The subject of this paper is Rudolf Hermann Lotze’s concept of Geltung as him outlines it in the second Logik. This paper, through the notions of gnoseological immanentism and anti-psychologism, aims to shed light on the notion of validity. The Geltung’s concept is very interesting not only for the role that it plays in Lotze’s philosophy, but also for the importance that Lotze’s validityhas in the philosophical debate until the 1930s.

After three proceedings in which neuroscience was a relevant factor for the final verdict in Italian courts, for the first time a recent case puts in question the legal relevance of neuroscientific evidence. This decision deserves international attention in its underlining that the uncertainty still affecting neuroscientific knowledge can have a significant impact on the law. It urges the consideration of such uncertainty and the development of a shared management of it.

This essay recounts the author’s journey with her father during his prolonged decline due to dementia. The experience pushed her to break out of the confines of conventional scholarly research in her academic field of architectural history to a multi-disciplinary consideration of nineteenth-century environmental, sensory and horticultural therapies for the mentally ill. During her father’s illness, she discovered the tangible therapeutic benefits of momentary engagements with his environment through his five senses and through the emotional filter of poetry. This reorientation (...) to sensory and poetic experience had a beneficial impact on the caretaker as well. (shrink)

Like COVID-19, new infectious disease outbreaks emerge almost annually, and studies predict that this trend will continue due to a variety of factors, including an aging population, ease of travel, and globalization of the economy. In response to episodic public health crises, governments and organizations develop, implement, and enforce policies, procedures, protocols, and programs. The epidemiological triad is both a model of disease causation and fundamentally used to design and deploy such control measures. Here we adapt this model to the (...) workplace setting and use the epidemiological triad to characterize the related ethical challenges in implementing the control measures employers face as a guide for a workplace intervention framework. Through this approach, our aim is to show how an integrated ethical framework, grounded in epidemiological principles, has important implications for how we categorize, understand, and resolve the difficult decisions that emerge in the workplace under pandemic conditions. (shrink)

It is often claimed that democratic voters have epistemic responsibilities. However, it is not often specified why voters have such epistemic responsibilities. In this paper, I contend that voters have epistemic responsibilities because voting is best understood as an act that bears assertoric force. More precisely, voters perform what I call an act of political advocacy whereby, like an asserter who states or affirms that something is the case, they state or affirm that a certain course of political action is (...) the one that should be followed or enacted. Consequently, the performance of acts of political advocacy such as voting should be understood as bounded by epistemic norms mirroring those binding the act of assertion and yield epistemic responsibilities mirroring the ones required to satisfy these norms. (shrink)

This paper explores the similarities between a crucial passage in Robert Grosseteste’s commentary on Posterior Analytics and the commentary on Nicomachean Ethics 6 written by the Byzantine commentator Eustratius of Nicaea (d. ca. 1120). According to the present author, Eustratius may be the direct source of Grosseteste’s epistemology and concept formation theory in the commentary. A tentative revision of the chronology of Grosseteste’s Greek studies may be necessary to account for the relationship between the two texts.

Since the beginning of the 1990s, the debate on expert evidence has constantly been growing. This article tries to give two separate contributions to a subsection of this debate, the one related to the alternative between deference and education. First, it contains an attack to the arguments that Ronald Allen and others have given in favor of the thesis according to which experts should perform a merely educational role at trial. Second, it maintains that the question of whether fact finders (...) should ever “defer” to experts or should be allowed to draw on their opinions only if they “understand” them should be clarified by introducing a distinction between two different senses “deference”, which is paralleled by a similar distinction between two senses of “understanding”. (shrink)

In this study, we explore the role of Chief Executive Officers’ incentives, split between monetary and non-monetary, in relation to corporate social responsibility. We base our analysis on a sample of 597 US firms over the period 2005–2009. We find that both monetary and non-monetary incentives have an effect on CSR decisions. Specifically, monetary incentives designed to align the CEO’s and shareholders’ interests have a negative effect on CSR and non-monetary incentives have a positive effect on CSR. The study has (...) important implications for the design of executive remuneration plans, as we show that there are many levers that can affect the CEO’s decisions with regard to CSR. Our evidence also confirms the prominent role of the CEO in relation to CSR decisions, while also recognizing the complexity of factors affecting CSR. Finally, we propose a research design that takes into account endogeneity issues arising when examining compensation variables. (shrink)

Essays on a wide range of areas and topics in Asian studies for scholars looking to incorporate Asia into their worldview and teaching. Contributors give contemporary presence to Asian studies through a variety of themes and topics in this multidisciplined and interdisciplinary volume. In an era of globalization, scholars trained in Western traditions increasingly see the need to add materials and perspectives that have been lacking in the past. Accessibly written and void of jargon, this work provides an adaptable entrée (...) to Asia for the integration of topics into courses in the humanities, social sciences, cultural studies, and global studies. Guiding principles, developed at the East-West Center, include noting uncommon differences, the interplay among Asian societies and traditions, the erosion of authenticity and cultural tradition as an Asian phenomenon as well as a Western one, and the possibilities Asian concepts offer for conceiving culture outside Asian contexts. The work ranges from South to Southeast to East Asia. Essays deal with art, aesthetics, popular culture, religion, geopolitical realities, geography, history, and contemporary times. “This volume truly lies at the intersection of scholarship and teaching. Each essay has the potential to help rethink approaches to scholarly issues, and there is a great deal of material for classroom discussion and examples. The book’s breadth—covering India, China, Korea, the Sea of Malay, Bhutan, and other locations—is impressive.” — Robert André LaFleur, Beloit College. (shrink)

The pluralist sheds the more traditional ideas of truth and ontology. This is dangerous, because it threatens instability of the theory. To lend stability to his philosophy, the pluralist trades truth and ontology for rigour and other ‘fixtures’. Fixtures are the steady goal posts. They are the parts of a theory that stay fixed across a pair of theories, and allow us to make translations and comparisons. They can ultimately be moved, but we tend to keep them fixed temporarily. Apart (...) from considering rigour of proof as a fixture, I discuss fixed models, invariant notions and fixed information about objects across theories. There are other fixtures, but it is enough to start with these. (shrink)

This paper examines the marital bed through existential themes of spatial, temporal, corporeal and relational experience. It is a collaborative effort in that it relates anecdotes contributed by twelve people who each described – in writing, in interviews and in conversation – very personal moments of life in the “marital bed”. Through other eyes, one sees that what seemed unique has echoes of a shared experience. The everyday noises and movements, the negotiations, even the sorrows of that particular place, are (...) so familiar that, in recognising them as true to one’s own experience, one wonders, “Is it like this for others too?” What is presented here is the culmination of researching a phenomenon by trying to capture it in writing and rewriting, in order to give form to the truth in an experience, while knowing that, by writing it, the real truth becomes limited. Phenomenological writing becomes a conversation which is at once both intimate and universal. The marital tales speak to a specific journey, but, as when one recounts details of any special trip – say Paris, for example – the listeners are drawn inward to their own experience. Personal remembrance enmeshes with public exposure so that the collective sighs, “Ah yes, Paris.” And therefore we know some small fragment of an abandoned bed as truly as we know the family bed. (shrink)

The article investigates the significance of the so-called phenomenon of apparent faultless disagreement for debates about the semantics of taste discourse. Two kinds of description of the phenomenon are proposed. The first ensures that faultless disagreement raises a distinctive philosophical challenge; yet, it is argued that Contextualist, Realist and Relativist semantic theories do not account for this description. The second, by contrast, makes the phenomenon irrelevant for the problem of what the right semantics of taste discourse should be. Lastly, the (...) following dilemma is assessed: either faultless disagreement provides strong evidence against semantic theories; or its significance should be considerably downplayed. (shrink)

Sexually dimorphic mate selection strategies were examined in 200 university students reporting their willingness to engage in casual sexual encounters with hypothetical individuals of the opposite sex. Using a questionnaire format, the possibility of forming a long-term relationship was manipulated, while risk of disease, pregnancy, and detection was eliminated across all conditions. In addition, potential partners varied in level of attractiveness, and in personality and behavioral characteristics. As expected, men reported a greater anticipated willingness to engage in sexual intercourse across (...) all conditions compared with women. The possibility of forming a long-term relationship elevated women’s, but not men’s, willingness for sexual intercourse. While a potential partner’s attractiveness had a significant positive overall effect on responses, reducing their relative attractiveness had a greater negative impact on men’s responses. Reference to the parental qualities of a potential partner significantly increased women’s, but not men’s, anticipated willingness for sexual intercourse. Describing a hypothetical partner as non-aggressive marginally increased women’s willingness and did not affect men’s responses. The wording of items relevant to this condition may have resulted in the potential partner sounding "wimpy" rather than nonaggressive, and this may have reduced the expected effect of this manipulation. The possibility that women may trade off personality and behavioral characteristics with attractiveness to a greater degree than men when assessing potential mates is considered. (shrink)

In the past decade the central principles of western feminist theory have been dramatically challenged. many feminists have endorsed post-structuralism's rejection of essentialist theoretical categories, and have added a powerful gender dimension to contemporary critiques of modernity. Earlier 'women' have been radically undermined, and newer concerns with 'difference', 'identity', and 'power' have emerged. Destabilizing Theory explores these developments in a set of specially commissioned essays by feminist theorists. Does this change amount to a real shift within feminist theory, or will (...) feminism's links with an emancipatory modernism reinstate an older political agenda? Can we transcend the common counterposition of equality and difference, or is feminism condemned to argue within the terms of this binary opposition? (shrink)

In the 1950’s Quine rejected the analytic/synthetic distinction insisting, instead,on language conceived of as a tool created by mankind for practical purposes, and this move allowed him to overcome the strictures of a purely analytic conception of language by resorting, instead, to the pragmatist tradition represented by thinkers like James, Peirce and Dewey and C.I. Lewis. In the subsequent phases of his philosophical development, however, his commitment to pragmatism became looser, maybe because Dewey and the other main fi gures of (...) American classical pragmatism always stress the practical side of the scientifi c enterprise, thus not giving too much importance to the construction of artificial languages. What kind of metaphysics, if any, cana pragmatically oriented philosopher consistently endorse? All we have to do is to envision a more modest concept of metaphysics. A pragmatist metaphysics can indeed be construed, provided we recall that metaphysics – just like science – evolves with the passing of time. An author like Rescher follows this path. Nowhere he presents his own system as giving the “final” answer to all metaphysical, epistemic or ethical interrogatives. After all, if science is no longer held to give the ultimate answers, why should such a burden be put on the philosopher’s shoulders? (shrink)

The presence of easily accessible yet unpossessed evidence seems to matter epistemically. In this chapter I offer an inquiry-theoretic explanation of this datum. I argue that agents in the target cases fail to be competent inquirers and gather the relevant easily accessible evidence. This offers a deflationary explanation of the initial datum. I then show how to inflate this explanation to vindicate the thought that unpossessed evidence has defeating power over the justificatory status of one’s beliefs. The inflationary explanation rests (...) on two main planks. First, the subject who believes that p in the target cases ought to have gathered the target piece of evidence that bears on p. Secondly, such a duty is incompatible with justifiedly believing p. Along the way, the chapter offers a framework for thinking about zetetic competence, comments on the existence of epistemic duties of inquiry, and discusses the relationship between such duties and traditional epistemic norms of belief. (shrink)

I wish to prove in this article that Thomas Aquinas was a metaontological pluralist, i.e., that he held that there are many, non-equivalent and irreducible dependence relations in the universe. In this respect, I shall focus on Aquinas' doctrine of the four causes and on the dependence relationships between matter and form in material substances. Subsequently, I shall also reconstruct Aquinas' doctrines by explicitly appealing to metaontological pluralism. I shall explore two routes towards Aquinas' metaontological pluralism: one based on cases (...) of apparent mutual dependence and the other based on the asymmetry of natural priority. Finally, I shall provide two original interpretations of the doctrine of the four causes and of the dependence relationships between matter and form. Such interpretations will be based on the metaphysics of powers. In Section 1 I shall introduce metaontological pluralism and the two routes. In Section 2 I shall examine Aquinas' doctrine of the four causes. In Section 3 I shall provide an interpretation of that doctrine based on powers. In Section 4 I shall consider the dependence relationships between matter and form in material substances. In Section 5 I shall provide an interpretation of such relationships based on powers. (shrink)