Inspired by the vision of care in Vincent van Gogh's depiction of the parable of the Good Samaritan, this article offers a paradigm for inhabiting compassion. Compassion is understood in this article as a moral emotion that is also a pathocentric virtue. This definition creates a dynamic view of compassion as a desire to alleviate the suffering of others, the capacity to act on behalf of others and a commitment to sustain engagement with the suffering other. To weave this vision (...) of compassion as a habitus rather than a theoretical construct, the article develops three phases of compassion: seeing, companioning and sighing. This framework deepens and augments a pastoral theological paradigm of compassion with the aim of inculcating an inhabited compassion in caregivers and the communities in which they participate. (shrink)

This paper examines Wesley Salmon's "process" theory of causality, arguing in particular that there are four areas of inadequacy. These are that the theory is circular, that it is too vague at a crucial point, that statistical forks do not serve their intended purpose, and that Salmon has not adequately demonstrated that the theory avoids Hume's strictures about "hidden powers". A new theory is suggested, based on "conserved quantities", which fulfills Salmon's broad objectives, and which avoids the problems discussed.

The greatest existential threats to humanity stem from increasingly powerful advanced technologies. Yet the “risk potential” of such tools can only be realized when coupled with a suitable agent who; through error or terror; could use the tool to bring about an existential catastrophe. While the existential risk literature has provided many accounts of how advanced technologies might be misused and abused to cause unprecedented harm; no scholar has yet explored the other half of the agent-tool coupling; namely the agent. (...) This paper aims to correct this failure by offering a comprehensive overview of what we could call “agential riskology.” Only by studying the unique properties of different agential risk types can one acquire an accurate picture of the existential danger before us. (shrink)

The current paper provides an overview of treatment noncompliance at various points in the treatment pathway, especially with respect to treatment for Pelvic-floor Dysfunction. The effects of noncompliance on healthcare are considered, and examples of supporting patients psychologically to increase compliance are discussed. An outline of a method to identify costs of non-compliance, and where such costs most intensely impact the healthcare system, is provided. It is suggested that psychological support is effective in terms of increased compliance and improved healthcare (...) economics. The model is presented for PFD, but the principles developed can be generalised to many aspects of healthcare. (shrink)

There is, no doubt, a temptation to treat preventions, such as ‘the father’s grabbing the child prevented the accident’, and cases of ‘causation’ by omission, such as ‘the father’s inattention was the cause of the child’s accident’, as cases of genuine causation. I think they are not, and in this paper I defend a theory of what they are. More specifically, the counterfactual theory defended here is that a claim about prevention or ‘causation’ by omission should be understood not as (...) being directly about actual genuine causation but primarily as a counterfactual claim about genuine causation.1 The relation between actual causation and the mere possibility of causation allows my theory to explain both the difference and the similarity between the two notions (causation and prevention/omission). Further, the difference explains certain intuitions we have and the similarity justifies and explains the fact that for practical purposes we usually treat preventions and omissions as if they were genuine causation. Finally, the fact that this counterfactual theory of prevention and omission takes causation as primitive suggests that it is consistent with any theory of causation. This allows us to construct two arguments against what I will call genuinism, the view that cases of prevention and ‘causation’ by omission really are cases of genuine causation. In section II I show that genuinism does not account for the so-called intuition of difference. In section III I outline a number of problems that various theories of causation have with preventions and ‘causation’ by omission. These problems are ipso facto problems for genuinism, whereas I show in section V how the counterfactual theory solves those problems. Further, I answer a genuinist argument based on another type of intuition—the genuinist intuition—by showing why we have that intuition and how it should be handled (section VI). (shrink)

This chapter argues that dual-use emerging technologies are distributing unprecedented offensive capabilities to nonstate actors. To counteract this trend, some scholars have proposed that states become a little “less liberal” by implementing large-scale surveillance policies to monitor the actions of citizens. This is problematic, though, because the distribution of offensive capabilities is also undermining states’ capacity to enforce the rule of law. I will suggest that the only plausible escape from this conundrum, at least from our present vantage point, is (...) the creation of a “supersingleton” run by a friendly superintelligence, founded upon a “post-singularity social contract.” In making this argument, the present chapter offers a novel reason for prioritizing the “control problem,” i.e., the problem of ensuring that a greaterthan-human-level AI will positively enhance human well-being. (shrink)

This research applies the impression management theory of exemplification in an accounting study by identifying and measuring differences in both auditor and public perceptions of exemplary behaviors. The auditors were divided into two groups, one of which reported self-perceptions (A-S) while the other group reported their perceptions of a typical auditor (A-O). There were two separate public groups, which gave their perceptions of a typical auditor and were divided based on their levels of accounting sophistication. The more sophisticated public group (...) was comprised of bank loan officers (LO) while the less sophisticated public group consisted of investment club members (IC). Comparisons were made on 30 behaviors contained in the AICPA Code of Professional Conduct, which served as the basis for the research instrument. Profile analysis, a special form of MANOVA technique, was used to analyze the results. A-S perceptions were the highest of the four treatment levels and were significantly higher (i.e., more exemplary) than the perceptions of both the A-O and LO groups. The more sophisticated user group (LO) provided the lowest perceptions of the four treatment levels. For at least four of the six measures, the LO treatment group perceived the typical auditor to be less exemplary than both the IC and A-O treatments. There were no differences in perceptions between the A-O group and IC. Additional analysis revealed that auditors overrated the degree to which the public relied on financial statements. However, both public groups reported a reasonably high level of reliance on financial statements when making decisions. (shrink)

This book, published in 2000, is a clear account of causation based firmly in contemporary science. Dowe discusses in a systematic way, a positive account of causation: the conserved quantities account of causal processes which he has been developing over the last ten years. The book describes causal processes and interactions in terms of conserved quantities: a causal process is the worldline of an object which possesses a conserved quantity, and a causal interaction involves the exchange of conserved quantities. Further, (...) things that are properly called cause and effect are appropriately connected by a set of causal processes and interactions. The distinction between cause and effect is explained in terms of a version of the fork theory: the direction of a certain kind of ordered pattern of events in the world. This particular version has the virtue that it allows for the possibility of backwards causation, and therefore time travel. (shrink)

Changing patterns of political participation observed by political scientists over the past half-century undermine traditional democratic theory and practice. The vast majority of democratic theory, and deliberative democratic theory in particular, either implicitly or explicitly assumes the need for widespread citizen participation. It requires that all citizens possess the opportunity to participate and also that they take up this opportunity. But empirical evidence gathered over the past half-century strongly suggests that many citizens do not have a meaningful opportunity to participate (...) in the ways that many democratic theorists require, and do not participate in anything like the numbers that they believe is necessary. This paper outlines some of the profound changes that have been experienced by liberal democratic states in the 20th and early 21st Centuries, changes which are still ongoing, and which have resulted in declines in citizens participation and trust, the marginalisation of citizens from democratic life, and the entrenchment of social and economic inequalities which have damaged democracy. The paper challenges the conventional wisdom in rejecting the idea that the future of democracy lies in encouraging more widespread participation. The paper takes seriously the failure of the strategies adopted by many states to increase participation, especially among the poor, and suggests that instead of requiring more of citizens, we should in fact be requiring less of them. Instead of seeking to encourage more citizen participation, we should acknowledge that citizens will probably not participate in the volume, or in the ways, many democratic theorists would like, and that therefore we need an alternative approach: a regime which can continue to produce democratic outcomes, and which satisfies the requirements of political equality, in the absence of widespread participation by citizens. (shrink)

Abstract Kitcher (1989) and others have criticized Salmon's (1984) causal account of explanation on the grounds that it is epistemologically inadequate. The difficulty is that Salmon's principle of ?mark transmission? fails to achieve its intended purpose, namely to distinguish causal processes from other types of processes. This renders Salmon's account of causality epistemically inaccessible. In this paper that critique is reviewed and developed, and a modification to Salmon's theory, the ?conserved?quantity? theory (Dowe, 1992) is presented. This theory is shown to (...) avoid the epistemologicalproblem, by replacing mark transmission with the ascription of conserved quantities such as energy. The virtue of this approach is that it renders causality epistemically accessible. This constitutes a defence of the causal theory of explanation. (shrink)

This short essay describes the long process of producing the 2005 biography of Michael Polanyi.

According to Hugh Mellor in Real Time II (1998, Ch. 12), assuming the logical independence of causal facts and the 'law of large numbers', causal loops are impossible because if they were possible they would produce inconsistent sets of frequencies. I clarify the argument, and argue that it would be preferable to abandon the relevant independence assumption in the case of causal loops.

Garfinkel’s Ethnomethodology (EM) at its core involves a praxeological, or interactional, respecification of Gestalt phenomena. In early EM, this is pursued through the development of a category of praxeological Gestalten in which social facts (or social units) are respecified as Gestalt phenomena, where members are the constituents and the social unit is the whole or Gestalt, produced praxeologically by the methodic work of its members. In later work, Garfinkel would praxeologically transpose traditional perceptual Gestalt phenomena, such as music, to explore (...) the interactional work done in the production and perception of those phenomena. In developing EM by praxeologically reconfiguring Gestaltism, Garfinkel drew on the constitutive phenomenology of Aron Gurwitsch, wherein Gurwitsch sought to integrate Gestalt Psychology and phenomenology. In drawing on Gurwitsch, while also being informed by the work of Schütz and, later, Merleau-Ponty, EM is often depicted as either heavily indebted to phenomenology or as a distinct type of phenomenology: praxeological phenomenology, perhaps. At the same time, parallels have been drawn between Ludwig Wittgenstein’s later work and EM, since Garfinkel’s Studies in Ethnomethodology was published in 1967. The parallels drawn have often centred on the treatment of rules and rule-following and on the similarities in the treatment of meaning in EM and in Wittgenstein’s later work. However, given the centrality of Gestalt psychology to the development of EM, it is worth noting that in his later manuscripts Wittgenstein discussed Gestalt phenomena and Gestalt Psychology extensively and in ways that often anticipate what Garfinkel would do with Gestaltist ideas. It is, therefore, worth exploring the similarities and differences between Wittgenstein’s, Gurwitsch’s and Garfinkel’s engagement with Gestaltism. This is what I seek to do in this article. In conclusion, I propose that EM should be seen, like Wittgenstein, as post-phenomenological. (shrink)

When Aristotle introduces the perfect moods, he refers back to the dictum de omni et nullo, a semantic condition for universal affirmations and negations. There recently has been renewed interest in the question whether the dictum validates the assertoric syllogistic. I rehearse evidence that Aristotle provides a mereological semantics for universal affirmations and negations, and note that this semantics entails a nonstandard reading of the dictum, under which the dictum, in the presence of a minimal logical apparatus, indeed validates the (...) assertoric syllogistic. I argue that this mereological validation offers advantages over recent discussions in Morison, Malink, Ebert and Vlasits. (shrink)

This article is a close analysis of a popular song by the Italian singer-songwriter Paolo Conte, ‘Sparring Partner’, in Ozon's film [Formula: see text]. With particular reference to what Barthes called the ‘grain’ of the voice, the article shows how the song does not work anempathetically, cutting across characters and narrative and undermining them; nor does it work empathetically to support the characters or reflect their emotions in a straightforward way. Rather, the song creates a complex haptic moment, where affect (...) and gender fluidity combine to form a ‘haptic metaspace’; this acts as a frame for productively unstable embodiments, marked by nomadic transitions and volatilities, focused on the male of the couple. (shrink)

In this paper I show how the conserved quantity theory, or more generally the process theory of Wesley Salmon and myself, provides a sufficient condition in an analysis of causation. To do so I will show how it handles the problem of alleged 'misconnections'. I show what the conserved quantity theory says about such cases, and why intuitions are not to be taken as sacrosanct.

Several well-known theodicies, whatever their merits, seem to make little sense of animal suffering. Here we argue that the problem of animal suffering has more layers than has generally been acknowledged in the literature and thus poses an even greater challenge to traditional Judeo-Christian Theism than is normally thought. However, the Neo-Cartesian (NC) defence would succeed in defanging this Expanded Problem of Animal Suffering. Several contemporary philosophers have suggested that recent evidence either supports the NC view or at least should (...) decrease our incredulity with respect to it. We discuss new evidence that undermines the NC position and thus reassert the gravity of the Expanded Problem. (shrink)

Much research has linked surprise to violation of expectations, but it has been less clear how one can be surprised when one has no particular expectation. This paper discusses a computational theory based on Algorithmic Information Theory, which can account for surprises in which one initially expects randomness but then notices a pattern in stimuli. The authors present evidence that a “randomness deficiency” heuristic leads to surprise in such cases.

This idea of time travel has long given philosophers difficulties. Most recently, in his paper ‘Troubles with Time Travel’ William Grey presents a number of objections to time travel, some well known in the philosophical literature, others quite novel. In particular Grey's ‘no destinations’ and ‘double occupation’ objections I take to be original, while what I will call the ‘times paradox’ and the ‘possibility restriction argument’ are versions of well known objections. I show how each of these can be answered, (...) thereby defending the plausibility of time travel. (shrink)

Attributed to Phil Smith ("the Crab Man") on the publisher's webite.

1 Context The idea for the current issue of _Philosophia Scientiæ_ emerged from discussions which took place in the Manchester Ethnomethodology Reading Group. This reading group has its origins in Wes Sharrock’s weekly discussion groups, which have taken place in Manchester (UK) since the early 1970s. As the global Covid-19 pandemic hit in early 2020, the reading group moved online, facilitated by Phil Hutchinson and Alex Holder. Being an online reading group opened up participation to people beyond Northwest UK (...) and within weeks the group became global, with the membership including participants logging on from Canada, Czech Republic, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hong Kong, Japan, Macau, New Zealand, Spain, Sweden, and the USA. While the name of the group might indicate an exclusive focus on ethnomethodology, following the naming conventions for academic discussion groups, the name really fails to indicate both the heterogeneity of the group’s reading materials, the interests of t... (shrink)

Jeffrey Stout claims that John Rawls's idea of public reason (IPR) has contributed to a Christian backlash against liberalism. This essay argues that those whom Stout calls “antiliberal traditionalists” have misunderstood Rawls in important ways, and goes on to consider Stout's own critiques of the IPR. While Rawls's idea is often interpreted as a blanket prohibition on religious reasoning outside church and home, the essay will show that the very viability of the IPR depends upon a rich culture of deliberation (...) in which all forms of reasoning can be put forth for consideration. This clarification addresses the perception that the IPR imposes an “asymmetrical burden” upon believers. In fact, the essay suggests that there are good reasons why believers, qua believers, might endorse the IPR. (shrink)

The purpose of this study was to investigate the features of modeling-based abductive reasoning as a disciplinary practice of inquiry in the domain of earth science. The study was based on an undergraduate course of a university of education, Korea, offered for preservice elementary teachers majoring in science as their specialty. The course enrollees participated in an inquiry project in which they were asked to abductively generate models representing past geologic events in order to explain how two units in a (...) sedimentary rock outcrop had been formed. Three students were selected as major informants for the study, and multiple types of qualitative data were collected, including the students’ sketchbook records, audio-recording of whole-class presentation and discussion, and interviews with the students. The data were analyzed according to the method of analytical induction, which yielded three assertions as the findings of the study. First, while an explanatory model can be generated by combining resource models, the combination of resource models does not necessarily result in a scientifically sound explanatory model. Second, a systemic approach can help activate a critical resource model which can in turn lead to a scientifically sound explanatory model. Third, simulations with a model can enhance the plausibility of the model. Based on these findings, causal combinations of resource models, a systemic approach to earth scientific problem-solving, and simulations with a model are suggested and discussed as implications for science education and relevant research. (shrink)

Discussion of the Aristotelian syllogistic over the last sixty years has arguably centered on the question whether syllogisms are inferences or implications. But the significance of this debate at times has been taken to concern whether the syllogistic is a logic or a theory, and how it ought to be represented by modern systems. Largely missing from this discussion has been a study of the few passages in the Prior Analytics where Aristotle provides explicit guidance on how to individuate syllogisms. (...) I argue that syllogisms are individuated by unordered premise pairs and so may be fruitfully thought of as multi-succedent sequents. I conclude by drawing a few consequences for the representation of the syllogistic. (shrink)

‘Framing the Refugee’ looks at the power of representation of liberal political theory with regard to refugees. In the author’s view, legal and political arbitrariness lies in the representing of refugees as lacking agency. His key point is that liberalism fails to conceive of refugees as politically capable actors, and he is thus complicit in the arbitrary neutralisation of their emancipatory potential and participatory powers. This paper emphasises the moral justifiability of that state of affairs by seeking some answers to (...) the question of why liberal political theory construes a concept of the refugee that does not contain any element of political agency. Most obviously, the author acknowledges that refugees perform a significant social role in contemporary societies and are hence active members in them. Nonetheless, they remain neglected in their political role by most political theory. What does it mean to have political agency for the author? It means to have the power of self-representation, that is, of being allowed and even enabled by a given legal system to bring about change in the political order, or at least to participate in that change. But the author also calls attention to the role of ‘theory’ in addressing this downside of the contemporary liberal democratic order. Theory becomes even more crucial at times of urgency, that is, when theorists have a moral responsibility to deepen their philosophical imagination, as Hannah Arendt so forcefully noted. The theoretical task of ‘re-framing’ the refugee entails reconfiguring political philosophy and its traditional categories of sovereignty, citizenship and nationality. The liberal inability to accommodate the political agency of many members of the political community – especially of non-nationals – is a sign of the historical contingency of the current rules of political membership. This inability makes evident the imperative of rethinking politics in ways that avoid the arbitrariness of treatment and aim instead at equality and justice. If political leaders can re-write the rules of membership to suit their own ideological agendas, the same demand should be addressed by – indeed demanded from – political and legal theorists. However, this is not as easy as it seems, according to the author. In his view, political theory is confronted with fundamental challenges, the most obvious one being that ‘theory’ is usually unequipped to defeat its own ‘topology’. Note that in saying this the author is raising a more pressing concern about arbitrary law-making: it may be that arbitrariness – especially the arbitrary treatment of aliens by the sovereign state and by liberal democracies in particular – is inscribed in the very DNA of liberalism. No matter how odd this may seem, the author advances the view that ideas, however creative of a new order, or transformative of a given status quo, never appear in "free form", and are instead deeply rooted in a structure that constrains our imagination. The challenge is thus to develop a meta-theory that reconceptualises the very way liberal political theory frames marginalised sectors of society – such as the "poor" – as a product of an international economic order that robs those sectors of their agency as the very condition of its internal functioning. We must therefore question how the very idea of the refugee is produced, because it symbolises the construction of an inside and an outside that is complicit with the arbitrary play of legal statuses involved in migration policy. The author’s main point regarding this is that certain groups are sidelined by economic, political and social systems because they are already excluded from theoretical systems to start with. Keywords: refugees, agency, political theory, migration. (shrink)

Virilio himself referred to his 1980 work The Aesthetics of Disappearance as a "juncture" in his thinking, one at which he brought his focus onto the logistics of perception -- a logistics he would soon come to refer to as the "vision machine." If Speed and Politics established Virilio as the inaugural -- and still consummate -- theorist of "dromology", The Aesthetics of Disappearance introduced his understanding of "picnolepsy" -- the epileptic state of consciousness produced by speed, or rather, the (...) consciousness invented by the subject through its very absence: the gaps, glitches, and speed bumps lacing through and defining it. Speed and Politics defined the society of speed; The Aesthetics of Disappearance defines what it feels like to live in the society of speed."I always write with images," Virilio has claimed, and this statement is nowhere better illustrated than with The Aesthetics of Disappearance. Moving from the movie theater to the freeway, and from Craig Breedlove's attainment of terrifying speed in a rocket-power car to the immobility of Howard Hughes in his dark room atop the Desert Inn, Virilio himself jump cuts from such disparate reference points as Fred Astaire, Franz Liszt, and Adolf Loos to Dostoyevsky, Paul Morand, and Aldous Huxley. In its extension of the "aesthetics of disappearance" to war, film, and politics, this book paved the way to Virilio's follow-up: the celebrated study, War and Cinema.This edition features a new introduction by Jonathan Crary, one of the leading theorists of modern visual culture.Foreign Agents seriesDistributed for Semiotext. (shrink)

Changing patterns of political participation observed by political scientists over the past half-century undermine traditional democratic theory and practice. The vast majority of democratic theory, and deliberative democratic theory in particular, either implicitly or explicitly assumes the need for widespread citizen participation. It requires that all citizens possess the opportunity to participate and also that they take up this opportunity. But empirical evidence gathered over the past half-century strongly suggests that many citizens do not have a meaningful opportunity to participate (...) in the ways that many democratic theorists require, and do not participate in anything like the numbers that they believe is necessary. This paper outlines some of the profound changes that have been experienced by liberal democratic states in the 20th and early 21st Centuries, changes which are still ongoing, and which have resulted in declines in citizens participation and trust, the marginalisation of citizens from democratic life, and the entrenchment of social and economic inequalities which have damaged democracy. The paper challenges the conventional wisdom in rejecting the idea that the future of democracy lies in encouraging more widespread participation. The paper takes seriously the failure of the strategies adopted by many states to increase participation, especially among the poor, and suggests that instead of requiring more of citizens, we should in fact be requiring less of them. Instead of seeking to encourage more citizen participation, we should acknowledge that citizens will probably not participate in the volume, or in the ways, many democratic theorists would like, and that therefore we need an alternative approach: a regime which can continue to produce democratic outcomes, and which satisfies the requirements of political equality, in the absence of widespread participation by citizens. (shrink)