This essay explores the unique temporal experience in anxiety. Drawing on first-person accounts as well as examples from literature, I attempt to show how anxiety not only disrupts our physiological and cognitive timing but also disturbs the embodied rhythms of everyday social life. The primary goal, however, is to articulate the extent to which human existence itself is a temporally structured event and to identity the ways that anxiety disrupts this structure. Using Martin Heidegger’s account of human existence as a (...) point of departure, I show how the mood of anxiety has the power to alter our self-interpretations by closing down or constricting our experience of the future. I argue that a constricted future impedes our ability ‘to be’ because it closes off the range of projective meanings that we would ordinarily draw on to create or fashion our identities. (shrink)

What is the property of being true like? To answer this question, begin with a Canberra-plan analysis of the concept of truth. That is, assemble the platitudes for the concept of truth, and then investigate which property might satisfy them. This project is aided by Friedman and Sheard’s groundbreaking analysis of twelve logical platitudes for truth. It turns out that, because of the paradoxes like the liar, the platitudes for the concept of truth are inconsistent. Moreover, there are so many (...) distinct paradoxes that only small subsets of platitudes for truth are consistent. The result is that there is no property of being true. The failure of the Canberra plan analysis of the concept of truth, points the way toward a new methodology: a conceptual engineering project for the concept of truth. Conceptual engineering is assessing the quality of our concepts, and when they are found defective, offering new and better concepts to replace them for certain purposes. Still, there are many aletheic properties, which are properties satisfied by reasonably large subsets of platitudes for the concept of truth. We can treat these aletheic properties as a guide to the multitude of new aletheic concepts, which are concepts similar to, but distinct from, the concept of truth. Any new aletheic concept or team of concepts might be called on to replace the concept of truth. In particular, the concepts of ascending truth and descending truth are recommended, but the most important point is that we need a full-scale investigation into the space of aletheic properties and new aletheic concepts—that is, we need an Aletheic Principles Project. (shrink)

Heidegger’s failure to discuss ‘the body’ in Being and Time has generated a cottage industry of criticism. In his recently translated Zollikon Seminars, Heidegger provides a response to the critics by offering a thematic account of the body that is strikingly similar to Merleau-Ponty’s account in Phenomenology of Perception. In this article, I draw on the parallels between these two texts in order to see how Heidegger’s neglect of the body affects his early project of fundamental ontology and to determine (...) whether or not an account of the body is necessary to complete the project. I defend Heidegger by suggesting that any analysis of the body is ‘ontic’ or regional and is made possible only on the basis of Dasein, understood as a public ‘clearing’ or ‘there’ of intelligibility that determines in advance the way things emerge-into-presence as the kinds of things that they are. Heidegger’s core concern in Being and Time is to unearth the essential, ‘ontological-existential’, structures of Dasein that make it possible for us to begin regional investigations into the problem of the body in the first place. (shrink)

Increasingly, frontiers between business and philanthropy seem to be blurred. Reward-Based Crowdfunding platforms contribute to this blurring of lines since they propose funders to support both for-profit and philanthropic projects. Our empirical paper explores the case of Ulule, the leading crowdfunding platform in Europe. Our results, based on a statistical analysis of more than 3000 projects, show that crowdfunding platforms foster specific kinds of relationships relying on reciprocal giving, beyond the usual opposition between altruistic and selfish motivations. We use the (...) work of Marcel Mauss to account for this process of reciprocal giving, and we argue that Maussian theory of gift can be used more generally to describe funding activities in the context of early stage entrepreneurship. (shrink)

Sixty‐one million Americans and approximately a billion people worldwide live with some form of disability that limits one or more major life activities. The field of precision medicine continues to grapple with how to best serve disability communities. In this paper, we suggest that precision medicine faces an ethical tension between its goal to treat or cure disabling conditions and views that consider disability as a marginalized identity. We appeal to the concepts of recognition justice and distributive justice to argue (...) that the ELSI community should take a more proactive role in promoting disability inclusion in precision medicine's practice and research. We also highlight two priorities for the ELSI community moving forward: facilitating greater collaboration between genetics and genomic professionals and disability communities and advocating for inclusive research design and disability accommodations in the research process. (shrink)

Against Hanna on Phenomenal Conservatism Content Type Journal Article Pages 1-10 DOI 10.1007/s12136-012-0148-2 Authors Kevin McCain, Department of Philosophy, University of Rochester, Box 270078, Rochester, NY 14627-0078, USA Journal Acta Analytica Online ISSN 1874-6349 Print ISSN 0353-5150.

Thinking about truth can be more dangerous than it looks. Of course, our concept of truth is the source of one of the most frustrating and impenetrable paradoxes humans have ever contemplated, the liar paradox, but that is just the beginning of its treachery. In an effort to understand why one of the most beloved and revered members of our conceptual repertoire could cause us so much trouble, philosophers have for centuries proposed “solutions” to the liar paradox. However, it seems (...) that our concept of truth takes offense to our efforts to understand it because it appears to retaliate against those who propose “solutions” to the liar. It takes its revenge on us by creating new paradoxes from our own attempts to find resolution. That is, most proposed solutions to the liar paradox give rise to new, more insidious paradoxes—often called revenge paradoxes. For our attempts at understanding, truth rewards us with inconsistent theories, untenable logics, and a deep feeling of bewilderment. It is as if our concept of truth lashes out at us because it wants to remain a mystery. After a few run-ins with truth, many philosophers have the good sense to keep their distance. Far from being the serene, profound concept most people take it to be, those of us who think much about the liar paradox know truth to be a vengeful bully—a conceptual misanthrope. (shrink)

Fraud and misleading research represent serious impediments to scientific progress. We must uncover the causes of fraud in order to understand how science functions and in order to develop strategies for combating epistemically detrimental behavior. This paper investigates how the incentive to commit fraud is enhanced by the structure of the scientific reward system. Science is an "accumulation process:" success begets resources which begets more success. Through a simplified mathematical model, I argue that this cyclic relationship enhances the appeal of (...) fraud and makes combating it extremely difficult. (shrink)

Adolf Meyer-Abich spent his career as one of the most vigorous and varied advocates in the biological sciences. Primarily a philosophical proponent of holistic thought in biology, he also sought through collaboration with empirically oriented colleagues in biology, medicine, and even physics to develop arguments against mechanistic and reductionistic positions in the life sciences, and to integrate them into a newly disciplinary theoretical biology. He participated in major publishing efforts including the founding of Acta Biotheoretica. He also sought international contacts (...) and worked for long stretches in Chile, the Dominican Republic, El Salvador, and the United States. His career straddled the Nazi period, which led him into a complex dance of support for and resistance to the regime. Despite the relative failure of his conceptual innovations to catch on, his ideas and writings sit squarely within the trajectory of thought and argument that has led to today’s reinvigoration of thought about conceptual integration in evolutionary developmental biology. (shrink)

Russell McCutcheon is one of the foremost proponents of what he calls “the critical study of religion,” that is, the shift to reflect critically on the concepts used in the academic study of religion, who invented them, and why. The critical study of religion leads to the realization that the concepts with which we think were invented by particular people, at a particular historical location, for a particular purpose. What are the philosophical implications of this? McCutcheon defends a debunking or (...) non-realist answer and contrasts this with my realist approach, and he is right to do so. This paper argues that those involved in the critical study of religion therefore face a choice between a non-realist and a realist metaphysics, that McCutcheon’s arguments against realism fail, and that those who wish to offer any kind of materialist account in which religious social structures shape human agency and subjectivity should adopt a critical study of religion that is also realist. (shrink)

This book is concerned with how we should think and act in our work, leisure activities, and time utilization in order to achieve flourishing lives. The scope papers range from general theoretical considerations of the value, e.g. 'What is a balanced life?', to specific types of considerations, e.g. 'How should we cope with the effects of work on moral decision-making?'.

Essential reading for students and researchers of existentialism and phenomenology, and also of interest to those studying ethics, philosophy and gender, philosophy of race, the emotions and philosophical issues in health and illness as well as related disciplines such as Literature, Sociology, and Political Theory.

In Morals by Agreement David Gauthier proposes four criteria for classifying a society's advancement toward ‘higher stages of human development.' Significantly, these criteria — material well-being, breadth of opportunity, average life-span, and density of population — do not include as an equally valuable achievement the society's capacity to sustain its standard of living. Nonetheless Gauthier presents three arguments intended to show that a community founded on his distributive theory will view depletionary resource policies as unreasonable and unacceptable. I shall contend (...) that these arguments do not succeed in motivating sustainable rates of resource exploitation. Furthermore, I argue that if truly just and rational resource use policies can be arrived at, such policies could only succeed by employing a conception of property rights substantially different from Gauthier's. (shrink)

Ever since, while continuing to develop his liguistic theories, he has been the most prominent US critic both of his country's foreign policy and of the intellectuals and media that give it overwhelming consensual support. "The Responsibility of Intellectuals" was followed by a series of ever more devastating attacks on American policy in Vietnam (collected in American Power and the New Mandarins and At War With Asia ): by 1970, he was far and away the best known intellectual opponent of (...) the US war effort. (shrink)

This article explores issues surrounding celibacy that have been amplified by the exposure of the sexual abuse crisis within the Catholic Church, which, for some, has called such a lifestyle into question. Taking the view that celibacy can be healthy and life-giving, provided that it is discerned well, the authors consider the ways in which an unintegrated celibate life can and does cause harm and has contributed to the scandal, though not the cause of it in and of itself. Moreover, (...) when celibacy is a gift of the Spirit, it can help to bring about a renewed, deepened understanding of sexuality needed for the Church and the world. (shrink)

Verstehen ist nicht nur ein Grundbegriff menschlicher Lebensfuhrung und Lebenswelt, sondern besitzt auch in der Philosophie und den verschiedenen Wissenschaften eine zentrale Bedeutung. Die Frage nach der Moglichkeit von Verstehen ist dabei immer auch die Frage nach dem Subjekt und Objekt des Verstandnisses. Wer versteht wen oder was? Ist "Verstehen" also nur rationales Erfassen, Erkennen tieferer Einsichten und komplexerer Zusammenhange oder impliziert es mehr? Versteht man den Anderen, den Fremden, aber auch den Text wirklich so einfach? Und wenn ja, wie (...) strukturiert sich dieses Verstehen? Es soll in dem interdisziplinaren Band versucht werden, mit den genannten Fragen Anschlussfahigkeit zu evozieren, so dass die Vieldimensionalitat des Verstehens thematisiert und nach Funktion, Leistung und Grenzen des Verstehens vor allem in Philosophie, Geistes- und Naturwissenschaft gefragt werden kann. Mit Beitragen von Christina Brandt, Selin Gerlek, Julia Gruevska, Felix Huttemann, Bernhard Irrgang, Gudrun Kuhne-Bertram, Hans-Ulrich Lessing, Kevin Liggieri, Kate Meyer-Drawe, Sabine Ohlenbusch, Tobias Schlicht, Gunter Scholtz und Volker Steenblock. (shrink)

Leading archaeologists and historians provide new studies of slavery, slave resistance and the economic, environmental and political consequences of slave trading in Africa, from the first millennium AD through to the nineteenth century.

The article presents a particular case of undergraduate students working on subprojects within the framework of their supervisors' (the authors') research project during Autumn Semester 2012 and Spring Semester 2013. The article's purpose is to show that an institutionalized focus on students as "research learners" rather than merely curriculum learners proves productive for both research and teaching. We describe the specific university learning context and the particular organization of undergraduate students' supervision and assistantships. The case builds on and further enhances (...) a well-established and proven university model of participant-directed, problem-oriented project work. We explore students' and researchers' experiences of being part of the collaboration, focusing on learning potentials and dilemmas associated with the multiple roles of researcher and student that characterized this particular intertwined research and education arrangement. We show that the connection to the research project assisted students to orientate, learn, and contribute in relation to empirical and theoretical aspects of research and supported the development of broad perspectives and deep analysis. (shrink)

Part one. The Dunayevskaya-Marcuse correspondence, 1954-78: the early letters: debating Marxist dialectics and Hegel's absolute idea; Dunayevskaya's Marxism and freedom and beyond; on technology and work on the eve of Marcuse's One-dimensional man; the later correspondence: winding down during the period of the New Left -- Part two. The Dunayevskaya-Fromm correspondence, 1959-78: the early letters: on Fromm's Marx's concept of man and his socialist humanism symposium; dialogue on Marcuse, on existentialism, and on socialist humanism in Eastern Europe; on Hegel, Marxism, (...) and the Frankfurt School in the period of Dunayevskaya's philosophy and revolution; the final letters: on critical theory and on Rosa Luxemburg, gender, and revolution. (shrink)

Poverty, understood as basic capability deprivation, can only be solved through a process of expanding the freedoms that people value and have reason to value. This process can only begin if the capability to imagine and aspire for an altenative lifestyle worthy of human dignity is cultivated by an education program that develops both the capability to reason and to value. These two facets play a major role in the creative exercise of human agency. This program of humane education can (...) only come from an adequate description of the human agent as a persona that seeks to actualize itself based on his/her understanding of the good. Education must therefore seek to cultivate the capability to have an adequate conception of the good (normative) as well as the capability to constantly re-evaluate one’s conception of the good (evaluative) in order to freely and reasonably choose a life that one values and has reason to value. Education must therefore entail not merely the development of skills nor specialization in a particular field but must concentrate on the integration of the human person as a whole which leads to self-creative praxis. (shrink)

The concept of truthmaking, the idea that when a statement is true, there is typically something about the world in virtue of which it is true, has garnered much interest in recent metaphysics. Often, the motivation has been the thought that truthmaking can provide a new perspective on an important issue. This paper evaluates the claim that truthmaking can play a substantive role in defining an unproblematic notion of emergence. For despite playing an important role in philosophical discourse over the (...) past 100 years, it has often been thought that there is something mysterious about the notion of emergence. It has recently been argued, however, that once emergent properties are characterized as those that, while “ontologically dependent” are yet needed as truthmakers emergence and emergent properties prove unproblematic. In response, I argue that there is reason to doubt that truthmaking can play an important role in formulating an unproblematic yet recognizable notion of emergence. I argue that it is consistent with truthmaking being unable to play a substantive role in emergentism that truthmaking can play a more significant role in characterizing an attractive middle ground between reductive and nonreductive physicalism. (shrink)

Thomas Lynch has proposed that scholars of religion can profitably follow Sally Haslanger’s lead and treat “religion,” as she treats race, as a social construction. He argues that this proposal resembles my treatment of “religion” in Philosophy and the Study of Religions, but it goes further by treating “religion” as what Haslanger calls a strongly pragmatic social construction, that is, a category that is solely the product of the use of the concept and which does not capture any feature in (...) the world. In this response, I clarify that this argument can be made in a way that is stronger and closer to that of Haslanger if one adopts the position she calls “promiscuous realism.”. (shrink)

Philosophical review of themes in 'Star Wars - Episode VII: The Force Awakens' by the co-editors of 'Star Wars and Philosophy' and 'The Ultimate Star Wars and Philosophy.'.

Frantz Fanon (1925-1961), psychiatre d'origine martiniquaise, bâtit en quelques livres une œuvre révolutionnaire dans laquelle il s'applique à décrire le système colonial et ses conséquences inévitables : le racisme et l'aliénation qu'il engendre. Mais il va aussi s'engager très concrètement, en Algérie. Rejetant toute forme d'obscurantisme, il entend défendre une Afrique libre, socialiste, démocratique et laïque. Son ambition? Ni plus ni moins que forger un nouvel humanisme, assumant les traditions locales comme la boussole universaliste, récusant tout impérialisme et permettant à (...) tous de s'épanouir librement. (shrink)

The contributors to this volume offer, in the light of specialised knowledge of leading philosophers of the ancient world, answers to the question: how are we to read and understand the surviving texts of Parmenides, Plato, Aristotle, Plotinus and Augustine?

The early nineteenth century was a time between empires in German-speaking lands, following the collapse of the holy Roman empire in 1806. This was also the time at which modern concepts of nations, nationalism, and the state entered theological discourse, bound together with emerging notions of world historical progress. From this time until the First World War, the task of conceptualizing national identity and the nature of the ‘Christian state’ became a pressing theological problem. This essay seeks to locate Schleiermacher’s (...) reflections on the Christian state within this developing problematic. Schleiermacher’s philosophical and theological works closely engaged emerging ideas of the nation, state, and historical progress. However, he departed from the more totalizing affirmations of national spirit and the Christian state of many of his contemporaries, arguing for a more limited conception of the state as a point of transition in the ongoing historical development of the reign of God. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Beyond Heaven and Earth: A Cognitive Theory of Religion by Gabriel LevyKevin SchilbrackBeyond Heaven and Earth: A Cognitive Theory of Religion. Gabriel Levy. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2022. 249 pp. $45.00 paperback; open access.The interdisciplinary field of religious studies includes both the humanities and social sciences in a tricky detente. Some religion scholars focus on interpreting texts, teachings, and rituals in an effort to grasp what religious (...) practitioners understand themselves to be doing. Other scholars want to move beyond the the practitioners’ views to create explanatory accounts of religion in terms of social power, psychological benefits, and modules in the evolved brain—causal accounts of which the practitioners might not be aware or that they might deny. Gabriel Levy argues that to develop consilience between the divergent efforts of the humanities and the sciences, the academic study of religion would be well served by developing a more adequate metaphysics that can do justice simultaneously to human behavior as moved both by subjective reasons and by material forces. Specifically, he recommends the “anomalous monism” of Donald Davidson. [End Page 98]According to this view, there is only one kind of reality, and this is a monist metaphysics that includes no nonmaterial or supernatural entities. However, this one kind of reality is “anomalous” in that the world we experience together permits two irreducible vocabularies, one that is physical and deterministic and another that is mental and includes free will. Davidson considered this two-sided approach Spinozistic (169), and Levy notes its similarities to Thomas Nagel’s “neutral monism” (8, 35, 50–51). In short, then, Levy is proposing to scholars of religion a non-reductive but science-friendly “pragmatist monism” (8) that would be congenial to many readers of this journal. Such a metaphysics would also be in line with the methodological naturalism that, for many, defines the legitimate scope of the academy. We might therefore consider this book an example of a philosophy of religious studies, or even a metaphysics for religious studies.An important feature of Davidson’s approach is that, on his account, semantic content is necessarily intersubjective and therefore non-nomological and irreducible to the physical. Imagine a parent offering their prelinguistic child a doll while asking, “Do you want your doll?” or pulling the child away from a neighbor’s dog while telling them, “You have to be careful around dogs.” Davidson argues that human beings learn the meaning of words and sentences in social exchanges like these as the listener makes an educated guess about the entities to which the other person is referring, a process that Davidson calls “triangulation.” The generation of meaning on this model depends on the human capacity for shared intentionality about things in the world. Davidson argues that having meaningful thoughts, even when alone, then requires that one has had intersubjective, “triangulated” experiences like these. As Levy says, “semantic content arises in immanent, contextual, enacted dialogue and conversation with other agents” (182). It follows that this Davidsonian approach insists on irreducible, non-eliminable mental categories such as meaning, belief, and reasons, now recast in terms of practical engagement with things rather than inner representations of them. Many in religious studies are critical of the field’s focus on subjective categories like these, but, as Levy points out, the meaning-generating and reason-giving subject on a Davidsonian model is necessarily a socially embedded self and not the free-floating, disembodied, or ahistorical self that is critiqued by post-structuralists like Michel Foucault (169–70).Levy introduces this model (ch. 1) and then explores several topics in its light. He proposes that beliefs about religious entities are a subset of imagining fictional entities, so that Mickey Mouse, Santa Claus, and Zeus are in the same cognitive category (ch. 2). He argues that there is a continuum between the human ability to interpret language and the ability of human beings and [End Page 99] other animals to interpret information in their natural environments (ch. 3). In the last three chapters, he connects his discussion to the Sefer Yitzirah, a medieval Jewish mystical “book of creation” that describes the cosmos as structured by language (ch. 4), to... (shrink)

Filled-in sensations exhibit a distinctive mélange of causal features, resembling perceptual sensations in some respects and imagery in others. This commentary identifies several of these shared causal features and advances the hypothesis that filled-in sensations may constitute the primordial species of imagery, the evolutionary neurofunctional precursor of paradigmatic forms of imagery.

Wesley Wildman is one of the foremost philosophers of religion calling for the evolution of the discipline from its present narrow focus on theistic beliefs to become a discipline concerned with religions in all their diversity. Towards this end, he proposes that philosophers of religion understand what they do as multidisciplinary comparative inquiry. This article assesses his proposal.

Entanglement and non-locality are non-classical global characteristics of quantum states important to the foundations of quantum mechanics. Recent investigations have shown that environmental noise, even when it is entirely local in influence, can destroy both of these properties in finite time despite giving rise to full quantum state decoherence only in the infinite time limit. These investigations, which have been carried out in a range of theoretical and experimental situations, are reviewed here.

La obra del escritor Mariano Azuela se ha considerado una piedra de toque para apreciar la Narrativa de la Revolución Mexicana. Aquí, me propongo abordar un estudio de Azuela que destaque mejor la visión ambigua del autor –sobre todo, cómo su cuento Andrés Pérez, maderista-- nos remiten a unos de los temas más destacados del porfiriato: el periodismo y el saber científico. Al enfocarnos solamente en cómo el cuento de Azuela describe la lucha armada, corremos el riesgo de ignorar el (...) contexto histórico en el que apreció la obra de Azuela y pasar por alto su complejidad. (shrink)

This anthology in epistemology is a collection of essays and excerpts from seminal texts on ways of knowing in mathematics, the natural and social sciences and the liberal and fine arts and communication.