This paper responds to contributions by Paul Billingham, Cécile Laborde and Jonathan Quong to a symposium on A Perfectionist Theory of Justice in Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy.

Very shortly before the end of Book 11 of the Aeneid, Turnus, hearing of Camilla's death, is forced to abandon his ambush in order to fall back to the city. Just after he leaves the wooded gorge, Aeneas passes through it unscathed with his company. Both then head toward the city walls. Virgil marks this near miss of the two commanders by an acrostic :ille furens deserit obsessos collis, nemora aspera linquit.uix e conspectu exierat campumque tenebat,cum pater Aeneas saltus (...) ingressus apertosexsuperatque iugum siluaque euadit opaca.sic ambo ad muros rapidi totoque ferunturagmine nec longis inter se passibus absunt. (shrink)

Perched on the ramparts of Volterra last July, I gaze over i dolci colli toscani, the sweet hills of Tuscany, drenched in summer sun. Warm, content and at peace, I am bemused at how much at home I feel in this strange land. I have felt this way since 1991 when I returned for the first time to la bell' Italia thirty-seven years after having lived in Rome as a young child in a Foreign Service family. In its sensuous beauty (...) and riotous disorder, Rome was stunning. My wife Eileen and I explored old childhood haunts, including the Embassy apartment residences on viale villa Graziole where my family had lived for four years in Rome—two consecutive two-year posts—in the 1950s. Memory cells exploding, I was assailed by vivid images from childhood. Once when I was five or six, my brother David and I accompanied our housemaid Marcella to her simple country home and joined villagers in the fields as they all turned out—men, women, and children—to harvest the bean crop. As dusk set in, fires were lit, simple musical instruments appeared with the wine, and the feasting and dancing began. Bonfires were soon aglow for miles up and down the sweet rolling hills. (shrink)

In this powerful work of conceptual and analytical originality, the author argues for the primacy of the material arrangements of the laboratory in the dynamics of modern molecular biology. In a post-Kuhnian move away from the hegemony of theory, he develops a new epistemology of experimentation in which research is treated as a process for producing epistemic things. A central concern of the book is the basic question of how novelty is generated in the empirical sciences. In addressing this question, (...) the author brings French poststructuralist thinking—notably Jacques Derrida’s concepts of “différance” and “historiality”—to bear on the construction of epistemic things. Historiographical perspective shifts from the actors’ minds to their objects of manipulation. These epistemological and historical issues are illuminated in a detailed case study of a particular laboratory, that of the oncologist and biochemist Paul C. Zamecnik and his colleagues, located in a specific setting—the Collis P. Huntington Memorial Hospital of Harvard University at the Massachusetts General Hospital of Boston. The author traces how, between 1945 and 1965, this group developed an experimental system for synthesizing proteins in the test tube that put Zamecnik’s research team at the forefront of those who led biochemistry into the era of molecular biology. (shrink)

The history of what we call molecular biology today is not just the story of DNA. Molecular biology emerged from and was supported by a multiplicity of widely scattered, differently embedded, and loosely, if at all connected experimental systems for characterizing living beings to the level of biologically relevant macromolecules. By implementing different modes of technical analysis, these systems created a new space of representation in which the central concepts of molecular biology gradually became articulated. The paper describes the establishment (...) of the rat liverin vitro protein synthesis system of Paul Zamecnik and his group a the Collis P. Huntington Memorial Hospital of Harvard University between 1947 and 1952. Insofar as such systems orient the research activity, they may also prove helpful for the orientation of the historian. Experimental systems „have a life of their own. (shrink)

Cette contribution examine la pertinence de la Convention européenne des droits de l’homme pour les personnes en situation de handicap. Elle se penche sur les principes de la Convention tels que la dignité humaine, l’autonomie personnelle et l’égalité, qui sont particulièrement importants pour les personnes en situation de vulnérabilité. Le texte aborde ensuite les obligations négatives et positives de l’État à l’égard des personnes handicapées. En ce qui concerne les premières, le texte souligne la nécessité de procéder à des évaluations (...) individualisées dans le cadre des processus décisionnels et de trouver un équilibre entre les droits des personnes et les intérêts de l’État. En ce qui concerne les secondes, l’État est également tenu d’évaluer les besoins réels des personnes handicapées. Il doit fournir une aide suffisante, tout en pouvant prendre en compte des considérations financières légitimes. La Convention européenne est ensuite examinée dans sa relation avec la Convention des Nations Unies relative aux droits des personnes handicapées. La Cour européenne des droits de l’homme s’efforce généralement d’interpréter la Convention européenne en harmonie avec les autres traités internationaux. Si la Convention des Nations Unies a ainsi influencé certains développements dans la jurisprudence de la Cour, il existe également des cas où la Cour a estimé que la Convention européenne n’offrait pas le même niveau de protection que la Convention des Nations Unies. La relation entre les deux conventions reste dynamique, ce qui laisse penser qu’avec le temps, davantage de principes de la Convention des Nations Unies pourraient devenir partie intégrante de l’interprétation de la Convention européenne. (shrink)

My argument here is principally that the ubiquity of epistemics is evident in the ways in which knowledge claims and attributions of knowledge to self and other are embedded in turns and sequences, inform the design of turns at talk, are amended in the corrections that speakers sometimes make, to change from one epistemic stance to another, and are contested, in the occasional ‘struggles’ between participants, as to which of them has epistemic primacy. I show that these cannot be understood (...) in cognitive terms; furthermore, I show that epistemics – again the attribution of knowledge to self and other – is ‘real’ for participants. That is, in these four practices and aspects of interaction it is evident that participants orient to their states of knowledge relative to one another, on a moment-by-moment, turn-by-turn basis. (shrink)

The authors argue that the time is ripe for national and corporate leaders to move consciously towards the development of global ethics. This papers presents a model of global ethics, a rationale for the development of global ethics, and the implications of the model for research and practice.

Philosophers and ethicists debate this controversial moral principle illustrating its application to current moral dilemmas such as war, suicide, nuclear power, affirmative action, and morphine use for terminal cancer patients.

In Part I of this paper, we identified and compared various schemes for trivalent truth conditions for indicative conditionals, most notably the proposals by de Finetti and Reichenbach on the one hand, and by Cooper and Cantwell on the other. Here we provide the proof theory for the resulting logics DF/TT and CC/TT, using tableau calculi and sequent calculi, and proving soundness and completeness results. Then we turn to the algebraic semantics, where both logics have substantive limitations: DF/TT allows for (...) algebraic completeness, but not for the construction of a canonical model, while CC/TT fails the construction of a Lindenbaum-Tarski algebra. With these results in mind, we draw up the balance and sketch future research projects. (shrink)

Franklin G. Miller and colleagues have stimulated renewed interest in research ethics through their work criticizing clinical equipoise. Over three years and some twenty articles, they have also worked to articulate a positive alternative view on norms governing the conduct of clinical research. Shared presuppositions underlie the positive and critical dimensions of Miller and colleagues' work. However, recognizing that constructive contributions to the field ought to enjoy priority, we presently scrutinize the constructive dimension of their work. We argue that it (...) is wanting in several respects. (shrink)

In ‘Levinas: Ethics or Mystification?’ (Miller, 2017), Alistair Miller presents a searing indictment of the philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas and a dismissal of claims for its importance for education. He provides a summary account of Levinas's philosophy and, in relation to this, refers briefly to a number of authors who have related Levinas's work to education. This account is at fault, however, in fundamental ways, and this leads to errors in the conclusions that he draws. The present short paper does (...) not attempt to address these problems in the round but rather focuses on a particular aspect of his phrasing in constructing the account, taking this as a significant pointer to the nature of the misinterpretation as a whole. (shrink)

We present a variety of (ω 1 ,∞)-distributive forcings which when applied to models of Martin's Maximum separate certain well known reflection principles. In particular, we do this for the reflection principles SR, SR α (α ≤ ω 1 ), and SRP.

(2008). Neither Dogma nor Common sense: Moore's confidence in his ‘proof of an external world’1. British Journal for the History of Philosophy: Vol. 16, No. 1, pp. 163-195.

This essay re-examines Adam Smith’s encounter with Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Against the grain of present scholarship it contends that when Smith read and reviewed Rousseau’s Second Discourse, he neither registered it as a particularly important challenge, nor was especially influenced by, or subsequently preoccupied with responding to, Rousseau. The case for this is made by examining the British context of Smith’s own intervention in his 1759 Theory of Moral Sentiments, where a proper appreciation of the roles of David Hume and Bernard (...) Mandeville in the formation of Smith’s thought pushes Rousseau firmly into the background. Realising this, however, forces us to re-consider our evaluations of Rousseau’s and Smith’s very different political visions. Given that questions of individual recognition, economic inequality, and political stability remain at the heart of today’s social challenges, the implications of this are not just historical but of direct contemporary import. (shrink)

Champions of the methodological movement of experimental philosophy have challenged the long-standing practice of relying on intuitive verdicts on cases in philosophical inquiry. They argue that th...

Causal decision theory attends to probabilities used to obtain an option's expected utility but for completeness should also attend to utilities of possible outcomes. A suitable formula for an option's expected utility uses a certain type of conditional utility.

Let me start with an example. Presumably our understanding of the sentence ‘dogs bark’ arises somehow from our understanding of its components and our appreciation of how they are combined. That is to say, ‘dogs bark’ somehow gets its meaning from the meanings of the two words ‘dog’ and ‘bark’, from the meaning of the generalization schema ‘ns v’, and from the fact that the sentence results from placing those words in that schema in a certain order. However, as Davidson (...) was the first to emphasize, it is not possible to produce a strict logical deduction of what ‘dogs bark’ means from these more basic facts alone. So a question arises as to which further premises are required. What assumptions about the character of meaning should be added in order to obtain an explanation of the meaning of the sentence on the basis of the meanings of its words? (shrink)

The paper offers a matrix-based logic (relevant matrix quantum physics) for propositions which seems suitable as an underlying logic for empirical sciences and especially for quantum physics. This logic is motivated by two criteria which serve to clean derivations of classical logic from superfluous redundancies and uninformative complexities. It distinguishes those valid derivations (inferences) of classical logic which contain superfluous redundancies and complexities and are in this sense from those which are or in the sense of allowing only the most (...) informative consequences in the derivations. The latter derivations are strictly valid in RMQ, whereas the former are only materially valid. RMQ is a decidable matrix calculus which possesses a semantics and has the finite model property. It is shown in the paper how RMQ by its strictly valid derivations can avoid the difficulties with commensurability, distributivity, and Bell's inequalities when it is applied to quantum physics. (shrink)

Proposed derivations of the Born rule for Everettian theory are controversial. I argue that they are unnecessary but may provide justification for a simplified version of the Principal Principle. It’s also unnecessary to replace Everett’s idea that a subject splits in measurement contexts with the idea that subjects have linear histories which partition Many worlds? Everett, quantum theory, and reality, Oxford University Press, Oxford, pp 181–205, 2010; Wallace in The emergent multiverse, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2012, Chapter 7; Wilson in (...) Br J Philos Sci 64:709–737, 2013; The nature of contingency: quantum physics as modal realism, Oxford University Press, Oxford, forthcoming). Linear histories were introduced to provide a concept of pre-measurement uncertainty and I explain why pre-measurement uncertainty for splitting subjects is after all coherent, though not necessary because Everett’s original fission interpretation of branching can arguably be rendered coherent without it, via reference to Vaidman, Tappenden, Sebens and Carroll and McQueen and Vaidman. A deterministic and probabilistic quantum mechanics can be made intelligible by replacing the standard collapse postulate with a no-collapse postulate which identifies objective probability with relative branch weight, supplemented by the simplified Principal Principle and some revisionary metaphysics. (shrink)

This article offers a critical examination of Kroll’s (Natural Language Semantics 16: 359–372, 2008) arguments against Elbourne’s (Situations and individuals, 2005) treatment of bishop sentences.

Gilbertson, Savulescu, Oakley and Wilkinson propose extending the availability of terminal sedation (TS) to patients with intractable pain and/or suffering who are expected to live more than 2 weeks (hence the designation of extended TS (ETS)) and to patients whose values are known but who do not have decision-making capacity.1 Their plan is worthy of serious consideration: it is, after all, based on the fundamental and well-recognised medical ethical values of patient autonomy and beneficence. But, even when restricted to jurisdictions (...) that allow assisted dying, the ETS proposal raises three important issues. When the authors speak of ‘assisted dying’ and of ‘Voluntary Assisted Dying (VAS)’, they refer specifically to the laws in Australia and similar ones in New Zealand, the Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg, Switzerland, Spain and Canada that permit clinicians either to provide patients with lethal medications for self-administration (formerly called physician-assisted suicide) or to administer lethal medications themselves (voluntary euthanasia). First, the authors distinguish—as do many patients and the public—between sedation to unconsciousness and death. Indeed, as the authors point out, the difference seems obvious: unconsciousness can be reversed, death cannot. Yet in the case of TS, this may be …. (shrink)

This essay presents a new interpretation of Bolzano's account of necessary truth as set out in ?182 of the Theory of Science. According to this interpretation, Bolzano's conception is closely related to that of Leibniz, with some important differences. In the first place, Bolzano's conception of necessary truth embraces not only what Leibniz called metaphysical or brute necessities but also moral necessities (truths grounded in God's choice of the best among all metaphysical possibilities). Second, in marked contrast to Leibniz, Bolzano (...) maintains that there is still plenty of room for contingency even on this broader conception of necessity. (shrink)

Data on birth order and parent-offspring relations for 1,601 adolescents participating in the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health were used to test hypotheses about the role of adolescent suicidal behavior in parent-offspring conflict. Among adolescents highly dissatisfied with their mothers, the odds that middleborns would make at least one suicide attempt was 23% that of first- and lastborns (p<.001), but their odds of receiving medical treatment for their attempts was 8.5 times greater than the odds for first- and lastborns (...) (p=.032). The results are tentatively interpreted as supporting the hypothesis that adolescents use suicide attempts to leverage investment from their parents. (shrink)

Peter Vanderschraaf’s Strategic Justice is a powerful elaboration and defense of what he calls ‘justice as mutual advantage’. Vanderschraaf opens Strategic Justice by observing that ‘Plato set a template for all future philosophers by raising two interrelated questions: (1) What precisely is justice? (2) Why should one be just?’. He answers that (1) justice consists of conventions which (2) are followed because each sees that doing so is in her interest. These answers depend upon two conditions which Vanderschraaf calls Baseline (...) Consistency and Negative Mutual Expectations. I contend that the plausibility of the first condition depends upon principles which are prior to Vanderchraaf’s conventions of justice and that the second condition does not account for the interest Vanderschraaf must think we take in those principles. I therefore worry that Vanderschraaf does what he accuses other theorists of justice as mutual advantage of doing: going outside the bounds of justice as mutual advantage. To lay the groundwork for his conditions, Vanderschraaf analyzes the circumstances of justice. I argue that, his claims to the contrary notwithstanding, he does not take the circumstances to be the kind of conditions Hume takes them to be, but that he has good reason to do so. (shrink)

Huw Price’s subject naturalism has emerged as a leading pragmatist position within recent debates surrounding philosophical naturalism. Unlike orthodox views which tend to be guided by metaphysical questions about the “place” of, for instance, the mind, meaning, and morality within the natural world, subject naturalism focuses philosophical attention on language-users and the functions that certain concepts play within discursive practices. This paper considers two objections to subject naturalism and argues that they can be overcome by looking to the methodological insights (...) of philosophical genealogy. Although Price occasionally characterizes his project as a kind of genealogy, he offers little explanation of what such a methodological orientation is supposed to involve. I suggest that subject naturalists ought to remedy this theoretical lacuna by looking to the work of Bernard Williams. On the one hand, doing so can serve a diagnostic function: Williams’ conception of genealogy affords a perspective from which subject naturalism’s explanatory inadequacies are more clearly understood. On the other hand, Williams’ elaborated conception of genealogy represents a path by which the subject naturalist can overcome the shortcomings discussed in this paper. (shrink)

Epistemic Analysis, as I conceive of it, is concerned with the analysis of knowledge. The precincts of my concern have, however, been determined by the ...

During the last ten years John Beatty, Elisabeth Lloyd and I have argued that the semantic conception of theories is, in the context of biological theorizing, a richer conception of theory structure than the syntactic ("received view") conception. Specifically, I have argued semantic conception of theory structure better represents the structure of evolutionary theory and the relationship of this theory to phenomena. One aspect of the semantic conception that is in need of greater attention is the nature of explanation on (...) this conception. In this paper, I argue that the semantic conception provides a richer mo accurate account of scientific explanation, in particular, of evolutionary explanations. In essence, I argue that explanation involves an appeal to numerous theories in addition to the putative explanatory theory. Employment of these theories is not formally possible in a syntactic conception but is in a semantic conception. (shrink)