ExcerptHuman rights organizations for the past few decades have generally attempted to promote international law against the principle of state sovereignty in order to establish human rights norms worldwide. This approach presumes the universality of human rights is in fundamental opposition to the principle of sovereignty because this principle can be used by governments to shield themselves from outside criticism. By contrast, the U.S. State Department’s Report of the Commission on Unalienable Rights has outlined an approach that emphasizes not just (...) the compatibility between universal human rights and state sovereignty but even their dependence on each other.1 We see the results of this clash in the response to the Report by Kenneth Roth, executive director of Human Rights Watch and one of the expert witnesses during the commission’s proceedings.2 He sees in the Report’s foregrounding of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights “a frontal assault on international human rights law” because it shifts attention away from international law and toward more informal documents such as the Universal Declaration, which lays out a set of goals rather than legally binding commitments. (shrink)

Evolutionary processes such as natural selection and random drift are commonly regarded as causes of population-level change. We respond to a recent challenge that drift and selection are best understood as statistical trends, not causes. Our reply appeals to manipulation as a strategy for uncovering causal relationships: if you can systematically manipulate variable A to bring about a change in variable B, then A is a cause of B. We argue that selection and drift can be systematically manipulated to produce (...) different kinds of population-level change. They should therefore be regarded as causes. (shrink)

The three classic regress problems (the Extensive Regress of states, the Intensive Regress of contents, and the Fichte-Henrich-Shoemaker Regress of de se beliefs) related to the Self-Awareness Thesis (that one’s conscious states are the ones that one is aware of being in) can all be elegantly resolved by a self-acquaintance postulate. This resolution, however, entails that consciousness has an irreducibly circular structure and that self-acquaintance should not be conceived of in terms of an independent entity bearing an external or mediated (...) relation to itself but rather in terms of a realized relation-instance relating to itself as well as to something other than itself. Consciousness, on this account, has a categorially curious status. It is like a relation-particular hybrid. This can be formalized in terms of the theory of hypersets, which in turn can be used to elucidate the problem of individuality, one source of the conceptual difficulty with adequately characterizing de se content. (shrink)

The Systematicity Arguments is the only book-length treatment of the systematicity and productivity arguments.

This essay looks at the concept of AKEDAH, the essence of which is the travail of the human condition and the trust in vindication and victory, as a salient and deep metaphor for bioethics. The author first delineates the symbol, then shows its theological and ethical significance, and finally suggests its bioethical applications.The LORD said, “Go get Isaac, your only son, the one you dearly love! Take him to the land of Moriah, and I will show you a mountain where (...) you must sacrifice him to me on the fires of an altar.” So Abraham got up early the next morning and chopped wood for the fire. He put a saddle on his donkey and left with Isaac and two servants for the place where God had told him to go.Genesis 22There is silence all around. The Baptist appears, and cries: “Repent, for the Kingdom of Heaven is at hand.” Soon after that comes Jesus, and in the knowledge that He is the coming Son of Man lays hold of the wheel of the world to set it moving on that last revolution which is to bring all ordinary history to a close. It refuses to turn, and He throws Himself upon it. Then it does turn; and crushes Him. The wheel rolls onward, and the mangled body of the one immeasurably great Man, who was strong enough to think of Himself as the spiritual ruler of mankind and to bend history to His purpose, is hanging upon it still. That is His victory and His reign. (shrink)

This article considers claims that biology should seek general theories similar to those found in physics but argues for an alternative framework for biological theories as collections of prototypical interlevel models that can be extrapolated by analogy to different organisms. This position is exemplified in the development of the Hodgkin‐Huxley giant squid model for action potentials, which uses equations in specialized ways. This model is viewed as an “emergent unifier.” Such unifiers, which require various simplifications, involve the types of heuristics (...) discussed in Wimsatt’s writings on reduction, but with a twist. Here, the heuristics are used to generate emergent rather than reductive explanations. †To contact the author, please write to: Department of History and Philosophy of Science, University of Pittsburgh, 1017 Cathedral of Learning, Pittsburgh, PA 15260; e‐mail: [email protected]. (shrink)

Human beings as imperfect rational beings face continuous challenges, one of them has to do with the lack of recognizing and respecting our inner dignity in present times. In this collective paper, we address the overall theme—Philosophy of Education in a New Key from various perspectives related to dignity. We address in particular some of the constraints and possibilities with regard to this issue in various settings such as education and society at large. Klas Roth discusses, for example, that (...) it is not uncommon that the value of human beings has to do with their price in, inter alia, their social, cultural, political and economic settings throughout the world. He argues that such a focus does not necessarily draw attention to the inner dignity of human beings, but that human beings ought to do so in education and society at large. Lia Mollvik discusses views of inner and outer dignity, and argues that there needs to be a balance in between them, and that the balance ought to be acknowledged in education. Rama Alshoufani discusses the classification of human beings in terms of various diagnoses related to the asserted dysfunction of the brain, and she argues that such classification does paradoxically not necessarily respect people with such diagnoses as ends in themselves. On the contrary, she argues that their inner dignity is not respected, but that it should be. Other such failures are due to the lack of inner dignity when it comes to Children’s rights as discussed by Rebecca Adami, and to the lack of recognition of human beings’ vulnerability as discussed by Katy Dineen. Fariba Majlesi criticizes a too strong emphasis on substantive notions of humanist education, which seem to hinder new ways of thinking; she argues that it is necessary to acknowledge the latter in and through education in order to preserve the dignity of human beings. Dignity, it is argued throughout the paper, has an inner moral worth, and is beyond price. (shrink)

One might have thought that if something has two or more distinct realizations, then that thing is multiply realized. Nevertheless, some philosophers have claimed that two or more distinct realizations do not amount to multiple realization, unless those distinct realizations amount to multiple “ways” of realizing the thing. Corey Maley, Gualtiero Piccinini, Thomas Polger, and Lawrence Shapiro are among these philosophers. Unfortunately, they do not explain why multiple realization requires multiple “ways” of realizing. More significantly, their efforts to articulate multiple (...) “ways” of realizing turn out to be problematic. (shrink)

In the summer of 1998, the Wisconsin State legislature amended its child protection laws. Under new child abuse provisions, Wisconsin judges can confine pregnant women who abuse alcohol or drugs for the duration of their pregnancies. South Dakota enacted similar legislation almost simultaneously. The South Dakota statute requires mandatory drug and alcohol treatment for pregnant women who abuse those substances and classifies such activity as child abuse. In addition, the South Dakota legislation gives relatives the power to commit pregnant women (...) involuntarily for two days; a court order can place the pregnant women in custody for up to nine months. These recent legislative “successes” follow scores of failed attempts by legislators in other states to establish fetal protection laws aimed at women who use and abuse drugs and alcohol during pregnancy. (shrink)

Characterizations of the Anthropocene often indicate both the challenges that our new epoch poses for human well-being and a sense of loss that comes from a compromised environment. In this paper I explore a deeper problem underpinning both issues, namely, that decoupling humanity from the world with which we are familiar compromises human flourishing. The environmental conditions characteristic of the Anthropocene do so, I claim, by compromising flourishing on two fronts. First, the comparatively novel conditions of the Anthropocene risk rupturing (...) our narratives, putting at risk our sense of self and connections to familiar environments. Second, by undermining the connections between our environmental background and the sense of well-being conditioned by that background our ability to exercise options that constitute a recognizable good life are compromised. This paper argues that to the extent humanity is decoupled from their environments humans are not only less able to access opportunities our understanding of who we are, our identities, and our capacity to make sense of the world around us through those identities is compromised. I conclude that the Anthropocene does more than challenge our ability to utilize resources, it challenges our understanding of who we are in the world. (shrink)

In an important new book on shared agency, Michael Bratman develops an account of the normative demand for the coordination of intentions amongst participants in shared agency. Bratman seeks to understand this form of normative guidance in terms of that associated with individual planning intentions. I give reasons to resist his form of reductionism. In addition, I note how Bratman’s discussion raises the interesting issue of the function or purpose of shared intention and of shared agency more generally. According to (...) Bratman, the function of shared intention is to promote interpersonal coordination of intention and action. I suggest that power sharing amongst participants must also be included as a function of shared intention. (shrink)

This lucid and wide-ranging volume constitutes a self-contained introduction to the elements and key issues of the philosophy of language.

Despite the considerable attention that the systematicity argument has enjoyed, it is worthwhile examining the argument within the context of similar explanatory arguments from the history of science. This kind of analysis helps show that Connectionism, qua Connectionism, really does not have an explanation of systematicity. Second, and more surprisingly, one finds that the systematicity argument sets such a high explanatory standard that not even Classicism can explain the systematicity of thought.

Within the philosophy of sport, the phenomenon of practising has received very little attention, whereas other related aspects of sport such as excellence and competition have been subjected to many and thorough studies. This essay will attempt to clarify this particular phenomenon of practising through the notion of athletic ascetics, which will be analysed as a special variant of askēsis. Drawing especially on Foucault’s lectures on ascetics in ancient philosophy and Sloterdijk’s anthropology of the practising life, the essay outlines and (...) interrogates the potential relevance of an ascetological understanding of sport. Through both descriptive and normative analysis, it is argued that athletic ascetics can refine our understanding of performance in sport and comprise an embodied account of the formative aspect of ethics, with implications for ethical considerations related to performance enhancement. (shrink)

Discusses human sexuality, population contral, women's rights, genetic research, abortion, AIDS, and childcare.

Once Queen of the Medieval court of sciences, dethroned theology may be able in our time to play a strategic servant role in rightly humiliating, elevating, and ordering the disciplines, in gadflying like a mutant honeybee, generating surprise and serendipity through the intermediacy of social science, and in offering ethical homing direction to the disciplines in their applied endeavors.

It is sometimes suggested that the history of computation in cognitive science is one in which the formal apparatus of Turing-equivalent computation, or effective computability, was exported from mathematical logic to ever wider areas of cognitive science and its environs. This paper, however, indicates some respects in which this suggestion is inaccurate. Computability theory has not been focused exclusively on Turing-equivalent computation. Many essential features of Turing-equivalent computation are not captured in definitions of computation as symbol manipulation. Turing-equivalent computation did (...) not play the role in McCulloch and Pitts’s early cybernetic work that is sometimes attributed to it. Finally, various segments of the neuroscientific community invoke a notion of computation that differs from the Turing-equivalent notion.Keywords: Circular causality; Computation; Cortical maps; Neural networks; Symbol manipulation; Turing-equivalent computation. (shrink)

In the extended mind literature, one sometimes finds the claim that there is no neural correlate of consciousness. Instead, there is a biological or ecological correlate of consciousness. Consciousness, it is claimed, supervenes on an entire organism in action. Alva Noë is one of the leading proponents of such a view. This paper resists Noë's view. First, it challenges the evidence he offers from neuroplasticity. Second, it presses a problem with paralysis. Third, it draws attention to a challenge from the (...) existence of metamers and visual illusions. (shrink)

Stakeholder scholars have long explored how stakeholder relationships differ from economic transactions. We contribute to this ongoing inquiry by developing a conceptual framework of relationality in stakeholder theory that encompasses a stakeholder-theoretic extension of Williamson's contracting schema and a new typology of stakeholder relationships. Premised on understanding relationality as the need for informal human relationships beyond formal governance, our framework locates the key difference between transaction cost economics and stakeholder theory in their treatment of informal relationships. While transaction cost economics (...) perceives informal relationships to be shaped by formal governance structures and enforced by contractual safeguards, stakeholder theory is open to the possibility that some informal relationships between stakeholders may be genuinely moral and thus irreducible to formal governance and contractual safeguards. These stakeholder relationships may lead to unique economic effects described by instrumental stakeholder theory. The difference that we identified between the two literatures shows how stakeholder theory's embrace of relationality surpasses that of transaction cost economics. (shrink)

The debate over the central issue confronted in Closing--the role of the university and the liberal arts in the United States--has become increasingly urgent and contentious. The goal of this collection of essays is to consider what we can learn about the dilemmas confronting American culture through a consideration of both The Closing of the American Mind and the debate it has aroused. The contributors differ among themselves as to the validity of both the diagnoses and the solutions Bloom offers, (...) yet they do not engage in "Bloom-bashing" or hero-worship. The goal of the book is to place the debate over Closing into the larger context than can be achieved in a book review format. To provide the historical perspective that has been missing in the controversy over Bloom, included in this volume is Christopher Lasch's "The Great Experiment: Where Did it Go Wrong?" Also included are essays by other leading critics: John K. Roth, Frank Caucci, William K. Buckley, Milton R. Stern, Susan Bourgeois, Margaret C. Jones, Daniel Zins, Kenneth Alan Hovey, Bonnie A. Hain, John Peacock, Patricia L. Lundberg, Peter Siedlecki, Mark W. Roche, William Thickstun, Lorraine Clark, and Gerald Graff. This volume of essays does much to illuminate the issue surrounding The Closing of the American Mind. (shrink)

00 In this innovative analysis, Plato's four eleatic dialogues are treated as a continuous argument. In Kenneth Dorter's view, Plato reconsiders the theory of forms propounded in his earlier dialogues and through an examination of the theory's limitations reaffirms and proves it essential. Contradicted are both those philosophers who argue that Plato espoused his theory of forms uncritically and those who argue that Plato in some sense rejected the theory and moved toward the categorical analysis developed byAristotle. Dorter's reexamination (...) of Plato's insights implies an important new direction for modern philosophical inquiry. In this innovative analysis, Plato's four eleatic dialogues are treated as a continuous argument. In Kenneth Dorter's view, Plato reconsiders the theory of forms propounded in his earlier dialogues and through an examination of the theory's limitations reaffirms and proves it essential. Contradicted are both those philosophers who argue that Plato espoused his theory of forms uncritically and those who argue that Plato in some sense rejected the theory and moved toward the categorical analysis developed byAristotle. Dorter's reexamination of Plato's insights implies an important new direction for modern philosophical inquiry. (shrink)

There is a broadly held view that neonatologists are ethically obligated to act to override parental nontreatment decisions for imperiled premature newborns when there is a reasonable chance of a good outcome. It is argued here that three types of uncertainty undercut any such general obligation: (1) the vagueness of the boundary at which an infant’s deficits become so intolerable that death could be reasonably preferred; (2) the uncertainty about whether aggressive treatment will result in the survival of a reasonably (...) healthy child or, alternatively, the survival of a child with intolerable deficits; and (3) the inability to determine an acceptable ratio between the likelihoods of those two outcomes. It is argued that the broadly held view accords insufficient weight to the fact that newborn intensive care increases the likelihood of harm to the child by effecting survival with intolerable deficits. Though treatment may offer a reasonable chance of a good outcome, it is argued that there are situations in which neonatologists should nonetheless defer to parental nontreatment decisions. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: The Origins of the Philosophy of Social Science Winch's Triad The Legitimation of “Continental” Philosophy Enter Davidson Rational Choice: The Scientization of the Intentional Philosophy of Social Science Today Notes.

Cicero could both orate and write a treatise on oratory. A dog can bark but he can’t write a tract on barking. If all typically symbol-using animals were suddenly obliterated, their realm of symbolic action would be correspondingly obliterated. The earth would be but a realm of planetary, geologic, meteorological motion, including the motions of whatever nonhuman biological organisms happened to survive. The realm of nonsymbolic motion needs no realm of symbolic action; but there could be no symbolic action unless (...) grounded in the realm of motion, the realm of motion having preceded the emergence of our symbol-using ancestors; and doubtless the time will come when motions go on after all our breed will have vanished. Kenneth Burke is now developing the implications of the position stated in the present essay. He is also editing his Symbolic of Motives, a work designed to complement his Grammar of Motives and Rhetoric of Motives. His contributions to Critical Inquiry are "In Response to Booth: Dancing with Tears in my Eyes" , "Post-Poesque Derivation of a Terministic Cluster" , "A Critical Load, Beyond that Door; or, Before the Ultimate Confrontation; or, When Thinking of Deconstructionist Structuralists; or, A Hermeneutic Fantasy" , and "Methodological Repression and/or Strategies of Containment" . The first section of " Motion/ Action" was presented at a symposium at New York University in May 1976 and will appear in a slightly altered version in the report of those proceedings, Psychoanalysis, Criticism, and Creativity: A French-American Dialogue. (shrink)

NIMBY claims have certainly been vilified. But, as Feldman and Turner point out, one cannot condemn all NIMBY claims without condemning all appeals to partiality. This suggests that any moral problem with NIMBY claims stems not from their status as NIMBY claims but from an underlying illegitimate appeal to partiality. I suggest that if we are to distinguish illegitimate from legitimate appeals to partiality we should look to what might morally justify the sort of agent-relative reasons that can be expressed (...) as a part of public morality. However, if this serves to distinguish legitimate from illegitimate appeals to partiality, the scope for justifiable NIMBY claims is significantly reduced. NIMBY claims require special justification, just as do appeals to the appropriate form of agent-relative reasons. NIMBY appeals to the value of a particular place may very well be morally acceptable, but not merely in virtue of being significant to someone. (shrink)