Bruno Latour claims to have shown that a Kantian model of knowledge, which he describes as seeking to unite a disembodied transcendental subject with an inaccessible thing-in-itself, is dramatically falsified by empirical studies of science in action. Instead, Latour puts central emphasis on scientific practice, and replaces this Kantian model with a model of “circulating reference.” Unfortunately, Latour's alternative schematic leaves out the scientific subject. I repair this oversight through a simple mechanical procedure. By putting a slight spin on Latour's (...) diagrammatic representation of his theory, I discover a new space for a post-Kantian scientific subject, a subject brilliantly described by Ludwik Fleck. The neglected subjectivities and ceaseless practices of science are thus re-united. (shrink)

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, ...

Disgust is reasoned to operate in conjunction with the immune system to help protect the body from illness. However, less is known about the factors that impact the degree to which individuals invest in pathogen avoidance (disgust) versus pathogen management (prophylactic immunological activity). Here, we examine the role that one’s control over pathogen contact plays in resolving such investment trade-offs, predicting that (a) those from low control environments will invest less in pathogen-avoidance strategies and (b) investment in each of these (...) two strategies will occur in a compensatory fashion (i.e. they will be traded off with one other). Across four studies, we found support for these predictions, using a variety of manipulations and measures. By providing novel insights into how one’s control over pathogen exposure influences disgust sensitivity and immune system activity, the current research poses an important contribution to the literature on disgust, pathogen avoidance, and the immune system. (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)

One of the greatest challenges in teaching an introductory philosophy course is convincing students that there are, indeed, reliable standards for the evaluation of arguments. Too often introductory students criticize an argument simply by contesting the truth of one of its claims. And far too often, the only claim in an argument that meets serious objections is its conclusion. For many students, the idea that an argument displays a structure which can be evaluated on its own terms is not very (...) difficult to grasp. Unfortunately, the idea is grasped only in an abstract way, with insufficient appreciation of how structural problems manifest themselves in concrete arguments, and without the vocabulary for formulating structural criticisms. But this paper is not simply about teaching logic, it is about pedagogy. Our task is to instill in the student the habit of clear thinking. When we send our students out into the world, we have to ensure that they are prepared for it. (shrink)

Rewards are reinforcement mechanisms that organizations use to shape desirable employee behaviors. However, rewards may also have unintended consequences, such as building expectations for receiving extra benefits and weakening employee barriers to unethical acts. This article investigates the dark side of the reward–behavior association, and exploring what is referred to as the reward–theft parity effect (RTPE). The authors hypothesize that receiving rewards induces a corresponding type of theft. In Study 1, survey results (n = 634) show initial support for the (...) RTPE between rewards and same‐category theft, and that perceptions of procedural justice attenuate this association. Study 2 involved a 2 (reward) × 2 (theft opportunity) between‐subjects experimental design (n = 300) and provides further support for the RTPE by revealing greater theft under a reward–theft parity condition than under a reward–theft disparity condition. Study 3 replicates these findings in a field experiment (n = 285) and finds that the RTPE is exacerbated when the reward–behavior task is perceived as unjust. Collectively, these findings provide new theoretical insights while also giving managers a more complete understanding of the dark side of behavioral reinforcement mechanisms. (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)

This paper describes the approach that Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility uses to advise and influence government policymakers at the local, state, and federal levels. It analyzes why CPSR - a relatively small organization - has enjoyed a fair amount of success in influencing policy. It also describes a recurring pattern that applies to CPSR's involvement in policymaking, using as an example CPSR's involvement in policymaking on the Calling Number Identification telephone service. An appendix lists situations in which CPSR has (...) directly advised policymakers. (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)

This volume, the first to tackle Heidegger and music, features contributions from philosophers, musicians, educators, and musicologists from many countries throughout the world, utilizes Heidegger’s philosophy to shed light on the place of music in different contexts and fields of practice.

We study the wisdom of the crowd in three sequential decision‐making tasks: the Balloon Analogue Risk Task (BART), optimal stopping problems, and bandit problems. We consider a behavior‐based approach, using majority decisions to determine crowd behavior and show that this approach performs poorly in the BART and bandit tasks. The key problem is that the crowd becomes progressively more extreme as the decision sequence progresses, because the diversity of opinion that underlies the wisdom of the crowd is lost. We also (...) consider model‐based approaches to each task. This involves inferring cognitive models for each individual based on their observed behavior, and using these models to predict what each individual would do in any possible task situation. We show that this approach performs robustly well for all three tasks and has the additional advantage of being able to generalize to new problems for which there are no behavioral data. We discuss potential applications of the model‐based approach to real‐world sequential decision problems and discuss how our approach contributes to the understanding of collective intelligence. (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)

A comprehensive study of the ethics of killing in cases in which the metaphysical or moral status of the individual killed is uncertain or controversial. Among those beings whose status is questionable or marginal in this way are human embryos and fetuses, newborn infants, animals, anencephalic infants, human beings with severe congenital and cognitive impairments, and human beings who have become severely demented or irreversibly comatose. In an effort to understand the moral status of these beings, this book develops and (...) defends distinctive accounts of the nature of personal identity, the evaluation of death, and the wrongness of killing. The central metaphysical claim of the book is that we are neither nonmaterial souls nor human organisms but are instead embodied minds. In ethical theory, one of the central claims is that the morality of killing is not unitary; rather, the principles that determine the morality of killing in marginal cases are different from those that govern the killing of persons who are self‐conscious and rational. Another important theme is that killing in marginal cases should be evaluated in terms of the impact it would have on the victim at the time rather than on the value of the victim's life as a whole. What primarily matters is how killing would affect that which would be rational for the victim to care about at the time of death. By appealing to various foundational claims about identity, death, and the morality of killing, this book yields novel conclusions about such issues as abortion, prenatal injury, infanticide, the killing of animals, the significance of brain death, the termination of life support in cases of persistent vegetative state, the use of anencephalic infants as sources of organs for transplantation, euthanasia, assisted suicide, and advance directives in cases of dementia. In particular, the book defends the moral permissibility of abortion, infanticide, and euthanasia in certain cases and argues that brain death is not the appropriate criterion of death either for a person or a human organism. (shrink)

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.

This book reviews the facts and arguments surrounding Heidegger's politics, and situates them within critical political debates as we move into the 21st century.

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

Many writers in bioethics, science, and medicine contend that embryo selection is a morally better way of avoiding genetic disorders then gene editing, as the latter has risks that the former does not. We argue that one reason to use gene editing is that in many cases it would be better for the person who would develop from the edited embryo, so that not to have done it would have been worse for that person. By contrast, embryo selection is never (...) better for the person who develops from the selected embryo. This reason to use gene editing has, however, been challenged on two grounds: first, that it makes no difference, morally, whether a bad effect is worse for someone, or a good effect better for someone; and, second, that beneficent gene editing would not be unequivocally better for the person who would develop from the edited embryo. We argue that both of these objections can be satisfactorily answered and thus that there is indeed a significant moral reason, at least in some cases, to use gene editing rather than embryo selection. (shrink)

J. E. Malpas discusses and develops the ideas of Donald Davidson, influential in contemporary thinking on the nature of understanding and meaning, and of truth and knowledge. He provides an account of Davidson's holistic and hermeneutical conception of linguistic interpretation, and, more generally, of the mind. Outlining its Quinean origins and the elements basic to Davidson's Radical Interpretation, J. E. Malpas' book goes on to elaborate this holism and to examine the indeterminacy of interpretation and the principle of charity. The (...) metaphysical and epistemological consequences of Davidson's approach are considered, particularly in relation to scepticism and relativism, the realist/anti-realist debate, and the problem of truth. Parallels are drawn between the Davidsonian emphasis on the centrality of the notion of truth and Heidegger's notion of truth as aletheia, as the book looks to structuralist, hermeneutical and phenomenological sources to illuminate Davidson's position. (shrink)

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)

Aron Gurwitsch’s theory of the structure and dynamics of consciousness has much to offer contemporary theorizing about consciousness and its basis in the embodied brain. On Gurwitsch’s account, as we develop it, the field of consciousness has a variable sized focus or "theme" of attention surrounded by a structured periphery of inattentional contents. As the field evolves, its contents change their status, sometimes smoothly, sometimes abruptly. Inner thoughts, a sense of one’s body, and the physical environment are dominant field contents. (...) These ideas can be linked with (and help unify) contemporary theories about the neural correlates of consciousness, inattention, the small world structure of the brain, meta-stable dynamics, embodied cognition, and predictive coding in the brain. (shrink)

This volume brings together a range of interdisciplinary perspectives on a topic of central importance, but which has otherwise tended to be approached from within just one or another disciplinary framework. Most of the essays contained here incorporate some degree of interdisciplinarity in their own approach, but the volume nevertheless divides into three main sections: Philosophical considerations; Humanities approaches; Legal, medical, and therapeutic contexts. The volume includes essays by philosophers, medical practitioners and researchers, historians, lawyers, literary, Classical, and Judaic scholars. (...) The essays are united by a common concern with the question of the human character of suffering, and the demands that suffering, and the recognition of suffering, make upon us. (shrink)

The question whether cognition is subserved by internal processes in the brain (internalism) or extends in to the world (active externalism) has been vigorously debated in recent years. I show how internalist and externalist ideas can be pursued in a common framework, using (1) open dynamical systems, which allow for separate analysis of an agent's intrinsic and embodied dynamics, and (2) supervenience functions, which can be used to study how low-level dynamical systems give rise to higher-level dynamical structures.

This book charges that just about every philosophical theory of mind or language developed over the past 50 years in the West is systematically inaccurate. Systemic oppression has influenced the processes that theories of mind or language purport to identify; however, that same systemic oppression has also made it so that most middle-to-upper class White men (including most philosophers of mind or language) are ignorant of systemic oppression. Consequently, most theories of mind or language are systematically inaccurate because they fail (...) to account for the influences of systemic oppression. Philosopher Jeff Engelhardt argues for the de-idealization of two influential theories in the philosophy of mind and language--social externalism and objective type externalism--and considers some consequences of the de-idealization project. -/- Following the work of Charles Mills, Engelhardt argues that ideal theories adopt oppression-obscuring assumptions while nonideal theories avoid them (or at least try to). Ideal theories assume that language users are basically equal, and that social institutions and structures are basically just, but scholarship on Western social relations, institutions, and structures shows that in fact each of these is systematically influenced by oppression. Consequently, ideal theories tend to be systematically inaccurate. Moreover, since oppression systematically produces ignorance of systemic oppression, such systematically inaccurate theories are likely the norm rather than the exception. -/- Engelhardt shows that once we've shown that oppression systematically influences the processes that determine linguistic meanings (according to content externalism), then we have reason to expand our notion of hermeneutical injustice, we have evidence that hermeneutical injustice occurs systematically, and we have grounds for expanding discussions of conceptual engineering to include questions about engineering the processes that determine concepts, not just concepts themselves. (shrink)

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