This article examines the role of the Christian, or liturgical, year as one of the simplest yet most powerful ways of spiritually forming people, both individually and corporately, to become more like Jesus. Many Christians and churches are subtly shaped more by the time structures of the average work week or cultural holidays than the life of Christ or the church. The tendency to address individual spiritual formation focuses largely on cognitivist approaches to change or individual formative practices. However, the (...) author explores several ways in which the Christian year offers a wholistic approach to life formation through the steady, time-bound patterns of the Christian year. Engaging both the conscious and unconscious self in cognitive practices and steady habits, both the individual Christian and local congregations are trained toward Christlikeness. (shrink)

Resenha do livro de: Gareth B. Matthews. A Filosofia e a Criança.

Neurlolinguistic programming is a powerful technology for modelling aspects of human excellence so that others can achieve similar levels of effectiveness. This article describes how to teach a simple communication pattern called "pace and lead,” derived from studies of the hypnotic induction techniques of such master hypnotists as Milton Erickson. The "Pace and Lead" frame consists of several sensorily verifiable statements (pace) followed by a positive suggestion (lead). This pattern is the basis for virtually all communication which seeks to (...) influence, manipulate or heal and as such, constitutes a very useful skill with a wide variety of applications.This frame—simple in its outward form but profound in its potential extension to a variety of real world situations—deserves more general inclusion in the teaching of consciousness curriculum. Anthropologists with an interest in language and consciousness issues will appreciate the accessibility of the exercise and its ability to concretely embody abstract issues such as the role of language in the creation of personal and cultural "realities.”. (shrink)

This book addresses a range of relevant theoretical issues, including the possibility of an interpersonally comparable measure of well-being, or “utility” metric; the moral value of equality, and how that bears on the form of the social welfare function; social choice under uncertainty; and the possibility of integrating considerations of individual choice and responsibility into the social-welfare-function framework. This book also deals with issues of implementation, and explores how survey data and other sources of evidence might be used to calibrate (...) both a utility metric and a social welfare function, and whether distributive goals are ever best pursued through regulation rather than the tax system. In working through this range of theoretical and practical issues, the book draws from a wide variety of literatures, including philosophical scholarship on equality, responsibility, the nature of well-being, and personal identity over time; the social choice literature within economics; applied economic literatures concerning the measurement of inequality and poverty; legal and policy-analysis scholarship on cost-benefit analysis, environmental justice, and the choice between regulation and taxation; and the burgeoning field of “happiness studies”. (shrink)

Recent debates within the autism advocacy community have raised difficult questions about who can credibly act as a representative of a particular population and what responsibilities that...

Though there are many challenges to Ekman’s thesis that there are basic emotions with universal corresponding facial expressions, our main criticism revolves around the extent to which grounding situations alter how people read faces. To that end, we recruit testifying experimental studies that show identical faces expressing varying emotions when contextualized differently. Rather than dismissing these as illusions, we start with the position—generally favored by embodied thinkers—that situations are primary: they are where specifiable and hence knowable properties first show up. (...) We further argue that situationally inflected emotional expressions are informationally meaningful. We reject the idea that reading expressions is primarily about ascertaining internal mental states, arguing instead that people are registering overall situations when looking at faces. However, if mind is understood as a situated phenomenon that extends into active ecological frames, then one can still argue that mindreading is going on. Although we do not claim isolated things like cliffs or cars have agency, we speculate networked systems with cliffs, people, cars, bears, etc., collectively function with intentionality, more so if advancing a robust situated mind thesis, contra figures like Dennett who argue that people over-impute mind to things. Our position has practical implications insofar as it casts doubts on recent attempts to develop AI systems that extract emotional intent out of facial expressions since many of these systems are grounded on Ekman’s basic view. (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)

Should we remain neutral between our interests and those of future generations? Or are we ethically permitted or even required to depart from neutrality and engage in some measure of intergenerational discounting? This Article addresses the problem of intergenerational discounting by drawing on two different intellectual traditions: the social welfare function (“SWF”) tradition in welfare economics, and scholarship on “prioritarianism” in moral philosophy. Unlike utilitarians, prioritarians are sensitive to the distribution of well-being. They give greater weight to well-being changes affecting (...) worse-off individuals. Prioritarianism can be captured, formally, through an SWF which sums a concave transformation of individual utility, rather than simply summing unweighted utilities in utilitarian fashion. The Article considers the appropriate structure of a prioritarian SWF in intergenerational cases. The simplest case involves a fixed and finite intertemporal population. In that case, I argue, policymakers can and should maintain full neutrality between present and future generations. No discount factor should be attached to the utility of future individuals. Neutrality becomes trickier when we depart from this simple case, meaning: (1) “non-identity” problems, where current choices change the identity of future individuals; (2) population-size variation, where current choices affect not merely the identity of future individuals, but the size of the world’s future population (this case raises the specter of what Derek Parfit terms “the repugnant conclusion,” i.e., that dramatic reductions in the average level of individual well-being might be compensated for by increases in population size); or (3) an infinite population. The Article grapples with the difficult question of outfitting a prioritarian SWF to handle non-identity problems, population-size variation, and infinite populations. It tentatively suggests that a measure of neutrality can be maintained even in these cases. (shrink)

In the burgeoning philosophical literature on conceptual engineering improving our concepts is typically portrayed as the hallmark activity of the field. However, Herman Cappelen has challenged the idea that we can know how and why conceptual changes occur well enough to actively intervene in revising our concepts; the mechanisms of conceptual change are typically inscrutable to us. If the ‘inscrutability challenge’ is correct, the practical aspect of conceptual engineering may seem to be undermined, but I argue that endorsing such pessimism (...) would be a mistake. Even if the inscrutability challenge is correct, conceptual engineers often have good reasons to try to preserve existing concepts. I examine several cases where concept preservation is important and draw lessons about this activity for conceptual engineers. (shrink)

People with depression often report alterations in their experience of time, a common complaint being that time has slowed down or stopped. In this paper, I argue that depression can involve a range of qualitatively different changes in the structure of temporal experience, some of which I proceed to describe. In addition, I suggest that current diagnostic categories such as "major depression" are insensitive to the differences between these changes. I conclude by briefly considering whether the kinds of temporal experience (...) associated with depression are specific to depression. (shrink)

I develop two reasons for thinking that, in most cases, not all conditions for knowing the past by way of episodic memory are met. First, the typical subject who accurately and justifiedly believes what episodic memory delivers is Gettiered, as her justification essentially depends on the falsehood that episodic memory functions like a storehouse. Second, episodic memory misrepresents often. If the subject has evidence of this she typically does not satisfy the justification condition for knowledge of the past from episodic (...) memory. If instead the subject lacks evidence of this misrepresentation, she typically does not satisfy the Gettier condition for knowledge of the past from episodic memory. Either way, episodic memory does not provide the typical subject with knowledge of the past. (shrink)

Embedding ethics modules within computer science courses has become a popular response to the growing recognition that CS programs need to better equip their students to navigate the ethical dimensions of computing technologies like AI, machine learning, and big data analytics. However, the popularity of this approach has outpaced the evidence of its positive outcomes. To help close that gap, this empirical study reports positive results from Northeastern’s program that embeds values analysis modules into CS courses. The resulting data suggest (...) that such modules have a positive effect on students’ moral attitudes and that students leave the modules believing they are more prepared to navigate the ethical dimensions they’ll likely face in their eventual careers. Importantly, these gains were accomplished at an institution without a philosophy doctoral program, suggesting this strategy can be effectively employed by a wider range of institutions than many have thought. (shrink)

Taking a fresh look at a central controversy in criminal law theory, The Ethics of Capital Punishment presents a rationale for the death penalty grounded in a theory of the nature of evil and the nature of defilement. Original, unsettling, and deeply controversial, it will be an essential reference point for future debates on the subject.

Local food is often defended on environmental grounds. However, environmental defenses of local food are flawed, and all environmental defenses are limited as they at most establish that local food is instrumentally valuable. These deficiencies motivate a different approach. By drawing on the aesthetics of engagement, a theory of environmental aesthetics, I argue that local food has an overlooked intrinsic value; it can allow people to become engaged with—and thereby aesthetically appreciate—the environment. My argument charts a comparatively neglected area of (...) aesthetics: the aesthetics of taste and smell and, more specifically, the role that these senses play in the aesthetic appreciation of the environment. (shrink)

Dogged resistance to demanding moral views frequently takes the form of The Demandingness Objection. Premise (1): Moral view V demands too much of us. Premise (2): If a moral view demands too much of us, then it is mistaken. Conclusion: Therefore, moral view V is mistaken. Objections of this form harass major theories in normative ethics as well as prominent moral views in applied ethics and political philosophy. The present paper does the following: (i) it clarifies and distinguishes between various (...) demandingness objections in the philosophical literature, (ii) identifies a formidable and interesting form of the demandingness objection that targets a wide scope of moral views, and (iii) defuses this objection by developing a local skeptical argument from unreliability the form of which may, interestingly, be effectively deployed in other areas of philosophy. (shrink)

This Article provides a comprehensive, critical overview of proposals to use happiness surveys for steering public policy. Happiness or “subjective well-being” surveys ask individuals to rate their present happiness, life-satisfaction, affective state, etc. A massive literature now engages in such surveys or correlates survey responses with individual attributes. And, increasingly, scholars argue for the policy relevance of happiness data: in particular, as a basis for calculating aggregates such as “gross national happiness,” or for calculating monetary equivalents for non-market goods based (...) on coefficients in a happiness equation. But is individual well-being equivalent to happiness? The happiness literature tends to blur or conflate important concepts: well-being, subjective well-being, happiness, utility, satisfaction. A preference-realization account of well-being denies the equivalence of happiness and welfare, since someone can have preferences for non-mental attributes, such as health, autonomy, goal-fulfillment, knowledge or the quality of her relationships. It is critical, therefore, to differentiate two potential policy roles for happiness surveys. First, the survey response may provide prima facie evidence of the respondent’s preference-utility: the extent to which her preferences are realized. Second, it may indicate her experience-utility: the quality of her mental states. The Article clarifies these two, very different, ideas. It then criticizes, in turn, the preference-utility and the experience-utility defenses of the policy relevance of happiness surveys. Enthusiasm about happiness is premature. (shrink)

Getting Emotional -- Constructing Discourse -- Telling and Remembering -- Inviting Emotional Tellings -- Eliciting Feelings -- (re)formulating Emotionality -- Managing Emotionality and Distress -- Being Negative -- Reflecting Back, Moving Forward.

This book explores how ancient philosophers, particularly Plato, Aristotle, the Stoics, and Sextus Empiricus, understood relativity and how their theories of the phenomenon affected, and were affected by, their broader philosophical outlooks.

Technical results about the time dependence of eigenvectors of reduced density operators are considered, and the relevance of these results is discussed for modal interpretations of quantum mechanics which take the corresponding eigenprojections to represent definite properties. Continuous eigenvectors can be found if degeneracies are avoided. We show that, in finite dimensions, the space of degenerate operators has co-dimension 3 in the space of all reduced operators, suggesting that continuous eigenvectors almost surely exist. In any dimension, even when degeneracies are (...) hit, we find conditions under which a theorem due to Rellich can provide continuous eigenvectors. We use this result to formulate an extended version of the modal interpretation. We also discuss eigenvector instability which we argue poses a serious problem for the modal interpretation, even in our extended version. Many examples are given to illustrate the mathematics. (shrink)

The COVID-19 crisis has forced a difficult trade-off between limiting the health impacts of the virus and maintaining economic activity. Welfare economics offers tools to conceptualize this trade-off so that policy-makers and the public can see clearly what is at stake. We review four such tools: the Value of Statistical Life (VSL); the Value of Statistical Life Years (VSLYs); Quality-Adjusted Life-Years (QALYs); and social welfare analysis, and argue that the latter are superior. We also discuss how to choose policies that (...) differentially affect people’s wellbeing. We argue in favor of evaluating policies using a Social Welfare Function (SWF), which evaluates the possible distributions of wellbeing across individuals that may result from a policy. Such a function, we argue, should regard increases in the wellbeing of the less well-off as especially valuable. We then use a model to illustrate how such a framework can help evaluate two broad policy types in response to the pandemic: eradication of the virus, and more lenient control of the spread. Our model reveals how such evaluations depend on many empirical facts but also on key value judgments about the relative importance of health and on the extent of special concern for the worse off. The purpose of this brief is not to make precise recommendations, as conditions vary widely across countries and over time, but to provide a methodology. (shrink)

Introduction -- Struggle, compensation, and argument in Cicero's philosophy -- Reading and reception -- Literature, history, and philosophy : the example of De re publica -- History with rhetoric, rhetoric with history : De oratore and De legibus -- History and memory -- Brutus -- Divination, history, and superstition -- Ironic history in the Roman tradition -- Cicero from Enlightenment to idealism -- Conclusions.

The correspondence theory of truth is often thought to be supported by the intuition that if a proposition (sentence, belief) is true, then something makes it true. I argue that this appearance is illusory and is sustained only by a conflation of two distinct notions of truthmaking, existential and non-existential. Once the conflation is exposed, I maintain, deflationism is seen to be adequate for accommodating truthmaking intuitions.

If you do not know the correct answer, guess.Design addresses need, of various types. A designer “designs” to address, to propose a possibility, or to meet a need. A great variety of things are designed: shoes, posters, watches, houses, televisions, keyboards, movies, washing machines, toasters, belts, and cars, to mention only some.A designer, be he or she an architect, interior designer, graphic designer, product designer, or industrial designer, nearly always provides drawings, models, written descriptions, and overarching ideas in response to (...) a need, articulated, stated, by someone. The need might be one that the designer recognizes on his or her own and decides to address, or the need might come to the... (shrink)

Training on the Law of armed conflict employs different rationales to motivate soldiers and to induce their compliance with LOAC rules. Of these, none is as controversial, or as potentially...

They discuss philosophy and methodology, and such topics as the history of evolution and the evolution of history. Paper edition (unseen), $16.95. Annotation c. by Book News, Inc., Portland, Or.

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)

I defend the acceptance principle for testimony (APT), that hearers are justified in accepting testimony unless they have positive evidence against its reliability, against Elizabeth Fricker's local reductionist view. Local reductionism, the doctrine that hearers need evidence that a particular piece of testimony is reliable if they are to be justified in believing it, must on pain of scepticism be complemented by a principle that grants default justification to some testimony; I argue that (APT) is the principle required. I consider (...) two alternative weaker principles as complements to local reductionism; one yields counter-intuitive results unless we accept (APT) as well, while the other is too weak to enable local reductionism to avoid scepticism. (shrink)

Judith Jarvis Thomson famously argued that abortion is permissible even if we accept that a fetus qualifies as a person and possesses a right to life. The current paper presents two arguments that undermine Thomson’s position. First, the paper sketches a contractarian argument that explores Thomson’s violinist thought experiment from behind a veil of ignorance, which suggests that if we had an equal likelihood of being an unwanted fetus and a pregnant woman, it would be rational for us to oppose (...) abortion. Second, the paper discusses the hypothetical self-aborting fetus, a thought experiment that reverses the dependence relationship between a woman and a fetus. It is argued that in this scenario, where fetuses have agency of their own, Thomson’s position would counterintuitively prohibit a woman from temporarily curtailing the freedom of her fetus even to save her own life. (shrink)

This chapter attempts to articulate a novel approach to thinking about urban politics and urban public policy. Building on the observation that all action requires reliance, the chapter argues that elements of the urban environment function as what we call reliance structures. These are the structures that allow agents to realize their intentions as actions. That is, reliance structures are constitutive features of the capacity for action, that is, for agency. The chapter then argues that the urban can be understood (...) as a network of reliance structures. It follows that the urban partially constitutes human agency—agential capacities are partially constituted by urban reliance systems. This is meant to be a substantive diagnostic tool for making sense of the ways that urban public policy can produce and reproduce forms of human agency and, ultimately, the way that the urban partially determines human freedom. (shrink)

The contemporary methodological debate about justice has centered around a dispute about the value of so-called ideal theory. I argue that justice performs a social-guiding function, which explains how people should respond to their limited and fallible abilities to realize justice institutionally. My argument helps to re-orientate the contemporary methodological debate. The obvious disagreement between many prominent supporters and skeptics of ideal theory obscures the fact that they are united by a false assumption: the practical value of justice exclusively consists (...) of its institution-guiding function. To capture the overlooked social-guiding function, a richer normative theory of justice is required; I show how such a theory can be supplied by “ideal-transitional” principles. (shrink)

Matti Eklund has argued that a new problem in metanormative theory arises when we consider the possibility of "normative counterparts"—normative concepts with the same normative roles as OUGHT and RIGHT, but with different extensions. I distinguish two versions of the problem, and propose a solution: when we attend to the attitudinal commitments involved in the possession and application of some normative concepts, we find that tolerance for the possibility of normative counterparts is rationally ruled out.

We are experiencing a historical moment characterized by unprecedented conditions of virality: a viral pandemic, the viral diffusion of misinformation and conspiracy theories, the viral momentum of ongoing Hong Kong protests, and the viral spread of #BlackLivesMatter demonstrations and related efforts to defund policing. These co-articulations of crises, traumas, and virality both implicate and are implicated by big data practices occurring in a present that is pervasively mediated by data materialities, deeply rooted dataist ideologies that entrench processes of datafication as (...) granting objective access to truth and attendant practices of tracking, data analytics, algorithmic prediction, and data-driven targeting of individuals and communities. This collection of papers explores how data is figuring in the making of the discourses, lived realities, and systemic inequalities of the uneven impacts of the coronavirus pandemic. (shrink)

This article brings together two sets of insights about deliberative democracy and uses them to develop a novel epistemic justification for the importance of testimony. Some democratic theorists have argued persuasively that a deliberative process limited to formal argumentation is exclusionary and thus undermines democratic legitimacy; they have made a compelling case for testimony on grounds of democratic inclusion. Others have made the case that deliberation has important epistemic benefits. Those theorists emphasize the give and take of reasons as a (...) means to arrive at well-informed collective decisions. The author’s central claim is that there is an important epistemic value to the inclusion of testimony. It can introduce new information into the deliberative process. It can enable deliberators to grasp connections between the particular and the general. And it can invite them to imaginatively engage with the experiences of others. These epistemic benefits provide a new set of reasons for including testimony in democratic deliberation. (shrink)

The authors' proposal for the evolutionary origins of historical myths does not hold up to scrutiny, as illustrated by a simple mathematical model. Group-level explanations, such as defining the conditions for in-group membership, are dismissed by the authors but are far more plausible, as illustrated by the ongoing war in Ukraine.

I argue that the completeness of physics is composed of two distinct claims. The first is the commonly made claim that, roughly, every physical event is completely causally determined by physical events. The second has rarely, if ever, been explicitly stated in the literature and is the claim that microphysics provides a complete inventory of the fundamental categories that constitute both the causal features and intrinsic nature of all the events that causally affect the physical universe. After showing that these (...) claims are distinct, I argue that they can be used to solve a difficulty with existing responses to the exclusion problem—namely, that these existing responses also undermine the powerful causal argument for physicalism. Recognizing that there are two kinds of completeness opens up room for the nonreductive physicalist to solve the exclusion problem while also endorsing a modified, cogent causal argument for a kind of physicalism compatible with her position. (shrink)