Den här rapporten analyserar kortfattat Joseph H. Carens senaste bok, The Ethics of immigration. Den inledande delen av dokumentet berör de grundläggande principerna från boken och hur Carens härleder sin utvärdering av olika immigrations och integrations principer från Ius Soli inom ett liberalt demokratiskt ramverk. Den andra delen behandlar bokens huvudsakliga metodologiska område, detta är den dualistiska strukturen Carens använder och hur den ska bli förstådd med hans givande bidrag. Slutligen kommer dokumentet undersöka den milda anti-cosmopolitan attityden Carens håller (...) och dess implikationer. (shrink)

I propose to analyze the concept of basing beliefs on reasons. The concept is an important one in understanamg the so-called "inferential" or "indirect" knowledge. After briefly stating the causal analyses of this concept given by D.M. Armstrong and Marshall Swain I will present two cases which show these analyses to be too strong and too weak. Finally, I will propose an analysis which avoids these twin difficulties.

ABSTRACTMichelle Amazeen's rebuttal of Uscinski and Butler 2013 is unsuccessful. Amazeen's attempt to infer the accuracy of fact checks from their agreement with each other fails on its own terms and, in any event, could as easily be explained by fact checkers’ political biases as their common access to the objective truth. She also ignores the distinction between verifiable facts and unverifiable claims about the future, as well as contestable claims about the causes of political, social, and economic phenomena. The (...) social benefits that she claims for the fact-checking enterprise must, at the very least, be weighed against the strong possibility that what passes for fact checking is actually just a veiled continuation of politics by means of journalism rather than being an independent, objective counterweight to political untruths. (shrink)

This paper was originally delivered orally at a meeting of the Semiotic Society of America in Lubbock, Texas in 1980 and first published in Semiotics 1980, eds. Michael Herzfeld and Margot Lenhart (New York: Plenum Press, 1982), 427-438. The present version is only lightly revised from the original but a more extensive revision is in process.

Philosophy of the Social Sciences, Ahead of Print.

Some bioethicists have argued in favor of a sliding scale notion of competence, paternalistically requiring greater competence in relation to more significant risk. I argue against a sliding scale notion, taking issue with the positions of Allen E. Buchanan and Dan W. Brock, Ian Wilkes, and Joel Feinberg. Rejecting arguments that a sliding scale is supported by legal cases, by ordinary usage, and by fallible judgments about competence, I argue in favor of greater evidence of competence when risk is greater. (...) Two clinical cases are examined, both involving amputation, to show that my fixed concept of competence, with a requirement of clearer evidence of competence when risk is high, better accounts for good moral decisions in bioethics. (shrink)

Volume 3, Issue 1, March 2019, Page 81-85.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Eternal Life and Human Happiness in Heaven: Philosophical Problems, Thomistic Solutions by Christopher M. BrownElizabeth C. Shaw and Staff*BROWN, Christopher M. Eternal Life and Human Happiness in Heaven: Philosophical Problems, Thomistic Solutions. Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 2021. xiii + 487 pp. Cloth, $75.00The contents of the book are straightforwardly announced by the title. Christopher Brown entertains four apparent problems about eternal life in heaven (...) considered by contemporary philosophers and theologians and offers solutions to them from the thought of St. Thomas Aquinas. The book consists of seventeen chapters together with an introduction and conclusion and is divided into four parts. In the first part Brown lays out the problems and the solutions to them proposed by contemporary philosophers and theologians. In the second part he explains St. Thomas's distinction between essential and accidental reward in heaven and goes on to treat of the former—which consists in the beatific vision, that is, our beholding of God—and its proper accidents—which are delight, joy, and charity. In the third part he then deals with the accidental reward, which has to do with the perfected condition of our glorified bodies, society with other persons, and so on. Finally, in the fourth part Brown, drawing on his expositions of St. Thomas's doctrine in the two previous parts, details Thomistic solutions to the four problems discussed in the first part and argues that these solutions are superior to those proposed by the contemporary philosophers and theologians he has engaged.So, what are the four problems that Brown addresses? Let's present them as questions. (1) Is heaven just a private communion between a human person and God, or is it a perfect community centered on God that also involves angels, other human persons, and other creatures? (2) Is heaven just a spiritual affair, or are our resurrected bodies a part of it? (3) Is heaven a static or dynamic reality? (4) Is heaven boring?The answers are as follows. Ad primum: Heaven is a perfect community centered on God that also involves angels, other human persons, and other creatures. Ad secundum: Heaven is a spiritual and physical affair that includes our souls and our resurrected bodies. Ad tertium: Heaven is a dynamic reality. Ad quartum: Heaven is not boring!I cannot cover here all of the specifics of the way Brown shows how St. Thomas arrives at these answers. People who know St. Thomas well, even if they have not reflected much on these problems before, probably will [End Page 135] not have great difficulty thinking through how he might get to the first and second answers, at least in general terms. But the third and fourth, I think, call for further comment. My comments will necessarily be brief.If I understand Brown correctly, he wants to say (and contends that St. Thomas holds) that heaven is dynamic insofar as in heaven we are in act. But we can be in act in two senses: We can be in act in an unchanging way or in a changing way. In heaven my capacities to know God and to love him are both fully perfected, that is, they are fully actualized and undergo no change. But in heaven we will enjoy our resurrected bodies as well, and our bodies will also be active and interacting with other bodies. This activity will entail change. So, either way we will be active in heaven and, therefore, heaven will be something dynamic.What, then, about the problem of boredom? Because we will be perfectly happy in heaven, argues Brown (interpreting St. Thomas), heaven won't be boring. But the matter doesn't end there. Brown points out that Brian Ribeiro, developing an idea of Bernard Williams, objects that a person who is perfectly happy in the way that we are supposed to be in heaven, cannot be personally identical with any person in this life because the conditions of the beatified person and the nonbeatified person are just too radically different for there to be continuity between the two. Brown replies that St. Thomas convincingly shows that God can, by grace, prepare persons in this... (shrink)

The ability to identify the mineral composition of rocks and soils is an important tool for the exploration of geological sites. Even though expert knowledge is commonly used for this task, it is desirable to create automated systems with similar or better performance. For instance, NASA intends to design robots that are sufficiently autonomous to perform this task on planetary missions. Spectrometer readings provide one important source of data for identifying sites with minerals of interest. Reflectance spectrometers measure intensities of (...) light reflected from surfaces over a range of wavelengths. Spectral intensity patterns may in some cases be sufficiently distinctive for proper identification of minerals or classes of minerals. For some mineral classes, carbonates for example, specific short spectral intervals are known to carry a distinctive signature. Finding similar distinctive spectral ranges for other mineral classes is not an easy problem. We propose and evaluate data-driven techniques in two stages: first, evaluating algorithms to identify which components are probably present in a given rock; second, trying to improve this classification by automatically searching for spectral ranges optimized for specific classes of minerals. In one set of studies, we partition the whole interval of wavelengths available in our data into sub-intervals, or bins, and use a genetic algorithm to evaluate a candidate selection of subintervals. As an alternative to these computationally expensive search techniques, we present an entropy-based heuristic that gives higher scores for wavelengths more likely to distinguish between classes. Results are presented for four different classes, showing reasonable improvements in identifying some, but not all, of the mineral classes tested. (shrink)

Parkinson, Joseph Can a dead person conceive a child? Even if it is technically possible, should it be permitted? The legal system seems to have reached a position on this matter without obvious ethical reflection. Noting that a child should be able to know and relate to his or her parents, this article argues that a person's capacity to contribute to the conception of new life should cease with that person's death.

Family relations between Greek eponymous heroes almost certainly reflect political or commonly agreed ethnic relationships between the communities concerned. Pelops and his proverbially numerous descendants are investigated here from this perspective and it is argued that the creation of eponymous Pelopids was primarily due to political motivations. Pelops as one of the most remote ancestors of Sparta was used, already by the 5th century BC, to establish connections on a mythological level with those cities which became the allies of the (...) Lakedaimonians and are commonly known as the members of the Peloponnesian League. It is also suggested that after the battle of Plataea, these poleis erected a victory monument at Olympia on their own, which is commonly referred to as the “Achaean monument”. (shrink)

A great deal of research has demonstrated that learning is influenced by the learner’s prior background knowledge (e.g. Murphy, 2002; Keil, 1990), but little is known about the processes by which prior knowledge is deployed. We explore the role of explanation in deploying prior knowledge by examining the joint effects of eliciting explanations and providing prior knowledge in a task where each should aid learning. Three hypotheses are considered: that explanation and prior knowledge have independent and additive effects on learning, (...) that their joint effects on learning are subadditive, and that their effects are superadditive. A category learning experiment finds evidence for a superadditive effect: explaining drives the discovery of regularities, while prior knowledge constrains which regularities learners discover. This is consistent with an account of explanation’s effects on learning proposed in Williams & Lombrozo (in press). (shrink)

Frédéric Bastiat was a member of the French liberal school, which thoroughly dominated economics in France from the beginning of the nineteenth century until the 1880’s and continued to exert a strong intellectual influence right up to the eve of World War One. He was neither the school’s founder, nor its most profound theorist, nor even the most consistent defender of the laissez-faire implications of its economic theories. He was however the most gifted expositor of its politico-economic doctrines, and as (...) such, is the economist associated with this school whose name evokes greatest recognition among contemporary Anglo-American economists. Thus I refer to “Bastiat’s school” In an earlier article, I detailed the profound influence that the French liberal school had on the development of nineteenth-century economic theory not only in France and other Continental countries, particularly Italy, Germany and Austria, but also in the United States, Great Britain and Australia.. In this article, I also criticized the attempts of a number of economists who were conversant with, if not sympathetic to, the French liberal school, including Joseph Schumpeter, Karl Pribram, and Peter Groenewegen, to explain its almost complete neglect by Anglo-American economists and historians of thought after World War One. Their explanations boiled down to three main claims. First, the leaders of the school succeeding its founder J.-B. (shrink)

The theory of transference and the centrality of transference interpretation have been hallmarks of psychoanalysis since its inception. But the time has come to subject traditional theory and practice to careful, critical scrutiny in the light of contemporary science. So holds Joseph Schachter, whose _Transference: Shibboleth or Albatross?_ undertakes this timely and thought-provoking task. After identifying the weaknesses and inconsistencies in Freud's original premises about transference, Schachter demonstrates how contemporary developmental research across a variety of domains effectively overturns any (...) theory that posits a linear deterministic relationship between early childhood and adult psychic functioning, including the adult patient's treatment behavior toward the analyst. No less trenchantly, he shows how contemporary chaos theory complements developmental research by making the very endeavor of historical reconstruction - of backward prediction - suspect on logical grounds. Nor, Schacter continues, does the clinical evidence normally adduced in support of transference theory provide the firm bedrock of data that most analysts suppose to exist. What one finds, he holds, are endlessly reiterated claims of identifying determining historical antecedents sustained only by descriptions of current behaviors through a gloss of theory. Less a polemic than a call to order, _Transference: Shibboleth or Albatross?_ is cogently argued and straightforwardly written. It is destined to be a thorn in the side of analysts who resist change and a spur to those who seek to bring analytic theory into closer alignment with contemporary science in the interest of improves treatment efficacy. (shrink)

War: A Primer for Christians provides a concise introduction to the main approaches that Christians have taken toward war and examines each approach critically. Some Christians have supported their country's wars as crusades of good against evil. Others, as pacifists, have rejected participation in or support for any war. Still others have followed the just-war tradition in holding that it can be justifiable under some conditions to resort to war, but that then Christian love must limit the conduct of war. (...) In an updated preface and new afterword, Allen explores aspects of current international relations that have a special bearing on the context of war. “Joseph Allen’s War: A Primer for Christians is just that: a succinct, fair-minded, wonderfully reasoned, and accessible account of the major Christian traditions on war—Just War, Holy War, and the Pacifist renunciation of violence. His book is also a primer in the further sense, that it will prime the pump for further discussion and debate as to when wars are just and how a nation might keep the means employed under restraints.”—William F. May. (shrink)

In a small portion of The Origin of German Tragic Drama, Walter Benjamin engages in a critique of Nietzsche’s understanding of tragedy in The Birth of Tragedy. He argues that Nietzsche’s account divests individuals of significance in the tragic worldview. The corrective to Nietzsche’s view, according to Benjamin, is a reflective, historical approach to the Greek social and literary phenomenon of tragic poetry. I argue that Benjamin’s approach to tragedy and to The Birth of Tragedy is inherently flawed. The paper (...) has threesections: (1) a presentation of Benjamin’s critique of Nietzsche in The Origin of German Tragic Drama; (2) a refutation of that critique on the basis of a reading of The Birth of Tragedy; and (3) a rejection of Benjamin’s theory of tragedy on the basis of Nietzsche’sinsights into the relation to human significance of both tragedy and the science of history. (shrink)