During the past several decades, political philosophers have frequently clashed with one another over the question whether governments are morally required to remain neutral among reasonable conceptions of excellence and human flourishing. Whereas the numerous followers of John Rawls have maintained that a requirement of neutrality is indeed incumbent on every system of governance, other philosophers -- often designated as 'perfectionists' -- have argued against the existence of such a requirement. Liberalism with Excellence enters these debates not by plighting itself (...) unequivocally to one side or the other, but instead by reconceiving each of the sides and thus by redirecting the debates that have occurred between them. On the one hand, the book rejects the requirement of neutrality by contending that certain subsidies for the promotion of excellence in sundry areas of human endeavour can be proper and vital uses of resources by governments. Advocating such departures from the constraint of neutrality, the book presents a version of liberalism that can rightly be classified as 'perfectionist'. On the other hand, the species of perfectionism espoused in Liberalism with Excellence diverges markedly from the theories that have usually been so classified. Indeed, much of the book assails various aspects of those theories. What is more, the aspirational perfectionism elaborated in the closing chapters of the volume is reconcilable in most key respects with a suitably amplified version of Rawlsianism. Hence, by reconceiving both the perfectionist side and the neutralist side of the prevailing disputation, Liberalism with Excellence combines and transforms their respective insights. (shrink)

"This book argues for a mixed view of punishment that balances consequentialism and retributivism. He has published extensively on philosophy and applied ethics. A central question in the philosophy of law is why the state's punishment of its own citizens is justified. Traditionally, two theories of punishment have dominated the field: consequentialism and retributivism. According to consequentialism, punishment is justified when it maximizes positive outcomes. According to retributivism, criminals should be punished because they deserve it. This book defends a mixed (...) view that recognizes the strength of both of these intuitions. By this account, the legislature should develop institutional policies and statutory penalties that maintain the social order, that is, consequentialism. It establishes punishment policies to deter criminal activity. By contrast, the criminal judiciary should give individual defendants what they deserve, that is, retributivism and thus expressing the community's appropriate sense of resentment at being wronged. The book justifies the two-tiered model by showing how it accords with our moral intuitions, our assumptions about how what we know affects our moral obligations, and a commonly held theory of freedom. This approach is developed by engaging classic and contemporary work in the philosophy of law, and shows its advantages over competing approaches from contemporary retributivists and other mixed theorists. The work also defends consequentialism against a longstanding objection that the social sciences give us little guidance regarding which policies to adopt. It draws on cutting-edge criminological research to show how punishment theory can help us to address some of our most pressing social issues, including the death penalty, drug laws, and mass incarceration. The book will also be of interest to legal philosophers, social scientists, especially criminologists, sociologists, economists, and political scientists"--. (shrink)

Why does art matter to us, and what makes it good? Why is the role of imagination so important in art? Illustrated with carefully chosen colour and black-and-white plates of examples from Michaelangelo to Matisse and Poussin to Pollock, _Revealing Art_ takes us on a compelling and provocative journey. Kieran explores some of the most important questions we can ask ourselves about art: how can art inspire us or disgust us? Is artistic judgement simply a matter of taste? Can art (...) be immoral or obscene, and should it be censored? He brings such abstract issues to life with fascinating discussions of individual paintings, photographs and sculptures, such as Michelangelo's _Pieta_, Andres Serrano's _Piss Christ_ and Francis Bacon's powerful paintings of the Pope. He also suggests some answers to problems that any one in an art gallery or museum is likely to ask themselves: what is a beautiful work of art? and can art really reveal something true about our own nature? _Revealing Art _is ideal for anyone interested in debates about art today, or who has simply stood in front of a painting and felt baffled. (shrink)

In this paper, I draw on postphenomenology and material engagement theory to consider the material and emergent character of sociality in Homo faber. I approach this through the context of the bow and arrow, which is a technology that has received recent attention in cognitive archeology as a proxy for assessing criteria that made early human cognition distinct from that of other hominins. Through an ethnographic case study, I scrutinize the forms of knowledge that are required to use the technology (...) in the dynamic field of environmental practices that constitute the hunt. I demonstrate that the learning of the skill is a transformational process where beginners develop self and intentionality by attuning subjective capacities for sensory awareness and creative responsiveness. Through mutual participation, the bow and arrow aligns disposition and rapport among those whose life processes are shaped by the skill. As a mechanism of shared experience, the bow and arrow generates a community can together perceive and act creatively in an impermanent world. Through these observations, I argue that early human sociality was built not on a pre-evolved capacity for symbolic representation but on technical experience, and I consider important questions this raises about the nature of evolutionary processes at work in the development of communities through time. (shrink)

The primary aim of this paper is to analyze the concept of degrees of causal contribution for actual events and examine the way in which it can be formally defined. This should go some way to filling out a gap in the legal and philosophical literature on causation. By adopting the conception of a cause as a necessary element of a sufficient set (the so-called NESS test) we show that the concept of degrees of causation can be given clear and (...) even empirical meaning. We then apply a game theoretical framework to derive a measure of causal contribution. Our favoured measure turns out to be a generalised version of the normalized Penrose–Banzhaf index of voting power. (shrink)

This volume addresses the question of what it is like to be depressed. Despite the vast amount of research that has been conducted into the causes and treatment of depression, the experience of depression remains poorly understood. Indeed, many depression memoirs state that the experience is impossible for others to understand. However, it is at least clear that changes in emotion, mood, and bodily feeling are central to all forms of depression, and these are the book's principal focus. In recent (...) years, there has been a great deal of valuable philosophical and interdisciplinary research on the emotions, complemented by new developments in philosophy of psychiatry and scientifically-informed phenomenology. The book draws on all these areas, in order to offer a range of novel insights into the nature of depression experiences. To do so, it brings together a distinguished group of philosophers, psychiatrists, anthropologists, clinical psychologists and neuroscientists, all of whom have made important contributions to current research on emotion and/or psychiatric illness. (shrink)

Counterfactual thinking involves imagining hypothetical alternatives to reality. Philosopher David Lewis argued that people estimate the subjective plausibility that a counterfactual event might have occurred by comparing an imagined possible world in which the counterfactual statement is true against the current, actual world in which the counterfactual statement is false. Accordingly, counterfactuals considered to be true in possible worlds comparatively more similar to ours are judged as more plausible than counterfactuals deemed true in possible worlds comparatively less similar. Although Lewis (...) did not originally develop his notion of comparative similarity to be investigated as a psychological construct, this study builds upon his idea to empirically investigate comparative similarity as a possible psychological strategy for evaluating the perceived plausibility of counterfactual events. More specifically, we evaluate judgments of comparative similarity between episodic memories and episodic counterfactual events as a factor influencing people's judgments of plausibility in counterfactual simulations, and we also compare it against other factors thought to influence judgments of counterfactual plausibility, such as ease of simulation and prior simulation. Our results suggest that the greater the perceived similarity between the original memory and the episodic counterfactual event, the greater the perceived plausibility that the counterfactual event might have occurred. While similarity between actual and counterfactual events, ease of imagining, and prior simulation of the counterfactual event were all significantly related to counterfactual plausibility, comparative similarity best captured the variance in ratings of counterfactual plausibility. Implications for existing theories on the determinants of counterfactual plausibility are discussed. (shrink)

This paper addresses the following questions: what account should be given of the state of wakeful consciousness, and what explanatory roles should be assigned to that state? Those questions are taken up after some discussion of the related but distinct question of what it is to be awake. On the view proposed here, in seeking to provide an account of the state of wakeful consciousness one should be aiming to provide an account of a point of view that is associated (...) with the distinctive form of awareness to which one surfaces when one wakes up. Our specification of that point of view should appeal to the awake subject’s temporal point of view, and the epistemic orientation and agential perspective it embodies. The explanatory roles that can be assigned to the state of wakeful consciousness are the explanatory roles that can be assigned to that point of view. (shrink)

In this book Nicholas Wolterstorff, a well-known proponent of “Reformed epistemology,” sets out to investigate the modern origins of the evidentialist and foundationalist tradition that he opposes. He locates these origins in book 4 of Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding. Wolterstorff tells us that he had to overcome strong prejudices in writing the book, for “in the philosophical world I inhabit, Locke has the reputation of being boringly chatty and philosophically careless”. He suggests that the earlier parts of the Essay (...) deserve that reputation, but says that while reading book 4 he felt himself to be “present at the making of the modern mind”. To Wolterstorff’s credit, he seems to have vanquished some of his prejudices, for this book offers careful and charitable readings of many important strands in Locke’s epistemology. (shrink)

I argue that Kroedel's 'Simple Argument' for downward causation fails and that this failure has consequences for any attempt to establish the reality of downward causation by appealing to counterfactual theories thereof. A central premise in Kroedel's argument equivocates. On one reading, it is true but renders the argument invalid; on another, it renders the argument valid but is likely false. I dedicate most of my efforts to establishing the second of these two claims. I show that the purported physical (...) effects of mental properties do not counterfactually depend upon the total realizers of these properties. If counterfactual dependence is necessary for causation, it follows that mental properties are not causes. If counterfactual dependence is merely sufficient for causation, it follows that no appeal to counterfactuals will by itself succeed in showing that mental properties are causes. (shrink)

This collection of 28 original essays examines the diverse scope of John Locke’s contributions as a celebrated philosopher, empiricist, and father of modern political theory. Explores the impact of Locke’s thought and writing across a range of fields including epistemology, metaphysics, philosophy of science, political theory, education, religion, and economics Delves into the most important Lockean topics, such as innate ideas, perception, natural kinds, free will, natural rights, religious toleration, and political liberalism Identifies the political, philosophical, and religious contexts in (...) which Locke’s views developed, with perspectives from today’s leading philosophers and scholars Offers an unprecedented reference of Locke’s contributions and his continued influence. (shrink)

This paper builds upon, but substantially revises, John Harsanyi's concept of ‘extended preferences’. An individual ‘history’ is a possible life that some person (a subject) might lead. Harsanyi supposes that a given spectator, formulating her ethical preferences, can rank histories by empathetic projection: putting herself ‘in the shoes’ of various subjects. Harsanyi then suggests that interpersonal comparisons be derived from the utility function representing spectators’ (supposedly common) ranking of history lotteries. Unfortunately, Harsanyi's proposal has various flaws, including some that have (...) hitherto escaped scholarly attention. In particular, it ignores the limits of personal identity. If the subject has welfare-relevant attributes that the spectator cannot acquire without changing who she is, full empathetic identification of the latter with the former becomes impossible. This paper proposes instead to usesympathyas the attitude on a spectator's part that allows us to make sense of her extended preferences. Sympathy – an attitude of care and concern – is a psychological state quite different from empathy. We should also allow for hetereogeneity in spectators’ extended preferences. Interpersonal comparisons emerge from a plurality of sympathetic spectators, not (as per Harsanyi) from a common empathetic ranking. (shrink)

As philosophers we should have as one of our aims to produce as much philosophical knowledge as possible. A lot of potential philosophical knowledge is lost because of the flaws of the peer review system, and so a lot of philosophical knowledge would be gained were the system improved. Accordingly, as authors we should write papers about how to fix peer review, and as editors we should accept such papers if they are good. This paper presents some familiar problems with (...) peer review, elaborates on and motivates the argument just given, and replies to some objections to it, making the case that fixing peer review is both a philosophical problem and one that admits of a solution. (shrink)

Businesses frequently exclude spiritual values, viewing such values as impositions that belong in business as much as a priest belongs at a bachelor party. Yet spirituality should not be viewed as impositions from without, but as inclusions from within. Spiritual values should be included in a company to the extent that these values are shared by the principals of a firm. Excluding spiritual values found in a “convergent consensus” runs contrary to freedom and liberty that Milton Friedman, among others, champions. (...) Furthermore, the exclusion of such values from a business threatens to alienate business persons from their moral integrity. By cultivating what I will call “the spiritual imagination,” businesses can facilitate fidelity between the convergent values of its principals, and the actions, policies, and culture of a company. (shrink)

Climate change poses a significant danger that requires intervention today; climate denial poses a key challenge to meaningful timely intervention. In this paper, we argue that current free speech jurisprudence in the US inadequately addresses the risk of climate change because it is overly permissive of ‘professional’ climate denial and underappreciates the need to address the future harm of climate change today. We begin by clarifying the risk posed by the Supreme Court's current approach to speech with respect to climate (...) change and, relatedly, reviewing the philosophical foundations of the marketplace of ideas found in the work of John Stuart Mill. Following this, we examine three potential ways in which Supreme Court jurisprudence could be used to limit what we term ‘professional climate change denial’ while permitting a degree of ‘private’ scepticism. Largely setting aside the return to earlier free speech jurisprudence and the extension of libel law, we offer a novel solution to the problem that suggests that ‘professional’ climate denial could be treated as a categorical exception under free speech jurisprudence and thus afforded a lower level of constitutional protection than other expression. (shrink)

Crises of forced migration are, unfortunately, nothing new. At the time of the writing of this paper, at least two such crises were in full swing – mass movements from the Middle East and parts of Africa to the E.U., and major movements from Central America to the Southern U.S. border, including movements by large numbers of families and unaccompanied minors. These movements are complex, with multiple causes, and it is always risky to attempt to craft either general policy or (...) philosophical positions in response to salient crises. However, both of these instances do bring to the foreground important questions about the proper purpose and extent of refugee protection as a means of dealing with crises of forced migration. In particular, both of these instances force us to consider what role persecution on the basis of a protected ground – race, religion, nationality, membership in a particular social group, or political opinion – ought to play in granting refugee protection, and whether our response to those in danger should change if the agents of persecution are non-state actors. This paper is not primarily about the problems arising from Syria or Central America. In a way similar to how hard cases make bad law, I contend that a too central focus on salient crises tends to lead to bad theory and often to bad general policy. However, if I am successful in my goal of clarifying the place of persecution and non-state action in refugee protection, then we may in turn be better able to think clearly about our current crisis situations. -/- In this paper I will first draw on my previous work on the normative logic of the refugee convention to argue that, while persecution should play an important, and even central, role in our thinking about refugees, this importance is shallow and pragmatic rather than deep and fundamental. Next, I will show how this conclusion supports the claim that harms amounting to persecution by non-state actors may ground an asylum claim, at least in some cases, both when the state is unwilling and when it is unable to protect its members. I consider two cases: first, instances where the authority and power of the state has been usurped by another power, and second, when the state has (implicitly or explicitly) delegated its power or authority to non-state actors. I will show how this leads to extending asylum to a broader range of people than traditional accounts would. -/- (To download this paper, please use the link from SSRN below.). (shrink)

The spacing effect is among the most widely replicated empirical phenomena in the learning sciences, and its relevance to education and training is readily apparent. Yet successful applications of spacing effect research to education and training is rare. Computational modeling can provide the crucial link between a century of accumulated experimental data on the spacing effect and the emerging interest in using that research to enable adaptive instruction. In this paper, we review relevant literature and identify 10 criteria for rigorously (...) evaluating computational models of the spacing effect. Five relate to evaluating the theoretic adequacy of a model, and five relate to evaluating its application potential. We use these criteria to evaluate a novel computational model of the spacing effect called the Predictive Performance Equation. Predictive Performance Equation combines elements of earlier models of learning and memory including the General Performance Equation, Adaptive Control of Thought—Rational, and the New Theory of Disuse, giving rise to a novel computational account of the spacing effect that performs favorably across the complete sets of theoretic and applied criteria. We implemented two other previously published computational models of the spacing effect and compare them to PPE using the theoretic and applied criteria as guides. (shrink)

The jumping off point for this paper is a metaphysical puzzle for this view and for any relational theory of autonomy. Most of the time, our relationships with others are reciprocal in the sense that they involve activity and passivity, acting on others and being acted on by them. Consequently, claiming that our relationships with others are constitutive of our autonomy implies that being passively affected is also constitutive of our autonomy. But this seems problematic, perhaps even contradictory, because autonomy (...) is equivalent to self-determination, which is a kind of activity: how can being passively affected be constitutive of our self-determination and activity? In Spinoza, the difficulty arises in his theory of striving. Spinoza’s view that relationships are constitutive of our freedom and autonomy implies that our relationships—and being passively affected in these relationships—are constitutive of our striving, in which our freedom and autonomy consist. But how can passivity be constitutive of our striving, which is a kind of activity? -/- To resolve the apparent paradox, I look to the Aristotelian notion that the natures of things make them subject or susceptible to undergoing certain kinds of change. For instance, water, because of its nature, is susceptible to boiling, rather than burning. This implies that a passive or exogenous change—for instance, fire causing the water to boil—is brought about partly from the nature and activity of the patient: the water is active in the sense of determining it to boil, rather than burn. This way of thinking implies that changes arise cooperatively from both internal and external sources, which eliminates the apparent contradiction in claiming that change can be both active and passive. The paper shows that Spinoza’s theory of striving shares the gist of this Aristotelian commitment by claiming that our nature is active in determining us to certain effects, even when the effects originate externally. Consequently, like Aristotle, Spinoza does not see passivity and activity as mutually exclusive, which eliminates the apparent paradox. The paper concludes by considering how this more Aristotelian conception of activity is amenable to relational theories of autonomy. (shrink)

Recent philosophical discussions of intersubjectivity generally start by stating or assuming that our ability to understand and interact with others is enabled by a ‘folk psychology’ or ‘theory of mind’. Folk psychology is characterized as the ability to attribute intentional states, such as beliefs and desires, to others, in order to predict and explain their behaviour. Many authors claim that this ability is not merely one amongst many constituents of interpersonal understanding but an underlying core that enables social life. For (...) example, Churchland states that folk psychology ‘embodies our baseline understanding’ of others. Currie and Sterelny similarly assert that ‘our basic grip on the social world depends on our being able to see our fellows as motivated by beliefs and desires we sometimes share and sometimes do not’. And, as Frith and Happé put it, ‘this ability appears to be a prerequisite for normal social interaction: in everyday life we make sense of each other’s behaviour by appeal to a belief-desire psychology’. (shrink)

Funding agencies and large public scientific institutions are increasingly using the term “research portfolio” as a means of characterizing their research. While portfolios have long been used as a heuristic for managing corporate R&D, they remain ill-defined in a science policy context where research is aimed at achieving societal outcomes. In this article we analyze the discursive uses of the term “research portfolio” and propose some general considerations for their application in science policy. We explore the use of the term (...) in private R&D and related scholarly literature in existing science policy practices, and seek insight in relevant literature in science policy scholarship. While the financial analogy can in some instances be instructive, a simple transposition from the world of finance or of corporate R&D to public research is problematic. However, we do identify potentially fruitful uses of portfolio analysis in science policy. In particular, our review suggests that the concept of research portfolio can indeed be a useful analytical instrument for tackling complex societal challenges. Specifically, the strands of scholarship identified suggest that the use of research portfolio should: i) recognize the diversity of research lines relevant for a given societal challenge, given the uncertainty and ambiguity of research outcomes; ii) examine the relationships between research options of a portfolio and the expected societal outcomes; and iii) adopt a systemic perspective to research portfolios – i.e. examine a portfolio as a functional whole, rather than as the sum of its parts. We argue that with these considerations, portfolio-driven approaches may foster social inclusion in science policy decisions, help deliberation between “alternative” portfolios to tackle complex societal challenges, as well as promote cost-effectiveness and transparency. (shrink)

:Preference-aggregation problems arise in various contexts. One such context, little explored by social choice theorists, is metaethical. ‘Ideal-advisor’ accounts, which have played a major role in metaethics, propose that moral facts are constituted by the idealized preferences of a community of advisors. Such accounts give rise to a preference-aggregation problem: namely, aggregating the advisors’ moral preferences. Do we have reason to believe that the advisors, albeit idealized, can still diverge in their rankings of a given set of alternatives? If so, (...) what are the moral facts when the advisors do diverge? These questions are investigated here using the tools of Arrovian social choice theory. (shrink)

Athenian democracy is rightly recognized for its extensive network of accountability institutions. This essay focuses instead on popular unaccountability in democratic Athens: ordinary citizens participating but not speaking in the Courts and the Assembly were unaccountable. I explore possible justifications of popular unaccountability, including arguments from democratic sovereignty and epistemic arguments, and stress the importance of a third strand: the identification of jurors and assemblymen with deservedly unaccountable, because comparatively weak and powerless, idiōtai (private citizens), whose political activity failed to (...) reach a level requiring intense scrutiny and control. Nonetheless, such a justification was always tenuous in light of the power jurors and assemblymen collectively wielded in the city. As I show through a reading of Aristophanes’s Wasps, it was always possible to destabilize the juror idiōtēs identity and replace it with a much more troubling image: the identification of the juror with the dangerously unaccountable tyrant. (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)

The border is an area where the rule of law has often found difficulty taking root, existing as law-free zones characterized by largely unbounded legal and administrative discretion. In his important new book, The Rule of Law in the Real World, Paul Gowder deftly combines historical examples, formal models, legal analysis, and philosophical theory to provide a novel and compelling account of the rule of law. In this paper I consider whether the account Gowder offers can provide the tools needed (...) to bring the border under the rule of law. I argue that on Gowder’s account, there are two ways in which we might try to extend the rule of law to the border.The first is to look at concrete connections that current citizens or members of the political community have with non-citizens. Just as the interests of current citizens give them strong reasons to coordinate to establish the rule of law in their own community, so may the interests of current members in connections with nonmembers give them reason to work to extend the rule of law to the border. These interests can include family ties, other forms of personal relationships, offers of employment, intellectual connections, and others. Some of these connections already serve to give greater legal protections, including protections from arbitrary decision-making, to some non-citizens, and the general trend, I argue, can and should be further strengthened The second method for extending the rule of law to the border involves appealing to certain universal norms so as to build a sense of community that stretches beyond borders. While these norms are not as robust or well established as domestic law, and therefore are unlikely to extend all of the protections of the rule of law to all people at the border, they can, I argues, be a basis for working against the worst arbitrary actions by border officials. I conclude by considering the vexed dispute about providing “amnesty” for unauthorized immigrants in the United States and other countries. I argues that Gowder’s account of the amnesty provided to supporters of the oligarchic coups in ancient Athens provides a model for thinking about when and how amnesties for unauthorized migrants can be done without offending the rule of law, thereby making them more palatable to current citizens. (Please download this paper for free from SSRN on the link provided on this page). (shrink)

This article addresses the issue of professionalization in the life sciences during the second half of the nineteenth century through a survey of British entomological periodicals. It is generally accepted that this period saw the rise of professional practitioners and the emergence of biology (as opposed to the older mode of natural history). However, recent scholarship has increasingly shown that this narrative elides the more complex processes at work in shaping scientific communities from the 1850s to the turn of the (...) century. This article adds to such scholarship by examining the ways in which the editors of four entomological periodicals from across this time frame attempted to shape the communities of their readership, and in particular focuses upon the apparent divide between ‘mere collectors’ and ‘entomologists’ as expressed within these journals. Crucially, the article argues that non-professional practitioners were active in defining their own distinct identities and thereby claiming scientific authority. Alongside the periodicals, the article makes use of the correspondence archive of the entomologist and periodical editor Henry Tibbats Stainton (1822–1892), which has hitherto not been subject to sustained analysis by historians. (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)

Arguments figure prominently in our practices of reason-giving. For example, we use them to advance reasons for their conclusions in order to justify believing something, to explain why we believe something, and to persuade others to believe something. Intuitively, using arguments in these ways requires a certain degree of self-reflection. In this paper, I ask: what cognitive requirements are there for using an argument to advance reasons for its conclusion? Towards a partial response, the paper’s central thesis is that in (...) order to so use an argument one must believe the associated inference claim to the effect that the premises collectively are reasons that support the conclusion. I then argue against making it a further cognitive requirement that one be aware of one’s justification for believing such an inference claim. This thesis provides a rationale for the typical informal-logic textbook characterization of argument and motivates a constraint on adequate accounts of what are referred to as inference claims in the informal logic and argumentation literatures. (shrink)

In this chapter, Altman gives two separate arguments that, in conjunction, support a mixed theory of punishment. First, he shows that consequentialism is insufficient on its own because it cannot capture the condemnatory function of the law as an expression of the community’s resentment. Second, he shows that retributivism is insufficient on its own because any plausible legal arrangement must be committed to some non-retributivist values. He then argues that the institution of punishment is justified by its costs and benefits, (...) and the distribution of punishment—who is punished and how much—is justified by what offenders deserve. This two-tiered model of punishment makes more sense than an alternative scheme, according to which retributivist reasoning informs criminal lawmaking and consequentialist reasoning informs criminal judgments and sentencing. (shrink)

As face shields are dusted off and conferences go virtual again, Omicron reminds us how the once-novel coronavirus ruptured our collective idea of medical training. For nearly 2 years, social media...

ABSTRACTThis paper looks at the state of the literature surrounding Heidegger and Nazism today. Part 1 focusses on Hassan Givsan’s remarkable work, Une histoire consternante: pourquoi les philosophes se laissent corrompre par le “cas Heidegger”, which looks at the different, mutually inconsistent forms of “apologetics” denying that Heidegger had been a Nazi, or that this commitment could have been shaped by his philosophy. Part 2 looks at five themes that emerge from the 2014 French-language collection Heidegger, le sol, la communauté, (...) la race, edited by Emmanuel Faye: Heidegger’s anti-semitism, before and in the Black Notebooks; Sein und Zeit and “the political”; Heidegger and his estate’s post-war “rewriting” of his Nazi-era texts; Heidegger’s esotericism; and his intellectual proximities to other Nazi thinkers. Closing reflections touch on the state of the debate, calling for increased scholarly awareness of the evidence, and debate of its significance. (shrink)

Although many organizations around the world have engaged in corporate social responsibility programing, there is little evidence of social impact. This is a problematic omission since many programs carry the stigma of marketing ploys used to bolster organizational image or reduce consumer skepticism. To address this issue and build on existing scholarship, the purpose of this study was to evaluate a socially responsible youth employability program in the United Kingdom. The program was developed through the foundation of a professional British (...) soccer team to bolster employability and life skills for marginalized London youth. Program funding was provided by a large multinational bank as part of their CSR agenda. This evaluation was undertaken to understand the beneficiary impacts associated with program deployment. Results from the pre-intervention/post-intervention, sequential mixed-method evaluation show statistically significant differences among several “soft” beneficiary outcomes. However, results are mixed regarding whether the “hard” outcome of employment was achieved by program participants. Qualitative findings buttress these results, indicating a high level of motivation for work, attitude enhancement, and satisfaction with program delivery. (shrink)

This commentary provides a legal analysis of the extent to which changes proposed by scholars to promote care for substance use disorder or other under-treated illnesses through risk adjustment could be implemented administratively, without legislation, in federal risk adjustment systems: Medicare's privatized component, Medicare's pharmaceutical component, and the individual and small group market. As the article explains, federal laws governing risk adjustment provide broad discretion to regulators and can reasonably be interpreted to permit full and final implementation through the administrative (...) process of almost all of the changes that scholars have proposed. (shrink)

False beliefs and delusions are usually regarded negatively, especially in psychology and evolutionary biology. Recently, McKay and Dennett have argued that there are ungrounded beliefs which confer benefits on individuals even if they are false. I propose to expand this class of beliefs to include the belief that one has free will, and I will defend the claim that this belief is advantageous, even if it is false. One derives one’s belief in control from one’s experience of control, which is (...) generated by a set of cognitive systems termed “control systems.” While the control systems and the interpretive mechanism are useful in and of themselves, the belief in personal free will is adaptive because it directly leads to fitness-increasing behaviors. As such, we have good reason to regard the belief that one has free will as an adaptive, ungrounded belief. This paper will also suggest that further research on the possible distinction between belief in personal free will and belief in general free will may put us in a better position to understand recent, apparently contradictory data on individuals’ beliefs regarding free will and other related phenomena. (shrink)

The sensorimotor account of vision proposed by O'Regan & Noë (O&N) challenges the classical view of visual cognition as a process of mentally representing the world. Many infant cognition researchers would probably disagree. I describe the surprising ability of young infants to represent and reason about the physical world, and ask how this capacity can be explained in non-representational terms. As a first step toward answering this question, I suggest that recent models of embodied cognition may help illustrate a way (...) of escaping the representational trap. (shrink)

"The problem of art in the modern era," according to the opening of Audrey Wasser's The Work of Difference: Modernism, Romanticism, and the Production of Literary Form, "is the problem of the new". Citing the familiar maxim of Ezra Pound, "make it new," Wasser locates in the problem of novelty the problem of modern art as such. Modernity inherits its fixation on the new from a longer tradition, which for Wasser begins with the German romantics in the wake of Kantian (...) aesthetics. Crucial for Wasser is the way in which the romantic philosophers, particularly Friedrich Schlegel and other contributors to the Athenaeum, attempted to resolve the problems with the Kantian system by "invest[ing] the literary with the... (shrink)