This is a book about the meanings of words and how they can combine to form larger meaningful units, as well as how they can fail to combine when the ...

Francis Fukuyama's controversial new book, Our Posthuman Future: Consequences of the Biotechnology Revolution, has elicited varied reactions, but like it or not, it seems likely to be influential. Here are three opinions. —Ed.

The authors explore the history of experiments in economics, provide examples of different types of experiments and show that the growing use of experimental methods is transforming economics into an empirical science.

Current theories of addiction try to explain what addiction is, who experiences it, why it occurs, and how it develops and persists. In this article, I explain why none of these theories can be accepted as a comprehensive model. I argue that current models fail to account for differences in embodiment, interaction processes, and the experience of addiction. To redress these limiting factors, I design a proposal for an enactive account of addiction that follows the enactive model of autism proposed (...) by Hanne De Jaegher. (shrink)

In their constructive reviews, Frances Egan, Randy Gallistel and Steven Gross have raised some important problems for the account of content advanced by Nicholas Shea in Representation in Cognitive Science. Here the author addresses their main challenges. Egan argues that the account includes an unrecognised pragmatic element; and that it makes contents explanatorily otiose. Gallistel raises questions about homomorphism and correlational information. Gross puts the account to work to resolve a dispute about probabilistic contents in perception, but argues that (...) a question remains about whether probabilities are found in the content or instead in the manner of representation. (shrink)

Recent attempts to distinguish a normatively acceptable “civic nationalism"—as distinct from an irrationally tainted “ethnic nationalism"—have failed to take seriously the implications of the transition from the city as the immediate spatial unit of the patria to the more abstract national state that replaced it. The nation‐state has required a mythologizing naturalism to legitimate it, thus blurring the distinction between “civic” and “ethnic.” The urban political experience of the patria is lost to us; cosmopolitan intellectuals should resist the comforting temptation (...) to recover it in the nation, and should recognize civic nationalism for the oxymoron it is. (shrink)

This paper offers practical advice about how to interact with machines that we have reason to believe could have minds. I argue that we should approach these interactions by assigning credences to judgements about whether the machines in question can think. We should treat the premises of philosophical arguments about whether these machines can think as offering evidence that may increase or reduce these credences. I describe two cases in which you should refrain from doing as your favored philosophical view (...) about thinking machines suggests. Even if you believe that machines are mindless, you should acknowledge that treating them as if they are mindless risks wronging them. Suppose your considered philosophical view that a machine has a mind leads you to consider dating it. You may have reason to regret that decision should these dates lead on to a life-long relationship with a mindless machine. In the paper’s final section, I suggest that building a machine that is capable of performing all intelligent human behavior should produce a general increase in confidence that machines can think. Any reasonable judge should count this feat as evidence in favor of machines having minds. This rational nudge could lead to broad acceptance of the idea that machines can think. (shrink)

(1996). Statelessness: The making and unmaking of political identity. The European Legacy: Vol. 1, Fourth International Conference of the International Society for the study of European Ideas, pp. 820-825.

Imperialism seems to be deeply antithetical to democracy. Yet, at least one form of imperialism – what I call “hands-off imperialism" – seems to be perfectly compatible with the kind of self-governance commonly thought to be the hallmark of democracy. The solution to this puzzle is to recognize that democracy involves more than self-governance. Rather, it involves what I call self-rule. Self-rule is an example of what Philip Pettit has called a modally demanding value. Modally demanding values are, roughly, values (...) the instantiation of which depends not only on what actually happens, but on what would happen in certain non-actual circumstances. Self-rule is the modally demanding counterpart of self-governance, since it requires, not merely that the members of a state actually govern themselves, but that they would continue to do so across a range of non-actual situations. Moreover, the value of self-rule (and hence democracy) is not reducible to the value of self-governance. Understanding the modally demanding character of democracy allows us to appreciate what is democratically objectionable about occupation by a foreign power, even if there is no prospect of the foreign power intervening in the governance of the occupied state by its members. (shrink)

This essay proposes a bifurcation within the concept of moderation in early modern Europe. To draw this out it reconstructs an “encounter” between two citizens of the scholarly Republic of Letters in the years around 1700—Lodovico Antonio Muratori and Jean Le Clerc—and the concept of moderation each maintained. It proposes that the former maintained an ideal of moderation which was “hard” principally about self-regulation, while the latter maintained an ideal of moderation which was “soft” and principally about (religious) toleration. It (...) then attaches this “encounter” to an analogous conflict between uses of moderation in late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century England. It concludes by proposing that this bifurcation, while occurring within scholarly and theological debates, has enduring significance for our interpretation of the Enlightenment, and for the passage of political moderation into the modern world. (shrink)

Controlled donation after circulatory determination of death (cDCDD) is an important strategy for increasing the pool of eligible organ donors.

RÉSUMÉJe conteste l'affirmation de Harbin selon laquelle les jugements esthétiques, pour Kant, ne sont pas normatifs. En me concentrant sur la nature systématique de la philosophie critique de Kant, je montre que les jugements esthétiques, comme les jugements dans les domaines théorique et pratique, doivent être normatifs, bien que de tels jugements affichent un type distinct de normativité, qui s'exprime dans leur subjectivité, leur indétermination et leur affectivité.

What makes New York City different from Moscow? Are small towns looking more and more alike? What criteria should we use to distinguish one place from another? Today, geographers and other social scientists are debating not only the answers to these sorts of questions but even whether or not to ask them at all. This ongoing controversy about how (or whether) to study place and its meaning in modern life forms the focus of J. Nicholas Entrikin's pioneering work. Those (...) who point to a decline in the study of place in geography, Entrikin explains, cite three main causes: the apparent homogenization of world culture; the belief that studying particular places is somehow "parochial;" and the tendency of the scientific method to generalize. Entrikin treats each of these in turn, addressing topics that include the Marxist view of a world economy, the moral implications of place (in such notions as community and provincialism), and the empiricist versus neo-Kantian traditions in philosophy. To geographers arguing the merits of hard, scientific data versus subjective experience, Entrikin offers a compromise. "To understand place," he suggests, "requires that we have access to both an objective and a subjective reality. From the decentered vantage point of the theoretical scientist, place becomes either location or a set of generic relations and loses much of its significance for human action. From the centered viewpoint of the subjective self, place has meaning only in relation to one's own goals and concerns. Place is best viewed from points in-between.". (shrink)

In Plato’s Laws, the Athenian Stranger maintains that law should consist of both persuasion (πειθώ) and compulsion (βία) (IV.711c, IV.718b-d, and IV.722b). Persuasion can be achieved by prefacing the laws with preludes (προοίμια), which make the citizens more eager to obey the laws. Although scholars disagree on how to interpret the preludes’ persuasion, they agree that the preludes instill true beliefs and give citizens good reasons for obeying the laws. In this paper I refine this account of the preludes by (...) arguing that the primary purpose of the preludes is to motivate correct action, and that for citizens who lack rational-governance this is achieved via useful false beliefs. That is to say, in many cases, the prelude functions as a “noble lie” (γενναῖον ψεῦδος). (shrink)

I want to thank all of those who have commented on my article in the Journal of Medical Ethics.1 The commentaries address a wide cross-section of the issues raised in my article. I have organised my responses thematically.The state of playAllen Buchanan's scepticism2 about moral statuses higher than personhood derives, in part, from our apparent inability to describe them. We seem to have little difficulty in imagining what it might be to have scientific understanding far beyond that of any human (...) scientist. By contrast, it is exceedingly difficult to describe moral statuses superior to that of any person. Boosting cognitive capacities seems to result in cognitively superior persons—not post-persons . I offer an explanation of our moral myopia.2 We are necessarily clueless in respect of moral statuses superior to our own. If mice understood practical reasons sufficiently well to truly understand why persons have a moral status superior to their own then they would be capable of the feats of practical reason constitutive of personhood—they would be persons. Our cluelessness about post-persons is compatible both with their possible existence and with their necessary non-existence. I propose an inductive argument for the existence of statuses superior to personhood. The observed existence of many moral statuses up to and including persons provides moderately strong inductive support for the possibility of post-persons.Who do we trust to make decisions about higher moral statuses?What precisely does the inductive argument predict? If my diagnosis of our moral myopia about post-personhood is correct, then mere persons cannot really understand what properties of post-persons give them a superior status. They will be able to infer their existence indirectly by an appeal to the predicted judgments of beings who lack our cognitive limitations. Wasserman3 questions my suggestion that we should defer to the sincere moral judgments of …. (shrink)

This article discusses the current epistemological status of the political blogosphere, in light both of the concerns raised by Alvin Goldman in his 2008 paper ?The Social Epistemology of Blogging? and the recent drastic changes in the structure of the blogosphere. I argue that the political blogosphere replicates epistemically beneficial functions of the mainstream media for the functioning of democracy, and defend this claim from objections to the blogosphere that have been levelled by Goldman and Richard Posner. I then provide (...) an expanded defence of the political blogosphere in response to these particular objections. (shrink)

This article provides a speech act analysis of ‘crime-enacting’ provisions in criminal statutes, focusing on the illocutionary force of these provisions. These provisions commonly set out not only particular crimes and their characteristics but also their associated penalties. Enactment of a statute brings into force new social facts, typically norms, through the official utterance of linguistic material. These norms are supposed to guide behaviour: they tell us what we must, may, or must not do. Our main claim is that the (...) illocutionary force of such provisions is primarily ‘world-creating’, i.e. effective, or declarational, rather than directive. We assume that directive illocutionary force is either direct or indirect, showing that provisions need not contain the linguistic items that make for direct directives and that according to standard tests no indirect directive is present. A potential counter-argument is that any utterance serving to direct behaviour is necessarily a directive. We show that this behaviour-directing property is shared by some clear non-directives. (shrink)

The philosophical origins of the principle of subsidiarity must be understood historically. This chapter argues that the critical point for the emergence of the principle lay in Thomas Aquinas’s theological interpretation of Aristotle’s political philosophy and his application of it to the institutional pluralism of medieval Europe. From Aristotle, Aquinas developed the idea that human societies naturally progress from families, through villages to entire city-states, but he recognised that what Aristotle said of city-states could be applied not only to cities (...) but even more emphatically to political communities on the scale of provinces, kingdoms and empires. Moreover, for Aquinas, the civil order was not the only ‘perfect community’ in Aristotle’s sense: there was also the church in all of its many grades and jurisdictions, alongside the many different religious orders and fraternities of medieval Europe, some of them also organised into their own graded hierarchies. Reflecting on the complexity of the society surrounding him, Aquinas acknowledged the many and various purposes for which various associations and forms of human community exist and are formed, giving rise to a whole host of familial, geographical, professional, mercantile, scholarly and other specialised societies. All of these groups and groupings, from the smallest to the largest, have their place and their proper function, according to Aquinas, and each should to be allowed to make its unique and special contribution as a means to integral human fulfillment, without undue interference from any others, including the state. (shrink)

This article deals with a highly debated text, namely 2 Maccabees 12, specifically the problematic verses (38–45) which contain a theology that is distinctly non-Jewish in import. Indeed, most recent scholars concerned with this passage do not seem to be unanimous apropos the best interpretation of the events that are described, resulting in a range of different opinions concerning, inter alia, the afterlife, purgatory and/or doctrinal disputes between Pharisees and Sadducees. By means of an interpretivist or constructivist epistemology, the authors (...) advocate that normally, traditional Judaism emphasises personal, individual responsibility and accountability, whereas in this text God is portrayed as requiring material, financial payment for wrongdoing and not individual תשובה [teshuvah]. This is in contradistinction to, inter alia, Exodus 30:11–16 and theologically Jewish ‘transgression’ has clearly metamorphosed into Christian ‘sin’. In addition, Judas Maccabeus seems to have retained a half-shekel methodology (employed for Jewish men of military age – soldiers) whilst emphasising the ‘atonement for your lives’ from Exodus 30:11–16 in a more literalistic, materialistic, non-Jewish sense whilst de-emphasising the real need to maintain the Temple as well as the proper, traditional rules of תשובה. (shrink)

Study on the logic of normative discourse.

The use of autonomous weaponry in warfare has increased substantially over the last twenty years and shows no sign of slowing. Our chapter raises a novel objection to the implementation of autonomous weapons, namely, that they eliminate moral cost-sharing. To grasp the basics of our argument, consider the case of uninhabited aerial vehicles that act autonomously (i.e., LAWS). Imagine that a LAWS terminates a military target and that five civilians die as a side effect of the LAWS bombing. Because LAWS (...) lacks moral agency, and in particular the capacity for moral emotions, moral cost-sharing is limited to dead civilians and their loved ones. We argue that's unjust insofar as those responsible for unjust harm to others ought to share in those costs. Our worry expands to other strategic uses of AI, e.g., cyber warfare. This presents a dilemma: Either we design autonomous weaponry capable of moral emotions, or we limit the use of autonomous weaponry. The former undermines the risk-mitigation purpose of creating autonomous weaponry and expands the number of sentient individuals whose welfare is risked in war. The latter risks worsening combatant casualties and achieving strategic aims. (shrink)

There is increasing resistance to gendering in contemporary society, seen in gender-neutral childrearing and pronouns, expansion of legal sex categories and intersex rights, and queer and genderqueer movements. This timely book considers the utopian question of whether, and how, gender could be eradicated and how we might understand identity and relationships without it. It considers the implications of arguments from 'new materialism' about the malleability of biological sex, and of queer theory and gender deconstruction, for social change and political practice. (...) The original theoretical and practical argument is for an androgynous, reciprocal ethic or way of being in the world that transcends both sex/gender and some of the debates plaguing gender studies. It takes inspiration from real-world queer and post-gender practices, for example by being written using gender-neutral pronouns, and also considers the reality of implementing such an ethic in a highly gendered world, especially in cross-cultural contexts. (shrink)

This article aims to give an analysis of the phenomena of unjust misappropriation of marginalised groups’ terms online, using the example misappropriation of ‘woke’ from the Black community on Twitter. I argue that using terms such as these outside their original context warps their meaning, decreasing the intelligibility of the experiences of the marginalised agents who use them when attempting to express themselves both within their community and without. I intend to give an analysis of this phenomena, with the expectation (...) that understanding it better will provide a crucial step in combatting it. To this end, I argue it can be understood as a specialised form of what Kristie Dotson calls ‘contributory injustice’, injustices which involve the suppression of a marginalised community’s existing hermeneutical resources, combined with a specific consequence of what Boyd and Marwick call ‘context collapse’, the removal of social norms created through the homogenising effect of social media sites like Twitter. The result is a novel misappropriation phenomenon, I label ‘Context-Collapsed Contributory Injustice’ or ‘CC.CI’. This type of misappropriation is particularly harmful due to it being faster-acting than historical varieties of misappropriation. Furthermore, unchecked continual cases of CC.CI can cause a novel from of what Miranda Fricker calls ‘hermeneutical injustice’, which is demarcated from standard cases by its ability to reintroduce conceptual lacunas through undermining existing hermeneutical resources. I finish by disambiguating cases of CC.CI from natural meaning change and critically analysing some existing philosophical treatments of “woke”. (shrink)

Many scholars have viewed the noble lie as fundamentally a device for educating the non-philosophers in the Kallipolis. On this reading, the elite and sophisticated philosopher rulers lie to the non-philosophers, who are unable to fully grasp the truth; such lies help motivate the non-philosophers towards virtuous activity and the promotion of the common good. Hence, according to many scholars, the falsehoods of the noble lie play no role in motivating fully accomplished adult philosophers towards virtue. The motivation for this (...) view is that it would seem strange that the wisest citizens, who have knowledge of the Forms, believe something as far-fetched as the myth of the metals. However, this paper challenges this tradition by arguing that the falsehoods of the noble lie are fundamental to the philosophers’ virtuous dispositions. More precisely, this paper argues that the non-reasoning part of the rulers believes the falsehoods of the noble lie and that these false beliefs have positive ethical value because the non-reasoning part of the soul is too unsophisticated to grasp the complete truth. Thus, the non-reasoning part of a philosopher’s soul requires false beliefs in the same way that non-philosophers require false beliefs. (shrink)

This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work was reproduced from the original artifact, and remains as true to the original work as possible. Therefore, you will see the original copyright references, library stamps (as most of these works have been housed in our most important libraries around the world), and other notations in the work. This work is in the public domain (...) in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work. As a reproduction of a historical artifact, this work may contain missing or blurred pages, poor pictures, errant marks, etc. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant. (shrink)

Building on recent formal work by Aleks Knoks, we explore how the idea that certain epistemic norms may be indeterminate could be implemented in a default logic.

Originally developed by Alcoholics Anonymous, the Twelve Step program now provides life direction for the millions of people worldwide who are recovering from addiction and undergoing profound personal transformation. Yet thus far it has received surprisingly little attention from philosophers, despite the fact that, like philosophy, the program addresses all-important questions regarding how we ought to live. In Sobering Wisdom, Jerome A. Miller and Nicholas Plants offer a unique approach to the Twelve Step program by exploring its spirituality from (...) a philosophical point of view. Drawing on a variety of thinkers from Aristotle to William James and from Nietzsche to Foucault, as well as a diverse range of philosophical perspectives including naturalism, Buddhism, existentialism, Confucianism, pragmatism, and phenomenology, the contributors to this volume address such questions as the relation of personal responsibility to an acknowledgment of powerlessness, the existence of a "higher power," and the role of virtue in recovery. Ranging in tone from deeply scholarly to intensely personal, their essays are written in an accessible way for a broad audience that includes not only philosophers, theologians, and psychologists but also spiritual directors, health professionals, and addiction counselors. Perhaps most important, the book is also conceived for those involved in Twelve Step programs whose lives are being transformed by the experience. (shrink)

The aim of this article is to situate Arendt’s account of labour as a critical response to humanisms of labour, or put otherwise, to situate it as an anti-humanism of labour. It compares Arendt’s account of labour with that of the most prominent humanist theorist of labour at the time of the composition of The Human Condition: Georges Friedmann. Arendt’s and Friedmann’s accounts of labour are compared specifically with respect to the range of capacities, social relations, and possibilities of fulfilment (...) at stake in the activity of labour. The comparison provides a previously unexplored context for understanding Arendt’s account of labour and her distinction between labour and work. The relevance of Arendt’s and Friedmann’s theories of labour for the contemporary debate about the meaning of work in an age of automation is also briefly discussed. (shrink)

A structural harm results from countless apparently innocuous interactions between a great many individuals in a social system, and not from any agent’s intentionally producing the harm. Iris Young has influentially articulated a model of individual moral responsibility for such harms, and several other philosophers have taken it as their starting point for dealing with the phenomenon of structural injustice. In this paper, I argue that this social connection model is far less realistic and socially effective than it aims to (...) be. This is because the model systematically neglects the key role played by the emotions in human moral life. (shrink)

I analyze Hegel’s conception of nationality in order to make clear how he conceives the precise relation between the state and religion. This analysis also allows me to draw conclusions about whether Hegel can be considered racist or Eurocentric. My project involves understanding nationality as Hegel presents it in the anthropology: viz., as a form of spirit immersed in nature and closely related to geography. The geographical features of a nation’s land are reflected in its national religion; its nation-state is (...) a positive expression of this national religion; national religion further functions to reconcile a nation to the particular positive character of its nation-state. Yet as nation-states clash and collapse in history (i.e. the state proper), an absolute (non-national) religion emerges which reconciles its adherents not to the positive form of a certain nation-state, but to the state proper, i.e. the course of world history: this is “Christianity.” Christianity is not a national religion, tied to a certain part of the natural world, but, oddly, it does emerge with a certain peculiar ‘nation’: the “Germans.” Contrary to appearances, the “Germans” for Hegel are necessarily not a nation or race in the traditional sense, because as the vehicle for the absolute religion, their ‘nationality’ is not a form of spirit immersed in nature. Instead, the “Germans” (the apex of history) are beyond race and nationality. Any representation of the “Germans” as exclusively white or European, by Hegel or anyone else, is thus false: the “German” and “Christian” spirit is really just the modern spirit, which is necessarily trans-racial and trans-national. (shrink)

Given the strong mimetic and dramatic qualities found in Judith the authors make the suggestion that perhaps, before LXX Judith became a fixed, written text, the basic fabula might well have been part of an oral tradition. The authors accept that an appropriately written dramatic work, whether transmitted through reading or an oral presentation, by means of its performative qualities, has the potential to achieve immediacy. Here, the audience may become captivated with its own familiarity and memory of popular, communally (...) shared narratives. Accordingly, this article attempts to find evidence in the Greek text of LXX Judith for a possible oral precursor. In this context, corroboration is sought for the employment of verbal aspect and mood of the Greek language as well as instances of drama, theatrics, bodily gestures, mnemonic devices or special emphasis on the employment of the senses such as sight, taste and smell. The authors suggest that based on an analysis of the text of Chapter 13, there is much circumstantial evidence for the Judith fabula once being an oral narrative – one that embodies the dramatic and even encourages audience participation. This characteristic strongly suggests the removal of the fourth wall – the notion of an imaginary boundary between any fictional work and its audience. Contribution: This article shows that Judith 13 is indeed the climax of the narrative. However, it goes further. It is a vivid scene with various performative aspects. There are props, dialogue and audience participation. This research is cutting-edge and paves the way for new explorations. (shrink)

. Getting and spending. Cultural Values: Vol. 4, No. 3, pp. 374-382.