In some cases people judge it morally acceptable to sacrifice one person’s life in order to save several other lives, while in other similar cases they make the opposite judgment. Researchers have identified two general factors that may explain this phenomenon at the stimulus level: (1) the agent’s intention (i.e. whether the harmful event is intended as a means or merely foreseen as a side-effect) and (2) whether the agent harms the victim in a manner that is relatively “direct” or (...) “personal”. Here we integrate these two classes of findings. Two experiments examine a novel personalness/directness factor that we call personal force, present when the force that directly impacts the victim is generated by the agent’s muscles (e.g., in pushing). Experiments 1a and b demonstrate the influence of personal force on moral judgment, distinguishing it from physical contact and spatial proximity. Experiments 2a and b demonstrate an interaction between personal force and intention, whereby the effect of personal force depends entirely on intention. These studies also introduce a method for controlling for people’s real-world expectations in decisions involving potentially unrealistic hypothetical dilemmas. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to present an explanation for the impact of normative considerations on people’s assessment of certain seemingly purely descriptive matters. The explanation is based on two main claims. First, a large category of expressions are tacitly modal: they are contextually equivalent to modal proxies. Second, the interpretation of predominantly circumstantial or teleological modals is subject to certain constraints which make certain possibilities salient at the expense of others.

The arc of the moral universe -- Structure, choice, and legitimacy: Locke's theory of the state -- Democratic equality -- A more democratic liberalism -- For a democratic society -- Knowledge, morality and hope: the social thought of Noam Chomsky: with Joel Rogers -- Reflections on Habermas on democracy -- A matter of demolition?: Susan Okin on justice and gender -- Minimalism about human rights: the most we can hope for? -- Is there a human right to democracy? -- Extra (...) republicam nulla justitia?: with Charles Sabel. (shrink)

In this article, I consider how recent work on the philosophy of group-agency and shared-agency can help us to understand what it is for a church to act in worship. I argue that to assess a model’s suitability for providing such an account, we must consider how well it handles cases of non-paradigm participants, such as those with autism spectrum disorder and young infants. I suggest that whilst a shared-agency model helps to clarify how individuals coordinate actions in cases of (...) reading or singing liturgy, it does not handle non-paradigm cases well and so cannot be considered a suitable model of group liturgical action. Instead, I suggest that a model of groupagency, in which a plurality of action types can contribute to the actions of a group as a whole, is better suited to explaining a church’s actions in worship. (shrink)

Susan Okin has written an important book on justice and the family. Animated by the experiences that contemporary feminism has sought to articulate, and guided by a principled hostility to the subordination of women that continues to disgrace American life, she argues that the current ordering of domestic life in the United States is unjust and that its alteration ought to be made a matter of public policy.Families, according to Okin, are not havens in an otherwise heartless world. Instead the (...) current division of domestic labor marks them as the centerpiece of a broader system of inequalities between men and women. Justice condemns those inequalities and commands their remedy through the transformation of our domestic practices. Because the division of domestic labor is so fundamental to injustice, we need in particular to ‘encourage and facilitate’ equal sharing by parents in the responsibilities of child-rearing, and in the more quotidian chores that provide the material foundation of modern domesticity. (shrink)

How to Do Things with Fictions considers how fictional works, ranging from Chaucer to Beckett, subject readers to a series of exercises meant to fortify their mental capacities. While it is often assumed that fictions must be informative or morally improving in order to be of any real benefit to us, certain texts defy this assumption by functioning as training-grounds for the capacities: in engaging with them we stand not to become more knowledgeable or more virtuous but more skilled, whether (...) at rational thinking, at maintaining necessary illusions, at achieving tranquillity of mind, or even at religious faith. Instead of offering us propositional knowledge, these texts yield know-how; rather than attempting to instruct by means of their content, they hone capacities by means of their form; far from seducing with the promise of instantaneous transformation, they recognize, with Aristotle, that change is a matter of sustained and patient practice. (shrink)

Søren Kierkegaard’s claim that having faith requires being contemporary with Christ is one of the most important, yet difficult to interpret claims across his entire authorship. How can one be contemporary with a figure who existed more than two millennia ago? A prominent answer to this question is that contemporaneity with Christ is achieved through a kind of imaginative co-presence made possible by reading Scripture. However, I argue, this ignores what Kierkegaard thinks about Christ as a living agent, and not (...) a merely historical agent. By drawing on Kierkegaard’s discussion of Christ’s true presence in the sacrament of Communion, I argue that contemporaneity with Christ should be understood in the same way as any other intersubjective relation. That is, I argue, that just as relating to any living person as contemporary requires a kind of two-way attention-sharing, relating to Christ as contemporary, on Kierkegaard’s account, requires a kind of two-way attention-sharing with Christ. (shrink)

This first English publication of selected German writings by Abraham Joshua Heschel written during his years in Nazi Germany and London exile reveals his insights on the redemptive role of Jewish learning"--Provided by the publisher.

In this article, I summarize recent work on the philosophy of liturgy. In part 2 of this article, I consider how liturgy can provide a way of knowing God personally. I outline accounts of acquiring phenomenal knowledge, practical knowledge, and propositional knowledge by participating in liturgy.

In this article, I aim to reconstruct Otto Neurath’s naturalistic program for practical philosophy. This program, which he calls “felicitology,” was intended as a version of ethics suitable for the “scientific worldview” of the logical empiricists. I begin by situating Neurath’s ethical concerns in the context of the debate between his fellow Austro-Marxists and the Marburg neo-Kantians. I then show why, contrary to many logical empiricists, Neurath thought that ethical considerations had an important role to play in scientific inquiry. I (...) argue that this conclusion follows from his contribution to the protocol-sentence debate of the early 1930s. Finally, I show how Neurath’s advocacy of unified science, democratic socialism, a world economy, and his method of visual learning all relate to his program for felicitology. (shrink)

One of the most pressing ethical challenges facing phase I cancer research centres is the process of informed consent. Historically, most scholarship has been devoted to redressing therapeutic misconception, that is, the conflation of the nature and goals of research with those of therapy. While therapeutic misconception continues to be a major ethical concern, recent scholarship has begun to recognise that the informed consent process is more complex than merely a transfer of information and therefore cannot be evaluated only according (...) to how well an individual understands such information. Other components of decision-making operate independently of understanding and yet still may compromise the quality of informed consent. Notable among these components is unrealistic optimism, an event-specific belief that one has a better chance of receiving benefit than others similarly situated. In this article, we consider responses to interviews with parents who had recently completed an informed consent conference for enrolling their child in a phase I cancer clinical trial to examine how this influence manifests and how investigators might address it during informed consent. (shrink)

In the Euthydemus, Socrates is presented as an eager student of seemingly trivial arts, earning derision both for desiring to master the peculiar art of Euthydemus and Dionysodorus and for studying the harp in his old age. I explain Socrates’ interest in these apparently trivial arts by way of a novel reading of the first protreptic argument, suggesting that the wisdom Socrates praises is complex in nature, securing the happiness of its possessor only insofar as it is composed of both (...) ordinary productive knowledge and ethically productive knowledge. This reading of the first protreptic makes sense of the otherwise perplexing second protreptic, explaining why Socrates is so keen to identify an art which makes what it uses. Wisdom acts as a reliable source of benefit only insofar as it is a complex composed of multiple different arts and types of knowledge. These arts, however, can only be acquired one at a time – if no single art is capable of combining the powers of both ordinary productive knowledge and ethically productive knowledge in the way that wisdom as a whole does, then the pursuit of wisdom will fail to offer reliable benefit despite the reliably beneficial nature of its possession. Thus, it is appropriate for the Euthydemus to conclude with Socrates telling Crito to take courage and pursue philosophy despite the seemingly harmful effects that its pursuit has had on others. Euthydemus and Dionysodorus represent the danger facing the aspiring philosopher, the possibility of being ruined by independent possession of the particular kind of ordinary productive knowledge on which philosophical activity depends – verbal mastery, the grasp of subtle conceptual distinctions needed both to argumentatively reveal reality and to argumentatively obscure it, to reliably equivocate and to reliably avoid equivocation. (shrink)

This article presents the views of four sets of authors, each taking concepts of embodied cognition into problem spaces where the new paradigm can be applied. The first considers consequences of embodied cognition on the legal system. The second explores how embodied cognition can change how we interpret and interact with art and literature. The third examines how we move through architectural spaces from an embodied cognition perspective. And the fourth addresses how music cognition is influenced by the approach. Each (...) contribution is brief. They are meant to suggest the potential reach of embodied cognition, increase the visibility of applications, and inspire potential avenues for research. (shrink)

Originally published in 1970. This work evaluates the appeal to the sensually given which played an important role in epistemological discussions during the early 20 th Century. While many contemporary philosophers regarded this appeal as a mistake, there were still some who defended the notion of the given and even made it the foundation of their views regarding perception. The author here points to several different views concerning the nature of the sensually given and argues that the issue between them (...) is not empirical, as is naturally suggested by what he calls ‘the Naïve View’ of the dispute, but rather metaphysical, involving different theories regarding the relationship between Thought and Reality. This leads on to a discussion of the different views presently held regarding the task of the epistemologist, and to a new suggestion with regard to the relationship between common sense and the rival ontologies suggested by scientists and philosophers. In the course of the argument a variety of different topics are discussed such as the correspondence and coherence theories of truth, the differences between scientific and philosophical theories, and the relevance of scientific treatments of the subject of perception to the treatment of this topic by philosophers. (shrink)

Name der Zeitschrift: Kierkegaard Studies Yearbook Jahrgang: 2017 Heft: 1 Seiten: 101-114.

In this article, I summarize recent work on the philosophy of liturgy. In part 2 of this article, I consider how liturgy can provide a way of knowing God personally. I outline accounts of acquiring phenomenal knowledge, practical knowledge, and propositional knowledge by participating in liturgy.

In the vicinity of the work we were suddenly somewhere else than we usually tend to be.In “the age of commemoration” (Stone 2010), it is ironic that we have developed such an affective immunity to the commemorative artifacts that fill our cities. In downtown Washington, Boston, or Philadelphia, many pedestrians stroll past a dozen or more memorials in a single afternoon, usually failing to pay much attention to the specific historical calling they make. Outside the ritualistic and consumptive settings where (...) tourists encounter a city’s most popular monuments, many artifacts of public memory simply blend into the mundane architectural atmosphere that surrounds them. As John Berger has pointed out, works of art—and .. (shrink)

The aim of the causal dynamical triangulations approach is to define nonperturbatively a quantum theory of gravity as the continuum limit of a lattice-regularized model of dynamical geometry. My aim in this paper is to give a concise yet comprehensive, impartial yet personal presentation of the causal dynamical triangulations approach.

ABSTRACT Where Being and Event was a book of meta-ontology, demonstrating how things be, Alain Badiou tells us that Logics of Worlds is an objective phenomenology demonstrating how (and what) things do. As such, it should also be considered a book about power: how objects function in their worlds, how change is possible, and what the event does to worlds and the objects in them. Attending to this, this article shows two conflicting forms of power emerge in Logics of Worlds, (...) the power of appearance and the power of change. In this article, the author argues their incommensurability suggests an overall failure of a consistent account of power from Badiou. (shrink)

This article is a critical exploration of compatibilities between Pentecostal-Charismatic theology and Process-Relational theology. The purpose of the investigation is to identify similarities that provide sufficient ground for mutual dialogue and transformation between the two traditions. Postmodernism is identified as a context in which such dialogue can occur, insofar as both the Pentecostal-Charismatic movements and Process-Relational theology are understood as reactions to modernism. The theological theme of “concursus,” the way in which God and humanity interact, is briefly explored as a (...) point of contact. Several social and ecclesial implications of mutual transformation are identified. Ecclesial implications of mutual transformation include a renewal of Process-Relational spirituality, an intellectualization of Pentecostal-Charismatic experience, ecumenical dialogue between evangelical and mainline denominations, and tempered operation of the charismata for Pentecostals. Social implications of mutual transformation include the possibility for positive social change, concern for healing and justice, and an increased cosmic concern. Ultimately, inasmuch as Pentecostalism is identified as an “experience in search of a theology,” Process-Relational theism is identified as a “theology in search of an experience.” Through dialogue and engagement, both the Pentecostal-Charismatic and Process-Relational traditions may gain a stronger and more holistic sense of humanity, God, and reality. (shrink)

This volume contains essays dealing with complex relationships between Judaism and Christianity, taking a bold step, assuming that no historical period can be excluded from the interactive process between Judaism and Christianity, conscious or unconscious, as either rejection or appropriation.

Though the federal government covers much of the cost of counterterrorism instruction, it has surprisingly little control over who is chosen to conduct the training. Structural problems abound. There is no unified system of expert evaluation or regulatory authority to impose quality control. The Tenth Amendment, which states, “The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people,” has been interpreted to mean (...) that police powers, and officer training, are the preserve of the states. By design, state and local law enforcement is not the responsibility of the federal government, and neither is officer training. While the Department of Homeland Security offers certification, this only means that approved courses are eligible for DHS funds. If the course is paid for by other means—by a regional source, or by another federal department—DHS accreditation isn’t necessarily required. Even DHS money, once received by a state or local police department, can often be used for trainers without DHS accreditation. (shrink)

This paper offers a counterpoint to the prevailing account of waste in the human sciences. This account identifies waste, firstly, as the anomalous product of arbitrary social categorizations, or ‘matter out of place’, and, secondly, as a distinctly human way of leaving behind and interpreting traces, or a mirror of culture. Together, these positions reflect a more or less constructivist and anthropocentric approach. Most commonly, waste is placed within a framework that privileges considerations of meaning over materiality and the threat (...) of death over the perpetuity of life processes. For an alternative I turn to bio-semiotics and cross-species scholarship around the question of the animal. Specifically, the paper asks what theories of waste would look like if instead of taking ‘dirt’ as their starting point, they began with trans-species encounters with animal scat. Following bio-semiotics and efforts to deconstruct the animal/human binary, it is suggested that the objectual forms commonly referred to as ‘waste’ are not arbitrarily classified but purposefully expended, and thus symptomatic of life’s spatio-temporal continuation. Waste matter, therefore, is best construed not as anthropocentric but as semi-biotic: a sign of the form of life to which it once belonged. This alternative perspective has implications for how approaches to industrial forms of mass waste can be reconceived. (shrink)