This article shares reflections from members of the community of philosophers of education in the United States and Canada who were invited to express their insights in response to the theme ‘Snaps...

ABSTRACT Stanley Cavell rarely gets to the point, and his winding sentences and frequent asides are a favorite target for detractors. This essay follows a different path, however, proposing that we listen carefully to Cavell's voice as an author and consider the philosophical significance of these twists and turns in his writings. After exploring the intellectual basis for Cavellian indirectness, the essay examines an exemplary passage from Must We Mean What We Say? linking it to the political unrest of the (...) 1960s. It shows how Cavell used the indirectness of his writing to mount a necessarily subtle social critique of American society on the issue of race. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Editors' Introduction to the Special Issue on the Translational Work of BioethicsElizabeth Lanphier and Larry R. ChurchillRecent essays in Perspectives and Biology and Medicine, including "Can Clinical Ethics Survive Climate Change" by Andrew Jameton and Jessica Pierce and "Ethical Maxims for a Marginally Inhabitable Planet" by David Schenck and Larry R. Churchill, both appearing in the Autumn 2021 issue, inspired conversations between us, among our colleagues, and (...) with various contributors to this symposium. We asked of ourselves and each other: where can, should, or must bioethics as a field go to make what bioethicists know and publish about in the academic literature relevant to public policy decisions, health and technological innovation, and a general public? In other words, where do we, practically speaking, go with our bioethical insights and discoveries to make a tangible impact on issues like climate change—though that is only one of the various topics that the authors in this symposium tackle.This translational work of connecting scholarly innovation back to overt practical innovation is often peripheral to academic bioethics. It is not the work the academy typically recognizes in its credit system. Yet this translational work is becoming a critical, central duty of bioethics for the 21st century, while the kinds of work the academy most valorizes may be the least important at this time. In particular, the need for translational initiatives is increasingly evident as pandemics linger into a new normal, the long history and ongoing impacts of racism become even more evident at institutional levels, and the devastating health implications of global warming emerge. [End Page 515]Bioethicists function in privileged proximity to the deleterious effects of failed health and social policy, as well the interplay between seemingly personal health choices, such as those related to diet or lifestyle, and inequitable conditions that impact the options available to individuals and groups. We are increasingly distressed by what we see from this privileged window into health. The COVID-19 pandemic has made preexisting social and policy inequities impacting health impossible to ignore. At the same time, the patterns of carbon pollution portend health crises of unprecedent severity and magnitude in the near future—and will likely deepen inequities and disparities already occurring between those most contributing to, and those most harmed by, climate change.As a field, bioethics has, since its start, been at the intersection of theory and practice. But it is not sufficient for the field to reside passively at this crossroads. The field must be constantly innovating new byways and highways, new offshoots from existing pathways and connector roads between them, that build out both the theory and practice of bioethics in a mutually innovative relationship to each other. Bioethics does not make sense without attention to the real-world practices and the lived realities of health and care. The practical engagement is what deepens and enriches theory, in ways that are more responsive to the real world in which bioethicists toil. But it also is not enough to merely contribute to the body of bioethics scholarship. The translational bioethics we envision is also about using novel theories and concepts to actively shape practices and realities; it is a bioethics in which theory and practices mutually influence each other, each reaching out to generate and change the other.This collection of essays, drawn from a diverse number of scholars, offers several promising paths forward. The essays were written in the spring of 2022, two years into the COVID-19 pandemic, two years after the murder of George Floyd and international attention to the movement for Black lives, and for the most part in the weeks just prior to a set of US Supreme Court decisions with enormous impacts on health, including the June 24 Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization and the June 30 West Virginia v. EPA decisions.The authors are diverse in age, spheres of work, discipline, sex, race, and ethnicity. They expand our vision for what bioethics can and should be. While we have grouped the essays by subject matter, most of the pieces speak to the field as a whole and invite cross-fertilization. We hope readers will find new ideas, old ideas... (shrink)

This essay contains a partial exploration of some key concepts associated with the epistemology of realist philosophies of science. It shows that neither reference nor approximate truth will do the explanatory jobs that realists expect of them. Equally, several widely-held realist theses about the nature of inter-theoretic relations and scientific progress are scrutinized and found wanting. Finally, it is argued that the history of science, far from confirming scientific realism, decisively confutes several extant versions of avowedly 'naturalistic' forms of scientific (...) realism. (shrink)

What is the nature of, and what is the relationship between, external objects and our visual perceptual experience of them? In this book, Frank Jackson defends the answers provided by the traditional Representative theory of perception. He argues, among other things that we are never immediately aware of external objects, that they are the causes of our perceptual experiences and that they have only the primary qualities. In the course of the argument, sense data and the distinction between mediate (...) and immediate perception receive detailed defences and the author criticises attempts to reduce perceiving the believing and to show that the Representative theory makes the external world unknowable. Jackson recognises that his views are unfashionable but argues in detail that they are to be preferred to their currently favoured competitors. It will become an obvious point of reference for all future work on the philosophy of perception. (shrink)

INTRODUCTION The appeal to teleological principles of explanation within the body of natural science has had an unfortunate history. ...

Temkin presents a new way of thinking about equality and inequality that challenges the assumptions of philosophers, welfare economists, and others, and has significant implications on both a practical and theoretical level.

In "Futurc Generations: Further Problems,"‘ and Part Four of Reasons and Persons} Derek Pariit raises many perplexing questions. Although some think his ingenious arguments little more than delightful puzzles, I believe they challenge some of our deepest beliefs. In this article, I examine some of Pariit’s arguments, focusing mainly on "The Mere Addition Paradox." If my analysis is correct, Parfit’s arguments have extremely interesting and important implications that not even Pariit rcalized. In Part I, I present ParHt’s argument for the (...) Merc Addition Paradox, and show that given Pa.rHt’s assumptions, a radical conclusion seems t0 follow; the notion of "bctter th2m"—indced, even the notion of "aH things.. (shrink)

Normative naturalism is a view about the status of epistemology and philosophy of science; it is a meta-epistemology. It maintains that epistemology can both discharge its traditional normative role and nonetheless claim a sensitivity to empirical evidence. The first sections of this essay set out the central tenets of normative naturalism, both in its epistemic and its axiological dimensions; later sections respond to criticisms of that species of naturalism from Gerald Doppelt, Jarrett Leplin and Alex Rosenberg.

This book consists of a collection of essays written between 1965 and 1981. Some have been published elsewhere; others appear here for the first time. Although dealing with different figures and different periods, they have a common theme: all are concerned with examining how the method of hy pothesis came to be the ruling orthodoxy in the philosophy of science and the quasi-official methodology of the scientific community. It might have been otherwise. Barely three centuries ago, hypothetico deduction was in (...) both disfavor and disarray. Numerous rival methods for scientific inquiry - including eliminative and enumerative induction, analogy and derivation from first principles - were widely touted. The method of hypothesis, known since antiquity, found few proponents between 1700 and 1850. During the last century, of course, that ordering has been inverted and - despite an almost universal acknowledgement of its weaknesses - the method of hypothesis (usually under such descriptions as 'hypothetico deduction' or 'conjectures and refutations') has become the orthodoxy of the 20th century. Behind the waxing and waning of the method of hypothesis, embedded within the vicissitudes of its fortunes, there is a fascinating story to be told. It is a story that forms an integral part of modern science and its philosophy. (shrink)

Man kann die Vielfalt und Dynamik der gegenwärtigen Analytischen Philosophie kaum besser unter Beweis stellen als durch sachorientierte Streitgespräche zwischen ihren herausragenden Vertretern. Die Kolloquien der GAP.5-Konferenz waren solche Streitgespräche. In ihnen haben international renommierte Philosophinnen und Philosophen über aktuelle Fragen aus dem Spektrum der Analytischen Philosophie debattiert - von Willensfreiheit bis Wohlfahrt und Armut, von Bedeutung und Normativität bis Feministische Wissenschaftstheorie, von Philosophie als Wissenschaft? bis Physikalismus. Mit Beiträgen von: Daniela Bailer-Jones, Paul A. Boghossian, Ansgar Beckermann, Jonathan Dancy, Hans-Johann (...) Glock, Jane Heal, Frank Jackson, Pierre Jacob, Janet A. Kourany, Brian P. McLaughlin, Margaret Morrison, Jan Narveson, Julian Nida-Rümelin, Cassandra L. Pinnick, Wolfgang Prinz, Michael Ruse, Ludwig Siep, Wolfgang Spohn, Larry Temkin und Holm Tetens. (shrink)

Much of the excitement about virtual reality and its potential for things like entertainment, art, education, and activism is its ability to generate experiences that are powerfully immersive. However, discussions of VR tend to invoke the notion of immersive experience without subjecting it to closer scrutiny; and discussions often take it for granted that immersive experience is a single unified phenomenon. Against this, we argue that there are four distinct types or aspects of immersive experience that should be distinguished: representational (...) immersion, which corresponds roughly to what is sometimes called “psychological presence”; participatory immersion, which is related to the interactive aspects of VR experience; affective immersion, which has to do with the subject’s emotional relation to the experience; and narrative immersion, which captures the phenomenon of being caught up in the flow of events experienced. We argue that this four-way distinction helps us understand the powerfully immersive character of VR, while also recognizing its continuity with the immersion we experience with media such as novels, films, and music. We also argue that the account of immersion we offer here lets us better understand the connection between VR and empathy, charting a middle course between extreme enthusiasts who view VR as the ultimate “empathy machine” and extreme skeptics who argue that this attitude is misguided. (shrink)

Felicity Haynes earned Honours degrees in English and French literature from The University of Western Australia and completed her doctorate on reason and understanding at the University of Illinoi...

Embodied Cognition is an approach to cognition that departs from traditional cognitive science in its reluctance to conceive of cognition as computational and in its emphasis on the significance of an organism's body in how and what the organism thinks. Three lines of embodied cognition research are described and some thoughts on the future of embodied cognition offered.

Jaegwon Kim’s causal exclusion argument has rarely been evaluated from an empirical perspective. This is puzzling because its conclusion seems to be making a testable claim about the world: supervenient properties are causally inefficacious. An empirical perspective, however, reveals Kim’s argument to rest on a mistaken conception about how to test whether a property is causally efficacious. Moreover, the empirical perspective makes visible a metaphysical bias that Kim brings to his argument that involves a principle of non-inclusion.

This book should prove provocative reading for philosophers, political scientists, social theorists, professionals of many stripes, and ethicists.

This paper argues that it has been widely assumed by philosophers of science that the cumulative retention of explanatory success is a "sine qua non" for making judgements about the progress or rational preferability of one theory over another. It has also been assumed that it is impossible to make objective, Comparative judgements of the acceptability of rival theories unless all the statements of both theories could be translated into a common language. This paper seeks to show that both these (...) dogmas are mistaken; that progress without cumulativity and comparability without commensurability are both viable. (shrink)

The growing interest in ethics and ethical behavior has not manifested itself in an ethical analysis of television programming beyond a journalism context. This study examines one social/ethical issue - lying in prime time network television situation comedies. Results show sitcom characters who lie are motivated primarily by self-interest. This egoistic approach raises questions of ethical maturity and provides a model of behavior that may have negative implications for society.

Critical Thinking: An Introduction to Analytical Reading and Reasoning, Second Edition, provides a nontechnical vocabulary and analytic apparatus that guide students in identifying and articulating the central patterns found in reasoning and in expository writing more generally. Understanding these patterns of reasoning helps students to better analyze, evaluate, and construct arguments and to more easily comprehend the full range of everyday arguments found in ordinary journalism. Critical Thinking, Second Edition, distinguishes itself from other texts in the field by emphasizing analytical (...) reading as an essential skill. It also provides detailed coverage of argument analysis, diagnostic arguments, diagnostic patterns, and fallacies. Opening with two chapters on analytical reading that help students recognize what makes reasoning explicitly different from other expository activities, the text then presents an interrogative model of argument to guide them in the analysis and evaluation of reasoning. This model allows a detailed articulation of "inference to the best explanation" and gives students a view of the pervasiveness of this form of reasoning. The author demonstrates how many common argument types--from correlations to sampling--can be analyzed using this articulated form. He then extends the model to deal with several predictive and normative arguments and to display the value of the fallacy vocabulary. Ideal for introductory courses in critical thinking, critical reasoning, informal logic, and inductive reasoning, Critical Thinking, Second Edition, features hundreds of exercises throughout and includes worked-out solutions and additional exercises at the end of each chapter. An Instructor's Manual--offering solutions to the text's unanswered exercises and featuring other pedagogical aids--is available on the book's Companion Website at www.oup.com/us/wright. (shrink)

Intuitionistic meta-methodologies, which abound in recent philosophy of science, take the criterion of success for theories of scientific rationality to be whether those theories adequately explicate our intuitive judgments of rationality in exemplary cases. Garber's (1985) critique of Laudan's (1977) intuitionistic meta-methodology, correct as far as it goes, does not go far enough. Indeed, Garber himself advocates a form of intuitionistic meta-methodology; he merely denies any special role for historical (as opposed to contemporary or imaginary) test cases. What all such (...) positions lack is a base from which to inform, criticize, or restructure our core methodological intuitions. To acquiesce in this is to deny that exemplary cases can serve the sort of warranting role required for intuitionism. This point is reinforced by a series of reasons for denying the warranting role of pre-analytic judgments of rationality. These reasons point the way toward an improved approach to meta-methodology. (shrink)

Sexual lust – understood as a feeling of sexual attraction towards another – has traditionally been viewed as a sort of desire or at least as an appetite akin to hunger. I argue here that this view is, at best, significantly incomplete. Further insights can be gained into certain occurrences of lust by noticing how strongly they resemble occurrences of “attitudinal” (“object-directed”) emotion. At least in humans, the analogy between the object-directed appetites and attitudinal emotions goes well beyond their psychological (...) structure to include similar ways in which their occurrence can be introspectively recognized, resulting in similar extensions of their functionality and meaningfulness to the subject. I conclude that although further research is needed, given the strength of the analogy, the ability of lust to satisfy some general requirements for being an emotion, and perhaps certain neurological findings, lust may somewhat uniquely straddle the line between appetite and emotion. (shrink)

I have discussed the frame problem and the Turing test at length, but I have not attempted to spell out what I think the implications of the frame problem ...

In I. Kecskes & L. Horn (eds.) Explorations in Pragmatics: Linguistic, Cognitive, and Interculural Aspects. Mouton: 39-69.

For positivists and post-positivists alike, methodology had a decidedly suspect status. Positivists saw methodological rules as stipulative conventions, void of any empirical content. Post-positivists (especially naturalistic ones) see such rules as mere descriptions of how research is conducted, carrying no normative force. It is argued here that methodological rules are fundamentally empirical claims, but ones which have significant normative bite. Methodology is thus divorced both from foundationalism and conventionalism.

In this study of Auguste Comte's philosophy of science, an attempt is made to explicate his views on such methodological issues as explanation, prediction, induction and hypothesis. Comte's efforts to resolve the dual problems of demarcation and meaning led to the enunciation of principles of verifiability and predictability. Comte's hypothetico-deductive method is seen to permit conjectures dealing with unobservable entities.

The just war tradition began life, primarily in the writings of Augustine and other Church Fathers, as a reaction to pacifism. In my view, contemporary just war adherents should also see pacifism as their main rival. The key question of the just war tradition is how to justify war, given that war involves intentionally attacking or killing innocent people. And this justificatory enterprise is not an easy one. Today some theorists argue that some, but not all, soldiers are liable to (...) be attacked, especially those who fight in an unjust war. In this view, some of those who fight and kill in unjust wars should not be excused for following orders or even for their ignorance. Yet, it is often hard to tell if one is fighting in an unjust war, or whether military orders are unjust. I will argue that, especially in light of new work by just war adherents, the moral risks of participating in war are so high that pacifism, at least in its contingent form, should be seen as a reasonable option. The new versions of the just war doctrine bring us much closer to pacifism than their adherents would admit. (shrink)

In addition to being one of the greatest technical philosophers of the twentieth century, John Dewey was an educational innovator, a Progressive Era reformer, and one of America’s last great public intellectuals. Dewey’s insights into the problems of public education, immigration, the prospects for democratic government, and the relation of religious faith to science are as fresh today as when they were first published. His penetrating treatments of the nature and function of philosophy, the ethical and aesthetic dimensions of life, (...) and the role of inquiry in human experience are of increasing relevance at the turn of the 21st century. Based on the award-winning 37-volume critical edition of Dewey’s work, The Essential Dewey presents for the first time a collection of Dewey’s writings that is both manageable and comprehensive. The volume includes essays and book chapters that exhibit Dewey’s intellectual development over time; the selection represents his mature thinking on every major issue to which he turned his attention. Eleven part divisions cover: Dewey in Context; Reconstructing Philosophy; Evolutionary Naturalism; Pragmatic Metaphysics; Habit, Conduct, and Language; Meaning, Truth, and Inquiry; Valuation and Ethics; The Aims of Education; The Individual, the Community, and Democracy; Pragmatism and Culture: Science and Technology, Art and Religion; and Interpretations and Critiques. Taken as a whole, this collection provides unique access to Dewey’s understanding of the problems and prospects of human existence and of the philosophical enterprise. (shrink)

In "Intrzmsitivity and thc Person-Affecting Principlc,"‘ (IPAP) Alastair Norcross attacks several key claims of my "Intransitivity and thc Merc Addition Paradox" (IMAP).2 This article suggests that N0rcross’s arguments despite: their appca1——lcavc IMAP’s claims mostly intact. Bcforc assessing N0rcross’s arguments, lct mc characterize two key notions distinguished in IMAP: an essentially comparative view of moral ideals and an intrinsic aspect view. On an essentially comparative view (ECU, different factors might bc relevant for comparing diffcrcnt alternatives regarding a given idcal. On such (...) a view, how bad a situation is regarding E1 given ideal is not an intrinsic feature of that situation. There is 110 fact of thc matter.. (shrink)

The essays in this anthology deal with the growing interconnections developmental psychology and evolutionary biology. This cross-disciplinary interchange coincides, not accidentally, with the renewed interest in ethical naturalism.

In distinguishing justification from discovery, the logical empiricists hoped to avoid confusing causal matters with normative ones. Exaggerating the virtue of this distinction, however, has disguised from us important features of the concept of a reason as it functions in human practice. Surfacing those features gives some insight into reasoning and argument.

The intelligent-seeming deeds of computers are what occasion philosophical debate about artificial intelligence (AI) in the first place. Since evidence of AI is not bad, arguments against seem called for. John Searle's Chinese Room Argument (1980a, 1984, 1990, 1994) is among the most famous and long-running would-be answers to the call. Surprisingly, both the original thought experiment (1980a) and Searle's later would-be formalizations of the embedding argument (1984, 1990) are quite unavailing against AI proper (claims that computers do or someday (...) will think ). Searle lately even styles it a "misunderstanding" (1994, p. 547) to think the argument was ever so directed! The Chinese room is now advertised to target Computationalism (claims that computation is what thought essentially is ) exclusively. Despite its renown, the Chinese Room Argument is totally ineffective even against this target. (shrink)

My pocket calculator (Cal) has certain arithmetical abilities: it seems Cal calculates. That calculating is thinking seems equally untendentious. Yet these two claims together provide premises for a seemingly valid syllogism whose conclusion -- Cal thinks -- most would deny. I consider several ways to avoid this conclusion, and find them mostly wanting. Either we ourselves can't be said to think or calculate if our calculation-like performances are judged by the standards proposed to rule out Cal; or the standards -- (...) e.g., autonomy and self-consciousness -- make it impossible to verify whether anything or anyone (save myself) meets them. While appeals to the intentionality of thought or the unity of minds provide more credible lines of resistance, available accounts of intentionality and mental unity are insufficiently clear and warranted to provide very substantial arguments against Cal's title to be called a thinking thing. Indeed, considerations favoring granting that title are more formidable than generally appreciated. (shrink)

In the first two volumes of On What Matters Derek Parfit argues that there are objective moral truths, and other normative truths about what we have reasons to believe, and to want, and to do. In defending his view, Parfit argues that if there are no objective normative truths, nihilism follows, and nothing matters. He criticizes many leading contemporary philosophers working on ethics, including Simon Blackburn, Stephen Darwall, Allen Gibbard, Frank Jackson, Peter Railton, Mark Schroeder, Michael Smith, and Sharon (...) Street. Does Anything Really Matter? gives these philosophers an opportunity to respond to Parfit, and includes essays by Richard Chappell, Andrew Huddleston, Katarzyna de Lazari-Radek and Peter Singer, Bruce Russell, and Larry Temkin. A third volume of On What Matters, in which Parfit engages with his critics and breaks new ground in finding significant agreement between his own views and theirs, is appearing as a separate companion volume. (shrink)

The paperbound edition of a 1987 work which began a series on ethics in economics and business. May argues that the structure of social groups influences the behavior of their members, and that groups should be given different moral status from individuals. He discusses mobs, corporations, and other groups in terms of collective action, responsibility, and rights. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR.

Money plays a powerful role in modern medicine, both in terms of how health services are organized and delivered and increasingly in how physicians understand themselves and their work. The phrase “the hegemony of money” is intended to capture that power.

When regimented in a certain natural way, the concepts of explanation and justification manifest a pattern of interrelations connected more or less systematically to their object. Besides its intrinsic interest, this pattern may give us some insight into the nature, source, and limits of the concept of argument.

[This paper was presented at the APA Eastern Division Conference in New York City, January 2024] -/- Can one reasonably doubt that one is voluntarily making a commitment, even when one is doing so? Given that one voluntarily makes a commitment if and only if one (personally) knows that one is doing so, the answer appears to be “No.” After all, knowing implies justifiably believing, and it seems impossible that one could (synchronically and from a single personal perspective) reasonably doubt (...) what one justifiably believes. Indeed, assuming that one reasonably doubts that P only if one has sufficient evidence to believe that not-P, traditional epistemologists may hold that such “epistemic ambivalence” entails one’s believing a contradiction, while some Bayesians should hold that it entails violating “probabilism” (the norm that credences must conform to the axioms of probability). However, I argue that in at least some cases of romantic commitment-making, such ambivalence may not only be epistemically permissible, but even required, and perhaps best dealt with pragmatically. (shrink)