Technological advancements, especially with regard to enhancements of human capacities and powers, have instigated a collision between opposing views of the human person. I begin with the premise that the predominant classical view of the human person attained its clearest and most cogent expression in the philosophy of Thomas Aquinas and can be termed the theory of the homo integralis. The human person is, for Thomas, the integrated being par excellence: he is a union of the material (body) and the (...) immaterial (soul); his freedom is guided by a normative nature; he is himself a product of and participant in nature; he is a member of a common species from which he draws his identity; and he balances the needs of his embodied state with a recognition that his existence is not limited to it. Due to the philosophical and technological revolutions of the modern period, themselves an outgrowth perhaps of earlier attitudes, a contrasting view of the human person emerged: the homo technologicus. Technological man, unlike his classical predecessor, is marked by fundamental disintegration: he is divided in himself, between mind and body; he is dissociated from a normative human nature; he is divided from nature itself as he sets himself against it through technological means; he is divided from the human community in radical, self-determining autonomy; and he is severed from any sense of transcendent purpose or value aside from that which can be attained through his own powers, technological or otherwise. By recovering a sense of the homo integralis as articulated by Thomas Aquinas, a fresh appraisal of contemporary issues regarding the human relationship to technology, human capacities and powers as evaluated by movements like transhumanism, and ultimately, human meaning and value, is made possible and is shown to provide a consistent and appealing rejoinder to the disintegrated vision of man that emerges in a technologized world. (shrink)

Technological advancements, especially with regard to enhancements of human capacities and powers, have instigated a collision between opposing views of the human person. I begin with the premise that the predominant classical view of the human person attained its clearest and most cogent expression in the philosophy of Thomas Aquinas and can be termed the theory of the homo integralis. The human person is, for Thomas, the integrated being par excellence: he is a union of the material (body) and the (...) immaterial (soul); his freedom is guided by a normative nature; he is himself a product of and participant in nature; he is a member of a common species from which he draws his identity; and he balances the needs of his embodied state with a recognition that his existence is not limited to it. Due to the philosophical and technological revolutions of the modern period, themselves an outgrowth perhaps of earlier attitudes, a contrasting view of the human person emerged: the homo technologicus. Technological man, unlike his classical predecessor, is marked by fundamental disintegration: he is divided in himself, between mind and body; he is dissociated from a normative human nature; he is divided from nature itself as he sets himself against it through technological means; he is divided from the human community in radical, self-determining autonomy; and he is severed from any sense of transcendent purpose or value aside from that which can be attained through his own powers, technological or otherwise. By recovering a sense of the homo integralis as articulated by Thomas Aquinas, a fresh appraisal of contemporary issues regarding the human relationship to technology, human capacities and powers as evaluated by movements like transhumanism, and ultimately, human meaning and value, is made possible and is shown to provide a consistent and appealing rejoinder to the disintegrated vision of man that emerges in a technologized world. (shrink)

Are there qualities of sound and the experience of listening that educators can extrapolate to inform the philosophy and practice of music education? In this essay, I imagine a music education where sound—how it behaves and how we experience it—serves not only as the subject of study, but generates the framework of the pedagogy. A sonic music education is not automatic because ocularcentrism privileges the vision and influences the listening and educational experiences, often in unrecognized ways. I explore two qualities (...) of sounds: they are, first, impermanent and continually changing and, second, diffuse—seemingly inside and outside our bodies. These qualities contrast with the visual experience, which makes objects appear permanent, fixed, and separate from our bodies. Pedagogies based on sound might present truth as impermanent and their aims as multidirectional and might employ social constructivist epistemologies and democratic education. A music education based on sounds may be a corrective to ocularcentric banking pedagogies where knowledge is fixed and progress is unidirectionally measured. (shrink)

Both male ornamentation and male combat result in increased male mortality. Because population sizes are limited by a carrying capacity, increased age-specific adult male mortality will result in decreased age-specific adult female mortality, as well as decreased juvenile mortality. As intersexual competition is one form of intraspecific competition, through choosing to mate with ornamented and/or combative males, females in polygamous systems reduce intraspecific competition. Because average male fitness must exactly equal average female fitness, male fitness will paradoxically rise with increasing (...) male mortality. This theory also offers new perspectives on peripheral problems to sexual theory, such as mate location, resource guarding, leks, harems, and others. (shrink)

In Edmund Husserl's Phenomenology, Joseph J. Kockelmans provides the reader with a biographical sketch and an overview of the salient features of Husserl's thought. Kockelmans focuses on the essay for the Encyclopedia Britannica of 1928, Husserl's most Important effort to articulate the aims of phenomenology for a more general audience. Included are Husserl's text -- in the original German and in English translation on facing pages -- a synopsis, and an extensive commentary that relates Husserl's work as a whole (...) to the essay for the Encyclopedia. (shrink)

Pitt :735–741, 2017) has argued that reductive representationalism entails an absurdity akin to the “paramechanical hypothesis” Ryle attributed to Descartes. This paper focuses on one version of reductive representationalism: the property-complex theory. We contend that at least insofar as the property-complex theory goes, Pitt is wrong. The result is not just a response to Pitt, but also a clarification of the aims and structure of the property-complex theory.

Science shops were established at universities throughout the Netherlands in the early 1970s with the avowed aim of democratizing science and contributing to social change. During the past few years, science shops have met with significant challenges. For one thing, they have had to adapt to various changes directly associated with the Dutch political climate, the organization of higher education, national research policies, and so on. Moreover, they have faced serious financial cutbacks. In their efforts to address these challenges, science (...) shops have adopted various approaches, some of which have turned out to be more successful than others. Usually, the differences between the individual Dutch science shops are described and understood only in pragmatic terms, with respect to their internal organization and practices. This article, by contrast, argues that the different ways of coping with change should be understood as reflecting divergent, yet unarticulated, answers to the question of how science and technology can or should be democratized. (shrink)

Moral distress has been the subject of extensive research and debate in the nursing ethics literature since the mid-1980s, but the concept has received comparatively little attention from those working outside of applied ethics. In this article, I defend a care ethical account of moral distress, according to which the phenomenon is the product of an agent’s inability to live up to one of her caring commitments. This account has a number of attractions. First, it places a greater emphasis on (...) the importance of the relationship between the caregiver and her cared-for than that found in previous accounts. Second, it does not make problematic assumptions about the correctness of a caregiver’s moral judgments, as has been claimed in relation to previous accounts of moral distress. Finally, my account allows for a clear conceptual distinction to be drawn between moral distress and other forms of negative moral emotion such as guilt and regret. Earlier accounts draw this distinction by appealing to the causal aetiology of moral distress, but as I show here, such appeals are ultimately unsuccessful unless they are made from an explicitly care ethical starting point. One of the implications of my account is that moral distress has the potential to occur in the context of any caregiving relationship. This claim is explored in the final section of the paper, in relation to student-teacher and parent-child caregiving. (shrink)

Moral rationalism has long been an attractive position within moral philosophy. However, among empirical-minded philosophers, it is widely dismissed as scientifically untenable. In this essay, I argue that moral rationalism’s lack of uptake in the empirical domain is due to the widespread supposition that moral rationalists must hold that moral judgments and actions are produced by rational capacities. But this construal is mistaken: moral rationalism’s primary concern is not with the relationship between moral judgments and rational capacities per se, but (...) rather with developing a conception objectivity normativity that avoids Platonism. In light of this, I develop an alternative approach to translating moral rationalism into the empirical domain that builds on the common rationalist view that normative requirements are explained by the relationship between agents and the social structures and practices in which they are embedded. I propose that this social conception of normativity can be translated into a scientific framework by interpreting it as a claim about the importance of constraint-based explanation when accounting for norm-governed behavior. In order to develop this point more concretely and show that it is empirically tractable, I turn to research on macaque social organization that highlights the ways in which normative standards are generated by empirically observable social structures. The insights garnered from the macaque case allow me to then locate moral rationalism’s core claims about the relationship between morality and the standards of practical rationality within an empirically plausible framework. (shrink)

In 1908, three years after Einstein first published his special theory of relativity, the mathematician Hermann Minkowski introduced his four-dimensional “spacetime” interpretation of the theory. Einstein initially dismissed Minkowski’s theory, remarking that “since the mathematicians have invaded the theory of relativity I do not understand it myself anymore.” Yet Minkowski’s theory soon found wide acceptance among physicists, including eventually Einstein himself, whose conversion to Minkowski’s way of thinking was engendered by the realization that he could profitably employ it for the (...) formulation of his new theory of gravity. The validity of Minkowski’s mathematical “merging” of space and time has rarely been questioned by either physicists or philosophers since Einstein incorporated it into his theory of gravity. Physicists often employ Minkowski spacetime with little regard to the whether it provides a true account of the physical world as opposed to a useful mathematical tool in the theory of relativity. Philosophers sometimes treat the philosophy of space and time as if it were a mere appendix to Minkowski’s theory. In this critical study, Joseph Cosgrove subjects the concept of spacetime to a comprehensive examination and concludes that Einstein’s initial assessment of Minkowksi was essentially correct. (shrink)

A notable feature of recent philosophical work on climate ethics is that it makes practically no reference to ‘traditional’ environmental philosophy. There is some irony in this, since environmental ethics arose as part of a broader movement within philosophy, starting in the 1960s, aimed at developing different fields of applied philosophy, in order to show how everyday practice could be enriched through philosophical reflection and analysis. The major goal of this paper is to explain why this branch of practical ethics (...) has, for the most part, failed the test of practicability when it comes to formulating a response to global climate change. The central problem is that debates in environmental philosophy became absorbed by a set of metaphysical questions about the nature of value. The result has been a field dominated by views that provide unsuitable foundations for the development of public policy. (shrink)

Intermodal representationalism is a popular theory of consciousness. This paper argues that intermodal representationalism is false, or at least likely so. The argument turns on two forms of exceptional episodic memory: hyperthymesia and prodigious visual memory in savant syndrome. Emerging from this argument is a broader lesson about the relationship between memory and perception; that it may be possible to entertain in memory the very same content as in a corresponding perceptual experience, and that the ‘overflow’ interpretation of the classic (...) Sperling paradigm experiments may not fully generalize. (shrink)

My topic is the possibility of acting in the belief that the action is bad and for the reason that it is, as the agent believes, bad. On route, I examine another question – namely whether agents can, without having any relevant false beliefs, perform actions motivated by the badness of those actions. The main worry is the compatibility of action for the sake of the bad with the thesis of the Guise of the Good. The examina-tion is helped by (...) considering the way reason explanations and the more widely understood normative explanations can explain actions, in light of the conditions for the rationality of actions and the bearing of masking beliefs on the explanation of their actions. The discussion leads to consideration of the possibility of various conceptual mistakes. Given the variety of human motivations, I focus on the interpretation of one case: the Luciferian motive, understood, roughly, as the drive to defy the limits of thought or of rational thought. (shrink)

In previous writings, I joined those who take the view that action with an intention is an action for a reason, where whatever value there is in the action is a reason for it. This paper sketches the role of reasons and intentions in leading to action with an intention. Section 1 explains that though belief in the value of the intended action is not an essential constituent of intentions, nevertheless when humans act with an intention they act in the (...) belief that there is value in the action. Section 2 explains the relative role of value and intention in “producing” the action, and relates their role to that of motivation. (shrink)

I show how thinking in terms of the protocol used can help clarify problems related to anthropic reasoning and self-location, such as the Doomsday Argument and the Sleeping Beauty Problem.

Originally published in 1942, this book examines Plato's later dialogues, particularly Timaeus, in terms of their dependence on pre-Socratic philosophy and other aspects of ancient thought and life. Skemp assesses Plato's views on reality and how it could be more than his idealized Forms. This book will be of value to anyone with an interest in the Socratic and Platonic philosophies and the circumstances of their development.

This anthology of selections from the works of noted philosophers affords the student an immediate contact with the unique historical background of the philosophy of science. The selections, many of which have not been readily accessible, follow the development of the philosophy of science from 1786 to 1927. Each selection is preceded by a brief introduction by the editor designed to familiarize the reader with a particular philosopher and provide insights into his work. Joseph J. Kockelmans divides the selections (...) into several sections. Part 1, from 17861850, includes chapters by Immanuel Kant, on the metaphysical foundations of natural science, John Frederick William Herschel, on experience and the analysis of phenomena, William Whewell, on the nature and conditions of inductive science, and John Stuart Mill, on induction and the law of universal causation; part 2, from 18701899, includes chapters by Hermann Von Helmholtz, on the origin and significance of geometrical axioms, William Stanley Jevons, on the philosophy of inductive inference, John Bernard Stallo, on the kinetic theory of gasses and the conditions of the validity of scientific hypotheses, Ernst Mach, on the economical nature of physical inquiry, Karl Pearson, on perceptual and conceptual space, Emile Boutroux, on mechanical laws, Heinrich Hertz, on the appropriateness, correctness, and permissibility of scientific theories, and Ludwig Boltzmann, on the fundamental principles and basic equations of mechanics. The third part, covering the first decade of the twentieth century, includes chapters by Henri Jules Poincare, on science and reality, Charles Peirce, on Induction, Pierre Marie Duhem, on the laws of physics, William Ostwald, on energetism and mechanics, Emile Meyerson, on identity of thought and nature as the final goal of science, Ernst Cassirer, on functional concepts of natural science; part 4, from 19101927, includes chapters by Charles Dunbar Broad, on phenomenalism, Alfred North Whitehead, on time, space, and material, Bertrand Russell, on the world of physics and the world of sense, Norman Robert Cambbell, on the meaning of science, Moritz Schlick, on basic issues of the philosophy of natural science, and Percy Williams Bridgman, on the concepts of space, time, and causality. Philosophy of Science provides a concise single volume text to the discipline and enables students to understand and evaluate the various trends in our contemporary philosophy of science. Joseph J. Kockelmans is professor emeritus of philosophy at the Pennsylvania State Univers. (shrink)

We welcome Norenzayan et al.’s claim that the prosocial effects of beliefs in supernatural agents extend beyond Big Gods. To date, however, supporting evidence has focused on the Abrahamic Big God, making generalisations difficult. We discuss a recent study that highlights the need for clarity about the causal path by which supernatural beliefs affect the evolution of big societies.

The starting point of Joseph Margolis' last philosophical effort is represented by the problem of the human "gap" in animal continuity: "There appear to be no comparable variants of animal evolution [...] effected by anything like the culturally enabled creation". While we share with other animals more or less refined forms of societal life, acquiring a natural language remains a distinctively human character: although it is grounded in the completely natural favourable changes in the human vocal apparatus and brain, (...) the merely causal emergence of language in humans reacts back into human primates by transforming them into persons or selves. The artifactuality of persons appears to be at the same time a natural and emergent phenomenon, constituting the other side of the process of language acquisition both by early hominids and by human infants. In this perspective the largely informal, mongrel and approximate functionality of ordinary language is interpreted as a good tool for the cultural animal to cope with the world, while the collective dimension of human forms of life appears as the shared context of external and internal constitution of the human selves. (shrink)

Nietzsche was a philosopher who prided himself, in deliberate contradistinction with previous philosophers, on his ‘historical sense’. But this leaves many questions unanswered about the precise role of the historical in Nietzsche’s philosophy. Perhaps most importantly, can the conception of genealogy in Nietzsche’s later philosophy, as a revised historical method, be taken to represent his mature philosophical methodology in general? I argue, firstly, that there is considerable continuity between Nietzsche’s conceptions of history in the early essay ‘On the uses and (...) disadvantages of history for life’ and those of his later philosophy. The former can therefore be used as a resource for understanding the latter. Through a reading of the early history essay I demonstrate that Nietzsche’s conception of the historical here is intimately bound up with the notion of the ‘unhistorical’ and that it is precisely renewed access to the unhistorical which is required in order for history to be conducive to the flourishing of humanity. I go on to contend that this holds for Nietzsche’s later writings as well, and that genealogy, being purely historical, must therefore be seen as one subsidiary part of a broader philosophy in which the unhistorical will play, literally, a vital role. (shrink)