Understanding how scientific activities use naming stories to achieve disciplinary status is important not only for insight into the past, but for evaluating current claims that new disciplines are emerging. In order to gain a historical understanding of how new disciplines develop in relation to these baptismal narratives, we compare two recently formed disciplines, systems biology and genomics, with two earlier related life sciences, genetics and molecular biology. These four disciplines span the twentieth century, a period in which the processes (...) of disciplinary demarcation fundamentally changed from those characteristic of the nineteenth century. We outline how the establishment of each discipline relies upon an interplay of factors that include paradigmatic achievements, technological innovation, and social formations. Our focus, however, is the baptism stories that give the new discipline a founding narrative and articulate core problems, general approaches and constitutive methods. The highly plastic process of achieving disciplinary identity is further marked by the openness of disciplinary definition, tension between technological possibilities and the ways in which scientific issues are conceived and approached, synthesis of reductive and integrative strategies, and complex social interactions. The importance – albeit highly variable – of naming stories in these four cases indicates the scope for future studies that focus on failed disciplines or competing names. Further attention to disciplinary histories could, we suggest, give us richer insight into scientific development. (shrink)

Those who hold that all fundamental sparse properties have dispositional essences face a problem with structural (e.g. geometrical) properties. In this paper I consider a further route for the dispositional monist that is enabled by the requirement that physical theories should be background-free. If this requirement is respected then we can see how spatial displacement can be a causally active relation and hence may be understood dispositionally.

Several current theories have essences as primary drivers of inductive potential: e.g., people infer dogs share properties because they share essences. We investigated the possibility that people take occupational roles as having robust inductive potential because of a different source: their position in stable social institutions. In Studies 1–4, participants learned a novel property about a target, and then decided whether two new individuals had the property (one with the same occupation, one without). Participants used occupational roles to robustly generalize (...) rights and obligations, functional behaviors, personality traits, and skills. In Studies 5–6, we contrasted occupational roles (via label) with race/gender (via visual face cues). Participants reliably favored occupational roles over race/gender for generalizing rights and obligations, functional behaviors, personality traits, and skills (they favored race/gender for inferring leisure behaviors and physiological properties). Occupational roles supported inferences to the same extent as animal categories (Studies 4 and 6). In Study 7, we examined why members of occupational roles share properties. Participants did not attribute the inductive potential of occupational roles to essences, they attributed it to social institutions. In combination, these seven studies demonstrate that any theory of inductive potential must pluralistically allow for both essences and social institutions to form the basis of inductive potential. (shrink)

Volume 20, Issue 6, June 2020, Page 30-32.

This book presents a comprehensive overview of what the criminal law would look like if organised around the principle that those who deserve punishment should receive punishment commensurate with, but no greater than, that which they deserve. Larry Alexander and Kimberly Kessler Ferzan argue that desert is a function of the actor's culpability, and that culpability is a function of the risks of harm to protected interests that the actor believes he is imposing and his reasons for acting in (...) the face of those risks. The authors deny that resultant harms, as well as unperceived risks, affect the actor's desert. They thus reject punishment for inadvertent negligence as well as for intentions or preparatory acts that are not risky. Alexander and Ferzan discuss the reasons for imposing risks that negate or mitigate culpability, the individuation of crimes, and omissions. (shrink)

In the historic tradition of calendar stories and calendar illustrations, this work presents a collection of thirty-nine stories and thirty-nine snow-swept photographs for the darkest month of the year. It includes stories drawn from modern history and the contemporary moment, from mythology, and even from meteorology.

In this paper, we investigate the trust-based mechanisms underlying the relationship between ethical leadership and followers’ organisational citizenship behaviours (OCBs). Based on three-wave survey data obtained from 184 employees and their supervisors, we find that ethical leadership leads to higher levels of both affective and cognitive trust. In addition, we find support for a three-path mediational model, where cognitive trust and affective trust, in turn, mediate the relationship between ethical leadership and follower OCBs. That is to say, we found that (...) ethical leadership leads to the development of cognitive trust, which subsequently influences the development of affective trust. Affective trust, in turn, induces followers to exhibit OCBs as a means of reciprocating the leader’s favourable behaviour. Our findings suggest that both affective and cognitive trust plays an important role in the social exchange processes that underlie the relationship between ethical leadership and the discretionary behaviour of followers. (shrink)

The first complete posthumous reflection on the work of Richard Rorty, one of the most important and influential American philosophers of recent times.

Contemporary philosophy’s three main naturalisms are methodological, ontological and epistemological. Methodological naturalism states that the only authoritative standards are those of science. Ontological and epistemological naturalism respectively state that all entities and all valid methods of inquiry are in some sense natural. In philosophy of mathematics of the past few decades methodological naturalism has received the lion’s share of the attention, so we concentrate on this. Ontological and epistemological naturalism in the philosophy of mathematics are discussed more briefly in section (...) 6. (shrink)

Relational egalitarians argue that democratic institutions are justified by appeal to relational equality. According to the skeptical challenge, equality of political power is not required for relational equality, and the relational egalitarian case for democracy fails. I defend the relational egalitarian justification of democracy. I develop an analysis of social status and show that inequalities of power will not entail inequalities of status. I then show that inequalities of power will robustly cause inequalities of status and argue that this vindicates (...) the relational egalitarian case for democracy, because such theories have a much more pragmatic standard of success for the justification of democracy than conceptual necessity. I consider the objection that if inequalities of power robustly cause inequalities of status, then relational egalitarians should also oppose democratic institutions, because officials such as legislators or judges will have more power than citizens. In reply, I argue that relational egalitarians are only opposed to inequalities of status that mark a failure of recognition respect, and that inequalities of status that follow from democratically licensed inequalities of power will not mark such a failure. I conclude that the skeptical challenge is unsuccessful, and that the relational egalitarian justification of democracy is sound. (shrink)

An account, based principally on Ferguson's Essay on the History of Civil Society, of his concept of enlightened governance, and of the relation between that concept and his concept of human nature.

Relato sobre el estudiante que realiza una broma académica para poner en jaque a los profesores que enseñan el método científico en lugar de enseñar la estructura de la materia.

The clinical clerkships in medical school are the first formal opportunity for trainees to apply bioethics concepts to clinical encounters. These clerkships are also typically trainees’ first sustained exposure to the “reality” of working in clinical teams and the full force of the challenges and ethical tensions of clinical care. We have developed a specialized, embedded ethics curriculum for Vanderbilt University medical students during their second year to address the unique experience of trainees’ first exposure to clinical care. Our embedded (...) curriculum is centered around core “ethics competencies” specific to the clerkship: for Medicine, advanced planning and end-of-life discussions; for Surgery, informed consent; for Pediatrics, the patient-family-provider triad; for Obstetrics and Gynecology, women’s autonomy, unborn child’s interests, and partner’s rights; and for Neurology/Psychiatry, decision-making capacity. In this paper, we present the rationale for these competencies, how we integrated them into the clerkships, and how we assessed these competencies. We also review the additional ethical issues that have been identified by rotating students in each clerkship and discuss our strategies for continued evolution of our ethics curriculum. (shrink)

Social theory between progress and apocalypse -- Autonomy and domination: Weber's cage -- Barbarism and modernity: Eisenstadt's regret -- Integration and justice: Parsons' utopia -- Despising others: Simmel's stranger -- Meaning evil -- De-civilizing the civil sphere -- Psychotherapy as central institution -- The frictions of modernity and their possible repair.

Classical real-valued probabilities come at a philosophical cost: in many infinite situations, they assign the same probability value—namely, zero—to cases that are impossible as well as to cases that are possible. There are three non-classical approaches to probability that can avoid this drawback: full conditional probabilities, qualitative probabilities and hyperreal probabilities. These approaches have been criticized for failing to preserve intuitive symmetries that can be preserved by the classical probability framework, but there has not been a systematic study of the (...) conditions under which these symmetries can and cannot be preserved. This paper fills that gap by giving complete characterizations under which symmetries understood in a certain “strong” way can be preserved by these non-classical probabilities, as well as by offering some results to make it plausible that the strong notion of symmetry here is the right one. Philosophical implications are briefly discussed, but the main purpose of the paper is to offer technical results to help make further philosophical discussion more sophisticated. (shrink)

Previous research has established that goal tracking emerges early in the first year of life and rapidly becomes increasingly sophisticated. However, it has not yet been shown whether young children continue to update their representations of others’ goals over time. The current study investigates this by probing young children’s ability to differentiate between goal directed actions that have been halted because the goal was interrupted, and because the goal was abandoned. To test whether children are sensitive to this distinction, we (...) manipulated the experimenter’s reason for not completing a goal-directed action - his initial goal is either interrupted by an obstacle, or it is abandoned in favour of an alternative. We measure whether children’s helping behaviour is sensitive to the experimenter’s reason for not completing his goal-directed action by recording whether they complete the experimenter’s initial goal or the alternative goal. The results showed that children helped complete the experimenter’s initial goal significantly more often after this goal had been interrupted than after it had been abandoned. These results support the hypothesis that children continue to update their representations of others’ goals over time by the age of two, and specifically that they differentiate between abandoned and interrupted goals. (shrink)

This paper points out neglected considerations about the standing to blame. It starts from the observation that the standing to blame debate largely focusses on factors concerning the blamer or the relation of blamer and wrongdoer, mainly hypocrisy and meddling, while neglecting the victim of wrongdoing. This paper wants to set this right by pointing out how considerations about the victim can impact a third party’s standing. The first such consideration is the blamer’s personal relation to the victim. It is (...) argued that persons close to the victim thereby gain standing even in the presence of factors that would normally undermine it. Arguing from the well-known sexual assault case of Chanel Miller and the public reactions to it, the paper then introduces two more considerations about standing hitherto neglected. First, given that blame has an expressive function and serves to contradict expressive aspects of wrongdoings, it is argued that third-party blame can morally support the victim in the face of wrongdoing and that such support matters to victims. It is argued that this importance of third-party blame can ground standing. Thirdly and relatedly, the paper argues that insufficient collective responses to wrongdoing, i.e. when other bystanders do not respond with sufficient blaming responses, can equally ground standing of third parties. It is argued that these considerations are relevant not only for an ethics of blame broadly conceived but also for standing to blame in particular. Thereby, the paper establishes that considerations about the victim are central for discussion of the standing to blame. (shrink)

We prove existence of mixed strategy equilibria for a class of discontinuous two-player games with non-compact strategy sets. As a corollary of our main results, we obtain a continuum of mixed strategy equilibria for the first- and second-price two-bidder auctions with toeholds. We also find Klemperer’s (2000) result about the existence of mixed strategy equilibria in the classical Bertrand duopoly.

Commentaries on Aristotle's writings have been produced since the 2nd century AD. This edition contains Greek commentaries on his work from the 3rd to the 8th centuries AD by, among others, Alexander of Aphrodiensias, Themistios, Joh. Philoponus, Simplicius in Greek.

Philosophical discussions often involve appeals to verdicts about particular cases, sometimes actual, more often hypothetical, and usually with little or no substantive argument in their defense. Philosophers — on both sides of debates over the standing of this practice — have often called the basis for such appeals ‘intuitions’. But, what might such ‘intuitions’ be, such that they could legitimately serve these purposes? Answers vary, ranging from ‘thin’ conceptions that identify intuitions as merely instances of some fairly generic and epistemologically (...) uncontroversial category of mental states or episodes to ‘thick’ conceptions that add to this thin base certain semantic, phenomenological, etiological, or methodological conditions. As this chapter discusses, thick conceptions turn out to have their own methodological problems; some may even leave philosophers in the methodologically untenable position of being unable to determine when anyone is doing philosophy correctly. (shrink)

S. 248-254: "Burckhardts Kulturkonstanten".

          Despite the fact that the strength of argument is clearly on the pro-life side—nobody except a handful of academics would question the grave wrongness of abortion were pregnancy never inconvenient—somehow ordinary intelligent people, like our students, often remain unconvinced. There are many reasons for this, of course. For instance, a number of students have had their children aborted while many know others who have had abortions, and one does not want (...) to condemn oneself or oneÂ’s friends. I am a philosopher, however, and so I will be interested in intellectual reasons, even though these subjective psychological ones are almost surely more important. Specifically, I will be interested in the fact that the ordinary person subscribes to a number of erroneous big-picture ethical beliefs, each of which, to a different degree, does something to block access to the pro-life arguments. I will not talk about all such erroneous beliefs and I would be grateful in the discussion for more examples.           I will talk about eight errors I have identified, largely through teaching. For each one, I will identify the error, show how it impacts the pro-life message and explain why it is tempting to most of us —there is, after all, something right about five of the errors. For each of these errors is one that we might ourselves be tempted by on occasion. I will then suggest some ways of refuting the error. In some cases, the mere identification of the error should do the trick, as these erroneous beliefs are often not explicitly identified by our interlocutors. My suggested refutations will not always be phrased in the way in which I would phrase them for didactic effectiveness: in this talk, I am mainly trying to convey ideas. (shrink)

We may have a bit of a handle on roughly what kinds of entities the Platonic Forms are. We can think of them as analogous to a number of notions in contemporary philosophy that are denominated “Platonic abstracta”, e.g., propositions, concepts, mathematicals, and the like. We may think them queer, but we have some idea what their queerness consists in. We may even believe that some of these kinds of entities actually exist.

It is argued that Weyl’s theory of gravitation and electricity came out of ‘mathematical justice’: out of the equal rights direction and length. Such mathematical justice was manifestly at work in the context of discovery, and is enough to derive all of source-free electromagnetism. Weyl’s repeated references to coordinates and gauge are taken to express equal treatment of direction and length.

As the USA contends with another surge in COVID-19 cases, hospitals may soon need to answer the unresolved question of who lives and dies when ventilator demand exceeds supply. Although most triage policies in the USA have seemingly converged on the use of clinical need and benefit as primary criteria for prioritisation, significant differences exist between institutions in how to assign priority to patients with identical medical prognoses: the so-called ‘tie-breaker’ situations. In particular, one’s status as a frontline healthcare worker (...) (HCW) has been a proposed criterion for prioritisation in the event of a tie. This article outlines two major grounds for reconsidering HCW prioritisation. The first recognises trust as an indispensable element of clinical care and mistrust as a hindrance to any public health strategy against the virus, thus raising concerns about the outward appearance of favouritism. The second considers the ways in which proponents of HCW prioritisation deviate from the very ‘ethics frameworks’ that often preface triage policies and serve to guide resource allocation—a rhetorical strategy that may undermine the very ethical foundations on which triage policies stand. By appealing to trust and consistency, we re-examine existing arguments in favour of HCW prioritisation and provide a more tenable justification for adjudicating on tie-breaker events during crisis standards of care. (shrink)

CHAPTER Introduction I do not take lightly the title of this book. I believe that Scottish philosophy matters greatly and my principal aim is to say why it ...