Recently, a physician requested permission to include in the information packet about himself that he would not accept patients who smoke and would not continue the care of current patients who smoke. His poignant statement follows.

This essay considers the dependency of trans youth by bridging transgender studies with feminist care ethics to emphasize a trans wisdom about solidarity through dependency. The first major section of the essay argues for reworking Sara Ruddick's philosophy of mothering in the context of trans and gender‐creative youth. This requires, first, stressing a more robust interaction among her divisions of preservative love, nurturance for growth, and training for acceptability, and second, creating a more nuanced account of “nature” in relation to (...) nurturance for growth to avoid casting transition as contrary to a trans youth's healthy development. In the second major section of the essay, I depart from Ruddick's framework to emphasize the difference of care for trans youth by trans and/or queer communities and through mutual caregiving, stressing a trans wisdom about dependency and solidarity found in the work of Sylvia Rivera and Marsha P. Johnson. Turning to Eva Feder Kittay's links between dependency work and equality, I argue that Rivera and Johnson's work contains a distinct knowledge derived from practice necessitating the connection between solidarity and dependency in particular communities. I then call for more work on trans care ethics, trans ethics, and trans wisdom more broadly. (shrink)

Objects which a human agent controls by efferent activities can be perceived by the agent as belonging to his or her body. This suggests that what an agent counts as “body” is plastic, depending on what she or he controls. Yet there are possible limitations for such momentary plasticity. One of these limitations is that sensations stemming from the body and sensations stemming from objects outside the body are not integrated if they do not sufficiently “match”. What “matches” and what (...) does not is conceivably determined by long–term experience with the perceptual changes that body movements typically produce. Children have accumulated less sensorimotor experience than adults have. Consequently, they express higher flexibility to integrate body-internal and body-external signals, independent of their “match” as suggested by rubber hand illusion studies. However, children’s motor performance in tool use is more affected by mismatching body-internal and body-external action effects than that of adults, possibly because of less developed means to overcome such mismatches. We review research on perception-action interactions, multisensory integration, and developmental psychology to build bridges between these research fields. By doing so, we account for the flexibility of the sense of body ownership for actively controlled events and its development through ontogeny. This gives us the opportunity to validate the suggested mechanisms for generating ownership by investigating their effects in still developing and incomplete stages in children. We suggest testable predictions for future studies investigating both body ownership and motor skills throughout the lifespan. (shrink)

This article reports an attempt to investigate, apart from the semantics and the pragmatics, how much the lexis and the grammar of a conversation can help extract interpersonal information about the interlocutors' orientations towards each other. The discourse analysed was extracted from a scene in Dan Brown's novel The Da Vinci Code and its motion picture adaptation. The adaptation of this scene is similar to the novel original in terms of the characters' content of discussion and only differs in the (...) orientation of the characters to one another. The analysis focuses on the determination of response types, which are generally classified as either expected or discretionary, and contribute to the realization of positive and negative orientations respectively. The distribution of different types of response is visualized as the interlocutor's `response profile', which helps in the realization of his/her orientation to the one to whom he/she is responding. (shrink)

The response to the special 2019 issue of Studia Gilsoniana on economics was so positive that it led to the creation of the Aquinas School of Leadership School of Economics (ASLSE). This 2021 publication is, therefore, a second special issue of Studia Gilsoniana on the same theme and the second installment of ASLSE’s economic journals. We are delighted to present here further fruits of thought from the maturing Studia Gilsoniana and ASLSE partnership. Economics is held to be a value-free, scientific (...) enterprise, and as such there can be no relationship between economics and religion. Ayn Rand, a well-known novelist-turned-philosopher, took this position in an unapologetic way in her writings, specifically in her novel Atlas Shrugged. The contrary position to what we might call the Randian “strict separation” thesis holds that economics and religion are related, in some way and to some degree, and therefore should be considered in tandem. The papers in this special edition of Studia Gilsoniana set out to show the extent and quality of the relationship between economics and religion from a variety of viewpoints and historical periods. (shrink)

This book, written by a close friend, recounts episodes in the life and career of Eugene M. Shoemaker , an ever‐youthful geologist with a passionate interest in applying geological principles to the moon and planets. In the early 1960s Shoemaker persuaded the U.S. Geological Survey to found an Astrogeology Branch, of which he served as the first director, to search for impact scars on the earth and to map the moon and other planetary bodies. He also played a leadership role (...) in persuading NASA to include scientific investigations in its plans for the Apollo missions. In the 1970s, when images from spacecraft revealed the presence of impact craters on all the rocky planets and satellites, he declared that the impact of solid bodies was the most fundamental process to have taken place on the terrestrial planets. Acting on this insight, he helped to transform geology from an earth‐centered to a planetary science. Eugene Shoemaker was, indeed, a man who made an impact.Details of Shoemaker's career and his many accomplishments have been documented elsewhere, including the numerous citations for honors bestowed upon him and, sadly, his recent obituaries. In this book David Levy, an amateur astronomer and a collaborator with Gene Shoemaker and his wife, Carolyn, gives us personal reminiscences that are available nowhere else. Levy writes in a relaxed, anecdotal style that adds new information and a great sense of fun to this story.Levy tells us, for example, that as a young member of the U.S. Geological Survey, Gene broke with a stern tradition by bringing his wife and children to live with him in his field camps, arguing that their presence made him more rather than less efficient in conducting his work. It was perfectly natural, then, for Gene and Carolyn, decades later, to work together in the Australian outback, where they discovered ten previously unknown impact scars and confirmed several more suspected ones.From 1948 onward Gene harbored a fervent desire to go to the moon, a wish Levy ascribes to his view of a spectacular moonrise over the Colorado Plateau. Back then, such ideas were pure science fiction; but years later, when a real possibility arose, Gene was overcome by a mystifying loss of energy. When his doctor found nothing wrong, Gene and Carolyn took a river trip, hoping to restore his strength and spirits. But his condition worsened until he found a doctor who recognized, on sight, that Gene was a victim of Addison's disease, a formerly fatal illness that could be controlled by cortisone. On taking his second dose, Gene felt his energy returning, but he—like his contemporary President John Kennedy—was obliged to take cortisone every day for the rest of his life. This dashed Gene's hopes of going to the moon himself, but he redoubled his efforts to provide geological training to the fighter‐pilot astronauts who did go there.Beginning in the 1970s, Gene and Carolyn performed systematic searches of the night skies for comets and Near Earth Objects—bodies in orbits that might cause collisions with the earth. Levy joined in many of their searches, and the three of them shared the ultimate triumph of discovering their ninth comet together—Shoemaker‐Levy 9—and watching more than twenty luminous fragments of it plunge one by one into the atmosphere of Jupiter. Several of the pieces sent up dark plumes that lasted more than a year and would have been large enough to envelope the entire earth. No doubt remained that impacts could cause global damage to earth's lithosphere and biosphere were such impactors to strike our own planet. Levy tells us that as the last few pieces disappeared Carolyn lamented the loss of “her string of pearls”; as a consolation, Gene surprised her with the gift of a string of pearls.This book is not, nor was it intended to be, a serious biography based on extensive interviews and archival research. Regrettably, its excellence as a personal account is somewhat marred by the lack of attention from a good fact checker and editor, who would have fixed the slips that appear here and there. For example, on page 41 Levy describes Meteor Crater as being 1.2 kilometers across, and on page 43 as being 1.3 kilometers across—a small but needless discrepancy . On page 144 we read that when Gene brought a carload of students to the Grand Canyon, “a steady snow was falling as they made their way into the canyon. Gene showed a lot of enthusiasm—after all it was his crater!” Clearly, several sentences are missing from between these two sentences. Such lapses are minor, but they are sufficiently common to make the book unreliable as a source of facts. Nevertheless, it is a delightful book that can be strongly recommended to general readers and also to specialists, both for their enjoyment and for the personal details it will add to their knowledge of Eugene Shoemaker's contributions to science. (shrink)

Marvin is a contract hog farmer in Iowa. He owns his land, his barn, his tractor, and his animal crates. He has seen profits drop steadily for the last twenty years and feels trapped. Josh is a dairy farmer on a cooperative in Massachusetts. He doesn’t own his cows, his land, his seed, or even all of his equipment. Josh has a healthy income and feels like he’s made it. In The Food Sharing Revolution, Michael Carolan tells the stories (...) of traditional producers like Marvin, who are being squeezed by big agribusiness, and entrepreneurs like Josh, who are bucking the corporate food system. The difference is Josh has eschewed the burdens of individual ownership and is tapping into the sharing economy. Josh and many others are sharing tractors, seeds, kitchen space, their homes, and their cultures. They are business owners like Dorothy, who opened her bakery with the help of a no-interest, crowd-sourced loan. They are chefs like Camilla, who introduces diners to her native Colombian cuisine through peer-to-peer meal sharing. Their success is not only good for aspiring producers, but for everyone who wants an alternative to monocrops and processed foods. The key to successful sharing, Carolan shows, is actually sharing. He warns that food, just like taxis or hotels, can be co-opted by moneyed interests. But when collaboration is genuine, the sharing economy can offer both producers and eaters freedom, even sovereignty. The result is a healthier, more sustainable, and more ethical way to eat. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Ethics & the Environment 8.1 (2003) 112-125 [Access article in PDF] You Make My Heart Sing David Rothenberg Last March I went to Pittsburgh to play music live with birds. The plan was to arrive at dawn, to catch the wary singers at their best—in the early morning chorus, when the most sound was happening. I met my friend Michael Pestel at the gates of the National Aviary, a (...) mostly forgotten federal institution in a rundown neighborhood. I had never heard of the aviary before Pestel told me what a great place it was to jam with the more-than-human world. The staff was rumored to be friendly, and they liked to let musicians in during the early hours before the public, mostly guided schoolchildren, would storm the gates.Pestel was there with his flute and various homemade stringed instruments. I had clarinets and saxophones, coaxed out of their cases, a bit tired from the long ride, but ready to hear what these birds had up their sleeves. We headed for the marsh room, a vaulted expanse with an observation deck and waterbirds from all over the world. I strained my ears to catch some pretty rocking bird beats, but they sounded familiar. Too familiar—the aviary was blaring Marvin Gaye at top volume to these birds at six o'clock in the morning. They were definitely squawkin' and squealin'."I cannot work in these conditions," muttered Pestel. "We've got to get these people to turn that racket down.""Didn't you warn them we were coming?""No," he shook his head. "You can't do that. Art always arrives without warning." [End Page 112]"You sure they'll let us do this?""No problem, man, I've come here many times before. These people know me. These birds know me."Marvin was turned down. The sprinklers were turned down (rain must start in the rainforest room every day before sunrise). How else to keep the gaudy barbets happy? Does a blue-crowned motmot (Momotus momota) or a violaceous euphonia (Euphonia violacea) really want to hear strange instrumental shrieks before breakfast? Weren't they content with "What's Going On?"Athanasius Kircher 1 knew the birds were onto something even in 1650:And then Wittgenstein had the nerve to warn us that if a lion could talk, we would not understand him. 2 When a lion roars, we do understand him (or her). If a cat purrs, we understand her, too. If the voice of an animal is not heard as message but as art, interesting things start to happen: Nature is no longer inscrutable, some alien puzzle, but instead immediately something beautiful, a source of exuberant song, a tune with some space for us to enter, at once a creative place for humanity to join in.We set up on the wooden deck, listening out over the water. Instruments out of their cases, recording equipment wired and set to go. An American crow (Corvus brachyrhynchos) was in the center of the action, sitting on a branch at the side of the room. He cocked his head, eyed us knowingly. Looking like there was something he wanted to say. [End Page 113]Pestel played a long, low sliding note, followed by a scratchy puff of air. Something strange swooped down next to my feet, shuffled its large black wings. Some kind of ungainly turkey... I read from a plaque on the railing that it was a Palawan peacock pheasant (Polyplectron emphanum). Its quizzical gaze was mute."What are you looking at?" I glared. He stepped cautiously toward the microphone cable, ready to gobble it in his hooked, formidable beak."Hey," I brushed him off. "Stop dancing. Sing!" But no, he was the prancing, silent type.All of a sudden there was a strange voice. A human voice? "Who." I heard. "Who. Who what where why. Who what where why."It was the crow. But not just any crow. He spoke."Did you hear that?" I coaxed Pestel up from the flute."Oh," he said. "That's Mickey. He's been here for years.""Does... (shrink)

In ordinary discourse we often attribute beliefs not just to individuals but also to groups. But can groups really have genuine beliefs? This paper considers but ultimately rejects one of the main arguments in support of the claim that groups can be genuine believers – the Argument From Interpretationism – and concludes that we have good reasons to be sceptical about the existence of group beliefs. According to the Argument From Interpretationism, roughly speaking, groups qualify as genuine believers because we (...) can interpret their behaviour in much the same way that we can interpret the behaviour of individuals. While this argument may seem initially attractive, I argue that it is ultimately unsuccessful. In particular, I argue that the argument is unsuccessful even if one is generally sympathetic towards interpretationism. The reason for this, as we will see, is that a number of problems arise when we try to apply the interpretationist strategy – originally formulated with individual subjects in mind – to plural subjects or groups. In showing why the Argument From Interpretationism fails, the paper also brings into focus some more general constraints on the scope and applicability of interpretationism. (shrink)

Computing Methodologies -- Artificial Intelligence.

"As Editor-in-Chief of World, Marvin Olasky has offered his views on current events and culture for more than twenty-five years. In this collection of columns, he shows readers how Christians can speak biblical truths while also living out the biblical values of grace and mercy in today's world."--From back of book.

I hope this book will be useful to everyone who seeks ideas about how human minds work, or wants suggestions about better ways to think, or who aims toward building smarter machines. It should be useful to readers who want to learn about the field of Artificial Intelligence. It should also be of interest to psychologists, neurologists, computer scientists, and philosophers because it develops many new ideas about the subjects those specialists struggle with.

In recent work, Bengson, Cuneo, and Shafer‐Landau (2020) develop a new social version of moral intuitionism that promises to explain why our moral intuitions are trustworthy. In this paper, we raise several worries for their account and present some general challenges for the broader class of views we call Social Moral Intuitionism. We close by reflecting on Bengson, Cuneo, and Shafer‐Landau's comparison between what they call the “perceptual practice” and the “moral intuition practice”, which we take to raise some difficult (...) normative and meta‐normative questions for theorists of all stripes. (shrink)

In this comprehensive study, Marvin Fox offers an approach to Moses Maimonides that illuminates the intersections of his philosophical, religious, and Jewish visions—ideas that have embattled readers of Maimonides since the twelfth century.

A number of national educational organizations and individual authors have called for the use of information technology to radically reform higher education. Several projections of how this reformation will unfold are presented here. Three different approaches to critically assessing these projections are considered in this article, two briefly and one in more detail. Brief consideration is given to an approach based on educational values and to an approach based on cost/benefit analysis. After some discussion of the strengths and weaknesses of (...) these approaches, a third approach deriving from a theory of technology control (Incrementalism) is elaborated in more detail and is found to offer helpful criticisms of the called for revolution in higher education. Some recommendations for how these new technologies can be developed in responsible ways are also offered. (shrink)

Illustrates how using ethics in decision making can improve communication, resolve disagreements, and set just standards for worker-management relations. Presents strategies for how organizations can use ethics to uncover values and beliefs, and determine whether they are acting upon just and moral decisions.

In the last seven years, philosophers have discussed the topic of transformative experiences. In this paper, we contribute to a crucial issue that is currently under-researched: transformative experiences' influence on cognitive modelling. We argue that cognitive modelling can be operationalized as affective forecasting, and we compare transformative and non-transformative experiences with respect to the ability of affective forecasting. Our finding is that decision-makers’ performance in cognitively modelling transformative experiences does not systematically differ from decision-makers’ performance in cognitively modelling non-transformative experiences. (...) This claim stands in strict opposition to L.A. Paul’s main argument. (shrink)

A leading contributor to artificial intelligence offers insight into the numerous ways in which the mind works to demonstrate how emotions and feelings are just ...

The primary aim of this paper is to defend the Lockean View—the view that a belief is epistemically justified iff it is highly probable—against a new family of objections. According to these objections, broadly speaking, the Lockean View ought to be abandoned because it is incompatible with, or difficult to square with, our judgments surrounding certain legal cases. I distinguish and explore three different versions of these objections—The Conviction Argument, the Argument from Assertion and Practical Reasoning, and the Comparative Probabilities (...) Argument—but argue that none of them are successful. I also present some very general reasons for being pessimistic about the overall strategy of using legal considerations to evaluate epistemic theories; as we will see, there are good reasons to think that many of the considerations relevant to legal theorizing are ultimately irrelevant to epistemic theorizing. (shrink)

The primary objective of this paper is to introduce a new epistemic paradox that puts pressure on the claim that justification is closed under multi premise deduction. The first part of the paper will consider two well-known paradoxes—the lottery and the preface paradox—and outline two popular strategies for solving the paradoxes without denying closure. The second part will introduce a new, structurally related, paradox that is immune to these closure-preserving solutions. I will call this paradox, The Paradox of the Pill. (...) Seeing that the prominent closure-preserving solutions do not apply to the new paradox, I will argue that it presents a much stronger case against the claim that justification is closed under deduction than its two predecessors. Besides presenting a more robust counterexample to closure, the new paradox also reveals that the strategies that were previously thought to get closure out of trouble are not sufficiently general to achieve this task as they fail to apply to similar closure-threatening paradoxes in the same vicinity. (shrink)

It seems to me that the ingredients of most theories both in Artificial Intelligence and in Psychology have been on the whole too minute, local, and unstructured to account–either practically or phenomenologically–for the effectiveness of common-sense thought. The "chunks" of reasoning, language, memory, and "perception" ought to be larger and more structured; their factual and procedural contents must be more intimately connected in order to explain the apparent power and speed of mental activities.

Freud's theory of jokes explains how they overcome the mental "censors" that make it hard for us to think "forbidden" thoughts. But his theory did not work so well for humorous nonsense as for other comical subjects. In this essay I argue that the different forms of humor can be seen as much more similar, once we recognize the importance of knowledge about knowledge and, particularly, aspects of thinking concerned with recognizing and suppressing bugs -- ineffective or destructive thought processes. (...) When seen in this light, much humor that at first seems pointless, or mysterious, becomes more understandable. (shrink)

Scholars believe that cosmopolitans—individuals who are open to foreign cultures—contribute to the adoption of Euro-American conceptions of food in the Global South. However, there remains a dearth in our understanding of the links between globalization, cosmopolitanism, and the reproduction of food and food cultures more broadly. In this paper, I draw from the sociology of translation to examine the mechanisms by which cosmopolitans reproduce food across space and time, a conceptual approach I refer to as ‘cosmopolitan translations of food.’ This (...) approach focuses on how human and non-human actants (mostly cosmopolitans themselves) mediate and translate the discursive and material elements of food as they travel from one geographic context to another. The broader history, socio-culture, and political economy where cosmopolitan actants are situated further influence these translations, resulting in diverse expressions of food globalization. I illustrate the merits of this approach by examining the emergence of alternative food in Manila, the capital of the Philippines. Based on qualitative research, I find that alternative food in Manila has striking similarities to and notable differences from its counterparts in the United States. I purport that these similarities and differences can be attributed to Filipino cosmopolitans’ unconscious and intentional translations of what they understand as alternative food. Mediating these layers of translations are Filipino cosmopolitans’ mobilities and access to new media, as well as the colonial histories and postcolonial encounters that define their consumption tastes. (shrink)

Biofuels development has assumed an important role in integrating Indigenous peoples and other marginalized populations in the production of biofuels for global consumption. By combining the theories of commoditization and the environmental sociology of networks and flows, the author analyzed emerging trends and possible changes in institutions and behaviors brought about by the introduction of biofuels as a development option on ancestral lands. Using the Indonesian oil palm and the Philippine Jatropha experiences, the author argues that although there are efforts (...) to integrate smallholder systems to the global integrated biofuels network, the effects of commoditization continue to undermine the more sustainable, less commoditized agricultural practices of Indigenous peoples. Indigenous peoples and their traditional agricultural practices are at risk of being either phased out from or eventually transformed by the global integrated biofuels network to accommodate large-scale, consolidated biofuel plantation systems. However, there are also indications that persistent criticisms of and enduring reforms in the global integrated biofuels network challenge the future of highly commoditized biofuels. This suggests that the coevolutionary trajectory of both highly commoditized biofuels and noncommoditized Indigenous agricultural practices remains uncertain. (shrink)

Based in sociologist Zygmunt Bauman's theory of liquid modernity, this volume describes and critiques key aspects and practices of liquid education--education as market-driven consumption, short life span of useful knowledge, overabundance of information--through a systematic comparison with ancient Greek "paideia" and medieval university education, producing a sweeping analysis of the history and philosophy of education for the purpose of understanding current higher education, positing a more holisitic alternative model in which students are embedded in a learning commutity that is itself (...) embedded in a larger society. If liquid modernity has left a vacuum where, according to Bauman, the pilot's cabin is empty, this volume argues that no structure is better positioned to fill this vacuum than the university and outlines a renewed vision of social transformation through higher education. (shrink)

The succession of shocks—sudden social and environmental crises, whether they be episodic or erratic, such as extreme weather events, pandemics, and economic recessions—has dire consequences on the ability of people, especially the vulnerable and precarious, to secure safe, nutritious, and culturally appropriate foods. While the scholarship on multiple shocks and stressors is increasingly recognized in the academic literature, there remains a dearth in scholarship that critically interrogates the impacts of successive and overlapping shocks on the various dimensions and temporalities of (...) food security. In this paper, we adapt the double exposure framework to examine how a triad of shocks—a catastrophic typhoon, the COVID-19 pandemic, and high economic inflation—has led to varying magnitudes of transitory and chronic food insecurity among the fisherfolk in coastal communities in Capiz, the Philippines. Drawing from field research, we illustrate that the succession of shocks induced a decline in household incomes, an escalation of dependence on credit, and the consequential accumulation of debt among the fisherfolk. Credit and debt have allowed the fisherfolk to sustain meal frequency to some extent during periods of high vulnerability, but the succession of shocks continued to aggravate their lack of access to nutritious food. Looming in the background is the gradual crisis of declining fish stocks, which may exacerbate the impacts of successive shocks in the future. (shrink)