I have taken the traditional problem of the seeming interdependence of identity concepts and essentialistic concepts and the attendant difficulties with circularity as a starting point in my consideration of recent attempts to provide accounts ofde re essences. Having distinguished between theories of individual and generic essences, I have shown how a linguistic device based upon a new approach to referring expressions has, perhaps, provided some advance in the understanding of individualde re essences. I have argued that, however efficacious these (...) linguistic devices may be in dealing with individual essences, they are of no help in dealing with generic essences. I considered, therefore, one of the recent attempts to use science as the arbiter ofde re essences and concluded that such attempts will not, ultimately, solve the traditional problem of circularity. That problem remains, arising in different forms to thwart different attempts to account forde re generic essences. (shrink)

Volumes 1 and 2 of Hume’s Treatise of Human Nature, first published in January 1739, were soon after publication the subject of five notices and four reviews. Volume 3, published at the end of October 1740, received no notices and was reviewed only in the Bibliothèque raisonnée. This anonymous review of vol. 3 is of interest not only for David Norton is Professor of Philosophy Emeritus, McGill University, and Adjunct Professor of Philosophy, University of Victoria. His address is 8-4305 (...) Maltwood Lane, Victoria, BC, Canada V8X 5G9. what it says about Hume’s views as set out in the third book of the Treatise, but also because of questions that have arisen about the authorship of this and an earlier review of vol. 1 of the Treatise published in the same journal. In Part I of this paper we begin by reviewing the grounds for attributing to Pierre Des Maizeaux the notice of vols. 1 and 2 of the Treatise published by the Bibliothèque raisonnée in its April–June, 1739 issue. We then focus principally on the question of the authorship of the review of vol. 3 of the Treatise published by the Bibliothèque raisonnée in its April–June, 1741 issue, but we also consider in passing the grounds that have been offered for attributing to Francis Hutcheson the critical components of the Bibliothèque raisonnée review of vol. 1 of the Treatise. In Part II of the paper we present a transcription of the French text, never before reprinted, of this review. Part III is a new English translation of this text. In an effort to show the differences between the sense of the Treatise presented by translated quotations of it and Hume’s original texts, Part IV offers some three-column comparisons of three relatively lengthy French “quotations” of Treatise 3 found in the review, our back-translations of these texts, and the versions of these texts found in the Treatise. It then offers in a similar format, comparisons of the present and earlier translations of passages of the review of vol. 3. (shrink)

Accountability for Reasonableness has gained international acceptance as a framework to assist with resource allocation within healthcare. Despite this, one of the four conditions, the relevance condition, has not been widely adopted. In this paper I will start by examining the relevance condition, and the constraints placed on it by Daniels and Sabin. Following this, I review the theoretical limitations of the condition identified to date, by prominent critics such as Rid, Friedman, Lauridsen and Lippert—Rasmussen. Finally, I respond to Daniels (...) and Sabin’s enthusiasm for testing the accountability for reasonableness framework in different contexts, by evaluating the challenges of implementing the relevance condition within the NHS. I use the funding of treatments for patients on the basis of their exceptional circumstances as a case study to examine whether the relevance condition could be applied in practice. (shrink)

Contrary to formal theories of induction, I argue that there are no universal inductive inference schemas. The inductive inferences of science are grounded in matters of fact that hold only in particular domains, so that all inductive inference is local. Some are so localized as to defy familiar characterization. Since inductive inference schemas are underwritten by facts, we can assess and control the inductive risk taken in an induction by investigating the warrant for its underwriting facts. In learning more facts, (...) we extend our inductive reach by supplying more localized inductive inference schemes. Since a material theory no longer separates the factual and schematic parts of an induction, it proves not to be vulnerable to Hume's problem of the justification of induction. (shrink)

We have now celebrated the centenary of J. J. Thomson’s famous paper (1897) on the electron and have examined one hundred years of the history of our first fundamental particle. What should philosophers of science learn from this history? To some, the fundamental moral is already suggested by the rapid pace of this history. Thomson’s concern in 1897 was to demonstrate that cathode rays are electrified particles and not aetherial vibrations, the latter being the “almost unanimous opinion of German physicists” (...) (p. 293) But were these German physicists so easily vanquished? De Broglie proposed in 1923 that electrons are a wave phenomenon after all and his proposal was soon multiply vindicated, even by the detection of the diffraction of the electron waves. Should we not learn from such a reversal? Should we not dispense with the simple-minded idea that Thomson discovered our first fundamental particle and admit that the very notion of discovery might well be ill-suited to science? (shrink)

Newton’s equations of motion tell us that a mass at rest at the apex of a dome with the shape specified here can spontaneously move. It has been suggested that this indeterminism should be discounted since it draws on an incomplete rendering of Newtonian physics, or it is “unphysical,” or it employs illicit idealizations. I analyze and reject each of these reasons. †To contact the author, please write to: Department of History and Philosophy of Science, University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, PA (...) 15260; e‐mail: jdnorton@pitt.edu. (shrink)

Agency is a power, but what is it a power to do? The tradition presents us with three main answers: (1) that agency is a power to affect one’s own will, consequent upon which act further events ensue, beginning with the movement of a part of one's body; (2) that agency is a power to affect one’s own body, consequent upon which act further events ensue, beginning with the movement of an object that one touches; and (3) that agency is (...) a power to affect that material upon which one brings one's action to bear---e.g. the apple one is peeling (with a knife in one's hand). These three answers correspond to three increasingly expansive conceptions of the province of human agency. I refer to them, respectively, as volitionalism, corporealism and materialism. Only the first two are seriously considered in contemporary action theory. Favoring the third, and hoping to sharpen the conflict between the third and the first, I criticize the second. Corporealism has been a popular position—arguably, the default position in the philosophy of action—since Donald Davidson’s classic paper “Agency” (1971). Although it seems to occupy a sensible middle ground between volitionalism and materialism, corporealism is, I argue, indefensible: it shares the vulnerabilities of both its two rivals, without possessing the strengths of either. Nevertheless, reflection on corporealism lights the road to materialism, which, in the end, is the only possible alternative to volitionalism. (shrink)

There has been a recent spate of publications on how we should evaluate change to ecological systems, some of which have introduced the concept of ‘relational values’. Environmental ethicists have, with a few exceptions, not engaged with this debate. We survey the literature on relational values, noting that most advocates of the concept introduce relational values as an additional type of value, in addition to ‘instrumental’ and ‘intrinsic’ values. In this paper, we explore the idea that all environmental values are (...) ultimately relational. We explore how such an approach can be articulated, and discuss the implications of this concept for the future of environmental ethics and value studies. One key implication is to suggest a stronger role for empirical ethnography. (shrink)

I give an informal outline of the hole argument which shows that spacetime substantivalism leads to an undesirable indeterminism in a broad class of spacetime theories. This form of the argument depends on the selection of differentiable manifolds within a spacetime theory as representing spacetime. I consider the conditions under which the argument can be extended to address versions of spacetime substantivalism which select these differentiable manifolds plus some further structure to represent spacetime. Finally, I respond to the criticisms of (...) Tim Maudlin and Jeremy Butterfield. (shrink)

The epistemic state of complete ignorance is not a probability distribution. In it, we assign the same, unique, ignorance degree of belief to any contingent outcome and each of its contingent, disjunctive parts. That this is the appropriate way to represent complete ignorance is established by two instruments, each individually strong enough to identify this state. They are the principle of indifference (PI) and the notion that ignorance is invariant under certain redescriptions of the outcome space, here developed into the (...) ‘principle of invariance of ignorance' (PII). Both instruments are so innocuous as almost to be platitudes. Yet the literature in probabilistic epistemology has misdiagnosed them as paradoxical or defective since they generate inconsistencies when conjoined with the assumption that an epistemic state must be a probability distribution. To underscore the need to drop this assumption, I express PII in its most defensible form as relating symmetric descriptions and show that paradoxes still arise if we assume the ignorance state to be a probability distribution. *Received February 2007; revised July 2007. †To contact the author, please write to: Department of History and Philosophy of Science, University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, PA 15260; e-mail: jdnorton@pitt.edu. (shrink)

This paper defends the usefulness of the concept of philosophical progress and the common assumption that philosophy and science aim to make the same, or a comparable, kind of progress. It does so by responding to Yafeng Shan's (2022) arguments that the wealth of research on scientific progress is not applicable or useful to philosophy, and that philosophy doesn't need a concept of progress at all. It is ultimately argued that while Shan's arguments are not successful, they reveal the way (...) forward in developing accounts of philosophical progress. (shrink)

When an agent intentionally changes something separate from herself—when, say, she opens a bottle—what is the relation between what the agent does and what the patient suffers? This paper defends the Aristotelian thesis that action is to passion as the road from Thebes to Athens is to the road from Athens to Thebes: they are two aspects of a single material reality. Philosophers of action tend to think otherwise. It is generally taken for granted that intentional transactions must be analyzed (...) in terms of a causal relation. Controversy surrounds the question what the causal relata are: event-causalists claim that both of the relata are events; agent-causalists claim that the first relatum is an agent, and they dispute among themselves whether the second is an event or a terminal state of the patient. But the entire controversy assumes the necessity of some causal analysis of transactions. This paper argues that, far from being necessary, no such analysis is even possible. (shrink)

While there is no universal logic of induction, the probability calculus succeeds as a logic of induction in many contexts through its use of several notions concerning inductive inference. They include Addition, through which low probabilities represent disbelief as opposed to ignorance; and Bayes property, which commits the calculus to a ‘refute and rescale’ dynamics for incorporating new evidence. These notions are independent and it is urged that they be employed selectively according to needs of the problem at hand. It (...) is shown that neither is adapted to inductive inference concerning some indeterministic systems. (shrink)

Standard descriptions of thermodynamically reversible processes attribute contradictory properties to them: they are in equilibrium yet still change their state. Or they are comprised of non-equilibrium states that are so close to equilibrium that the difference does not matter. One cannot have states that both change and no not change at the same time. In place of this internally contradictory characterization, the term “thermodynamically reversible process” is here construed as a label for a set of real processes of change involving (...) only non-equilibrium states. The properties usually attributed to a thermodynamically reversible process are recovered as the limiting properties of this set. No single process, that is, no system undergoing change, equilibrium or otherwise, carries those limiting properties. The paper concludes with an historical survey of characterizations of thermodynamically reversible processes and a critical analysis of their shortcomings. (shrink)

Landauer's Principle asserts that there is an unavoidable cost in thermodynamic entropy creation when data is erased. It is usually derived from incorrect assumptions, most notably, that erasure must compress the phase space of a memory device or that thermodynamic entropy arises from the probabilistic uncertainty of random data. Recent work seeks to prove Landauer’s Principle without using these assumptions. I show that the processes assumed in the proof, and in the thermodynamics of computation more generally, can be combined to (...) produce devices that both violate the second law and erase data without entropy cost, indicating an inconsistency in the theoretical system. Worse, the standard repertoire of processes selectively neglects thermal fluctuations. Concrete proposals for how we might measure dissipationlessly and expand single molecule gases reversibly are shown to be fatally disrupted by fluctuations. Reversible, isothermal processes on molecular scales are shown to be disrupted by fluctuations that can only be overcome by introducing entropy creating, dissipative processes. (shrink)

Mathias Frisch has argued that the requirement that electromagnetic dispersion processes are causal adds empirical content not found in electrodynamic theory. I urge that this attempt to reconstitute a local principle of causality in physics fails. An independent principle is not needed to recover the results of dispersion theory. The use of ‘causality conditions’ proves to be the mere adding of causal labels to an already presumed fact. If instead one seeks a broader, independently formulated grounding for the conditions, that (...) grounding either fails or dissolves into vagueness and ambiguity, as has traditionally been the fate of candidate principles of causality. Introduction Scattering in Classical Electrodynamics Sufficiency of the Physics Failure of the Principle of Causality Proposed 4.1 A sometimes principle 4.2 The conditions of applicability are obscure 4.3 Effects can come before their causes 4.4 Vagueness of the relata and of the notion of causal process Conclusion CiteULike Connotea Del.icio.us What's this? (shrink)

What is possible, according to the empiricist conception, is what our evidence positively allows; and what is necessary is what it compels. These notions, along with logical possibility, are the only defensible notions of possibility and necessity. In so far as nomic and metaphysical possibilities are defensible, they fall within empirical possibility. These empirical conceptions are incompatible with traditional possible world semantics. Empirically necessary propositions cannot be defined as those true in all possible worlds. There can be empirical possibilities without (...) empirical necessities. The duality of possibility and necessity can be degenerate and can even be falsified. (shrink)

In the past three years, Heather Ford—an ethnographer and now a PhD student—has worked on ad hoc collaborative projects around Wikipedia sources with two data scientists from Minnesota, Dave Musicant and Shilad Sen. In this essay, she talks about how the three met, how they worked together, and what they gained from the experience. Three themes became apparent through their collaboration: that data scientists and ethnographers have much in common, that their skills are complementary, and that discovering the data (...) together rather than compartmentalizing research activities was key to their success. (shrink)

That quantum mechanical measurement processes are indeterministic is widely known. The time evolution governed by the differential Schrödinger equation can also be indeterministic under the extreme conditions of a quantum supertask, the quantum analogue of a classical supertask. Determinism can be restored by requiring normalizability of the supertask state vector, but it must be imposed as an additional constraint on the differential Schrödinger equation.

This book is the first to articulate and challenge the consensus on the right and left that knowledge is the key to any problem, demonstrating how the left’s embrace of knowledge productivity keeps it trapped within capital’s circuits. As the knowledge economy has forced questions of education to the forefront, the book engages pedagogy as an underlying yet neglected motor of capitalism and its forms of oppression. Most importantly, it assembles new pedagogical resources for responding to the range of injustices (...) that permeate our world. Building on yet critiquing the Marxist notion of the general intellect, Derek R. Ford theorizes stupidity as a necessary alternative pedagogical logic, an anti-value that is infinitely mute and unproductive. (shrink)

The thesis that observation necessarily fails to determine theory is false in the sense that observation can provide overwhelming evidence for a particular theory or even a hypothesis within the theory. The saga of quantum discontinuity illustrates the power of evidence to determine theory and shows how that power can be underestimated by inadequate caricatures of the evidential case. That quantum discontinuity can save the phenomena of black body radiation is the widely known result, but it leaves open the possibilities (...) of other accounts. That these phenomena, with the aid of minimal assumptions, entail quantum discontinuity is the crucial but now largely forgotten result. It was first demonstrated by Ehrenfest and Poincaré in 1911 and 1912. (shrink)

In Leo Szilard’s 1929 thought experiment, a Maxwell demon manipulates a one-molecule gas to reverse the second law of thermodynamics. The demon must fail, Szilard argued, since there is hidden entropy creation in the demon’s collecting of information. This thought experiment is an inconsistent muddle of improper idealizations. It diverted an already successful literature of exorcism into degenerating speculations about about a connection between thermodynamic entropy and information. These confusions persist today in a voluminous literature. Narrative conventions in a thought (...) experiment allow thought experimenters great latitude in deciding which processes are typical and bear generalization and which can be idealized away as incidental. For its abuse of this latitude and the extent of the harm it caused, this thought experiment merits the distinction of the worst thought experiment in science. (shrink)

© 2011 by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. Results on the observational indistinguishability of spacetimes demonstrate the impossibility of determining by deductive inference which is our spacetime, no matter how extensive a portion of the spacetime is observed. These results do not illustrate an underdetermination of theory by evidence, since they make no decision between competing theories and they make little contact with the inductive considerations that must ground such a decision. Rather, these results express a variety of indeterminism (...) in which a specification of the observable past always fails to fix the remainder of a spacetime. This form of indeterminism is more troubling than the familiar indeterminism of quantum theory. The inductive inferences that can discriminate among the different spacetime extensions of the observed past are here called "opaque," which means that we cannot readily see the warrant that lies behind them. (shrink)

That past patterns may continue in many different ways has long been identified as a problem for accounts of induction. The novelty of Goodman’s ”new riddle of induction” lies in a meta-argument that purports to show that no account of induction can discriminate between incompatible continuations. That meta-argument depends on the perfect symmetry of the definitions of grue/bleen and green/blue, so that any evidence that favors the ordinary continuation must equally favor the grue-ified continuation. I argue that this very dependence (...) on the perfect symmetry defeats the novelty of the new riddle. The symmetry can be obtained in contrived circumstances, such as when we grue-ify our total science. However, in all such cases, we cannot preclude the possibility that the original and grue-ified descriptions are merely notationally variant descriptions of the same physical facts; or if there are facts that separate them, these facts are ineffable, so that no account of induction should be expected to pick between them. In ordinary circumstances, there are facts that distinguish the regular and grue-ified descriptions. Since accounts of induction can and do call upon these facts, Goodman’s meta-argument cannot provide principled grounds for the failure of all accounts of induction. It assures us only of the failure of accounts of induction, such as unaugmented enumerative induction, that cannot exploit these symmetry breaking facts. (shrink)

In recounting his discovery of special relativity, Einstein recalled a debt to the philosophical writings of Hume and Mach. I review the path Einstein took to special relativity and urge that, at a critical juncture, he was aided decisively not by any specific doctrine of space and time, but by a general account of concepts that Einstein found in Hume and Mach’s writings. That account required that concepts, used to represent the physical, must be properly grounded in experience. In so (...) far as they extended beyond that grounding, they were fictional and to be abjured (Mach) or at best tolerated (Hume). Einstein drew a different moral. These fictional concepts revealed an arbitrariness in our physical theorizing and may still be introduced through freely chosen definitions, as long as these definitions do not commit us to false presumptions. After years of failed efforts to conform electrodynamics to the principle of relativity and with his frustration mounting, Einstein applied this account to the concept of simultaneity. The resulting definition of simultaneity provided the reconceptualization that solved the problem in electrodynamics and led directly to the special theory of relativity. (shrink)

The thermodynamics of computation assumes that computational processes at the molecular level can be brought arbitrarily close to thermodynamic reversibility and that thermodynamic entropy creation is unavoidable only in data erasure or the merging of computational paths, in accord with Landauer’s principle. The no-go result shows that fluctuations preclude completion of thermodynamically reversible processes. Completion can be achieved only by irreversible processes that create thermodynamic entropy in excess of the Landauer limit.

Two types of sustainability definitions are contrasted. ‘Social scientific’ definitions, such as that of the Brundtland Commission, treat sustainability as a relationship between present and future welfare of persons. These definitions differ from ‘ecological’ ones which explicitly require protection of ecological processes as a condition on sustainability. ‘Scientific contextualism’ does not follow mainstream economists in their efforts to express all effects as interchangeable units of individual welfare; it rather strives to express sensitivity to different types and scales of impacts that (...) present activities can exert on the future. We can therefore express the moral obligation to act sustainably as an obligation to protect the natural processes that form the context of human life and culture, emphasizing those large biotic and abiotic systems essential to human life, health, and flourishing culture. Ecosystems, which are understood as dynamic, self-organizing systems humans have evolved within, must remain ‘healthy’ if humans are to thrive. The ecological approach to sustainability therefore sets the protection of dynamic, creative systems in nature as its primary goal. (shrink)

When philosophers and psychologists think about consciousness, they generally focus on one or more of three features: phenomenality , intentionality , and introspectibility . Using examples from empirical psychology and neuroscience, I argue that consciousness is not a unitary state, that, instead, these three features characterize different and dissociable states, which often happen to occur together. Understanding these three features as dissociable from each other will resolve philosophical disputes and facilitate scientific investigation.

This comment explains why the claims of Callicott et al. in their paper 'Was Aldo Leopold a Pragmatist?' (Environmental Values 18 (2009): 453—486) are incorrect. The arguments they make are shown to be based upon several misunderstandings. In addition, important contributions by Aldo Leopold to the philosophy of conservation are missed.

Common themes in American Indian philosophy -- First introductions -- Common themes : a first look -- Constructing an actual American Indian world -- NelsonGoodman's constructivism -- Setting the stage -- Fact, fiction, and feeders -- Ontological pluralism -- True versions and well-made worlds -- Nonlinguistic versions and the advancement of understanding -- True versions and cultural bias -- Constructive realism : variations on a theme by Goodman -- True versions and cultural bias -- An American Indian well-made actual world (...) -- Relatedness, native knowledge, and ultimate acceptability -- Native knowledge and relatedness as a world ordering principle -- Native knowledge and truth -- Native knowledge and verification -- Native knowledge and ultimate acceptability -- An expansive conception of persons -- A western conception of persons -- Native conceptions of animate beings and persons -- An American Indian expansive conception of persons -- The semantic potency of performance -- Opening reflections and reminders about performances -- Symbols and their performance -- The Shawnee naming ceremony -- Gifting as a world constructing performance -- Closing remarks about the semantic potency of performances -- Circularity as a world ordering principle -- Goodman briefly revisited -- Time, events, and history or space, place, and nature? -- Circularity as a world ordering principle -- Circularity and sacred places -- Closing remarks about circularity as a world ordering principle -- The dance of person and place -- American Indian philosophy as a dance of person and place -- Consequences, speculations, and closing reflections. (shrink)

This paper reads Marx’s distinction between the method of inquiry and presentation as distinct and Marxist pedagogical logics that take the form of learning and studying. After articulating the differences and their current conceptualizations in educational theory, I turn to different interpretations of the Grundrisse and Capital. While I note the differences, I maintain these result from Marx’s alternation between learning and studying, to the different weights Marx gives to both. Marx sought to understand, articulate, learn, and relay the precise (...) logics of capital, of its contradictions, and of how the working class has and can seize on these contradictions to institute the revolutionary transition to communism. At the same time, he knew he couldn’t do this because no one can fully delineate and learn about capitalism so long as it exists, as capital is by definition a dynamic social relation. I show how readings of both books are products and productive of Marx’s own pedagogical constellation through their content and form of presentation. The argument is that this is a political and constellational pedagogy that’s contingent and singular rather than resolvable and unifiable. (shrink)

This article is written in response to Method Lab #2, reacting to and reading scenes from the theatre and the school classroom. We responded to ‘The table and the dancer’ by Carla J. Maier with drawings by Janna R. Wieland, and ‘The book and the authors reading’ by Elise v. Bernstorff and Carla J. Maier. Our responses are within the ontological turn and specifically posthuman studies and new material feminism(s). We move beyond representational thinking to explore vibrant matter and experiment (...) with what more the text, scenes and pictures can become. (shrink)

As multiparty interactions with single courses of coordinated action, workplace meetings place particular interactional demands on participants who are not primary speakers as they work to initiate turns and to interactively coordinate with displays of recipiency from co-participants. Drawing from a corpus of 26 hours of videotaped workplace meetings in a midsized US city, this article reports on multimodal practices – phonetic, prosodic, and bodily-visual – used for coordinating turn transition and for consolidating recipiency in these specialized speech exchange systems. (...) Practices used by self-selecting non-primary speakers as they secure turns in meetings include displays of close monitoring of current speakers’ emerging turn structure, displays of heightened interest as current turns approach possible completion, and turn initiation practices designed to pursue and, in a fine-tuned manner, coordinate with displays of recipiency on the parts of other participants as well as from reflexively constructed ‘target’ recipients. By attending to bodily-visual action, as well as phonetics and prosody, this study contributes to expanding accounts for turn taking beyond traditional word-based grammar. (shrink)

This article utilizes the case of Ms H. to examine the contrasting ways that surrogate decision makers move from simply hearing information about the patient to actually knowing and understanding the patient’s medical condition. The focus of the case is on a family’s request to actually see the patient’s wounds instead of being told about the wounds, and the role of clinical ethicists in facilitating this request. We argue that clinical ethicists have an important role to play in the work (...) of converting information into knowledge and that this can serve as a valuable way forward in the midst of seemingly intractable conflicts in the medical setting. (shrink)

What powered Einstein’s discoveries? Was it asking naïve questions, stubbornly? Was it a mischievous urge to break rules? Was it the destructive power of operational thinking? It was none of these. Rather, Einstein made his discoveries through lengthy, mundane investigations, pursued with tenacity and discipline. We have been led to think otherwise in part through Einstein’s brilliance at recounting in beguilingly simple terms a few brief moments of transcendent insight; and in part through our need to find a simple trick (...) underlying his achievements. These ideas are illustrated with the examples of Einstein’s 1905 discoveries of special relativity and the light quantum. (shrink)

Two fundamental errors led Einstein to reject generally covariant gravitational field equations for over two years as he was developing his general theory of relativity. The first is well known in the literature. It was the presumption that weak, static gravitational fields must be spatially flat and a corresponding assumption about his weak field equations. I conjecture that a second hitherto unrecognized error also defeated Einstein's efforts. The same error, months later, allowed the hole argument to convince Einstein that all (...) generally covariant gravitational field equations would be physically uninteresting. (shrink)

In this chapter, I explore the importance of ethics education for senior military officers with responsibilities at the strategic level of government. One problem, as I see it, is that senior commanders might demand “ethics” from their soldiers but then they are themselves primarily informed by a “morally skeptical viewpoint” (in the form of political realism). I argue that ethics are more than a matter of personal behavior alone: the ethical position of an armed service is a matter of the (...) collective responsibility of the people who constitute it, and senior military officers, having authority to give the orders, have a particularly important role. First, I discuss the continued prominence of a neorealist mindset in strategic thinking. Neorealist theory assumes that ethics is a largely irrelevant concern for strategic decision-makers. In contrast, I argue that consideration of moral values should be at the center of strategic theory and practice. Then, in the second section, I explore the “professional ethics” of senior military officers in order to develop an appreciation of the shared values and expectations regarding required conduct within any professional military service. I argue that senior military leaders should be concerned with what it means to be “good” and that this concept of the good can, and should, be applied across cultures and national boundaries. In the final section, I examine armed conflict and briefly discuss the moral reasoning involved to justify deliberate killing and destruction. I conclude that senior military officers require an understanding of sound moral reasoning to implement effective strategy. (shrink)

While there was a flurry of articles throughout the 1990s in philosophy of education on Lyotard, there are still several key concepts in his oeuvre that have import for but remain largely underdeveloped or absent in the field. One of the most interesting of these absent concepts is Lyotard’s notion of the figural. In this paper, I take the figural as an educational problematic and ask what new educational insights it can generate in regard to the existing literature. As such, (...) this article begins with a survey and synthesis of educational literature on Lyotard and the primary work on which most of it is based, exploring the relationship between knowledge, performativity, the differend, and “the system.” I then examine conceptions of education oriented toward defending the differend and disrupting the system and claim that, while helpful, these conceptions are limited in that they do not mention how educators and students might engage the alterity that the system seeks to repress. I believe that it is here that Lyotard’s notion of the figural can be productively engaged. The next section of the paper performs a partial and educationally partisan reading of Discourse, Figure. After this reading I move to formulate a figural education, which is composed of three educational processes and modes of engagement: reading, seeing, and blindness. A figural education, I argue, holds each of these practices in an uncertain and unsettling relation and, in so doing, can help educators defend the figural and the differend against the discursive demands of the system. (shrink)

Ecosystem health, as James Nelson argues, must be understood as having both descriptive and normative content; it is in this sense a 'morally thick' concept. The health analogy refers (a) at the similarities between conservation ecology and medicine or plant pathology as normative sciences, and (b) to the ability of ecosystems to 'heal' themselves in the face of disturbances. Nelson, however, goes beyond these two aspects and argues that judgements of illness in ecosystems only support moral obligations to protect them (...) if they are attributed a 'good of their own'. But this latter extension of the analogy flies in the face of ecological science, which has been forced to abandon organicism. If one separates the question of the warranted assertibility of environmentalists' goals from the question of where values in nature are located, the search for an objective realm of value realism can be seen to be unnecessary. (shrink)