Contemporary debates over the appropriate balance of unilateralism and multilateralism in U.S. foreign policy reflect disagreements not simply about the practical effectiveness of these alternative options but also about their legitimacy. Advocates of multilateral and unilateral action alike tend to bundle prudential calculations with normative claims, making assessments about costs and benefits difficult to disentangle from ethical arguments about fairness, justice, morality and obligation. Greater clarity may be possible by classifying U.S. foreign policy into six analytical categories, based on whether (...) the aims pursued are nationalist, internationalist, or cosmopolitan and the strategies adopted to realize them are unilateral or multilateral. Each set of aims has different ethical justifications that generate and help to explain divergent attitudes and judgments about the role of multilateral cooperation in U.S. foreign policy. The article sheds new light on alleged U.S. unilateralism, showing that the U.S. decision to go it alone–or to act with others–can be motivated by the desire to advance the narrow interests of the United States, to advance the interests of all states, or to advance the interests of humanity at large. The article suggests that purely nationalist policies, whether pursued through unilateral or multilateral means, will become increasingly untenable and illegitimate as world politics becomes institutionalized and as humanity becomes integrated, albeit slowly, into a single cosmopolitan community. (shrink)

After a brief account of the problem of higher-order vagueness, and its seeming intractability, I explore what comes of the issue on a linguistic, contextualist account of vagueness. On the view in question, predicates like 'borderline red' and 'determinately red' are, or at least can be, vague, but they are different in kind from 'red'. In particular, 'borderline red' and 'determinately red' are not colours. These predicates have linguistic components, and invoke notions like 'competent user of the language'. On my (...) view, so-called 'higher-order vagueness' is actually ordinary, first-order vagueness in different predicates. I explore the possibility that, nevertheless, a pernicious regress ensues. (shrink)

For almost twenty years, Penelope Maddy has been one of the most consistent expositors and advocates of naturalism in philosophy, with a special focus on the philosophy of mathematics, set theory in particular. Over that period, however, the term ‘naturalism’ has come to mean many things. Although some take it to be a rejection of the possibility of a priori knowledge, there are philosophers calling themselves ‘naturalists’ who willingly embrace and practice an a priori methodology, not a whole lot different (...) from traditional conceptual analysis. Along a different line, some take naturalism to involve the rejection of abstract objects—a sort of physicalism—while other naturalists not only allow the existence of abstracta; they take this existence to be all but obvious.For present purposes, we can begin with W.V.O. Quine, who once characterized naturalism as ‘the abandonment of the goal of first philosophy’ and ‘the recognition that it is within science itself …that reality is to be identified and described’. For Quine, the ‘naturalistic philosopher begins his reasoning within the inherited world theory as a going concern …[The] inherited world theory is primarily a scientific one, the current product of the scientific enterprise’ [Quine, 1981, p. 72]. This characterizes at least the bulk of contemporary philosophers who call themselves ‘naturalists’, and it characterizes the targets of many who oppose what they call ‘naturalism’. But as Maddy notes at the start, ‘the term has come to mark little more than a vague science-friendliness’.An attempt to define naturalism more fully would surely require a characterization of science—at least so that the reader can see when someone sins against that naturalism by being unscientific. But, as Maddy notes, one ‘lesson won through decades of study in the philosophy of science [is that] there is no …. (shrink)

Autism is a group of complex neurodevelopmental disorders characterized by impaired social interaction and restricted/repetitive behavior. We performed a large-scale retrospective analysis of 1,996 clinical neurological structural magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) examinations of 781 autistic and 988 control subjects (aged 0 to 32 years), and extracted regionally distributed cortical thickness measurements, including average measurements as well as standard deviations which supports the assessment of intra-regional cortical thickness variability. The youngest autistic participants (< 2.5 years) were diagnosed after imaging and were (...) identified retrospectively. The largest effect sizes and the most common findings not previously published in the scientific literature involve abnormal intra-regional variability in cortical thickness affecting many (but not all) regions of the autistic brain, suggesting irregular gray matter development in autism that can be detected with MRI. Atypical developmental patterns have been detected as early as 0 years old in individuals who would later be diagnosed with autism. (shrink)

This book presents a collection of contemporary discourses that reconsider the relationship of democracy as a political ideology and American ideal and education as the foundation of preparing democratic citizens in America.

This book examines cultural recognition and the struggle for identity in America's schools. In particular, the contributing authors focus on the recognition and misrecognition as antagonistic cultural forces that work to shape, and at times distort identity.

This book returns the reader to an agenda for addressing equity in schools, emphasizing the need to reexamine past reform efforts and the work ahead for educational leaders in reshaping schools and schooling.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Iago’s Roman Ancestors JAMES TATUM Othello is that rare thing: a tragedy of literary types who half suspect they are playing in a comedy. —D. S. Stewart, 1967 In memoriam Bill Cook1 Shakespeare’s Othello is a drama created for a world where everyone was bound by “service,” a formal connection to someone else superior, in a hierarchy that linked all persons in court, theater, and society through unavoidable (...) obligation. Service could range from the lightest kind of tie, to indentured servitude. This meaning of “service” reflects its origin in Norman French, from the Latin word for slavery, servitium. It is Iago’s sense of the word in his comment to his dupe Roderigo: “Why, there’s no remedy, ’tis the curse of service.” The perceived color of Othello poses a perennial challenge which producers and directors in the United States have to consider every time Othello is performed. Jim Crow did not officially end in most parts of the former Confederacy until the Civil Rights Acts of the 1960s; and even then such legacies of slavery and segregation as color prejudice remain a challenge, alive if now not entirely well, and they haunt many a production. It is this more recent history that inspired Patrick Stewart’s “photo-negative” production of Othello in Washington, DC in 1997, in which the English actor himself played Othello while the rest of the cast were black. Given recent and not so recent history, it is important to realize that there actually is a slave hard at work throughout Othello, from opening scene to last: not Othello himself, but his “ancient” or ensign, Iago. arion 27.1 spring/summer 2019 the slave-playwright of shakespeare’s OTHELLO Lodovico: O, thou Othello, that was once so good, Fallen in the practice of a damnèd slave, What shall be said to thee? Othello, 5.2.289–91 the plot of Shakespeare’s Othello comes from the story “Disdemona and the Moorish Captain” in Giraldi Cinthio’s The Hundred Tales (1565), but the theatrical tradition he used to adapt it for the stage was not other tragedies. He went back to a classical theater he had used to write one of his earliest successes, The Comedy of Errors, one he knew as well as any other through his study of it in Latin grammar school and afterwards: Roman comedy. What resulted was something of a puzzle to his later critics. Since the 17th century some of Shakespeare’s readers have alternately complained or marveled at the way Othello has the fast pace and structure of a farce. This accounts for its exceptional power as a tragedy when it is intelligently performed; the double catastrophe of Othello’s murder of Desdemona and his own suicide come more quickly and more violently, for example, than the endings of Macbeth, King Lear, or Hamlet. All of Othello’s characters are cast in the stereotypical roles first created in Menander and other playwrights of Greek New Comedy, and then passed on to later European vernacular theater through Plautus and Terence’s adaptations. In performance, Shakespeare’s Iago is at once a reprise of his earlier stage villains and a reincarnation of the servus callidus or clever slave playwright of Plautus. It is as if Zero Mostel’s Pseudolus in Sondheim’s A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum were playing Richard III. Iago creates what he regards as a comedy, from its opening scene before Brabantio’s house to its catastrophic end in Cyprus, and to the bafflement of Christian interpreters and others, he seems incapable of recognizing the enormity of his evil. Unlike his resourceful Roman ancestors, who think up ingenious plots to help their less clever owners 78 iago’s roman ancestors in their love affairs, Iago’s scenario is demonic, designed to destroy his master Othello, not save him. As I’ve suggested, one comedy in particular may have played an important role in the making of Othello: Plautus’ Amphitryon, with its story of Jupiter’s adulterous affair with Alcmena, the wife of the heroic king Amphitryon of Thebes. To aid him in his schemes Jupiter calls on his son the trickster... (shrink)

What is it to see the world, other people, and imagined situations as making personal moral demands of us? What is it to experience stories as speaking to us personally and directly? Kierkegaard's Mirrors explores Kierkegaard's answers to these questions, with a new phenomenological interpretation of Kierkegaardian 'interest'.

Violating the human status : the evil of genocide and crimes against humanity -- Superfluous humanity : the evil of global poverty -- Citizens of nowhere : the evil of statelessness -- Effacing the political : the evil of neoliberal globalization.

A new solution to the liar paradox is developed using the insight that it is illegitimate to even suppose (let alone assert) that a liar sentence has a truth-status (true or not) on the grounds that supposing this sentence to be true/not-true essentially defeats the telos of supposition in a readily identifiable way. On that basis, the paradox is blocked by restricting the Rule of Assumptions in Gentzen-style presentations of the sequent-calculus. The lesson of the liar is that not all (...) assumptions are for free. One merit of this proposal is that it is free from the revenge problem. (shrink)

The computations involved in statistical learning have long been debated. Here, we build on work suggesting that a basic memory process, chunking, may account for the processing of statistical regularities into larger units. Drawing on methods from the memory literature, we developed a novel paradigm to test statistical learning by leveraging a robust phenomenon observed in serial recall tasks: that short‐term memory is fundamentally shaped by long‐term distributional learning. In the statistically induced chunking recall (SICR) task, participants are exposed to (...) an artificial language, using a standard statistical learning exposure phase. Afterward, they recall strings of syllables that either follow the statistics of the artificial language or comprise the same syllables presented in a random order. We hypothesized that if individuals had chunked the artificial language into word‐like units, then the statistically structured items would be more accurately recalled relative to the random controls. Our results demonstrate that SICR effectively captures learning in both the auditory and visual modalities, with participants displaying significantly improved recall of the statistically structured items, and even recall specific trigram chunks from the input. SICR also exhibits greater test–retest reliability in the auditory modality and sensitivity to individual differences in both modalities than the standard two‐alternative forced‐choice task. These results thereby provide key empirical support to the chunking account of statistical learning and contribute a valuable new tool to the literature. (shrink)

The papers contained in this special issue are evidence that the philosophy of conspiracy theory is undergoing a ‘normative turn’, with earlier concerns about the epistemological soundness of conspiracy theories now being supplemented by a shift to concerns about discursive and epistemic justice. This is a welcome development. Nonetheless, these normative concerns need to be seen within the context of an ongoing and largely undeclared disagreement between generalists and particularists over just how conspired the world really is.

The Law of Non-Contradiction holds that both sides of a contradiction cannot be true. Dialetheism is the view that there are contradictions both sides of which are true. Crucial to the dispute, then, is the central notion of contradiction. My first step here is to work toward clarification of that simple and central notion: Just what is a contradiction?

The notion of mutual aid, which Peter Kropotkin introduced in the 19th century, goes against the logic of competition as a natural condition, and instead shows how mutual aid is a more important factor to consider for the survival and flourishing of a group. The best cooperation strategies allow organisms to adapt to different types of changes in their environment—and we have witnessed a lot of these changes since the start of the COVID‐19 pandemic. This propensity towards cooperation is not (...) a foreign concept, despite how it seems to be overshadowed by individualism in Western societies. These reflections then lead us to believe it is possible to apply the anarchist philosophical principle of mutual aid to our social organizations, rather than giving priority, again and again, to competition and professional hierarchies, especially in healthcare systems, and particularly in hospitals were the majority of nurses work. For us, anarchist philosophical precepts, including but not limited to mutual aid, can be the key to a more adequate functioning of healthcare institutions. Anarchism can help to imagine the first steps needed to take to gradually move away from ideologies that encourage competition, professional hierarchies, and illegitimate authority. In this paper, we will first explore some anarchist philosophical precepts before turning to mutual aid as it is currently conceptualised, then highlight several concrete ways it is visible in nursing, as well as ways it can be applied in hospitals, and healthcare systems. (shrink)

A small consortium of philosophers has begun work on the implications of epistemic networks (Zollman 2008 and forthcoming; Grim 2006, 2007; Weisberg and Muldoon forthcoming), building on theoretical work in economics, computer science, and engineering (Bala and Goyal 1998, Kleinberg 2001; Amaral et. al., 2004) and on some experimental work in social psychology (Mason, Jones, and Goldstone, 2008). This paper outlines core philosophical results and extends those results to the specific question of thresholds. Epistemic maximization of certain types does show (...) clear threshold effects. Intriguingly, however, those effects appear to be importantly independent from more familiar threshold effects in networks. (shrink)

This text presents and comments on 80 exemplary ethics statements from leading corporations and organizations worldwide. It offers these seven principles to follow in developing such statements: write it; tailor it; communicate it; promote it; revise it; live it; and enforce/reinforce it.

Making use of our prescientific understanding of things, as well as relevant scientific theories, this book presents original arguments for monism with respect to the concept of a natural kind, for essentialism with respect to the members of a natural kind, and for natural-kinds realism with respect to a few chemical, physical, and biological kinds.

Meaning, Understanding, and Practice is a selection of the most notable essays of an eminent contemporary philosopher on a set of central topics in analytic philosophy. Barry Stroud offers penetrating studies of meaning, understanding, necessity, and the intentionality of thought, with particular reference to the thought of Wittgenstein.

This LNCS book is part of the FOLLI book series and constitutes the proceedings of the 7th International Workshop on Logic, Rationality, and Interaction, LORI 2019, held in Chongqing, China, in October 2019. The 31 papers presented in this book were carefully reviewed and selected from 56 submissions. They focus on the following topics: agency; argumentation and agreement; belief revision and belief merging; belief representation; cooperation; decision making and planning; natural language; philosophy and philosophical logic; and strategic reasoning.

Many people understand the expression “formal logic” as meaning modern mathematical logic by opposition to traditional logic before the revolution that happened in the second part of the 19th century with Boole, Frege and others. But in fact this expression was created by Kant. Some people like to quote a excerpt of the preface of the second edition of the Critic of pure reason, where Kant says that formal logic is a finished and closed science: “logic … has not been (...) able to advance a single step, and hence is to all appearances closed and complete”. Retrospectively, this remark by Kant seems pretty ridiculous. One may wonder how such a wise man could have been so wrong. On the other hand it is quite ironic that the expression created by this philosopher has turned to be used to name the new logic that he was not able to prophesy. Of course “formal logic” is not the only expression used to denote the new logic but it is quite popular and widely spread, maybe because it means several things at the same time. (shrink)