The proper limit to paternalist regulation of citizens' private lives is a recurring theme in political theory and ethics. In the present study, we examine the role of beliefs about free will and determinism in attitudes toward libertarian versus paternalist policies. Throughout five studies we find that a scientific deterministic worldview reduces opposition toward paternalist policies, independent of the putative influence of political ideology. We suggest that exposure to scientific explanations for patterns in human behavior challenges the notion of personal (...) autonomy and, in turn, undermines libertarian arguments against state paternalism appealing to autonomy and personal choice. (shrink)

Una investigación que se centra en torno a la fuerza de la imaginación con el propósito básico de alcanzar una aproximación desde perspectivas plurales, diversas al poder humano de imaginar. La imaginación es una función compleja que exige ser abordada desde diversos ángulos, cada uno de los cuales arrojará una luz parcial sobre determinados aspectos y facetas pero no sobre otros, no sobre todos.

Purpose This paper aims to explore the technologization of peace work through “remote support monitors” that use social and digital media technologies like social media to alert local violence prevention actors to potentially violent situations during demonstrations. Design/methodology/approach Using a distributed cognition lens, the authors explore the information processing of monitors within peace organizations. The authors adopt a qualitative thematic analysis methodology composed of interviews with monitors and documents from their shared communication and discussion channels. The authors’ analysis seeks to (...) highlight how information is transformed between social and technical actors through the process of monitoring. Findings The authors’ analysis identifies that the technologization of monitoring for violence prevention to assist nonviolent activists produces two principal and related forms of transformation: appropriation and hidden attributes. Monitors “appropriate” information from sources to fit new ends and modes of representation throughout the process of detection, verification and dissemination. The verification and dissemination processes likewise render latent supporting informational elements, hiding the aggregative nature of information flow in monitoring. The authors connect the ideas of appropriation and hidden attributes to broader discourses in surveillance and trust that challenge monitoring and its place in peace work going forward. Originality/value To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this study is the first to focus on the communicative and information processes of remote support monitors. The authors demonstrate that adoption of social and digital media information of incipient violence and response processes for its mitigation suggests both a social and technical precarity for the role of monitoring. (shrink)

This contribution to Palgrave's 'Advances' series addresses a wide range of issues that have arisen in post-Gricean pragmatic theory, in chapters by distinguished authors. Among the specific topics covered are scalar implicatures, lexical semantics and pragmatics, indexicality, procedural meaning, the semantics and pragmatics of negation. The volume includes both defences and critiques of Relevance Theory and of Neo-Gricean Pragmatics.

"This volume contains two brief works by Isaiah Berlin, an acclaimed philosopher and thinker of the 20th century. "The first" is a short fictional piece he wrote when he was twelve reflecting his belief that the idea of a perfect society cannot justify the cruelties he saw in the Russian Revolution. "The last" is an essay he wrote the year before he died synthesizing his thoughts on topics such as freedom, determinism, and pluralism. Also included are several tributes to Berlin's (...) friendship, conversation, and thought."--Provided by publisher. (shrink)

Het moderne leven wordt beheerst door drie tegenstellingen, die overwonnen moeten worden: de neiging in het westerse denken om het ik gelijk te stellen aan de rede, de vrees voor isalement van het individu, dat tot cosiaal conformisme leidt en de door de mens geschapen technologie, die een wereld tot stand brengt, waarin het scheppende vermogen wordt verstrikt. Een echte uitweg geeft hij niet en ook zijn tragisch socialisme komt niet goed uit de verf. Hij wil wel een klassenloze maatschappij, (...) maar dan in een paternalistisch-individualistisch kader. (shrink)

Fr. Beretta, dans l'article auquel nous réagissons ici, considérait comme étant une question encore ouverte ce qu'est la valeur doctrinale de la condamnation à l'abjuration imposée à Galilée en 1633, et soutenait une double thèse à cet égard: une censure d'hérésie a été formellement appliquée à la doctrine héliocentrique, et une telle censure, prononcée par le juge suprême de la foi, acquiert valeur d'acte de magistère - le terme 'infaillibilité' est absent, mais la problématique en est toute proche -. Dans (...) une lecture cursive de la cinquantaine de pages de l'article, nous relevons de multiples erreurs de lecture des textes originaux ou des interprétations erronées, telles qu'elles invalident entièrement la thèse de Beretta. Nous incluons également quelques remarques sur l'authenticité du precetto, qui est mise en question à plusieurs reprises. (shrink)

Conservative ideology in its moderate form is inspired by opposition to belief in radical political and social change on the ground that it rests on several mistaken assumptions, of which the most important are that human nature is highly malleable; that human will can refashion history in whatever ways human ideals may require; that society is the artificial product of a contract between autonomous individuals; and that evil is an eliminable feature of human existence. The unifying theme of conservative ideology, (...) by contrast, is a defence of limited politics, although different schools of conservatism have theorized the concept of limit in ways that are incompatible and even incoherent. Of these, the four principal schools are the reactionary, the radical, the moderate, and, more recently, the New Right. This chapter examines the degree of coherence achieved by each of these schools of thought. (shrink)

In this paper, we set out what we see as a novel, and very promising, approach to resolving a number of the familiar linguistic puzzles that provide philosophy of language with much of its subject matter. The approach we promote postulates semantic pretense at work where these puzzles arise. We begin by briefly cataloging the relevant dilemmas. Then, after introducing the pretense approach, we indicate how it promises to handle these putatively intractable problems. We then consider a number of objections (...) to pretense views, taking this as an opportunity to provide more detailed explanation of what a pretense account amounts to, what the pretense approach commits us to, and why it is a promising approach in philosophy of language. (shrink)

According to spacetime state realism, the fundamental ontology of a quantum mechanical world consists of a state-valued field evolving in four-dimensional spacetime. One chief advantage it claims over rival wave-function realist views is its natural compatibility with relativistic quantum field theory. I argue that the original density operator formulation of SSR cannot be extended to QFTs where the local observables form type III von Neumann algebras. Instead, I propose a new formulation of SSR in terms of a presheaf of local (...) state spaces dual to the net of local observables studied by algebraic QFT. 1Introduction2Spacetime State Realism in Quantum Field Theory 2.1Equivalence thesis3Entanglement and the Type III Property 3.1No-Go Lemma 13.2No-Go Lemma 24State Space Axioms for Quantum Field Theory 4.1Revised equivalence thesis5Discussion. (shrink)

“Forget Taste” rejects the classical notion of taste as a viable concept for the exercise of critical evaluation and proposes an alternative approach to critical evaluation based crucially on the idea of the constitutive purpose of the artwork. The goal of this paper is to advance an approach—which I call the purpose-driven approach—to the critical evaluation of artworks that develops from and refines the views of art evaluation presented in my previous work. This approach, in virtue of its focus on (...) the constitutive purposes of artworks, regards the artwork as typically singular. For that reason, it follows that this approach is pluralistic in contrast to the hedonic conception of the taste model popularized in the eighteenth century and which still recurs today, if sometimes only subconsciously, and that reduces critical evaluation to feelings of pleasure. I argue that the hedonic taste model, which is noncognitive and reductive, should be abandoned in favor of one that is cognitivist and pluralistic, namely, the purpose-driven approach. (shrink)

Drawing on his knowledge of the worlds of art, criticism, and philosophy, Noèel Carroll argues that appraisal and evaluation of art are an indispensable part of the conversation of life.

Noel Carroll, film scholar and philosopher, offers the first serious look at the aesthetics of horror. In this book he discusses the nature and narrative structures of the genre, dealing with horror as a "transmedia" phenomenon. A fan and serious student of the horror genre, Carroll brings to bear his comprehensive knowledge of obscure and forgotten works, as well as of the horror masterpieces. Working from a philosophical perspective, he tries to account for how people can find pleasure in (...) having their wits scared out of them. What, after all, are those "paradoxes of the heart" that make us want to be horrified? (shrink)

Stephen Read has presented an argument for the inconsistency of the concept of validity. We extend Read’s results and show that this inconsistency is but one half of a larger problem. Like the concept of truth, validity is infected with what we call semantic pathology, a condition that actually gives rise to two symptoms: inconsistency and indeterminacy. After sketching the basic ideas behind semantic pathology and explaining how it manifests both symptoms in the concept of truth, we present cases that (...) establish the indeterminacy of validity and that link this indeterminacy with the concept’s inconsistency. Our conclusion is that an adequate treatment of the semantic pathology thus revealed must deal with both of its symptoms. Further, it must extend to the occurrences of this condition elsewhere: in the concept of truth, in the other central semantic notions, and even in certain philosophical concepts outside semantics. (shrink)

Higher courts sometimes assess the constitutionality of law by working through a concrete case, other times by reasoning about the underlying question in a more abstract way. Prior research has found that the degree of concreteness or abstraction with which an issue is formulated can influence people's prescriptive views: For instance, people often endorse punishment for concrete misdeeds that they would oppose if the circumstances were described abstractly. We sought to understand whether the so-called ‘abstract/concrete paradox’ also jeopardizes the consistency (...) of judicial reasoning. In a series of experiments, both lay and professional judges sometimes reached opposite conclusions when reasoning about concrete cases versus the underlying issues formulated in abstract terms. This effect emerged whether participants reasoned with broad principles, such as human dignity, or narrow rules, and was largest among individuals high in trait empathy. Finally, to understand whether people reflectively endorse the discrepancy between abstract and concrete resolutions, we examined their reactions when evaluating both, either simultaneously or sequentially. These approaches revealed no single pattern across lay and expert populations, or exploratory and confirmatory studies. Taken together, our studies suggest that empathic concern plays a greater role in guiding the judicial resolution of concrete cases than in illuminating judges' professed standards—which may result in concrete decisions in violation of their own abstract principles. (shrink)

Toward the end of his book Jokes, perhaps the best known philosophical treatment of the subject, Ted Cohen includes a notorious joke about a group of young Black men who are deterred from committing a gang rape by being thrown a basketball. This is a joke that perplexes Cohen and that he admits plays into stereotypes that presuppose the mindless obsession of Black youths with basketball as well as their unbridled sexuality. He agrees that the joke is morally bad and (...) that it would be a better world without it. But he denies that its evil compromises its alleged funniness. He writes: “Wish that there were no mean jokes. Try remaking the world so that such jokes will have no place, will not arise. But do not deny that they are funny. That denial is a pretense that will help nothing.” In this paper, I want to challenge the claim that the moral defectiveness of a joke, especially a racist joke, cannot ever compromise its capacity to be funny. (shrink)

Acclaimed writer and historian Noel Malcolm presents his sensational discovery of a new work by Thomas Hobbes : a propaganda pamphlet on behalf of the Habsburg side in the Thirty Years' War, translated by Hobbes from a Latin original. Malcolm's book explores a fascinating episode in seventeenth-century history, illuminating both the practice of early modern propaganda and the theory of "reason of state".

mind and certain collocations of living matter. Conscious mind is essentially a specialization, a distillation of that directive activity, inherent in certain mechanical activities, that distinguishes living from lifeless matter. The characteristics of mind ...

Prescriptive rules guide human behavior across various domains of community life, including law, morality, and etiquette. What, specifically, are rules in the eyes of their subjects, i.e., those who are expected to abide by them? Over the last sixty years, theorists in the philosophy of law have offered a useful framework with which to consider this question. Some, following H. L. A. Hart, argue that a rule’s text at least sometimes suffices to determine whether the rule itself covers a case. (...) Others, in the spirit of Lon Fuller, believe that there is no way to understand a rule without invoking its purpose — the benevolent ends which it is meant to advance. In this paper we ask whether people associate rules with their textual formulation or their underlying purpose. We find that both text and purpose guide people’s reasoning about the scope of a rule. Overall, a rule’s text more strongly contributed to rule infraction decisions than did its purpose. The balance of these considerations, however, varied across experimental conditions: In conditions favoring a spontaneous judgment, rule interpretation was affected by moral purposes, whereas analytic conditions resulted in a greater adherence to textual interpretations. In sum, our findings suggest that the philosophical debate between textualism and purposivism partly reflects two broader approaches to normative reasoning that vary within and across individuals. Keywords: , the concept of law, rules, legal psychology, Hart, Fuller. (shrink)

A collection of essays by Frederick J.E. Woodbridge that show the changes and developments in an essentially constant philosophy, and presents a unified view of the author's constructive ideas and metaphysical position.

Childcare robots are being manufactured and developed with the long term aim of creating surrogate carers. While total childcare is not yet being promoted, there are indications that it is ‘on the cards’. We examine recent research and developments in childcare robots and speculate on progress over the coming years by extrapolating from other ongoing robotics work. Our main aim is to raise ethical questions about the part or full-time replacement of primary carers. The questions are about human rights, privacy, (...) robot use of restraint, deception of children and accountability. But the most pressing ethical issues throughout the paper concern the consequences for the psychological and emotional wellbeing of children. We set these in the context of the child development literature on the pathology and causes of attachment disorders. We then consider the adequacy of current legislation and international ethical guidelines on the protection of children from the overuse of robot care. (shrink)

The principles that AN INSTANCE OF A CLASS IS THE CLASS and A CLASS IS AN INSTANCE OF ITSELF allow for the so called LAWS OF THOUGHTIDENTITY - WHAT IS, IS.CONTRADICTION - NOTHING BOTH IS and IS NOT.EXCLUDED MIDDLE - EVERYTHING IS or IS NOT.and allow us to adopt a bivalent system. Everything essential for primary logic is provided.Though this is not the place to discuss it, it should be noted that the development of general logic with its current theories (...) of class, identity and natural numbers could take a very different course from the one it currently pursues.Human thought would have had to evolve to a high level of development before any systematic attempt to analyse it could have been made. It seems it was in the floruit of the Greek civilisation that this attempt was first made. The issues in this paper were of prime concern to those ancient thinkers and their achievements were considerable. Since those times further developments have occurred, many of which they would not have dreamed, but to this day there are still great issues that have not been resolved. The state of the art leaves much to be desired and it is my hope that this paper will contribute to its progress.If the ideas in this paper are true, then it seems we have come across the very origins of human rationality. (shrink)

Truth-talk exhibits certain features that render it philosophically suspect and motivate a deflationary account. I offer a new formulation of deflationism that explains truth-talk in terms of semantic pretense. This amounts to a fictionalist account of truth-talk but avoids an error-theoretic interpretation and its resulting incoherence. The pretense analysis fits especially well with deflationism’s central commitment, and it handles truth-talk’s unusual features effectively. In particular, this approach suggests an interesting strategy for dealing with the Liar paradox. This version of deflationism (...) has advantages over the formulations currently available in the literature, mainly because it offers a more satisfying account of the generalizing role deflationary views take as truth-talk’s central function. Explaining the notion of truth in terms of pretense generates some special concerns, but none we cannot address through careful consideration of how pretense operates in truth-talk and of the attitudes instances of pretending involve. (shrink)

Noel Carroll, film scholar and philosopher, offers the first serious look at the aesthetics of horror. In this book he discusses the nature and narrative structures of the genre, dealing with horror as a "transmedia" phenomenon. A fan and serious student of the horror genre, Carroll brings to bear his comprehensive knowledge of obscure and forgotten works, as well as of the horror masterpieces. Working from a philosophical perspective, he tries to account for how people can find pleasure in (...) having their wits scared out of them. What, after all, are those "paradoxes of the heart" that make us want to be horrified? (shrink)

"Ontology" focuses on three ways ground and ontology are said to relate. One way involves ground's ability to provide a safe and sane way of admitting certain kinds of things in our theories. Another way involves ground's ability to show how we should measure ontological simplicity. And a third way involves ground's ability to restrict what things or kinds of things can depend on other things or kinds.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy, Psychiatry, & Psychology 10.4 (2003) 373-378 [Access article in PDF] The Forgotten Self:Training Mental Health and Social Care Workers to Work With Service Users Kim Woodbridge Keywords self, workers perspective, them and us, win-win situation The three main papers and the case studies presented in this issue of Philosophy, Psychiatry, & Psychology all focus on the service user perspective in relation to the self as illustrated by (...) different aspects of philosophy. This is also in the context of the service user looking for help during a time when they are experiencing levels of distress and difficulty.Important as this is, evident by the substantial clinical and philosophical literature in this area, what has been overlooked is the perspective of the mental health and social care worker responsible for the care of individuals whose sense of self is disturbed. The significance of this omission has been brought home to me through my experiences in running training workshops for workers working with service users with a diagnosis of personality disorder. (From here on, in this paper, the terms worker and trainee are used interchangeably to refer to the mental health and social care worker).During these workshops challenges to the worker's sense of self have been revealed emotionally ("this doesn't feel like me"), ideologically ("I am not a bad person"), and/or practically ("I don't usually behave like this") when discussing their work with service users. This paper draws from the workshop experiences to explore and consider the workers perspective in relation to the self in more detail.There follows a descriptive account of three workshop sessions which include the trainees responses. With each activity the responses are considered within the context of the self, particularly from the worker's perspective. In the conclusion the argument is made, as evidenced by these illustrations, for the importance of including the workers' perspective when attempting to understand the self. The Trainees and Service Users Workers from various professional and nonprofessional backgrounds attend the workshops. They include psychiatrists, nurses, social workers, support workers, and occupational therapists who work in both in-patient and community settings. They usually have several years of clinical experience working with people with a [End Page 373] diagnosis of personality disorder, but rarely have they had any formal education or training in the area. Discussing their experiences of working with this service user group generates strong and highly emotionally charged personal responses during training.It is their experiences of the relationships with service users whose sense of self is absent, inconsistent, or unstable, that make a substantial contribution to the content of the workshops.Often service users are struggling with fragmented, distorted, or threatening perceptions of the world, themselves, and others. The worker, while embedded within their own sense of self, is engaged in a relationship with the service user. The issues that arise as a part of this relationship can be challenging and distressing for the workers. There are two main areas:The impact the service user's chaotic, fragmented, and unstable sense of self has on the worker's own sense of self.The response of the workers when their sense of self is challenged, and the impact that response has on the service user. These can be seen in more detail in the examples taken from the training sessions presented later in this paper. The Training Sessions The training sessions are either run alone or form part of a 1- or 2-day workshop. As mentioned, the groups are composed of a variety of professionally and nonprofessionally qualified staff. The experiences they share mainly relate to people with a diagnosis of Borderline Personality Disorder, although other subcategories are mentioned occasionally. Information regarding these and other related sessions can be found in two recent publications: Making positive connections (Duff, Meredith, & Woodbridge,2003) and "Whose good practice?" (Woodbridge & Fulford, 2003). The First Activity: Revealing Internal Models Given the lack of available evidence, even the best-informed trainees are likely to have to fill in the knowledge gaps with their own interpretations of... (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)

At present, one of the most recurrent views in the philosophy of history claims that historical writing is interpretive and that a primary form that this interpretation takes is narration. Furthermore, narration, according to this approach, is thought to possess an inevitably fictional element, viz., a plot, and, in this regard, the work of the narrative historian is said to be more like that of the imaginative writer than has been admitted heretofore. The upshot of this philosophically, moreover, is the (...) assertion that historical narrations, qua narrative interpretations, are to be assessed, in large measure, in terms of the kind of criterion of truth that is appropriate to literary works. And a subsidiary, though far less tendentious, consequence is that our understanding of historical interpretation can profit from literary or “discourse” analysis. (shrink)