In this essay, I argue for an account of property possession as strict, numerical identity. According to this account, for an entity to possess a property is for that entity to be numerically identical to that property.

In their editors’ introduction, Rebuschat and Monaghan provide the background to the special issue. They outline the rationale for bringing together, in a single volume, leading researchers from two distinct, yet related research strands, implicit learning and statistical learning. The editors then introduce the new contributions solicited for this special issue and provide their perspective on the agenda setting that results from combining these two approaches.

This article focuses on the implicit statistical learning of words and syntax. Monaghan, Schoetensack and Rebuschat introduce a novel paradigm that combines theoretical and methodological insights from the two research traditions, implicit learning and statistical learning. Their cross‐situational learning paradigm has been used in the statistical learning literature, while their measures of awareness have widely been used in implicit learning research. They illustrate how the two literatures can be conjoined in a single paradigm to explore implicit statistical learning.

Think of the last thing someone did to you to seriously harm or offend you. And now imagine, so far as you can, becoming fully aware of the fact that his or her action was the causally inevitable result of a plan set into motion before he or she was ever even born, a plan that had no chance of failing. Should you continue to regard him or her as being morally responsible—blameworthy, in this case—for what he or she did? (...) Many have thought that, intuitively, you should not. Recently, Alfred Mele has employed this line of thought to mount what many have taken to be a powerful argument for incompatibilism: the “Zygote Argument”. However, in interesting new papers, John Martin Fischer and Stephen Kearns have each independently argued that the Zygote Argument fails. As I see it, the criticisms of Fischer and Kearns reveal some important questions about how the argument is meant to be—or how it would best be—understood. Once we make a slight (but important) modification to the argument, however, I think we will be able to see that the criticisms of Fischer and Kearns do not detract from its substantial force. (shrink)

Curriculum Development in the Postmodern Era provided the first introduction and analysis of contemporary concepts of curriculum development in relation to postmodernism. It challenged educators to transcend purely traditional approaches to curriculum development and instead incorporate various postmodern discourses into their reflection and action in schools. Since publication in 1995, the curriculum studies field has exploded, the very notion of the postmodern has shifted, and the landscape of American schooling has changed dramatically-federal policies like No Child Left Behind have dramatically (...) increased the focus on accountability and consequently what and how teachers teach. The need to understand curriculum in relation to global religions, ethnic relations, multicultural communities, and socio-political interest groups has been magnified. Controversial issues such as biology, gender roles, academic freedom, religion and prayer in schools, gay straight alliances, GLBT literature in the curriculumstudies is theorized. In this much-anticipated and thoroughly updated edition, noted curriculum studies scholar Patrick Slattery tackles these and other issues to reflect on the current state of curriculum development and on where the field may go from here. (shrink)

Is childhood valuable? And is childhood as, less, or more, valuable than adulthood? In this article I first delineate several different questions that we might be asking when we think about the ‘value of childhood’, and I explore some difficulties of doing so. I then focus on the question of whether childhood is good for the person who experiences it. I argue for two key claims. First, if childhood wellbeing is measured by the same standards as adulthood, then children are (...) worse off than adults. Second, if childhood and adulthood wellbeing are measured by different standards, then we cannot compare them, and children are neither better off nor worse off than adults. This has some counter-intuitive implications, such as that we do not harm persons by depriving them of a childhood, nor by keeping them as children for elongated periods. (shrink)

Is truth objective or relative? What exists independently of our minds? The essays in this book debate these two questions, which are among the oldest of philosophical issues and have vexed almost every major philosopher, from Plato, to Kant, to Wittgenstein. Fifteen eminent contributors bring fresh perspectives, renewed energy, and original answers to debates of great interest both within philosophy and in the culture at large.

This modern, advanced textbook reviews modal logic, a field which caught the attention of computer scientists in the late 1970's.

The historical context of the philosophical work of St. Thomas Aquinas, by D. Knowles.--Form and existence, by P. Geach.--Categories, by H. McCabe.--Analogy as a rule of meaning for religious language, by J. F. Ross.--Nominalism, by P. Geach.--St. Thomas' doctrine of necessary being, by P. Brown.--The proof ex motu for the existence of God; logical analysis of St. Thomas' arguments, by J. Salamucha.--Infinite causal regression, by P. Brown.--St. Thomas Aquinas and the language of total dependence, by J. N. Deck.--Divine foreknowledge and (...) human freedom, by A. Kenny.--Intellect and imagination in Aquinas, by A. Kenny.--The immortality of the soul, by H. McCabe.--Aquinas on intentionality, by P. Sheehan.--The scholastic theory of moral law in the modern world, by A. Donagan.--The first principle of practical reason, by G. G. Grisez. (shrink)

ABSTRACT In this article I consider alternate but often complementary models for women’s republicanism from those discussed by Sandrine Bergès. In particular, I make use of Bergès’s insights about extending philosophical inquiry beyond traditional texts to analyse how militant political action was both informed by and informed the creation of philosophical texts, and consider the possibility of bringing direct action into the realm of philosophical investigation.

The determination of individual moral status is a central factor in the ethical evaluation of controversial practices such as elective abortion, human embryo-destructive research, and the care of the severely disabled and those in persistent vegetative states. A review of recent work on Kant reveals the need for a careful examination of the content of Kant ’s biological and psychological theories and their relation to his views about moral status. Such an examination, in conjunction with Kant ’s practical-metaphysical analysis of (...) the origins of freedom, reveals Kant ’s principled basis for his contention that all human beings possess moral status. (shrink)

Griinbaum's own article sets forth his views on the ontology of the curvature of empty space, especially in the geometrodynamics of Clifford and Wheeler. ...

Bayesian confirmation theory offers an explicatum for a pretheoretic concept of confirmation. The “problem of irrelevant conjunction” for this theory is that, according to some people's intuitions, the pretheoretic concept differs from the explicatum with regard to conjunctions involving irrelevant propositions. Previous Bayesian solutions to this problem consist in showing that irrelevant conjuncts reduce the degree of confirmation; they have the drawbacks that (i) they don't hold for all ways of measuring degree of confirmation and (ii) they don't remove the (...) conflict with intuition but merely “soften the impact” (as Fitelson has written). A better solution, which avoids both these drawbacks, is to show that the intuition is wrong. (shrink)

This paper explores themethodological consequences of AmericanPragmatism for the social sciences. It alsocriticises some rival perspectives onmethodology of social research, in particularfalsificationist, realist and someanti-naturalist views. It is argued thatAmerican Pragmatism shows striking affinitieswith the genealogical method of history and thereflexive turn in cultural anthropology. It isalso argued that Pragmatism forces us to thinkdifferently about the relationship betweentheory and empirical research.

The Philosophy of Human Rights brings together an extensive collection of classical and contemporary writings on the topic of human rights, including genocide, ethnic cleansing, minority cultures, gay and lesbian rights, and the environment, providing an exceptionally comprehensive introduction. Sources include authors such as Aristotle, Cicero, Thomas Aquinas, Confucius, Hobbes, Locke, rant. Marx, Gandhi. Hart, Feinberg, Nussbaum, the Dalai Lama, Derrida, Lyocard and Rorty. Ideal for courses in human rights, social theory, ethical theory, and political science, each reading; begins with (...) a brief introduction, and is followed with study questions and suggested further readings. (shrink)

The author uses social epistemology to develop the cognitive authority theory. The fundamental concept of cognitive authority is that people construct knowledge in two different ways: based on their first-hand experience or on what they have learned second-hand from others. What people learn first-hand depends on the stock of ideas they bring to the interpretation and understanding of their encounters with the world. People primarily depend on others for ideas as well as for information outside the range of direct experience. (...) Much of what they think of the world is what they have gained second-hand. All that people know of the world beyond the narrow range of their own lives is what others have told them. However, people do not count all hearsay as equally reliable; only those who are deemed to “know what they are talking about” become cognitive authorities. --. (shrink)

Patrick Aidan Heelan’s The Observable offers the reader a completely articulated development of his 1965 philosophy of quantum physics, Quantum Mechanics and Objectivity. In this previously unpublished study dating back more than a half a century, Heelan brings his background as both a physicist and a philosopher to his reflections on Werner Heisenberg’s physical philosophy. Including considerably broader connections to the contributions of Niels Bohr, Wolfgang Pauli, and Albert Einstein, this study also reflects Heelan’s experience in Eugene Wigner’s laboratory (...) at Princeton along with his reflections on working with Erwin Schrödinger dating from Heelan’s years at the Institute for Advanced Cosmology in Dublin. A contribution to continental philosophy of science, the phenomenological and hermeneutic resources applied in this book to the physical and ontological paradoxes of quantum physics, especially in connection with laboratory science and measurement, theory and model making, will enrich students of the history of science as well as those interested in different approaches to the historiography of science. University courses in the philosophy of physics will find this book indispensable as a resource and invaluable for courses in the history of science. (shrink)

In his book Democratic Authority, David Estlund puts forward a case for democracy, which he labels epistemic proceduralism, that relies on democracy's ability to produce good – that is, substantively just – results. Alongside this case for democracy Estlund attacks what he labels ‘utopophobia’, an aversion to idealistic political theory. In this article I make two points. The first is a general point about what the correct level of ‘idealisation’ is in political theory. Various debates are emerging on this question (...) and, to the extent that they are focused on ‘political theory’ as a whole, I argue, they are flawed. This is because there are different kinds of political concept, and they require different kinds of ideal. My second point is about democracy in particular. If we understand democracy as Estlund does, then we should see it as a problem-solving concept – the problem being that we need coercive institutions and rules, but we do not know what justice requires. As democracy is a response to a problem, we should not allow our theories of it, even at the ideal level, to be too idealised – they must be embedded in the nature of the problem they are to solve, and the beings that have it. (shrink)

In his Discourses, Rousseau argues that inequalities of rank, wealth, and power are the inevitable result of the civilizing process. If inequality is intolerable - and Rousseau shows with unparalleled eloquence how it robs us not only of our material but also of our psychological independence - then how can we recover the peaceful self-sufficiency of life in the state of nature? We cannot return to a simpler time, but measuring the costs of progress may help us to imagine alternatives (...) to the corruption and oppressive conformity of modern society. Rousseau's sweeping account of humanity's social and political development epitomizes the innovative boldness of the Enlightenment, and it is one of the most provocative and influential works of the eighteenth century. This new translation includes all Rousseau's own notes, and Patrick Coleman's Introduction builds on recent key scholarship, considering particularly the relationship between political and aesthetic thought. (shrink)

In this article I argue that revisionists in just war theory must further revise their proportionality principles. I show that on the revisionist view it is possible for a war to be proportionate,...

L’IA révèle quelque chose sur le travail et la condition humaine que ne montraient pas pleinement les techniques antérieures, ce en quoi elle achève d’une certaine manière l’histoire des techniques. Ce qu’elle révèle, c’est la spécificité de l’intelligence humaine dans le travail collectif, qu’elle atteint au plus profond : à savoir la communication humaine et le fait que le travail est une expérience du temps. Il s’agit de formes d’une intelligence vivante ou vécue, dans lesquelles plonge le sens du travail. (...) En voulant les annihiler, l’IA participe de vieilles idées gnostiques. (shrink)

This article introduces and critically analyses Richard Rorty’s neo-pragmatism as a contribution to the philosophy of social sciences. Although Rorty has written little about philosophy of social sciences as such, it is argued that his overall philosophical position has significant ramifications for this subject area. The first part of the article sets out the implications of Rorty’s neo-pragmatism for various issues in the philosophy of social sciences, for instance, the doctrine of naturalism, the nineteenth-century Methodenstreit, the philosophical tenets of Marxism, (...) and the relatively recent wave of post-structuralism. The second part presents a constructive critique of Rorty’s neopragmatist philosophy of social sciences. Although critical of some aspects of Rorty’s argument, it is argued that his stance could provide a base for a fruitful view of social sciences, aiming at enlarging human potentialities rather than representation. (shrink)

By Reid's own account, ‘That the natural faculties, by which we distinguish truth from error, are not fallacious’, has a special place among the First Principles of Contingent Truths. Some have found that claim puzzling, but it is not. Contrary to what's usually assumed, certain FPs preceding FP#7 do not already assert the better part of what FP#7 explicitly states. FP#7 is needed because there is nothing epistemological in the FPs that precede it; and its special place among the FPs (...) is a straightforward consequence of its being both perfectly general and distinctively epistemological. (shrink)

Le matérialisme que ce livre interroge et construit n'est pas une « philosophie », mais la condition de possibilité et l'outil de la connaissance objective. Historiquement, il se confond, de fait, avec l'élaboration de la science moderne s'affranchissant graduellement des contrats de parole qui l'asservirent longtemps à la métaphysique et à la théologie. Comment cette émancipation s'est-elle effectuée en des temps où une croyance instituée dictait sa loi théologico-politique aux efforts de la connaissance en leur imposant a priori la limite (...) de l'Inconnaissable? Comment d'autre part, face à cet affranchissement toujours inachevé, une métaphysique résiduelle impose-t-elle encore aux artisans de la connaissance objective, sans qu'ils s'en doutent, des cadres, des frontières, des démarches et des représentations? Ce livre montre qu'une analyse savante des complexes de discours dans l'histoire, à travers ce qu'elle explique du passé, peut permettre de comprendre et d'améliorer ce qui constitue proprement aujourd'hui l'acte de connaître. De redéfinir la « conscience ». De sortir des leitmotivs exténués sur le « hasard ». De penser plus authentiquement la singularité émergente du vivant. De s'éloigner d'un modèle strictement nécessitariste du « déterminisme ». De sortir des impasses avérées du réductionnisme. De résoudre les contradictions tacitement acceptées entre matérialisme et morale, ou entre déterminisme et conduites autonomes. D'entrevoir l'origine du symbolisme. De comprendre la nature originellement et fondamentalement politique de la religion. De penser l'articulation évolutive entre « nature » et « civilisation », et un lien cohérent et critique entre sciences de la nature et sciences de la société. D'identifier les comportements discursifs récurrents de ce que l'on nomme l'« idéologie ». Et d'édifier sur de nouvelles bases une histoire naturelle et sociale de la liberté. Revenant sur une part essentielle de son oeuvre, Patrick Tort invite ici à une véritable réforme logique de l'initiative de connaissance, et, simultanément, à instruire la méthode capable d'éclairer les mécanismes qui la favorisent et la combattent dans l'univers infini des discours. (shrink)

Personal Identity theorists as diverse as Derek Parfit, Marya Schechtman and Galen Strawson have noted that the experiencing subject (the locus of present psychological experience) and the person (a human being with a career/narrative extended across time) are not necessarily coextensive. Accordingly, we can become psychologically alienated from, and fail to experience a sense of identity with, the person we once were or will be. This presents serious problems for Locke's original account of “sameness of consciousness” constituting personal identity, given (...) the distinctly normative (and indeed eschatological) focus of his discussion. To succeed, the Lockean project needs to identify some phenomenal property of experience that can constitute a sense of identity with the self figured in all moments to which consciousness can be extended. I draw upon key themes in Kierkegaard's phenomenology of moral imagination to show that Kierkegaard describes a phenomenal quality of experience that unites the experiencing subject with its past and future, regardless of facts about psychological change across time. Yet Kierkegaard's account is fully normative, recasting affective identification with past/future selves as a moral task rather than something merely psychologically desirable (Schechtman) or utterly contingent (Parfit, Strawson). (shrink)

McCarthy, Homan, and Rozier’s article seeks to bridge a gap between theological and secular bioethics (McCarthy, Homan, and Rozier 2020). It should be noted that the “theological” emphasis in the a...

Occupation, intellectual collaboration and the resistance -- The purge of collaborationist intellectuals -- Intellectual debates around the purge : responsibility, purity, patriotism -- The autumn of 1945 -- Sartre's committed literature in theory and practice -- Rise and demise : a synthesis -- Explaining intellectuals : a proposal.

Constrained instrumentalist theories of punishment – those that seek to justify punishment by its good effects, but limit its scope – are an attractive alternative to pure retributivism or utilitarianism. One way in which we may be able to limit the scope of instrumental punishment is by justifying punishment through the concept of duty. This strategy is most clearly pursued in Victor Tadros’ influential ‘Duty View’ of punishment. In this paper, I show that the Duty View as it stands cannot (...) find any moral distinction between the permissible punishment of the guilty and the permissible punishment of the innocent in extreme circumstances, therefore undermining one the key pillars of its intuitive appeal. I canvass several ways to respond to this problem, arguing that a rights forfeiture theory which employs the distinction between rights forfeiture and rights infringement is the best solution. (shrink)

Researchers in the fields of sign language and gesture studies frequently present their participants with video stimuli showing actors performing linguistic signs or co-speech gestures. Up to now, such video stimuli have been mostly controlled only for some of the technical aspects of the video material, leaving open the possibility that systematic differences in video stimulus materials may be concealed in the actual motion properties of the actor’s movements. Computer vision methods such as OpenPose enable the fitting of body-pose models (...) to the consecutive frames of a video clip and thereby make it possible to recover the movements performed by the actor in a particular video clip without the use of a point-based or markerless motion-tracking system during recording. The OpenPoseR package provides a straightforward and reproducible way of working with these body-pose model data extracted from video clips using OpenPose, allowing researchers in the fields of sign language and gesture studies to quantify the amount of motion pertaining only to the movements performed by the actor in a video clip. These quantitative measures can be used for controlling differences in the movements of an actor in stimulus video clips or, for example, between different conditions of an experiment. In addition, the package also provides a set of functions for generating plots for data visualization, as well as an easy-to-use way of automatically extracting metadata from large sets of video files. (shrink)

Descartes with his sharp separation of the mental and the physical set the stage for the philosophy of mind for the next 350 years. Philosopher Patrick T. Mackenzie finds in the later writings of Wittgenstein the suggestion that Descartes got off on the wrong foot. Following Wittgenstein's lead, Mackenzie argues that instead of analyzing our human nature as a composite of mind and body, we should view ourselves as whole persons. One of the dividends of this approach to the (...) mind-body problem is that it provides us with a resolution to the problem of human freedom—i.e., how can a human being be free if his or her body (including the brain) belongs to a deterministic world? Mackenzie here argues that the person is largely free even though the movements of the body are determined by neurophysiological events. He takes the same approach to the philosophy of mind as that taken by M.R.Bennett and P.M.S.Hacker in their recent and controversial book, The Philosophical Foundations of Neuroscience. Mackenzie's approach is, however, much more accessible. Students of philosophy and philosophers interested in the problem of human freedom will welcome Mackenzie's fresh approach, especially those disenchanted by the present list of mind-body "isms.". (shrink)

The participation of patients in the training of health professionals constitutes a paradigmatic break, not only with regard to what is going on in this particular field but also with regard to what can be observed in all training courses for the helping professions. The purpose of this article is to consider this mobilization of patient trainers both as an actual change and as a potential operator of change. To do this, we will rely on an intervention research aimed at (...) promoting partnership in health and on the functioning and productions of one of the working groups dedicated to the training of health professionals. (shrink)

This article introduces a new pragmatist-inspired perspective on the social sciences. It explores the relevance of neo-pragmatism for the philosophy of the social sciences, showing how it can lead to innovative and groundbreaking social research. The paper attempts to drive home these insights by elaborating on the affinities of neo-pragmatism with some Continental philosophers who have engaged with Husserl’s phenomenology, notably Gadamer, Levinas and Sartre. This neo-pragmatist proposal for the social sciences develops a non-representational view of knowledge and puts the (...) ongoing engagement with difference at the centre of social research. From this perspective, the process of knowledge formation is dialogical in nature whereby the researcher learns as much from those who are being researched as vice versa. The concluding section aims to show the implications of this perspective for current research in the social sciences, throwing new light on contemporary meta-discussions about social research. (shrink)

This essay is an attempt at opening parallel but contrastive avenues into the respective Christian and Buddhist outlooks with respect to the metaphysical notion of relativity in contradistinction with the concept of the Absolute. The main thesis is that Christianity and Buddhism present us, in their respective normative intellectual economies, with analogous, yet profoundly different ways of envisioning metaphysics from the vantage point of their sui generis soteriology. In other terms, our argument is that Christian and Buddhist metaphysics are essentially (...) informed by the tenets of their spiritual way, whether redemptive or emancipative. Furthermore, these forms of “soteriological metaphysics” could be encapsulated in the twin nutshells of an “absolutization of the relative” on the one hand, and a “relativization of the absolute” on the other hand. The first formula refers, more specifically, to Christian Trinitarian theology, and the second to the Buddhist ontology of emptiness. These two formulas provide a theoretical framework that suggests both the internal coherence of each tradition and the ways in which this coherence is variously understood within the tradition itself. In the soteriological emphasis of these two traditions lies a possible—but not exclusive—way to open a wider space for a hermeneutics of aspects and vantage points, as well as for warding off any overly rigid conceptual crystallizations through a deeper recognition of the interplay between principled intellectual unity and the manifold of human existence. This essay is the second section of the article, and focuses on the Buddhist tradition. (shrink)

This essay is an attempt at opening parallel but contrastive avenues into the respective Christian and Buddhist outlooks with respect to the metaphysical notion of relativity in contradistinction with the concept of the Absolute. The main thesis is that Christianity and Buddhism present us, in their respective normative intellectual economies, with analogous, yet profoundly different ways of envisioning metaphysics from the vantage point of their sui generis soteriology. In other terms, our argument is that Christian and Buddhist metaphysics are essentially (...) informed by the tenets of their spiritual way, whether redemptive or emancipative. Furthermore, these forms of “soteriological metaphysics” could be encapsulated in the twin nutshells of an “absolutization of the relative” on the one hand, and a “relativization of the absolute” on the other hand. The first formula refers, more specifically, to Christian Trinitarian theology, and the second to the Buddhist ontology of emptiness. These two formulas provide a theoretical framework that suggests both the internal coherence of each tradition and the ways in which this coherence is variously understood within the tradition itself. In the soteriological emphasis of these two traditions lies a possible—but not exclusive—way to open a wider space for a hermeneutics of aspects and vantage points, as well as for warding off any overly rigid conceptual crystallizations through a deeper recognition of the interplay between principled intellectual unity and the manifold of human existence. This essay is the first section of the submission, which is focusing on the Christian tradition. (shrink)