Chapter 1 reconstructs Gadamer's fundamental philosophical task. The task is the problem of certainty, which is the problem of responding in some way or another to reasons that seem to show that we need, but cannot complete, the justificationalist project. Justificationalism is the view that we need a special philosophical of all human knowledge all at once. Chapter 2 argues that Hegel and Heidegger both try to solve the problem of certainty by transforming the realist conception of truth on which (...) it depends. Chapters 3 and 4 argue that Gadamer provides the resources for a different response. By exploiting similarities between Gadamer's account of understanding and externalism in analytic epistemology, I argue that there is a possible position, hermeneutic externalism, which is based on Gadamer's concept of authority. Chapter 5 tries to show how hermeneutic externalism finally provides an answer to the problem of certainty. The conclusion that I would like to draw from the whole of this work is that Gadamer is a realist and an externalist, in the sense that those views represent what he should think. He should embrace externalism and realism because they best represent his genuine insights and they best address the philosophical task as he conceives it. (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...

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)

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)

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)

Standard accounts of the senses attempt to answer the question how and why we count five senses ; none of the standard accounts is satisfactory. Any adequate account of the senses must explain the significance of the senses, that is, why distinguishing different senses matters. I provide such an explanation, and then use it as the basis for providing an account of the senses and answering the counting question.

In “Deception and the Clinical Ethicist,” Christopher Meyers argues that clinical ethicists sometimes ought to actively help deceive patients or their families, all...

What do we expect of those whom we trust? Some argue that when we trust we are confident the trusted will act on moral motivations. But often we trust without appraising the trusted’s moral qualiti...

Television medical dramas frequently depict the practice of medicine and bioethical issues in a strikingly realistic but sometimes inaccurate fashion. Because these shows depict medicine so vividly and are so relevant to the career interests of medical and nursing students, they may affect these students' beliefs, attitudes, and perceptions regarding the practice of medicine and bioethical issues. We conducted a web-based survey of medical and nursing students to determine the medical drama viewing habits and impressions of bioethical issues depicted in (...) them. More than 80% of medical and nursing students watch television medical dramas. Students with more clinical experience tended to have impressions that were more negative than those of students without clinical experience. Furthermore, viewing of television medical dramas is a social event and many students discuss the bioethical issues they observe with friends and family. Television medical dramas may stimulate students to think about and discuss bioethical issues. (shrink)

We defend a scalar theory of the relationship between material scarcity and justice. As scarcity increases beyond a specified threshold, we argue that deontological egalitarian constraints should be gradually relaxed and consequentialist considerations should increasingly determine distributions. We construct this theory by taking a bottom-up approach that is guided by principles of medical triage. Armed with this theory, we consider the range of conditions under which justice applies. We argue that there are compelling reasons for thinking that justice applies under (...) a far broader range of conditions than is standardly supposed, including those that could sensibly be labelled as conditions of extreme rather than moderate scarcity. (shrink)

When decisionally incapable patients need a surrogate to make medical decisions for them, sometimes the patient has not appointed a healthcare agent and there is intractable disagreement among potential surrogates of equal priority, legal rank, or relation to the patient (e.g., child vs. child, sibling vs. sibling). There is no ethical, legal, or professional consensus about how to identify the appropriate surrogate in such circumstances. This article presents a case study involving an elderly female patient whose four children disagree about (...) whether to continue life-sustaining treatment for their mother, along with an ethical analysis of various strategies for selecting the appropriate surrogate in cases of conflicting equal-rank family members. It critically examines three different strategies—chance, majority rules, and quality of relationship with the patient—and defends the third approach. (shrink)

In both cognitive science and philosophy, many theorists have recently appealed to a predictive processing framework to offer explanations of why certain individuals form delusional beliefs. One aim of this essay will be to illustrate how one could plausibly develop a predictive processing account in different ways to account for the onset of different kinds of delusions. However, the second aim of this essay will be to discuss two significant limitations of the predictive processing framework. First, I shall draw on (...) the structure of explanatory why-questions to argue that predictive processing theories can only partially explain the formation of delusional beliefs. Second, I shall argue that predictive processing theories cannot explain how implausible delusional hypotheses are generated. Yet understanding why an agent even generates a delusional hypothesis is a crucial step to understanding why she eventually comes to believe it. The final section of the essay presents three alternative ways the process of hypothesis generation might be functionally divergent in cases of delusional cognition. (shrink)

Prioritarianism is an ethical theory that gives extra weight to the well-being of the worse off. In contrast, dominant policy-evaluation methodologies, such as benefit-cost analysis, cost-effectiveness analysis, and utilitarianism, ignore or downplay issues of fair distribution. Based on a research group founded by the editors, this important book is the first to show how prioritarianism can be used to assess governmental policies and evaluate societal conditions. This book uses prioritarianism as a methodology to evaluate governmental policy across a variety of (...) policy domains: taxation, health policy, risk regulation, education, climate policy, and the COVID-19 pandemic. It is also the first to demonstrate how prioritarianism improves on GDP as an indicator of a society's progress over time. Edited by two senior figures in the field with contributions from some of the world's leading economists, this volume bridges the gap from the theory of prioritarianism to its practical application. (shrink)

Examines how philosophical concepts like free will, personal identity, and goodness are given an artistic life in films and television programs.

In this paper, recent publications in the field of psychiatric nosology, classification, and diagnosis are reviewed. An attempt is made to group such writings into three broad themes: "essentialist/realist," "anti-essentialist/pragmatic," and "eliminative." The conceptual nature of these groupings is explored, and similarities between some elements of biological psychiatry and phenomenological psychiatry are outlined. The paper attempts to undercut current ways of thinking about psychiatric disorders by drawing on John McDowell's criticism of the idea of a value-free objective standpoint, and further (...) relates our difficulties in thinking about mental disorders to McDowell's wider diagnosis of problems in contemporary philosophy. (shrink)

Acts of interpersonal moral address depend upon a shared space of social visibility in which human beings can both display themselves and perceive others as morally important. This raises questions that have gone largely undiscussed in recent philosophical work on moral address. How does the social mediation of interpersonal perception by forces such as ideology shape and limit the possibilities for moral address? And how might creative acts of putting oneself on display make possible unanticipated forms of moral address, especially (...) under ideological conditions? In this paper, I propose that we can make progress towards answering such questions by treating moral address as a fundamentally aesthetic phenomenon. I begin by drawing examples from literature that invite the idea that humans and animals possess ethically value-laden features that are open to empirical view, and argue that approaches to moral address that do not avail themselves of this idea face serious limits, focusing on Stephen Darwall’s The Second-Person Standpoint. I then illustrate the role of the aesthetic in moral address by offering a reading of the “Capitol Crawl,” a 1990 direct action in which people with disabilities left behind assistive devices in order to ascend the stairs leading to the US Capitol. Drawing from some ideas in Iris Murdoch, I argue that the aesthetically striking features of this collective act of moral address are inseparable from the moral demands it expresses, and that, read as an aesthetic whole, its morally expressive power extends beyond the discursive while nevertheless remaining a part of the space of reasons. (shrink)

The aim in this paper is to focus on one of the proposals about successful perception that has led its adherents to advance some kind of disjunctive account of experience. The proposal is that we should understand the conscious sensory experience involved in successful perception in relational terms. I first try to clarify what the commitments of the view are, and where disagreements with competing views may lie. I then suggest that there are considerations relating to the conscious character of (...) our perception of events that speak in its favour. (shrink)

The breaking of bad news in a hospital setting, particularly to patients in a terminal condition, highlights some complex and often emotive ethical issues for nurses. One theory that examines the way in which individuals react to bad news such as a terminal illness, is the theory of awareness contexts. However, this theory may be limited by failing to recognize the complexity of the situation and the ethical issues involved for nurses caring for terminally ill patients. Furthermore, contexts of awareness (...) are influenced to a much greater extent by relationships with nurses than simply by the delivery of medical information. Even when information is given to the client and the family, the nurse is involved in helping them to know the meaning of this information. In a hospital, the nurse is faced with emotional demands by clients, families and colleagues, complex issues of advocacy, and professional boundaries and responsibilities. It is the author’s wish to examine the reality of clinical practice for nurses, thus further extending the theory of awareness contexts. (shrink)

The ideal of objectivity is in crisis in science and the law, and yet it continues to do important work in both practices. This article describes that crisis and develops a shared rescue strategy for objectivity in both domains. In a recent article, Inkeri Koskinen attempts to bring unity to the fragmented discourse on objectivity in the philosophy of science with a risk account of objectivity. To put it simply, she argues that we call practitioners, processes, and products of science (...) objective when they identify and manage certain important epistemic risks. We endorse this view and attempt to tailor Koskinen's strategy to the problem of objectivity in the legal context. To do so, we develop a novel notion of phronetic risk, and argue that we call practitioners, processes, and products of law objective when they identify and manage certain important epistemic and/or phronetic risks. Our attempt to rescue objectivity is especially important for work at the intersection of law and psychiatry. For that intersection represents a place where skeptical worries about objectivity in science and law work in tandem to pose serious critical challenges to contemporary practice; and our rescue strategy represents a promising way to negotiate those challenges. (shrink)

Brings together and interprets previously hard-to-find texts, new translations and passages detailing the interplay between philosophy and psychopathology.

This entry surveys main accounts of collective intentions.

In recent decades, scholars of Buddhist philosophy have frequently treated the Trisvabhāvanirdeśa, or “Teaching of the Three Natures,” attributed to Vasubandhu, as an authentic and authoritative representation of that celebrated thinker’s mature work within the Yogācāra tradition. However, serious questions may be posed concerning the status and authority of the TSN within Yogācāra, its true authorship, and the relation of its contents to trends in early Yogācāra thought. In the present article, we review the actual state of our knowledge of (...) the TSN’s possible origins, considering, too, the implications this may have for contemporary treatments thereof. (shrink)

Some philosophers argue that we are justified in rejecting skepticism because it is explanatorily inferior to more commonsense hypotheses about the world. Focusing on the work of Jonathan Vogel, I show that this “abductivist” or “inference to the best explanation” response rests on an impoverished explanatory framework which ignores the explanatory gap between an object's having certain properties and its appearing to have those properties. Once this gap is appreciated, I argue, the abductivist strategy is defeated.

How come quantum theory has anything to do with mind? Is your theory refutable? What is the point of all the technical detail? Do you suggest that the operation of the brain involves large scale quantum coherence? Isn't large scale quantum coherence necessary to solve the problem of the unity of consciousness? How does a many-minds interpretation survive Occam's razor? What, briefly, is your current philosophical position? What is your understanding of the relationship between mind and brain for split-brain patients? (...) Do you believe that the mind can survive the death of the brain? No journal reference is given for several of the recent papers on your home page. Where will these papers be printed? How are the “source” and “pdf” versions of the papers on your home page produced and viewed? Why does the page with your photograph behave oddly in some browsers? Where can I find an elementary introduction to the interpretation of quantum theory? Doesn't decoherence theory solve all the problems of the interpretation of quantum theory? How do the ambiguities of decoherence affect the many-worlds interpretation? Could you expand on your answers to the two previous questions? Why isn't the conventional interpretation of quantum theory adequate? What about the Bohm interpretation? What about consistent histories? Does the present many-minds interpretation solve all the problems? (shrink)

Lewisian theism is the view that both traditional theism and Lewis’s modal realism are true. On Lewisian theism, God must exist in worlds in one of the following ways: God can be said to have a counterpart in each world; God can be said to exist in each world in the way that a universal can be said to exist in worlds, i.e. through transworld identity; God can be said to be a scattered individual, with a part of God existing (...) in each world; and, God can be said to exist in each world, through His existing from the standpoint of each world. In the literature, – have been rejected as viable options. I grant that and are not viable. However, I believe that and have been too hastily rejected. Herein, I develop ways to respond to objections to and, and conclude that is a viable option for Lewisian theists. (shrink)

People who believe they have greater efficacy to address climate change are more likely to engage in pro-environmental behaviour. To confront the climate crisis, it will therefore be essential to understand the processes through which climate change efficacy is promoted. Some interventions in the literature assume that efficacy emerges from analytic reasoning processes: that it is deliberative, verbal, conscious, and influenced by information and education. In the current paper, we critique this notion. We review evidence showing that climate change efficacy (...) perceptions are (a) associated with climate-related distress and threat, (b) prescribed by social norms, (c) associated with social desirability and identity-expressive concerns, (d) surprisingly difficult to change through explicit, verbal instruction, but (e) responsive to imagery. We conclude by examining applied implications of these five propositions and discuss why non-analytic processes might (ironically) be beneficial for sustaining green activism. (shrink)

Al-Ghazālī on Condemnation of Pride and Self-Admiration : Book XXIX of the Revival of the Religious Sciences. Translated by Mohammed Rustom. Cambridge: The Islamic Texts Society, 2018. Pp. xxxvi + 190. £17.99.