This book launches a sustained defense of a radical interpretation of the doctrine of the open future. Patrick Todd argues that all claims about undetermined aspects of the future are simply false.

In the literature on free will, fatalism, and determinism, a distinction is commonly made between temporally intrinsic (‘hard’) and temporally relational (‘soft’) facts at times; determinism, for instance, is the thesis that the temporally intrinsic state of the world at some given past time, together with the laws, entails a unique future (relative to that time). Further, it is commonly supposed by incompatibilists that only the ‘hard facts’ about the past are fixed and beyond our control, whereas the ‘soft facts’ (...) about the past needn’t be. A substantial literature arose in connection with this distinction, though no consensus emerged as to the proper way to analyze it. It is time, I believe, to revisit these issues. The central claim of this paper is that the attempts to analyze the hard/soft fact distinction got off on fundamentally the wrong track. The crucial feature of soft facts is that they (in some sense) depend on the future. Following recent work on the notion of dependence, however, I argue that the literature on the soft/hard distinction has failed to capture the sense of dependence at stake. This is because such attempts have tried to capture softness in terms of purely modal notions like entailment and necessitation. As I hope to show, however, such notions cannot capture the sort of asymmetrical dependence relevant to soft facthood. Arguing for this claim is the first goal of this paper. My second goal is to gesture towards what an adequate account of soft facthood will really look like. (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.

There are several argumentative strategies for advancing the thesis that moral responsibility is incompatible with causal determinism. One prominent such strategy is to argue that agents who meet compatibilist conditions for moral responsibility can nevertheless be subject to responsibility-undermining manipulation. In this paper, I argue that incompatibilists advancing manipulation arguments against compatibilism have been shouldering an unnecessarily heavy dialectical burden. Traditional manipulation arguments present cases in which manipulated agents meet all compatibilist conditions for moral responsibility, but are (allegedly) not responsible (...) for their behavior. I argue, however, that incompatibilists can make do with the more modest (and harder to resist) claim that the manipulation in question is mitigating with respect to moral responsibility. The focus solely on whether a manipulated agent is or is not morally responsible has, I believe, masked the full force of manipulation-style arguments against compatibilism. Here, I aim to unveil their real power. (shrink)

Sartre's recollection, in Les Mots , of his first visit to the cinema is a multi-layered and ambivalent text through which Sartre proposes a number of interlocking arguments: concerning the contrast between the 'sacred' space of the theatre and the non-ceremonial space of the cinema, between the theatre as associated with paternal authority, and the cinema as associated with a clandestine bond with the mother. But the text also sets up a quasi-sociological account of the public Sartre encounters in the (...) cinema itself as revealing to him the truth of the social bond, a truth he expresses with the term 'adherence', and which he says he only rediscovered in his experience of being a prisoner in the Stalag in 1940. Rather than the basis of a sociological account of the social bond, which would seem at odds with Sartre's social philosophy, I read this as the expression of a desire for physical proximity. The space of the cinema thus develops a fantasy, and this is in continuity with the role of the cinema in the evolution traced in Les Mots , in which it is described as instigating a withdrawal into imaginary life and an indulgence in daydreaming. Through reference to Christian Metz and to Roland Barthes, whose essay 'En sortant du cinéma' is proposed as a parallel and a response to Sartre, I suggest that the 'true bond' of adherence which Sartre encounters is an unconscious rather than an epistemological truth. (shrink)

Concerns photography and time as duration, sequence, equability, past and present (illus.).

This paper addresses standard questions regarding comics and the arts (comics and fine arts, image and word combinations), then poses and addresses the neglected, but deeper and wider--thus philosophical--question, of how depictions, not just words, can have mental contents at all, including light, funny, scathing, comic ones.

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)

Introduction to the Special Issue containing selected contributions to the conference "Formal Methods and Science in Philosophy IV", Inter-University Center, Dubrovnik, April 11-13, 2019.

Contemporary yoga is popularly represented in various media by a fit, white woman. Yoga Journal is a magazine recognized by many as an industry cornerstone and an institution in and of itself. It represents the distinctive face of yoga. By analyzing the visual and textual content of the Yoga Journal magazine covers, from its first issue in 1975 to issue 313, we describe the produced and consumed portrait of yoga. By focusing on the cover themes, together with the objects and (...) persons depicted, we recognize three phases of development that have contributed to the understanding of the changing image of yoga in the media. While, in the initial phase, yoga was represented as a mystical and mysterious spiritual discipline that originated in the Orientalized East, in the later phase, it was depicted first as a global and universal phenomenon and then as a mainstream everyday fitness regime. Yoga’s depiction in the last phase is compatible with the scholarly representation of contemporary yoga as posture and body centered, but not with its earlier depictions. We found that in its mature phase, the yoga body, which is criticized for its lack of inclusiveness, emerged to become omnipresent. We conclude that the newly formed face of yoga is problematic, both for its female readers, who are encouraged to conform to a unique body type, and also for the yoga community, which encounters an appearance-based restriction of access. (shrink)

Central to Fischer and Ravizza's theory of moral responsibility is the concept of guidance control, which involves two conditions: (1) moderate reasons-responsiveness, and (2) mechanism ownership. We raise a worry for Fischer and Ravizza's account of (1). If an agent acts contrary to reasons which he could not recognize, this should lead us to conclude that he is not morally responsible for his behaviour; but according to Fischer and Ravizza's account, he satisfies the conditions for guidance control and is therefore (...) morally responsible. We consider ways in which the account of guidance control might be mended. (shrink)

According to Keith DeRose, the invariantist's attempt to account for the data which inspire contextualism fares no better, in the end, than the "desperate and lame" maneuvers of "the crazed theory of 'bachelor'", whereby S's being unmarried is not among the truth conditions of 'S is a bachelor', but merely an implicature generated by an assertion thereof. Here, I outline the invariantist account I have previously proposed. I then argue that the prospects for sophisticated invariantism — either as a general (...) approach, or in the specific form I have recommended — are not nearly as dim as DeRose suggests. (shrink)

This article is one of the first sociological explorations of power struggles between intellectuals where matters of life and death are literally at stake. It counters the prevailing tendency within sociology to study intellectuals within confined academic institutions where power struggles are limited to matters of symbolic and institutional recognition. This study explores the conflict between collaborationist and Resistance intellectuals at the end of the Second World War in France, and it focuses in particular on the purge of collaborationist intellectuals (...) which culminated in several high profile trials. This article shows that the arguments and meta-arguments put forward in these trials led to broader intellectual debates outside the courtroom. These debates not only centred on the notion of the writer’s responsibility, but also dealt with anxieties about the disintegrative forces of modern society. Whereas collaborationist intellectuals portrayed their writing as either separate from politics or rescuing a defunct or degenerate nation, Resistance intellectuals such as Jean-Paul Sartre were keen to portray collaborators as outsiders, both socially and sexually, lacking in social integration and subservient to a strong external force. The Resistance intellectuals saw the notion of individual responsibility not as antithetical but as integral to the remaking of the French nation, and this concept would become the cornerstone of the reshaping of the intellectual landscape in the post-war era in France. (shrink)

Innovative therapy is the name we give to novel medical interventions, radically different from the standard of care, provided in order to benefit a patient, rather than to acquire new knowledge. They are paradigmshifting, not incremental, responses to serious patient problems that standard medical care inadequately addresses. Innovative therapies are often devised by clinicians, not basic science researchers; they do not follow the linear model of basic research, to translation, to clinical research, to application. Instead, they come from thinking backwards (...) from the patient’s circumstances, and forward from deep knowledge of how the body functions, to challenge the limits of current mechanisms for effecting cures. (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)

Berichte zur Wissenschaftsgeschichte, EarlyView.

In this paper, missing attribute values in incomplete data sets have three possible interpretations: lost values, attribute-concept values and ‘do not care’ conditions. For rule induction, we use characteristic sets and generalized maximal consistent blocks. Therefore, we apply six different approaches for data mining. As follows from our previous experiments, where we used an error rate evaluated by ten-fold cross validation as the main criterion of quality, no approach is universally the best. Thus, we decided to compare our six approaches (...) using complexity of rule sets induced from incomplete data sets. We show that the smallest rule sets are induced from incomplete data sets with attribute-concept values, while the most complicated rule sets are induced from data sets with lost values. The choice between interpretations of missing attribute values is more important than the choice between characteristic sets and generalized maximal consistent blocks. (shrink)

Institutionalism gives priority to structure over agency. Yet institutions have never developed and operated without the intervention of interested groups. This paper develops a conceptual framework for the role of agency in historical institutionalism. Based on recent contributions following the coalitional turn and drawing on insights from sociological institutionalism, it argues that agency plays a key role in the creation and maintenance of social coalitions that stabilize but also challenge institutions. Without such agency, no coalition can be created, maintained, or (...) changed. Similarly, without a supporting coalition, no contested institution can survive. Yet, due to collective action problems, such coalitional work is challenging. This coalitional perspective offers a robust role for agency in historical institutionalism, but it also explains why institutions remain stable despite agency. In addition, this paper forwards several portable propositions that allow for the identification of who is likely to develop agency and what these actors do. (shrink)

The well-known classification of legal procedure into “four feet” presents certain conceptual problems for the Indian legal tradition that various Smṛtikāras and commentators have attempted to resolve in different and sometimes contradictory ways. These difficulties arise because the four feet originally referred in Indian legal theory to four distinct, hierarchical legal domains rather than procedural means for reaching a verdict. The earliest attested discussion of the four feet, found in Kauṭilya’s Arthaśāstra, indicates that early legal theorists understood the greater legal (...) order as being comprised of four hierarchical domains and that these domains were ordered by the state as expressed in the original formulation of the four feet. Among the four legal domains, that of vyavahāra was developed by the state itself as a realm of public, transactional law meant to address disputes that could not be resolved in other legal forums. From this we can conclude that the origin of Indian jurisprudence lies with state efforts to formalize and enforce the laws of public transactions. The reinterpretation of the four feet by later jurists was motivated perhaps by resistance to one of the fundamental relationships expressed in the four feet, namely that royal authority possessed the greatest legal authority, independent of Brāhmaṇical law. (shrink)

An attractive feature of Neuroconstructivism, Vol. I: How the Brain Constructs Cognition is its emphasis on the active role of the individual in neural and behavioural development and the importance of the interplay with the environment. Certain aspects of development are omitted, however, such as specializations for the distinctive ecologies of infancy and childhood and the scaffolding-like features of behaviour seen during development. It was also a pity that so little credit was given to many scientists who have contributed to (...) just those aspects of development on which the authors focus. (shrink)

Le présent article indique les principales caractéristiques de la ritualité funéraire. Il montre, au-delà de ses formes d'organisation, ses enjeux. Retenue du mort, séparation du défunt et remaniement des places que les vivants occupent en rapport à la société des morts, constituent les dimensions principales d'une ritualité sans doute variable selon les cultures, mais aussi universelle. On peut décrire les pratiques des funérailles, les « expliquer » en montrant qu'elles ressortissent à des impératifs sociaux, ou les « comprendre » en (...) disant que l'être désolé trouve au travers de coutumes les moyens d'affirmer son attachement à l'être aimé et de nier symboliquement la perte qu'il subit. Mais il faut surtout comprendre que la ritualité funéraire, qui déborde des obsèques, oblige les sociétés au-delà de leurs capacités communicationnelles. Ce débordement est précisément l'affaire de toute culture et de son travail. En direction de l'incommunicable.This article describes the main characteristics of the funeral ritual. It shows beyond its forms of organization, its issues. Retention of death, separation and rearrangement of the deceased that the living spaces occupy in relation to the company of the dead, are the main dimensions of a ritual probably varies by crop, but also universal. We can describe the practices of funerals, "explain" by showing that they belong to social imperatives, or "understand" saying sorry be found through customs means to affirm its commitment to the loved and symbolically deny the loss sustained. But above all understand that the funeral ritual, which extends beyond the funeral, requires companies beyond their communication skills. This overflow is precisely the case of any culture and work. Towards the incommunicable. (shrink)

As companies increasingly communicate CSR initiatives through social media, viral message propagation has become a crucial prerequisite for CSR success. Evidence from two experimental studies, one based on a national representative online sample, shows that social media peers’ endorsement of a CSR message in terms of number of shares, likes and positive replies contributes to an individual’s intention to share it on the social network and thereby participate in message propagation, and that this process can be explained by normative influences (...) exerted by the social media community through the activation of injunctive and descriptive norms, as well as social identity motives. Findings further confirmed that the norm-activating effects of social media endorsement are moderated by the empowering qualities of the CSR message, the sharing source of the message by affecting CSR credibility, and the recipient’s interdependent self-construal. Corporate communication managers are advised to achieve a high degree of initial social media endorsement of their CSR message, for recipients of the message to perceive social pressure motivating message sharing with their social media peers. (shrink)

Several interpretive disagreements about Kant's theory of divine commands (esp. in the work of Allen Wood and John E. Hare) can be resolved with further attention to Kant's works. It is argued that Kant's moral theism included (at least until 1797) the claim that practical reason, reflecting upon the absolute authority of the moral law, should lead finite rational beings like us to believe that there exists an omnipotent, omniscient and holy being who commands our obedience to the moral law (...) and proportions happiness to virtue. Kant's apparently contradictory claims about the relationship between morality and religion reflect his view that our acceptance of the authority of the moral law is incomplete or rationally unstable absent such a theological postulate. (shrink)

Les articles essentiels de la religion chrétienne doivent être, pour Locke, accessibles à tous et suffire au Salut. Ce souci de simplification a été rapporté à sa vision de la société, les gens modestes devant se contenter de croire et de rester à un bas niveau de rationalité : les thèses, encore vivaces, de C. B. Macpherson font d’une telle religion un moyen de contrôle des mœurs et de maintien des pauvres dans l’obéissance. Locke les supposerait incapables d’un comportement moral (...) autonome. Mais cette simplification est liée à la volonté de séparer la partie pratique du christianisme de sa partie spéculative et de favoriser ainsi la tolérance mutuelle. Et la religion prêchée par le Christ est adaptée, au-delà des conditions sociales, à la faiblesse de la nature humaine. Chacun – à la place où il se trouve – est capable d’user suffisamment de sa raison pour travailler à son Salut. (shrink)

One contested moral commitment shared by the American Medical Association and American Nurses Association has to do with the place of conscience in the practice of medicine. These organizations, each in their own way, urge their respective members to engage in careful moral discernment regarding their professional life, and they assert the existence of an obligation on the part of others to respect the conscientious objections of healthcare professionals and to accommodate objecting individuals. Yet despite the value that these organizations (...) place on conscience and objector rights, these organizations do not offer elaborate philosophical defenses of their positions. This shortcoming is exposed by the light of contemporary philosophical challenges to conscience-friendly policies. What such challenges demand is a philosophical defense of these organizations’ moral commitments and corresponding policy recommendations. The point of this article is to indicate how the Catholic philosophical tradition’s account of the nature and importance of conscience can philosophically underwrite these organizations’ conscience-related principles and practices. It can be seen, then, that the Catholic tradition is far from inimical to the contemporary practice of medicine and that, on the contrary, this tradition offers philosophically serious grounds on which to rest some of the most morally significant values and guidelines endorsed by these contemporary health-professional organizations and their members. (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)

Barack Obama has called him “one of my favorite philosophers.” John McCain wrote that he is “a paragon of clarity about the costs of a good war.” Andrew Sullivan has said, “We need Niebuhr now more than ever.” For a theologian who died in 1971, Reinhold Niebuhr is maintaining a remarkably high profile in the twenty-first century. In _Why Niebuhr Now?_ acclaimed historian John Patrick Diggins tackles the complicated question of why, at a time of great uncertainty about America’s (...) proper role in the world, leading politicians and thinkers are turning to Niebuhr for answers. Diggins begins by clearly and carefully working through Niebuhr’s theology, which focuses less on God’s presence than his absence—and the ways that absence abets the all-too-human sin of pride. He then shows how that theology informed Niebuhr’s worldview, leading him to be at the same time a strong opponent of fascism and communism and a leading advocate for humility and caution in foreign policy. Turning to the present, Diggins highlights what he argues is a misuse of Niebuhr’s legacy on both the right and the left: while neoconservatives distort Niebuhr’s arguments to support their call for an endless war on terror in the name of stopping evil, many liberal interventionists conveniently ignore Niebuhr’s fundamental doubts about power. Ultimately, Niebuhr’s greatest lesson is that, while it is our duty to struggle for good, we must at the same time be wary of hubris, remembering the limits of our understanding. The final work from a distinguished writer who spent his entire career reflecting on America’s history and promise, _Why Niebuhr Now? _is a compact and perceptive book that will be the starting point for all future discussions of Niebuhr. (shrink)

Innovation has become a buzzword that promises dramatic changes in almost every field of business. Absent from this attention is a serious discussion of the ethical sides of dramatic change. To address this, editors Georges Enderle and Patrick E. Murphy gather a team of experts to fully examine the ethics of innovation within business and the economy in this standout addition to the Studies in TransAtlantic Business Ethics series. The book opens with an exploration and clarification of several key (...) concepts necessary for a thorough study of innovation such as business ethics, moral innovation, creativity, and wealth creation. The opening chapters also propose a novel theoretical foundation and methodological approach with which to address ethical innovation. Subsequently, the contributors discuss challenges and opportunities of innovation for individuals, organizations, and systems while zoning in on a wide range of specific examples, including but not limited to: managerial responsibilities, morality and imagination of leaders, as well as the ethics of the Maker Movement. This comprehensive book evaluates organizational innovations from diverse parts of the world including Egypt, India, Latin America, the UK, and the US. Ethical Innovation in Business and the Economy concludes with a presentation of methods for improving economic systems, such as tracing Adam Smith in emerging enterprises, developing a justice model of marketing to the poor, and bridging the formal and informal economies in an African context. This in-depth examination of innovation, and its involvement in the business and economic world, is an invaluable reference tool for students, teachers, and researchers in business and economic ethics, as well as executives in business and other organizations who search for new and more responsible ways to address globalization, sustainability, and financialization. (shrink)

happy face, in my view, is this. It starts with two simple claims about our language that I think just have to be right. On the basis of essentially those two claims alone it offers what I think is a very plausible account of both (1) what really is wrong with the argument and (2) why there doesn't seem to be anything wrong with the argument.

Cet article étudie le renouvellement de sens que Nietzsche fait subir à la notion de scepticisme. Il part de la double appréciation déroutante du scepticisme grec, loué pour la probité intellectuelle de son ephexis et critiqué simultanément comme une forme de nihilisme de type bouddhiste préservant les valeurs ascétiques, pour montrer que le scepticisme évoqué par la formule « les grands esprits sont des sceptiques. Zarathoustra est un sceptique » renvoie au « frédéricisme » ( Par-delà bien et mal ), (...) c ’ est-à-dire à une expérimentation pratique – audacieuse et dangereuse – menée sur les valeurs. (shrink)

There are various argumentative strategies for advancing the claim that God does not exist. One such strategy is this. First, one notes that God is meant to have a certain divine attribute (such as omniscience). One then argues that having the relevant attribute is impossible. One concludes that God doesn't exist. For instance, Dennis Whitcomb's recent paper, ‘Grounding and omniscience’, proceeds in exactly this way. As Whitcomb says, ‘I'm going to argue that omniscience is impossible and that therefore there is (...) no God.’ This is not, I hope to show, a very promising way to start a paper. If having a given property is impossible, the greatest possible being need not have that property. Accordingly, the argumentative strategy in question is doomed to failure. The upshot of this article is a quite general one concerning how arguments against the existence of God in fact must proceed. (shrink)