The inaugural collection in an exciting new exchange between philosophers and geographers, this volume provides interdisciplinary approaches to the environment as space, place, and idea. Never before have philosophers and geographers approached each other's subjects in such a strong spirit of mutual understanding. The result is a concrete exploration of the human-nature relationship that embraces strong normative approaches to environmental problems.

Throughout the biological and biomedical sciences there is a growing need for, prescriptive ‘minimum information’ (MI) checklists specifying the key information to include when reporting experimental results are beginning to find favor with experimentalists, analysts, publishers and funders alike. Such checklists aim to ensure that methods, data, analyses and results are described to a level sufficient to support the unambiguous interpretation, sophisticated search, reanalysis and experimental corroboration and reuse of data sets, facilitating the extraction of maximum value from data sets (...) them. However, such ‘minimum information’ MI checklists are usually developed independently by groups working within representatives of particular biologically- or technologically-delineated domains. Consequently, an overview of the full range of checklists can be difficult to establish without intensive searching, and even tracking thetheir individual evolution of single checklists may be a non-trivial exercise. Checklists are also inevitably partially redundant when measured one against another, and where they overlap is far from straightforward. Furthermore, conflicts in scope and arbitrary decisions on wording and sub-structuring make integration difficult. This presents inhibit their use in combination. Overall, these issues present significant difficulties for the users of checklists, especially those in areas such as systems biology, who routinely combine information from multiple biological domains and technology platforms. To address all of the above, we present MIBBI (Minimum Information for Biological and Biomedical Investigations); a web-based communal resource for such checklists, designed to act as a ‘one-stop shop’ for those exploring the range of extant checklist projects, and to foster collaborative, integrative development and ultimately promote gradual integration of checklists. (shrink)

Matthew Soteriou provides an original philosophical account of sensory and cognitive aspects of consciousness. He explores distinctions of temporal character in our mental lives--especially in relation to the exercise of agency--and illuminates the more general issue of the place and role of mental action in the metaphysics of mind.

We advance a theory of inductive inference designed to predict the conditional probability that certain natural categories satisfy a given predicate given that others do (or do not). A key component of the theory is the similarity of the categories to one another. We measure such similarities in terms of the overlap of metabolic activity in voxels of various posterior regions of the brain in response to viewing instances of the category. The theory and similarity measure are tested against averaged (...) probability judgments elicited from a separate group of subjects. Fruit serve as categories in the present experiment; results are compared to earlier work with mammals. (shrink)

In Measuring the Immeasurable Mind: Where Contemporary Neuroscience Meets the Aristotelian Tradition, Matthew Owen argues that despite its nonphysical character, it is possible to empirically detect and measure consciousness. -/- Toward the end of the previous century, the neuroscience of consciousness set its roots and sprouted within a materialist milieu that reduced the mind to matter. Several decades later, dualism is being dusted off and reconsidered. Although some may see this revival as a threat to consciousness science aimed at (...) measuring the conscious mind, Owen argues that measuring consciousness, along with the medical benefits of such measurements, is not ruled out by consciousness being nonphysical. Owen proposes the Mind-Body Powers model of neural correlates of consciousness, which is informed by Aristotelian causation and a substance dualist view of human nature inspired by Thomas Aquinas, who often followed Aristotle. In addition to explaining why there are neural correlates of consciousness, the model provides a philosophical foundation for empirically discerning and quantifying consciousness. En route to presenting and applying the Mind-Body Powers model to neurobiology, Owen rebuts longstanding objections to dualism related to the mind-body problem. With scholarly precision and readable clarity, Owen applies an oft forgotten yet richly developed historical vantage point to contemporary cognitive neuroscience. (shrink)

In Zizek and Politics, Geoff Boucher and Matthew Sharpe go beyond standard introductions to spell out a new approach to reading Zizek, one that can be highly critical as well as deeply appreciative. They show that Zizek has a raft of fundamental positions that enable his theoretical positions to be put to work on practical problems. Explaining these positions with clear examples, they outline why Zizek's confrontation with thinkers such as Derrida, Foucault and Deleuze has so radically changed how (...) we think about society. They then go on to track Zizek's own intellectual development during the last twenty years, as he has grappled with theoretical problems and the political climate of the War on Terror. This book is a major addition to the literature on Zizek and a crucial critical introduction to his thought. (shrink)

Principlism, the bioethical theory championed by Tom Beauchamp and James Childress, is centered on the four moral principles of beneficence, non-maleficence, respect for autonomy, and justice. Two key processes related to these principles are specification—adding specific content to general principles—and balancing—determining the relative weight of conflicting principles. I argue that both of these processes necessarily involve an appeal to human goods and evils, and therefore require a theory of the good. A significant problem with principlism is that it lacks a (...) theory of the good and consequently does not have an adequate solution to the problems of specification and balancing. My conclusion is that principlism must adopt some account of human well-being in order to be a satisfactory bioethical framework. (shrink)

I argue that Sarah Sawyer's and Herman Cappelen's recent accounts of how speakers talk and think about the same concept or topic even when their understandings of that concept or topic substantially diverge risk multiplying our metasemantic categories unnecessarily and fail to prove explanatory. When we look more closely at our actual practices of samesaying, we find that speakers with seemingly incompatible formulations of a subject matter take one another to samesay when they are attempting to arrive at a correct (...) understanding of that subject matter. These speakers adopt what I call a prospective externalist perspective on the subject matter in question. I then argue that there are contexts where judgments of samesaying are more routinely defeated because speakers are taking up a perspective I call retrospective internalism. From this perspective, speakers are aiming to render maximally intelligible the linguistic behavior of other speakers that appear to them to deviate from their own. Whether or not we count speakers as samesaying with us will therefore depend on the kind of the perspective we adopt. Different perspectives, it will turn out, often yield different verdicts. On my perspective-based approach, there is no need to hypostatize or inflate our metasemantic taxonomies. (shrink)

One of the liveliest debates about cognition concerns whether our cognition sometimes extends beyond our brains and bodies. One party says Yes, another No. This paper shows that debate between these parties has been epistemologically confused and requires reorienting. Both parties frequently appeal to empirical considerations and to extra-empirical theoretical virtues to support claims about where cognition is. These things should constrain their claims, but cannot do all the work hoped. This is because of the overlooked fact, uncovered in this (...) paper, that we could never distinguish the rival views empirically or by typical theoretical virtues. I show this by drawing on recent work on testing, predictive accuracy, and theoretical virtues. The recommendation to emerge is that we step back from debate about where cognition is, to the epistemology of what cognition is. (shrink)

Responses to public health emergencies can entail difficult decisions about restricting individual liberties to prevent the spread of disease. The quintessential example is quarantine. While isolating sick patients tends not to provoke much concern, quarantine of healthy people who only might be infected often is controversial. In fact, as the experience with severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) shows, the vast majority of those placed under quarantine typically don't become ill. Efforts to enforce involuntary quarantine through military or police powers also (...) can backfire, stoking both panic and disease spread. Yet quarantine is part of a limited arsenal of options when effective treatment or prophylaxis is not available, and some evidence suggests it can be effective, especially when it is voluntary, home-based and accompanied by extensive outreach, communication and education efforts. Even assuming that quarantine is medically effective, however, it still must be ethically justified because it creates harms for many of those affected. Moreover, ethical principles of reciprocity, transparency, non-discrimination and accountability should guide any implementation of quarantine. (shrink)

Contemporary scholarship concerning science diplomacy is increasingly taking a historical approach. In our introduction to this special issue, we argue that this approach promises insight into science diplomacy because of the tools historians of science bring to their work. In particular, we observe that not only are historians of science currently poised to chart the diplomatic aspects involved in the transnational circulation of technoscientific knowledge, materials, and expertise. They are ready to bring critical global analysis to an important phenomenon that (...) has too often been treated as a benign diplomacy device deployed by the Global North without equal reference to the Global South. Through cases discussed in the articles of the special issue, however, we see that historically, in the Global South as well as the Global North, science diplomacy has often functioned to mediate the circulation of technoscientific knowledge and materials, and its historical study helps to better illuminate the resulting knowledge-power nexus. (shrink)

This paper proposes a new and testable view about the nature of species and other evolving lineages, according to which they are feedback systems. On this view, it is a mistake to think gene flow, niche sharing, and trait frequency similarities between populations are among variables that interact to cause some further downstream variable that distinguishes evolving lineages from each other, some sort of “species cohesion” for example. Instead, gene flow, niche sharing, similarities between populations, and other causal variables feed (...) into each other—instances of these at earlier times help cause instances of these same variables at later times. And any lineage-identifying cohesion just is the recurrence or cycling of these feedback relations within metapopulations over generations. Such cohesion can then be represented as variable M within multi-dimensional variable spaces, where values of M vary dynamically with the frequency and magnitude of feedback relations. Related conditions for being a species or other evolving lineage are then clarified. To argue for the development and testing of this view, the paper shows how it improves upon others. (shrink)

Over the past few decades, significant advances have been made in public engagement with, and the democratization of, science and technology. Despite notable successes, such developments have often struggled to enhance public trust, avert crises of expertise and democracy, and build more socially responsive and responsible science and innovation. A central reason for this is that mainstream approaches to public engagement harbor what we call “residual realist” assumptions about participation and publics. Recent coproductionist accounts in science and technology studies offer (...) an alternative way of seeing participation as coproduced, relational, diverse, and emergent but have been somewhat reluctant to articulate what this means in practice. In this paper, we make this move by setting out a new framework of interrelating paths and associated criteria for remaking public participation with science and democracy in more experimental, reflexive, anticipatory, and responsible ways. This framework comprises four paths to: forge reflexive participatory practices that attend to their framings, emergence, uncertainties, and effects; ecologize participation through attending to the interrelations between diverse public engagements in wider systems; catalyze practices of anticipatory reflection to bring about responsible democratic innovations; and reconstitute participation as constitutive of systems of technoscience and democracy. (shrink)

In 2019 public trust in politicians was at an all-time low in many parts of the world. Then again, it had been low for quite some time.1 Public trust in epistemic authority is a more complicated matter. The success of many right-wing politicians—Trump, Johnson, Bolsonaro, etc.—is partly due to their efforts to discredit traditional sources of information, including the “mainstream media” and whichever scientific institutions prove inconvenient to their political interests. But worries about the erosion of epistemic standards in public (...) discourse are easily overstated, and some polling data have shown that publics are not as distrustful of experts as we might fear.2Nonetheless, there are some political and social... (shrink)

The rapidly expanding field of critical animal studies now offers a myriad of theoretical and philosophical positions from which to choose. This timely book provides an overview and analysis of the most influential of these trends. Approachable and concise, it is intended for readers sympathetic to the project of changing our ways of thinking about and interacting with animals yet relatively new to the variety of philosophical ideas and figures in the discipline. It uses three rubrics—identity, difference, and indistinction—to differentiate (...) three major paths of thought about animals. The identity approach aims to establish continuity among human beings and animals so as to grant animals equal access to the ethical and political community. The difference framework views the animal world as containing its own richly complex and differentiated modes of existence in order to allow for a more expansive ethical and political worldview. The indistinction approach argues that we should abandon the notion that humans are unique in order to explore new ways of conceiving human-animal relations. Each approach is interrogated for its relative strengths and weaknesses, with specific emphasis placed on the kinds of transformational potential it contains. (shrink)

Here, I consider Derek Parfit’s Normativity Objection to naturalist realism, according to which normative-natural property or fact reductions are “conceptually excluded”. While a lot of philosophers inclined toward non-naturalism share this view or something close to it, plenty of philosophers remain unconvinced, and the literature offers little guidance to the perplexed. I suggest a way to improve the argument – indeed, I think it is the best and perhaps only plausible way to make good on the claim of conceptual exclusion. (...) But the improved argument relies on the highly controversial claim that normative cognition is transparentin the following sense: normative concepts reveal the nature of the properties they aim to ascribe. This nature, the argument continues, is inconsistent with naturalist strictures. (shrink)

In ‘Computing Machinery and Intelligence’, Turing, sceptical of the question ‘Can machines think?’, quickly replaces it with an experimentally verifiable test: the imitation game. I suggest that for such a move to be successful the test needs to be relevant, expansive, solvable by exemplars, unpredictable, and lead to actionable research. The Imitation Game is only partially successful in this regard and its reliance on language, whilst insightful for partially solving the problem, has put AI progress on the wrong foot, prescribing (...) a top-down approach for building thinking machines. I argue that to fix shortcomings with modern AI systems a nonverbal operationalisation is required. This is provided by the recent Animal-AI Testbed, which translates animal cognition tests for AI and provides a bottom-up research pathway for building thinking machines that create predictive models of their environment from sensory input. (shrink)

Although Kant defends a cosmopolitan ideal, his philosophy is problematically vague regarding how to achieve it, which lends support to the empty formalism charge. How Kant would respond to the crisis in Syria reveals that judgement plays too central a role, because Kantian principles lead to equally reasonable but opposite conclusions on how to weigh the duty of hospitality to refugees against a state’s duty to its own citizens, the right of prevention towards ISIS against the duty not to harm (...) non-combatants, and the responsibility to protect the people of Syria against the duty of non-interference in its internal affairs. (shrink)

Recent arguments over whether certain public health interventions should be mandatory raise questions about what counts as a "mandate." A mandate is not the same as a mere recommendation or the standard of practice. At minimum, a mandate should require an active opt-out and there should be some penalty for refusing to abide by it. Over-loose use of the term "mandate" and the easing of opt-out provisions could eventually pose a risk to the gains that truly mandatory public health interventions, (...) such as childhood vaccines, have provided over the last 50 years. Already, confusion about what counts as a mandate, and about what criteria should be used to determine when a public health intervention should be implemented as a mandate, has led to some inappropriate public policy decisions. For instance, by any reasonable criteria, the yearly influenza vaccine should be mandatory for health care workers. To enforce this mandate, those who refuse vaccination should be required to sign a waiver, and patients - especially those at high risk from flu - should be informed when they receive care from unvaccinated practitioners. (shrink)

We are happy to announce that Libertarian Papers has been chosen for inclusion in the web archives of the Library of Congress. This means that, once archived, the complete journal will be available indefinitely both to researchers at Library facilities and by special arrangement. Of course, because Libertarian Papers uses an open-access format, the use of ….

I offer an account of truth that combines elements of deflationism and traditional correspondence theories. We need such an intermediary account, I argue, in order to adequately answer two kinds of questions: "Why do we find it obvious that 'p' is true iff p?" and "Why is it contingent that 'p' is true iff p?" If what it is for 'p' to be true is explained by simply saying that p, as the deflationist claims, it is hard to see how (...) it could be contingent that 'p' is true iff p. But if it is claimed instead that what it is for a sentence to be true is for it to correspond to a fact, we still need some explanation of why 'p's correspondence with reality insure that p, and vice versa. What we need, I claim, is to recognize a structure to truth: truth for sentences, utterances, and other non-propositional entities depends on, and is analyzable in terms of, the expression of true propositions. Propositional truth can then be treated as insubstantial, as deflationary, and truth for other entities as substantial, consisting of correspondence to a fact . ;This account of truth, which I call Weak Deflationism, anchors the dissertation. In an introductory chapter, I give a partial defense of realism about propositions and properties, later defending Platonism against attacks by David Lewis. After formulating Weak Deflationism, I examine its implications for such matters as the "absurd comparison" objection, the truthmaker project in ontology, and non-factualist theories in metaethics. In a final chapter, I provide a Kripke-inspired modification of Weak Deflationism aimed to avoid liar-like paradox. Premised on a distinction between propositions that predicatively involve truth, i.e., truth-dependent propositions, and those that do not, truth-independent propositions, I argue that truth for the latter is deflationary and that truth for the former consists in being determined by the totality of truth-independent fact. Falsity is understood as truth of the negation. Liars are then counted neither true nor false, and paradox is averted. (shrink)

The general issue addressed in this dissertation is: what do the models of formal model-theoretic semantics represent? In chapter 2, I argue that those of first-order classical logic represent meaning assignments in possible worlds. This motivates an inquiry into what the interpretations of first-order quantified model logic represent, and in Chapter 3 I argue that they represent meaning assignments in possible universes of possible worlds. A possible universe is unpacked as one way model reality might be. The problem arises here (...) as to how we are to understand the distinction between the actual and the possible as it relates to modal reality. ;Along with the development of the main arguments in Chapters 2 and 3, the dissertation assesses the status of semantic accounts or logical properties and relations. Specifically, what does the model-theoretic account of a logically possible situation add to the syntactic account ? ;Proofs of invalidity in terms of the models of formal semantics do not establish that it is possible for the premises to be true and the conclusion false, since a formal model is merely given by a consistent set of sentences. Unless there is some way to generate a non-formal model from a formal one, such proofs do not really go beyond syntactic notions. The dissertation ends by concluding that there is no way to generate a non-formal model from a formal one without relying on logical intuitions that are syntactical. ;Hence efforts to construct a semantic basis for model logic independent of syntactic commitments are misguided. However, in classical logic the independence of the semantic account from the syntactic one is grounded on the intuition that it is metaphysically possible for there to be a denumerably infinite totality of objects. (shrink)

*The views represented are the author's alone and should not be construed as representing policies of the American Medical Association.

Confidentiality is a core value in medicine and public health yet, like other core values, it is not absolute. Medical ethics has typically allowed for breaches of confidentiality when there is a credible threat of significant harm to an identifiable third party. Medical ethics has been less explicit in spelling out criteria for allowing breaches of confidentiality to protect populations, instead tending to defer these decisions to the law. But recently, issues in military detention settings have raised the profile of (...) decisions to breach medical confidentiality in efforts to protect the broader population. National and international ethics documents say little about the confidentiality of detainee medical records. But initial decisions to use detainee medical records to help craft coercive interrogations led to widespread condemnation, and might have contributed to detainee health problems, such as a large number of suicide attempts several of which have been successful. More recent military guidance seems to reflect lessons learned from these problems and does more to protect detainee records. For the public health system, this experience is a reminder of the importance of confidentiality in creating trustworthy, and effective, means to protect the public's health. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy, Psychiatry, & Psychology 11.1 (2004) 35-41 [Access article in PDF] The Rationality of Psychosis and Understanding the Deluded Matthew R. Broome Campbell's important and influential paper (Campbell 2001) has framed the debate that Bayne and Pacherie (2004) most explicitly, and Klee (2004) and Georgaca (2004) more implicitly, engage in. Campbell has offered two broad ways of thinking about explanations of delusions—the empirical and the rational. He offers (...) some criticism of the former and an endorsement of the latter. Campbell uses examples from clinical psychopathology to illustrate his argument and Bayne and Pacherie in turn employ these. Campbell discusses the eponymously named delusions of Capgras and Cotard—the former a subtype of delusional misidentification and the latter a delusion whose content is colored predominantly with nihilistic and possibly hypochondriacal themes. Campbell, Bayne and Pacherie, and Klee discuss the empirical data in relation to such delusions and as an aid to discussing the empirical model more generally. It does seem a little unfortunate that these delusions, which are less than typical, become the focus of Campbell's paper, and Bayne and Pacherie's criticism of his work. Delusions are remarkably heterogeneous; this indeed may be part of the reason why there is so much difficulty in reaching a definition as Klee discusses, and occur in a wide variety of mental and neurological illnesses. The most common delusions are those of persecution and reference (World Health Organization [WHO] 1973) and typically occur in schizophrenia. By contrast, delusional misidentification occurs most commonly in patients with dementia, delirium, and focal cognitive impairment, but can occur in other functional psychoses such as an affective or schizophrenic psychosis. The most common form of delusional misidentification is not that of either the exotic Capgras or Fregoli syndromes but delusional misidentification for place; thus, although Bayne and Pacherie's arguments against Campbell may still hold, delusional misidentification tends to occur in the context of a patient believing that they are at home or on holiday rather than in hospital and may not necessarily involve close family members or other intimate relationships. Similarly, Cotard's syndrome tends to occur in the context of a severe depressive illness with mood-congruent psychotic symptoms, typically in an elderly individual. It does not have to have the content that the deluded is dead, but can include beliefs, for example, that the world no longer exists or that their internal organs are not present. Thus, a patient with either Capgras' or Cotard's syndrome is likely to differ from patients with delusions of persecution. They would [End Page 35] have different diagnoses, probably be older, and have a greater likelihood of structural abnormalities of the brain on imaging and consequent neuropsychological dysfunction. That is not to say that patients with schizophrenia have normal cerebral anatomy and neuropsychology, but rather that the Capgras' and Cotard's patients are likely to have neurological quality to their presentation that is clinically relevant, rather than what commonly the case in schizophrenia and the other functional psychoses, where the neurological abnormalities are only currently important at the level of academic research. Empirical Models of Delusion Formation Different delusions may not have that much in common, nor may the patients who believe in them. This in turn relates to the empirical paradigm that both Campbell and Bayne and Pacherie discuss. It is true that current research, and indeed the clinical practice of cognitive behavioral therapy for psychosis, is indebted to the work of Maher and it is within his legacy which we work. This, however, is not to say that we think his initial formulation was correct. Maher's (1988, 1992) work focused attempts in explaining delusions—both to support and refute his thesis that delusions are the consequence of normal cognitive mechanisms seeking to explain an anomalous sensory experience. Such a view initially led to work demonstrating delusions in the absence of anomalous perceptions, the presence of reasoning biases in the deluded population, and the possibility that abnormal sensory experience may be consequent upon biased cognitive processes (Garety and Freeman 1999). More recent work has demonstrated the prevalence of... (shrink)

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) recently recommended that HIV screening should become routine for all adults in the United States. Implicit in the CDC proposal is the notion that pre-test counseling would be more limited than at present, and that written informed consent to screening would no longer be required. If widely implemented, routine testing would mark a tremendous shift in the US HIV screening strategy. There are a number of considerations used to determine what screening tests (...) should be routine, and HIV fits the bill in almost every regard. Yet the stigma associated with HIV infection remains, making the CDC's recommendation highly controversial. Will minimizing requirements for pre-test counseling and special written informed consent lead to unexpected or unwanted HIV testing, or do these stringent counseling and consent requirements needlessly scare people away? Will widespread and routine testing be associated with declining stigmatization, or will it drive some patients away from seeking desperately needed health care? These are high stakes questions, and we're about to find out the answers. (shrink)

This paper examines one of the historical antecedents of Big Data, the social physics movement. Its origins are in the scientific revolution of the 17th century in Western Europe. But it is not named as such until the middle of the 19th century, and not formally institutionalized until another hundred years later when it is associated with work by George Zipf and John Stewart. Social physics is marked by the belief that large-scale statistical measurement of social variables reveals underlying relational (...) patterns that can be explained by theories and laws found in natural science, and physics in particular. This larger epistemological position is known as monism, the idea that there is only one set of principles that applies to the explanation of both natural and social worlds. Social physics entered geography through the work of the mid-20th-century geographer William Warntz, who developed his own spatial version called “macrogeography.” It involved the computation of large data sets, made ever easier with the contemporaneous development of the computer, joined with the gravitational potential model. Our argument is that Warntz's concerns with numeracy, large data sets, machine-based computing power, relatively simple mathematical formulas drawn from natural science, and an isomorphism between natural and social worlds became grounds on which Big Data later staked its claim to knowledge; it is a past that has not yet passed. (shrink)

This article aims to make a contribution to the conceptualization of mainstreaming gender equality promoted by the European Union. It starts by exploring the historical periodization of equal opportunities delivery strategies and challenging the compartmentalization of these developments. It suggests that equality policies can better be conceptualized in terms of a `three-legged equality stool', which recognizes the interconnectiveness of three perspectives — the equal treatment perspective, the women's perspective and the gender perspective. The article argues that the gender perspective has (...) been closely associated with strategies for mainstreaming gender equality, but that this association is misleading. As a result mainstreaming has remained a `fuzzy' concept, which in turn has led to many different styles and forms of practical implementation in European member states. (shrink)

Self-care apps are booming. Early iterations of this technology focused on tracking health and fitness routines, but recently some developers have turned their attention to the cultivation of character, basing their conceptual resources on the Hellenistic tradition (Stoic Meditations™, Stoa™, Stoic Mental Health Tracker™). Those familiar with the final writings of Michel Foucault will notice an intriguing coincidence between the development of these products and his claims that the Hellenistic tradition of self-cultivation has much to offer contemporary life. In this (...) article, I explore Foucault’s cryptic remarks on this topic, and argue that today’s self-care developers can improve future products by paying attention to the Hellenistic exercises of self-cultivation he identifies as especially important. (shrink)

I respond here to an argument in David Shoemaker’s recent essay, “Attributability, Answerability, and Accountability: Toward a Wider Theory of Moral Responsibility.” Shoemaker finds that “Scanlonian” approaches to moral blame err insofar as they do not include a capacity to respond to moral considerations among the conditions on blameworthiness. Shoemaker argues that wrongdoers must be able to respond to moral reasons for their behavior to express the disrespect to which blaming attitudes like resentment respond. I offer reasons for rejecting this (...) argument. (shrink)

This book reviews Foucault's philosophy on power and ethics to investigate the possibility of restructuring freedom available to the subject. Foucault's Kantian inspired view of critique as an art of voluntary inservitude, of reflective indocility is applied to biopolitics, bioethics, artificial intelligence, and bureaucracy. This work of freedom is a process of self-creation where the subject seeks to rearrange power relations and open possibilities for autonomy and agency. This book shows how the critical attitude identifies limitations of power to open (...) the possibility for transgression as an escape from normalized submission. This involves revealing and exposing unrecognised forms of power influencing the subject to enable new ways to think differently. Psychoanalysis combined with Foucault is also shown to enhance an understanding of power relations and the task of an ethics of freedom. This is then integrated with a philosophy of place to better understand the relationship between home, self-creation, ethics, and freedom. The book outlines that Foucault's philosophy has important relevance to the writings of Heidegger, Lacan, Aristotle, Jung and Arendt which is essential reading for students and professionals of politics, ethics, phenomenology and psychoanalysis. (shrink)

A narrowly person-affecting (NPA) axiology is an account of the moral ranking of outcomes such that the comparison of any two outcomes depends on the magnitude and weight of individuals’ well-being gains and losses between the two. This article systematically explores NPA axiology. It argues that NPA axiology yields an outcome ranking that satisfies three fundamental axioms: Pareto, Anonymity and, plausibly, Pigou-Dalton. The axiology is neutral to non-well-being considerations (desert); and (assuming well-being measurability) leads to the Repugnant Conclusion (RC). In (...) short, NPA axiology provides a grounding for Paretian, equity-regarding welfarism, albeit one that includes the RC. (shrink)

A recent movement within political philosophy called luck egalitarianism has attempted to synthesize the right’s regard for responsibility with the left’s concern for equality. The original motivation for subscribing to luck egalitarianism stems from the belief that one’s success in life ought to reflect one’s own choices and not brute luck. Luck egalitarian theorists differ in the decision procedures that they propose, but they share in common the general approach that we ought to equalize individuals with respect to brute luck (...) so that differences in distribution are only a consequence of the responsible choices that individuals make. I intend to show that through the application of its own distributive procedures, the interpersonal luck egalitarian approach actually undermines its original motivation by making the lives of individuals subject to brute luck. I propose two alternative methods that the luck egalitarian could use to prevent the problems suffered by the interpersonal luck egalitarian standard. (shrink)

What is a self? What does it mean to have selfhood? What is the relationship between selfhood and identity? These are puzzling questions that philosophers, psychologists, social scientists, and many other researchers often grapple with. -/- Self and Identity is a book that explores and brings together relevant ideas on selfhood and identity, while also helping to clarify some important and long standing scientific and philosophical debates. It will enable readers to understand the difference between selves in humans and other (...) animals, and the different selves that we come to possess from when we are born to when we become old. It also explains how and why the self might break down due to mental illness, thereby providing insight into how we might treat illnesses such as dementia and depression, both of which are conditions that fundamentally affect our selfhood. -/- Taking an important step towards clarifying our understanding of human selfhood and applying it to mental illness, this book will be of great interest to researchers and postgraduate students exploring philosophical questions of selfhood, as well as those examining the connection to clinical disorders. (shrink)

In Part 1, we situate Dugin’s interpretation of Heidegger in relation to the better known, broadly left-liberal approaches to interpreting Heidegger’s thought, stressing Dugin’s unusual focus on the German thinker’s “middle” or Nazi-era texts, and showing how this periodizing optic affects Dugin’s culminating reading of Sein und Zeit and its key axiological notion of authenticity (Part 1). Part 2 examines Dugin’s appropriation of Heidegger’s radically pessimistic, trans-epochal critique of Western thought, centring around his striking reading of the esoteric notion of (...) the “fourfold” or Gewiert. In this account, the essence of reality itself, the “crosshairs” of the fourfold, is provocatively depicted by Dugin as war, Polemos, Kampf, or Krieg, following the Heidegger of 1933–1936. In a move which echoes Heidegger’s own post-1938 relativizations of all distinctions between Nazism, liberalism and socialism – as well as the Shoah and mechanized agriculture – the Russian thinker hence ends by obviating any distinctions between liberal or democratic and totalitarian regimes, war and peace, and genocide and consumerism. All must be overcome in the “another beginning” destined for the new Russia, if it has the ears to hear. (shrink)

This article explores the role of Athenian literary prizes in the development of ancient literary criticism. It examines the views of a range of critics , and identifies several recurrent themes. The discussion reveals that ideas about what was good or bad in literature were not directly affected by the award of prizes; in fact the ancient critics display what is called an “anti-prize” mentality. The article argues that this “anti-prize” mentality is not, as is often thought, a product of (...) intellectual developments in the fourth century BC. It is suggested that the devaluation of prizes is actually a contemporary, integral feature of prize-awarding culture in general. This article draws on recent approaches from cultural sociology to offer some conclusions about the way in which prizes function in popular and critical discourse. (shrink)

The trajectory of the public discourse on agriculture in the twentieth century presents an interesting pattern:shortly after World War II, the manner in which farming and farmers were discussed underwent a profound shift. This rhetorical change is revealed by comparing the current debate on farmland preservation with a tradition of agricultural discourse that came before, known as “agrarianism.” While agrarian writers conceived of farming as a rewarding life, a public good, and a source of moral virtue, current writers on farmland (...) preservation speak of farming almost entirely in utilitarian terms describing its productive capacity and its economic returns. Proponents of farmland preservation use essentially the same underlying framework as critics of preservation:n “economic utilitarian” paradigm that purports to eschew normative values and evaluate land use decisions based on economic criteria only. I argue that, despite their good intentions, farmland preservationists are doomed to piecemeal victories at best, because their arguments, which rely on a utilitarian justification and disregard the agrarian ethic, are inadequate. Without expanding its focus beyond farmland to encompass farming and farmers, the movement risks losing both integrity and effectiveness. (shrink)

Much of the force behind doxastic involuntarism comes from our pre-theoretical judgement that any effort to form a belief simply by intending to form it must remain unsuccessful. However, despite this, ordinary language use of locutions like “chose to believe” are common. In this article, we present new experimental data that shows that the prevalence of ordinary language talk of “chosen beliefs” is no obstacle to doxastic involuntarism in a standard sense. While we employ the methods of experimental philosophy, our (...) argument also concerns the fundamental question as to what those methods can achieve: as is typical of philosophical debates, the debate over doxastic voluntarism involves a refined theoretical concept, specifically a refined concept of voluntary belief. In such debates, we cannot determine our pre-theoretical position by conducting surveys on those who may not yet own the requisite theoretical concepts. (shrink)