In The Ethics of Food, Gregory E. Pence brings together a collection of voices who share the view that the ethics of genetically modified food is among the most pressing societal questions of our time. This comprehensive collection addresses a broad range of subjects, including the meaning of food, moral analyses of vegetarianism and starvation, the safety and environmental risks of genetically modified food, issues of global food politics and the food industry, and the relationships among food, evolution, and human (...) history. (shrink)

This volume presents new essays on the propositional imagination by leading researchers. The propositional imagination---the mental capacity we exploit when we imagine that everyone is colour-blind or that Hamlet is a procrastinator---plays an essential role in philosophical theorizing, engaging with fiction, and indeed in everyday life. Yet only recently has there been a systematic attempt to give a cognitive account of the propositional imagination. These thirteen essays, specially written for the volume, capitalize on this recent work, extending the theoretical picture (...) of the imagination and exploring the philosophical implications of cognitive accounts of the imagination. The book also investigates broader philosophical issues surrounding the propositional imagination. The first section addresses the nature of the imagination, its role in emotion production, and its sophistication manifestation in childhood. The essays in the second section focus on the nature of pretence and how pretence is implicated in adult communication. The third section addresses the problem of 'imaginative resistance', the striking fact that when we encounter morally repugnant assertions in fiction, we seem to resist imagining them and accepting them as fictionally true. In the final section, contributors explore the relation between imagining, conceiving, and judgements of possibility and impossibility. The Architecture of the Imagination will be an essential resource for the growing number of philosophers and psychologists studying the nature of the imagination and on its role in philosophy, aesthetics, and everyday life. (shrink)

Throughout the 20th century, an enormous amount of intellectual fuel was spent debating the merits of a class of skeptical arguments which purport to show that knowledge of the external world is not possible. These arguments, whose origins can be traced back to Descartes, played an important role in the work of some of the leading philosophers of the 20th century, including Russell, Moore and Wittgenstein, and they continue to engage the interest of contemporary philosophers. (e.g., Cohen 1999, DeRose 1995, (...) Hill 1996, Klein 1981, Lewis 1996, McGinn 1993, Nozick 1981, Schiffer 1996, Unger 1975, Williams 1996) Typically, these arguments make use of one or more premises which the philosophers proposing them take to be intuitively obvious. Beyond an appeal to intuition, little or no defense is offered, and in many cases it is hard to see what else could be said in support of these premises. A number of authors have suggested that the intuitions undergirding these skeptical arguments are universal – shared by everyone (or almost everyone) who thinks reflectively about knowledge. In this paper we will offer some evidence indicating that they are far from universal. Rather, the evidence suggests that many of the intuitions epistemologists invoke vary with the cultural background, socioeconomic status and educational background of the person offering the intuition. And this, we will argue, is bad news for the skeptical arguments that rely on those intuitions. The evidence may also be bad news for skepticism itself – not because it shows that skepticism is false, but rather because, if we accept one prominent account of the link between epistemic intuitions and epistemic concepts, it indicates that skepticism may be much less interesting and much less worrisome than philosophers have taken it to be. (shrink)

Context: Although ethics consultation is commonplace in United States (U.S.) hospitals, descriptive data about this health service are lacking. Objective: To describe the prevalence, practitioners, and processes of ethics consultation in U.S. hospitals. Design: A 56-item phone or questionnaire survey of the "best informant" within each hospital. Participants: Random sample of 600 U.S. general hospitals, stratified by bed size. Results: The response rate was 87.4%. Ethics consultation services (ECSs) were found in 81% of all general hospitals in the U.S., and (...) in 100% of hospitals with more than 400 beds. The median number of consults performed by ECSs in the year prior to survey was 3. Most individuals performing ethics consultation were physicians (34%), nurses (31%), social workers (11%), or chaplains (10%). Only 41% had formal supervised training in ethics consultation. Consultation practices varied widely both within and between ECSs. For example, 65% of ECSs always made recommendations, whereas 6% never did. These findings highlight a need to clarify standards for ethics consultation practices. (shrink)

Over the last 20 years, a number of central figures in moral philosophy have defended some version of moral rationalism, the idea that morality is based on reason or rationality (e.g., Gewirth 1978, Darwall 1983, Nagel 1970, 1986, Korsgaard 1986, Singer 1995; Smith 1994, 1997). According to rationalism, morality is based on reason or rationality rather than the emotions or cultural idiosyncrasies, and this has seemed to many to be the best way of securing a kind of objectivism about moral (...) claims. Consider the following representative statements. (shrink)

Many philosophical problems are rooted in everyday thought, and experimental philosophy uses social scientific techniques to study the psychological underpinnings of such problems. In the case of free will, research suggests that people in a diverse range of cultures reject determinism, but people give conflicting responses on whether determinism would undermine moral responsibility. When presented with abstract questions, people tend to maintain that determinism would undermine responsibility, but when presented with concrete cases of wrongdoing, people tend to say that determinism (...) is consistent with moral responsibility. It remains unclear why people reject determinism and what drives people’s conflicted attitudes about responsibility. Experimental philosophy aims to address these issues and thereby illuminate the philosophical problem of free will. (shrink)

First Published in 1990. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

The laboratory animal environment: room for concern.

The annual volume of ethics consultations (ECs) has been a topic of interest in the bioethics literature, in part because of its presumed relationship to quality. To better understand factors associated with EC volume, we used multiple linear regression to model the number of case consultations performed in the last year based on a national survey. We found that hospital bed size, academic affiliation, and urban/rural location were all associated with EC volume, but were not the primary drivers. Instead, these (...) variables affected EC volume through three other variables, all of which relate to ethics staffing: the percentage of case consultations performed by a single individual; whether the survey respondent’s main role at the hospital contained the word “ethics”; and especially, the number of full-time ethics program staff. We conclude that EC is an example of supply-sensitive care, and further research is needed to determine the optimal level of EC activity. (shrink)

The topic of self-awareness has an impressive philosophical pedigree, and sustained discussion of the topic goes back at least to Descartes. More recently, selfawareness has become a lively issue in the cognitive sciences, thanks largely to the emerging body of work on “mindreading”, the process of attributing mental states to people (and other organisms). During the last 15 years, the processes underlying mindreading have been a major focus of attention in cognitive and developmental psychology. Most of this work has been (...) concerned with the processes underlying the attribution of mental states to other people. However, a number of psychologists and philosophers have also proposed accounts of the mechanisms underlying the attribution of mental states to oneself. This process of reading one’s own mind or becoming self- aware will be our primary concern in this paper. (shrink)

In J. Prinz (ed.) The Oxford Handbook on Philosophy of Psychology. New York: Oxford University Press.

This article offers a preliminary critical-historical reconstruction of the concept of dispossession. Part I examines its role in eighteenth- and nineteenth- century struggles against European feudal land tenure. Drawing upon Marx’s critique of French anarchism in particular, I identify a persistent limitation at the heart of the concept. Since dispossession presupposes prior possession, recourse to it appears conservative and tends to reinforce the very proprietary and commoditized models of social relations that radical critics generally seek to undermine. Part II turns (...) to use of the term in Indigenous struggles against colonization, both in order to better grasp the stakes of the above problematic and suggest a way beyond it. Through a reconstruction of arguments by Indigenous scholars and activists, I seek to show the coherence and novelty of their formulation by suggesting that dispossession has come to name a unique historical process, one in which property is generated under conditions that require divestment and alienation from those who appear, only retroactively, as its original owners. In this way, theft and property are related in a recursive, rather than strictly unilinear, manner. Part III provides a specific historical example in the form of nineteenth-century US property law concerning squatters and homesteaders. (shrink)

Organizations need to accurately understand the skills and competencies of their human resources to better utilize them and more effectively respond to internal and external demands for expertise....

According to one argument for Animalism about personal identity, animal , but not person , is a Wigginsian substance concept—a concept that tells us what we are essentially. Person supposedly fails to be a substance concept because it is a functional concept that answers the question “what do we do?” without telling us what we are. Since person is not a substance concept, it cannot provide the criteria for our coming into or going out of existence; animal , on the (...) other hand, can provide such criteria. This argument has been defended by Eric Olson, among others. I argue that this line of reasoning fails to show Animalism to be superior to the Psychological Approach, for the following two reasons: (1) human animal , animal , and organism are all functional concepts, and (2) the distinction between what something is and what it does is illegitimate on the reading that the argument needs. (shrink)

Sentimentalism, the idea that the emotions or sentiments are crucial to moral judgment, has a long and distinguished history. Throughout this history, sentimentalists have often viewed themselves as offering a more naturalistically respectable account of moral judgment. In this paper, I’ll argue that they have not been naturalistic enough. The early, simple versions of sentimentalism met with decisive objections. The contemporary sentimentalist accounts successfully dodge these objections, but only by promoting an account of moral judgment that is far too complex (...) to be a plausible account of moral judgment on the ground. I argue that recent evidence on moral judgment indicates that emotional responses do indeed play a key role in everyday moral judgment. However, the emotions themselves are only one part of moral judgment; internally represented rules make an independent contribution to moral judgment. This account of moral judgment is grounded in the empirical evidence, but it can also handle a cluster of desiderata that concern philosophical sentimentalists. If emotions and rules do make independent contributions to moral judgment, this raises a puzzle. For our rules tend to be well coordinated with our emotions. In the final section, I’ll argue that this coordination can be partly explained by appealing to the role of cultural evolution in the history of norms. (shrink)

This article examines the application of social contract theorizing to questions pertaining to the rights of indigenous peoples today, with particular reference to recent work by Jeremy Waldron. It is argued that such theorizing must be examined with reference not only to the content of its claims, but also with respect to its general mode of argumentation and its political function in specific contexts. Read in this light, social contract theory may function to unduly deny the claims of indigenous peoples, (...) oftentimes by shifting the register of debate to a relatively abstract and counter-factual level and relieving settler-colonial societies of the burden of proof. Insofar as social contract theory operates to this effect, it is analysed in terms of a ‘Settler Contract’. (shrink)

This study explored the impact of implementing Philosophy, in the tradition of 'Philosophy for Children', on pedagogy. It employed an experimental design that included 59 primary teachers. The experimental group received an intervention of training in Philosophy and the comparison group received training in Thinking Tools (graphic organisers), a subset of the Philosophy training. Lessons were coded on variables of pedagogy, across the two groups, at three time-points. Teacher interviews were conducted to gather participants' perspectives. Between group analysis of variance (...) on several measures of pedagogy revealed that Philosophy significantly broadened teachers' pedagogical repertoire. (shrink)

This paper argues in favor of two claims: (a) that Scope Shifting Operations (Quantifier Raising and Quantifier Lowering) are restricted by economy considerations, and (b) that the relevant economy considerations compare syntactic derivations that end up interpretively identical. These ideas are shown to solve several puzzles having to do with the interaction of scope with VP ellipsis, coordination, and the interpretation of bare plurals. Further, the paper suggests a way of dealing with the otherwise puzzling clause-boundedness of Quantifier Raising.

Vows play a central role in Buddhist thought and practice. Monastics are obliged to know and conform to hundreds of vows. Although it is widely recognized that vows are important for guiding practitioners on the path to enlightenment, we argue that they have another overlooked but equally crucial role to play. A second function of the vows, we argue, is to facilitate group harmony and cohesion to ensure the perpetuation of the dhamma and the saṅgha. However, the prominence of vows (...) in the Buddhist tradition seems at odds with another central part of the doctrine. For vows, like other promises, seem to involve representing a persisting self as the individual who undertakes the vow. And to explicitly appeal to a persisting self conflicts with one of the most important philosophical commitments of Buddhism – the no self view. We argue though that once we articulate the details of how vows generate behavior that conforms to them, we can see that no appeal to the self is required to internalize and act on vows. (shrink)

The author discusses the ways in which she finds the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center protocol for procuring organs from "non-heart-beating cadaver donors" medically and morally questionable and irreverent. She also identifies some of the factors that contributed to the composition of this troubling protocol, and to its institutional approval.

The role of epistemology in philosophy of religion has transformed the discipline by diverting questions away from traditional metaphysical issues and toward concerns about justification and warrant. Leaders responsible for these changes, including Plantinga, Alston and Draper, use methods and arguments fromScottish Enlightenment figures. In general theists use and cite techniques pioneered by Reid and non-theists use and cite techniques pioneered by Hume, a split reduplicated among cognitive scientists of religion, with Justin Barrett and Scott Atran respectively framing their results (...) in Reid’s and in Hume’s language and argument. This state of affairs sets our agenda. First we identify Reid’s use in the epistemology of religion and in the cognitive science of religion. Then we turn to Reid’s texts in an effort to assess the interpretations and extrapolations of Reid given by participants in these debates. The answers to our research questions shed light on what Reid would believe today, were he apprised of the latest research in epistemology of and cognitive science of religion. (shrink)

A Logical Form (LF) is a syntactic structure that is interpreted by the semantic component. For a particular structure to be a possible LF it has to be possible for syntax to generate it and for semantics to interpret it. The study of LF must therefore take into account both assumptions about syntax and about semantics, and since there is much disagreement in both areas, disagreements on LF have been plentiful. This makes the task of writing a survey article in (...) the field fairly difficult, a difficulty that is amplified by the amount of material that needs to be covered if the result is going to be in any way representative. My response to this difficulty is to limit my objectives. As a start, I will confine myself to issues relating to the syntactic positions of Quantificational Noun Phrases (QNPs) at LF and to various interpretive consequences. But even within these relatively narrow confines, I will not attempt anything close to a comprehensive survey. Instead my goal will be restricted to the presentation of one leading idea and to the discussion of some evidence that might bear on it.1 Much research on the nature of LF has consisted in attempts to account for the meaning of sentences containing QNPs. (shrink)

The manifest fact of experiential unity—namely, that a single experience often seems to be composed of multiple features and multiple objects—was lodged as a key objection to the Buddhist no-self view by Nyāya philosophers in the classical Indian tradition. We revisit the Nyāya-Buddhist debate on this issue. The early Nyāya experiential unity arguments depend on diachronic unification of experiences in memory, but later Nyāya philosophers explicitly widened the scope to incorporate new unity arguments that invoke synchronic unification in experiences. We (...) argue that classical responses to this objection in the Buddhist traditions are not satisfactory. We offer a new solution on behalf of the Buddhists, with some help from cognitive sciences. We argue that there are different kinds of experiential unity and that, once we distinguish between these kinds, the Nyāya argument becomes difficult to sustain. (shrink)

This book provides a systematic study of three foundational issues in the semantics of natural language that have been relatively neglected in the past few decades. focuses on the formal characterization of intensions, the nature of an adequate type system for natural language semantics, and the formal power of the semantic representation language proposes a theory that offers a promising framework for developing a computational semantic system sufficiently expressive to capture the properties of natural language meaning while remaining computationally tractable (...) written by two leading researchers and of interest to students and researchers in formal semantics, computational linguistics, logic, artificial intelligence, and the philosophy of language. (shrink)

How we understand, protect, and discharge our rights and responsibilities as citizens in a democratic society committed to the principle of political equality is intimately connected to the standards and behaviour of our media in general, and our news media in particular. However, the media does not just stand between the citizenry and their leaders, or indeed between citizens and each other. The media is often the site where individuals attempt to realise some of the most fundamental democratic liberties, including (...) the right to free speech. -/- Media Ethics, Free Speech, and the Requirements of Democracy explores the conflict between the rights that people exercise in, and through, the modern media and the responsibilities that accrue on account of its awesome and increasing power. The individual chapters—written by leading scholars from the US, UK, and Australia—address several recent events and controversial developments in the media, including Brexit, the rise of Trump, Lynton Crosby, Charlie Hebdo, dog-whistle politics, fake news, and political correctness. This much-needed philosophical treatment is a welcome addition to the recent literature in media ethics. It will be of interest to scholars across political and social philosophy, applied ethics, media and communication studies, and political science who are interested in the important issues surrounding the media and free speech and democracy. (shrink)

The ‘community of inquiry’ as formulated by C. S. Peirce is grounded in the notion of communities of discipline-based inquiry engaged in the construction of knowledge. The phrase ‘transforming the classroom into a community of inquiry’ is commonly understood as a pedagogical activity with a philosophical focus to guide classroom discussion. But it has a broader application. Integral to the method of the community of inquiry is the ability of the classroom teacher to actively engage in the theories and practices (...) of discipline-based communities of inquiry so as to become informed by the norms of the disciplines, not only to aspire to competence within the disciplines, but also to develop habits of self-correction for reconstructing those same norms when faced with novel problems and solutions, including those in the classroom. This has implications for science education and the role of educational philosophy in developing students' ability to think scientifically. But it also has broader implications for thinking critically within all key learning areas. Here we concentrate on science education. We present the parallels between philosophical inquiry and scientific inquiry that need to be realised to promote and engage with scientific inquiry in the classroom. We also discuss the conflicts between philosophical inquiry and the way inquiry science in the classroom is portrayed in the education literature. Based on philosophical and historical perceptions of science as inquiry, a practical approach to implementation of scientific inquiry in the science classroom is presented. (shrink)

Despite decades of action to reduce global malnutrition, rates of undernutrition remain stubbornly high and rates of overweight, obesity and chronic disease are simultaneously on the rise. Moreover, while volumes of robust research on causes and solutions to malnutrition have been published, and calls for interdisciplinarity are on the rise, researchers taking different epistemological and methodological choices have largely remained disciplinarily siloed. This paper works to open a scholarly conversation between “mainstream” public health nutrition and “critical” nutrition studies. While critical (...) nutrition scholars collectively question aspects of mainstream nutrition approaches, they also chart a different way to approach malnutrition research by focusing on politics, structural conditions, and the diverse ways people make sense of food and malnutrition. In this paper, we highlight the key research agendas and insights within both mainstream and critical nutrition in order to suggest spaces for their potential conversation. We ultimately argue that global public health nutrition interventions might achieve greater success in more equitable ways if they are informed by critical nutrition research. We aim for this intervention to facilitate more substantial crossing of disciplinary boundaries, critical to forging more socially and environmentally just dietary futures in the global South and beyond. (shrink)

It is an old and venerable idea in philosophy that morality is built into us, and this nativist view has seen a resurgence of late. Indeed, the prevailing systematic account of how we acquire complex moral representations is a nativist view inspired by arguments in Chomskyan linguistics. In this article, I review the leading argument for moral nativism – the poverty of the moral stimulus. I defend a systematic empiricist alternative that draws on the resources of statistical learning. Such an (...) empiricist account, I argue, promises to explain much of the complexity of people’s moral and other normative attitudes. (shrink)

This exploration into spirituality and climate change employs the “four paths” of the creation spirituality tradition. The author recognizes those paths in the rich teachings of Pope Francis’s encyclical, Laudato Si' and applies them in considering the nobility of the scientist's vocation. Premodern thinkers often resisted any split between science and religion. The author then lays out the basic archetypes for recognizing the sacredness of creation, namely, the Cosmic Christ (Christianity); the Buddha Nature (Buddhism); the Image of God (Judaism); the (...) “Primordial Man” (Hinduism), as well as the premodern universal teaching of “God as Beauty.” He addresses the subject of evil which deserves serious attention in the face of the realities posed by climate change and the resistance to addressing them. In the concluding section, the author speaks of a new Order of the Sacred Earth that was launched in fall 2017 to gather persons of whatever spiritual tradition or none to devote themselves to preserving Mother Earth. (shrink)

This essay discusses Cecilia Heyes’ groundbreaking new book Cognitive Gadgets: The Cultural Evolution of Thinking. Heyes’ point of departure is the claim that current theories of cultural evolution fail adequately to make a place for the mind. Heyes articulates a cognitive psychology of cultural evolution by explaining how eponymous “cognitive gadgets,” such as imitation, mindreading and language, mental technologies, are “tuned” and “assembled” through social interaction and cultural learning. After recapitulating her explanations for the cultural and psychological origins of these (...) gadgets, we turn to criticisms. Among those, we find Heyes’ use of evolutionary theory confusing on several points of importance; alternative theories of cultural evolution, especially those of the Tomasello group and of Boyd, Richerson and Henrich, are misrepresented; the book neglects joint attention and other forms of intersubjectivity in its explanation of the origins of cognitive gadgets; and, whereas Heyes accuses other theories of being “mindblind,” we find her theory ironically other-blind and autistic in character. (shrink)

Much has been written in recent years on environmental ethics relating to the more general 'natural' environment but little specifically written about ethics of the built environment. Ethics and the Built Environment responds to this need and offers a debate on the ethical dimension of building in all its forms from a variety of disciplinary perspectives and approaches. This book should be of interest to architects, students of building and building design, environmentalists, politicians and general readers with an interest in (...) ethics. (shrink)

Experimental tests about cross-cultural differentiation of cognitive style conclude that East Asian and Western cognition differ. Tendencies described as East Asian include holism, non-linearity, expectation of change, relationalism, field dependence, causal pluralism, dialecticism, and a tolerance of contradiction. Cross-cultural psychologists generally refrain from discussing the intellectual history or cultural evolution of these differences, preferring to explain results on cognitive scales in terms of results on social scales assessed using present-day participants. The present article attempts to partially close this explanatory gap (...) through detailed discussion of tendencies of East Asian cognitive style as represented in what is probably the most influential book in the history of East Asia, The Book of Changes. This study purports to show that the content of the Yijing 易經 and its commentaries is best described in terms of the cognitive tendencies just mentioned, that reading the Yijing activated those cognitive tendencies, and that the Yijing attained prodigious influence on subsequent Chinese and East Asian cultures through four known mechanisms of cultural transmission. Informed by this case study, researchers of cross-cultural cognition may be positioned to develop a richer appreciation of the cultural representation and evolution of East Asian cognitive style in historical context. (shrink)

The last several decades of research on counterfactual conditionals in the fields of philosophy and linguistics have yielded a predominant paradigm according to which the notion of similarity plays the starring role. Roughly, a counterfactual of the form A > C is true iff the closest A-worlds are all C-worlds, where the closeness of a world is a function of its similarity, in a certain sense, to the actual world. I argue that this is deeply misguided. In some cases we (...) may only care about the closest A-worlds, but quite often we care about some broader variety of A-worlds varying in closeness. After presenting several problem cases for the similarity-based paradigm, some new and some known, I propose an alternative paradigm for the semantics of counterfactuals, which introduces the notion of A-scenarios, understood roughly as different ways of making A true. According to this view, A > C is true iff all the contextually relevant ways of making A true also make C true. I then more carefully spell out a working view that formalizes this idea with greater precision, and explore the consequences of that version of the view. (shrink)

Thinking skills pedagogies like those employed in a community of inquiry (COI) provide a powerful teaching method that fosters reconstruction of thinking in both teachers and students. This collaborative, dialogic approach enables teachers and students to think deeply about the thinking process within a supportive, structured learning environment, by fostering the transformative potential of lived experience. This paper explores the potential for cognitive dissonance (genuine doubt) during students’ experiences of inquiry to be transformed into impetus for the acquisition and improvement (...) of social and intellectual inquiry capabilities and thinking behaviours across the curriculum. (shrink)

This article addresses a telling issue in academic science: the clarity of criteria for tenure and promotion reported by women and men faculty in scientific fields. Data from faculty surveyed in nine US research universities point to ways that formal and informal organizational indicators predict the clarity of evaluation reported by women and men. Unexpected patterns occur by gender. Among men, both formal and informal organizational indicators, as well as field, predict their reported clarity of evaluation. Among women, however, only (...) informal organizational indicators, namely, frequency of speaking with faculty about research and departmental climate, are significant predictors. Further, overall, informal indicators are stronger predictors of clarity than are formal indicators, and some field differences occur. These findings have implications for national and regional science policies and for the practices and policies of universities. (shrink)

In medieval studies, philology is the matrix out of which all else springs. So we scarcely need to justify the choice of philology as a topic for the special forum to which Speculum, in a historic move, has opened its pages. On the other hand, if philology is so central to our discipline, why should one postulate a “new” philology, however ironically? While each contributor answers this question in a different, though complementary, way, the consensus seems to be that medieval (...) philology has been marginalized by contemporary cognitive methodologies, on the one side, while within the discipline itself, a very limited and by now grossly anachronistic conception of it remains far too current. This version, formulated under the impulse of political nationalism and scientific positivism during the second half of the nineteenth century, continues to circumscribe the “discipline” of medieval studies. The forum presented here undertakes to explore and interrogate presuppositions underlying current philological practices. (shrink)