now in part digital, and digital and non-digital violence may merge and reinforce each other. At the same time, technological (...) and other developments have wrought significant changes in the nature of work, such as the blurring of work/life boundaries and routine use of digital technologies. Building on feminist theory and research on violence, and previous research on the ethics of digitalisation, this paper examines the ethical challenges raised for business, workplaces, employers and management by digital IPV. This includes the ethical challenges arising from the complexity and variability of DIPV across work contexts, its harmful impacts on employees, productivity, and security, and the prospects for proactive ethical responses in workplace policy and practice for victim/survivors, perpetrators, colleagues, managers, and stakeholders. The paper concludes with contributions made and key issues for the future research agenda. (shrink)

This article addresses the intersections, even blurrings, of two “homes” and two “aways” – the personal, ‹private’ home and the corporate ‹public’ ‹away’, and the national home country and corporate base and the transnational work away. Drawing on 40 semi-structured interviews with women and men top and middle managers in seven multinational corporations located in Finland, we examine the complex relations among transnational managerial work, corporate careers and personal, marriage and family-type relations, and their differences for women and men managers. (...) This shows the very different personal and social worlds inhabited by senior women and men managers, and how transnational processes can make those differences even greater. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:A Field on Fire: The Future of Environmental History ed. by Mark D. Hersey and Ted SteinbergJeff HirschyA Field on Fire: The Future of Environmental History EDITED BY MARK D. HERSEY AND TED STEINBERG Tuscaloosa: The University of Alabama Press, 2019In the beginning, there was something. Usually filled in with more details, the phrase “in the beginning” is a universal phrase that can cross academic fields, religions, governments, (...) works of literature, and many other things. In A Field on Fire: The Future of Environmental History, the “in the beginning” is used to refer to the works of famed environmental historian Donald Worster. Using Worster’s writings as a guide, editors Mark D. Hersey and Ted Steinberg use their contributors to lead readers through an examination of the past, present, and future of the field of environmental history.The concepts from Worster that Hersey and Steinberg organize their work around include the problems of natural limits, the transnational nature of environmental issues, and questions regarding method. This framework allows the editors and contributors to examine the relationship between democracy, capitalism, technology, and the environment; the ways that environmental history can and should cross borders; and the tools and the methods of the field. The framework built around Worster’s writings allows for a rich examination of environmental history and shows that many of the ideas that Worster pioneered almost forty years ago are still valid and important.A Field on Fire is divided into three sections containing six, six, and five chapters, respectively. The first section focuses on the relationship between capitalism, the environment, and technology. The second focuses on the international nature of environmental history. The third focuses on the ways that environmental history, including its methods and tools, can be useful in other fields. Together, all three sections [End Page 133] show the richness of environmental history and the influence Worster has had, and still has, on the field.The first section of the book focuses on ideas like resource use, capitalism, and the radical roots of the field. It is driven by Worster’s desire to “get out of parliamentary chambers, out of the birthing rooms and factories, get out of doors altogether, and ramble into the fields, woods, and the open air” (2). The contributors use Worster has a guide to “get out” and examine environmental history and concepts across the United States. They show that environmental history does, in fact, have radical roots dating back to the late 1960s and early 1970s, that capitalism was the lens through which the United States usually engaged with nature, and that humans will continue to have an influence on nature in the United States and around the world. For example, in chapter 3 Frank Zelko writes, “Changing historical interpretations of humans’ impact on landscapes and ecosystems, as well as a willingness among scholars to write histories on a large spatial and temporal scale, have also contributed significantly to the managerial worldview of the Anthropocene” (49). All the authors of this section show that the field of environmental history is an important one for the changing environmental, cultural, economic, and political conditions in the United States in the early 21st century.Section two of A Field on Fire travels outside the United States and shows that Worster’s wish to create a field that could more easily cut across national borders to both enrich the field and its readers is alive and well. This section shows how examinations of things and ideas in many places, like Abaca fiber (chapter 7) or human migration (chapter 10), can tell a complex and often transnational story that can shed historical light on often overlooked ideas, peoples, and concepts. The contributors in this section show that environmental history should consider things such as migrant history, nationalism, race, and economic history. These contributors show that Worster’s ideas have merit and are taking flight in the early 21st century. Take, for example, the idea that immigrants and colonists traveling around the world take their own ideas about nature with them. This simple individual and collective act shows the transnational nature of this and many other aspects of environmental history. [End... (shrink)

The article surveys some of the more potent aspects of the moral dimension of educational institutions, with particular reference to their hidden curriculum of moral formation, the place of passion in teaching, and the many elements that are required for a balanced and realistic moral education. It concludes with some comments on commodification and respect in education.

Chefs have been recognized as potentially important partners in efforts to promote local food systems. Drawing on the diffusion of innovation framework we (a) examine the characteristics of chefs and restaurants that have adopted local foods; (b) identified local food attributes valued by restaurants; (c) examine how restaurants function as opinion leaders promoting local foods; (d) explored network linkages between culinary and production organizations; and (e) finally, we consider some of the barriers to more widespread adoption of local foods in (...) the culinary community. Analyzing quantitative and qualitative data collected from interviews with individuals from 71 restaurants, we compare and contrast restaurants that utilize relatively large amounts of locally-produced ingredients with restaurants using few, if any, local products. Results reveal that chefs are most interested in intrinsic food qualities, such as taste and freshness, and less interested in production standards. As opinion leaders, chefs utilize signage, wait staff, and cooking classes to promote local foods; however, the diffusion process across restaurants, and between restaurants and producers, is limited by network associations. Structural barriers such as distribution problems and lack of convenience were identified as limiting more widespread use of locally-grown foods. We offer several implications of this research for further work that seeks to engage chefs as opinion leaders who are important to building greater support for local food systems. (shrink)

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use, available at http://www.jstor.org/about/terms.html. JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unless you have obtained prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and you may use content in the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use.

This book provides an original and provocative combination of ethnomethodological analysis and the concepts of linguistic philosophy with a breadth and clarity unusual in this field of writing. It is designed to be read by sociologists, psychologists and philosophers and concerns itself with the contributions of Wittgenstein, defending the claim for his relevance to the human sciences. However, this book goes some way beyond the usual limitations of such interdisciplinary works by outlining some empirical applications of ideas derived from the (...) Wittgenstein tradition. (shrink)

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

The exhibition Off Beat: Jeff Nuttall and the International Underground showcases the archive of Jeff Nuttall, a painter, poet, editor, actor and novelist. As the exhibition illustrates, Nuttall was a central figure in the International Underground during the 1960s through to the early 1970s. During this time he collaborated with a vast network of avant-garde writers from across the globe, as well as editing the influential publication My Own Mag between 1963 and 1967.

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)

Promotion is the relation between an act and a desire that obtains when the act advances or serves the desire. Under what conditions does an act promote a desire? Probabilistic accounts of promotion, the most prominent accounts, analyze promotion in terms of an increase in the probability of the desire’s satisfaction. In this paper, we clarify the promotion relation and explain why probabilistic accounts are attractive. Then we identify two questions probabilistic accounts must answer: the Baseline Question and the Interpretation (...) Question. We discuss and reject the three answers to the Baseline Question found in the literature, and explain the challenge future attempts at answering this question will face. Proponents of probabilistic accounts have not adequately addressed the Interpretation Question. We survey three answers to this question, finding each unsatisfactory. We conclude that no satisfactory probabilistic account has yet been offered, and that there are significant hurdles to providing one in the future. (shrink)