Im zweiten Buch seiner rechtstheologischen Summe De legibus ac Deo legislatore aus dem Jahre 1612 entwickelt Francisco Suárez seine Theorie des Naturrechts. Dabei gelingt Suárez die kritische Überarbeitung der lex-naturalis-Theorien des Augustinus und Thomas von Aquin und damit eine kritische Kontinuität mittelalterlicher Rechtstheologie. Suárez formuliert aber darüber hinaus eine für das frühe 17. Jahrhundert eigenständige Konzeption, die als innovatives Modell von Naturrecht mit den Entwürfen Hugo Grotius’ und Thomas Hobbes’ zu konkurrieren vermag. Die Einflüsse dieses genuin politisch-theologischen Naturrechtskonzepts reichen bis (...) zu Pufendorf und Wolff. Der Band erschließt diesen Schlüsseltext des frühneuzeitlichen Naturrechts im Sinne eine kooperativen Kommentars. Mit Beiträgen von Oliver Bach, Nobert Brieskorn, Simon Eultgen, Holger Glinka, Frank Grunert, Dominik Recknagel, Stefan Schweighöfer, Kurt Seelmann und Gideon Stiening. (shrink)

This article investigates the prospects of deliberative democracy through the analysis of small-scale deliberative events, or mini-publics, using empirical methods to understand the process of preference transformation. Evidence from two case studies suggests that deliberation corrects preexisting distortions of public will caused by either active manipulation or passive overemphasis on symbolically potent issues. Deliberation corrected these distortions by reconnecting participants’ expressed preferences to their underlying “will” as well as shaping a shared understanding of the issue.The article concludes by using these (...) insights to suggest ways that mini-public deliberation might be articulated to the broader public sphere so that the benefits might be scaled up. That mini-public deliberation does not so much change individual subjectivity as reconnect it to the expression of will suggests that scaling up the transformative effects should be possible so long as this involves communicating in the form of reasons rather than preferred outcome alone. (shrink)

The 1929 encounter between Ernst Cassirer and Martin Heidegger in Davos, Switzerland is considered one of the most important intellectual debates of the twentieth century and a founding moment of continental philosophy. At the same time, many commentators have questioned the philosophical profundity and coherence of the actual debate. In this book, the first comprehensive philosophical analysis of the Davos debate, Simon Truwant challenges these critiques. He argues that Cassirer and Heidegger's disagreement about the meaning of Kant's philosophy is (...) motivated by their different views about the human condition, which in turn are motivated by their opposing conceptions of what the task of philosophy ultimately should be. Truwant shows that Cassirer and Heidegger share a grand philosophical concern: to comprehend and aid the human being's capacity to orient itself in and towards the world. (shrink)

This is an expanded and revised discussion of the argument briefly put forward in my 'A New Problem for the A-Theory of Time', where it is claimed that it is impossible to experience real temporal passage and that no such phenomenon exists. In the first half of the paper the premises of the argument are discussed in more detail than before. In the second half responses are given to several possible objections, none of which were addressed in the earlier paper. (...) There is also some discussion of some related epistemic arguments against the passage of time given by Huw Price and David Braddon-Mitchell along with objections raised against them recently by Tim Maudlin and Peter Forrest respectively. (shrink)

Economic inequality is a pressing issue that the global community must address in an urgent and detailed manner if global peace is to be sustained. This paper makes the claim that viable alternative solutions to global economic inequality can be found outside the boundaries of western capitalism. This claim is defended via three movements: first, a critique of Christian teachings on the common good is presented as a pathway to this economic alternative. Second, insights from Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. (...) that call for strategic solidarity to help undo structures of inequality in our world are appropriated. Third, a cultural and philosophical notion of what it means to be human in African thought is presented as a means for justifying the relevance of the African ethic of Ubuntu as a global economic alternative; one that grounds cosmic flourishing in a vision and praxis of relationality and shared identity for all. Keywords: African Philosophy, Inequality, Political Theology, Ubuntu, Ujamaa, Wealth. (shrink)

Many environmental scientists, scholars and activists characterise our situation as one of alienation from nature, but this notion can easily seem meaningless or irrational. In this book, Simon Hailwood critically analyses the idea of alienation from nature and argues that it can be a useful notion when understood pluralistically. He distinguishes different senses of alienation from nature pertaining to different environmental contexts and concerns, and draws upon a range of philosophical and environmental ideas and themes including pragmatism, eco-phenomenology, climate (...) change, ecological justice, Marxism and critical theory. His novel perspective shows that different environmental concerns - both anthropocentric and nonanthropocentric - can dovetail, rather than compete with, each other, and that our alienation from nature need not be something to be regretted or overcome. His book will interest a broad readership in environmental philosophy and ethics, political philosophy, geography and environmental studies. (shrink)

What constitutes a just war? How does race matter in America? Are the interests of corporations the same as those of the public when it comes to the environment or public health? Middle and high school history, literature, and science classes abound with important moral, social, and political questions. But under pressure to cover required materials and out of fear of raising controversy, teachers often avoid classroom discussions of questions of profound importance to students and to society. This book investigates (...) how schools can responsibly take an active role in moral education while honoring their academic mission. Using extensive observations in public, Catholic, and Jewish high schools, Katherine Simon analyzes the ways in which teachers avoid or address moral questions raised by students and implicit in course materials. She examines how morally charged issues may be taught responsibly in a diverse democracy. And in an afterword that teachers and teacher educators will find particularly useful, Simon provides practical tools and strategies for structuring discussion and designing units to help teachers explore moral issues more deeply with their middle and high school students. (shrink)

This paper develops and defends a new account of B-theoretic endurantism and a new account of the metaphysics of the quantum state, and highlights the parallels between the considerations that motivate them. These new accounts are both fragmentalist, in the sense that they follow Fine (2005) in invoking a symmetric coordination relation between facts, such that facts that are pairwise incompatible (like Hugh's being happy and Hugh's being sad) can both obtain provided that they are not related by this relation. (...) However, while Fine allows that fragments can be logically incoherent— P can obtain in one fragment while not-P obtains in another—the fragmentalist accounts defended here are motivated even if we insist on logical coherence between fragments. (shrink)

Scientific realism driven by inference to the best explanation (IBE) takes empirically confirmed objects to exist, independent, pace empiricism, of whether those objects are observable or not. This kind of realism, it has been claimed, does not need probabilistic reasoning to justify the claim that these objects exist. But I show that there are scientific contexts in which a non-probabilistic IBE-driven realism leads to a puzzle. Since IBE can be applied in scientific contexts in which empirical confirmation has not yet (...) been reached, realists will in these contexts be committed to the existence of empirically unconfirmed objects. As a consequence of such commitments, because they lack probabilistic features, the possible empirical confirmation of those objects is epistemically redundant with respect to realism. (shrink)

Like no other philosopher of this century, the late Yves R. Simon grappled with philosophical issues that still carry weight today. This collection of his essays explores an impressive range of genuinely foundational topics of philosophical inquiry. These essays discuss, among other topics, the relationship between faith and reason, the nature of sensation, and the various meanings of work. SimonOs significant contribution to philosophy through these varied essays is unquestionable, and this is the first such collection of his works. (...) Philosopher at Work will be indispensable for philosophers of all backgrounds. (shrink)

We propose developing AIs whose only final goal is being shut down. We argue that this approach to AI safety has three benefits: (i) it could potentially be implemented in reinforcement learning, (ii) it avoids some dangerous instrumental convergence dynamics, and (iii) it creates trip wires for monitoring dangerous capabilities. We also argue that the proposal can overcome a key challenge raised by Soares et al. (2015), that shutdown-seeking AIs will manipulate humans into shutting them down. We conclude by comparing (...) our approach with Soares et al.'s corrigibility framework. (shrink)

It is shown that the Hilbert-Bernays-Quine principle of identity of indiscernibles applies uniformly to all the contentious cases of symmetries in physics, including permutation symmetry in classical and quantum mechanics. It follows that there is no special problem with the notion of objecthood in physics. Leibniz's principle of sufficient reason is considered as well; this too applies uniformly. But given the new principle of identity, it no longer implies that space, or atoms, are unreal.

The Everett interpretation of quantum mechanics divides naturally into two parts: first, the interpretation of the structure of the quantum state, in terms of branching, and second, the interpretation of this branching structure in terms of probability. This is the first of two reviews of the Everett interpretation, and focuses on structure, with particular attention to the role of decoherence theory. Written in terms of the quantum histories formalism, decoherence theory just is the theory of branching structure, in Everett's sense.

Dialog is a joint action at different levels. At the highest level, the goal of interlocutors is to align their mental representations. This emerges from joint activity at lower levels, both concerned with linguistic decisions (e.g., choice of words) and nonlinguistic processes (e.g., alignment of posture or speech rate). Because of the high‐level goal, the interlocutors are particularly concerned with close coupling at these lower levels. As we illustrate with examples, this means that imitation and entrainment are particularly pronounced during (...) interactive communication. We then argue that the mechanisms underlying such processes involve covert imitation of interlocutors’ communicative behavior, leading to emulation of their expected behavior. In other words, communication provides a very good example of predictive emulation, in a way that leads to successful joint activity. (shrink)

Although it is argued that social justice is a core concern for the discipline, nursing has not generally played a leadership role in the responses to many of the greatest social problems of our time. These include the accelerated rate of climate change, pandemic threats, systemic racism, growing health and social inequities, and the regulation of new technologies to ensure an equitable future ‘for all.’ In nursing codes of ethics, administration, education, policies, and practice, social justice is often claimed to (...) be a core value, yet it is rarely contextualized by philosophical or theoretical underpinnings. It appears that nurses’ commitment to social justice may stem more from a penchant for ‘doing good’ than an attempt to explore, understand, and enact what is meant by social justice from an ontological, epistemological, and methodological perspective. We contend that the dominance of a human science perspective in nursing contributes to a narrow definition of health and relegates many issues central to social justice to the margins of nurses’ care. In this article, we explore how the focus on ‘the human’ in the human science perspective may not only be limiting the capacity of nurses to develop strategies to adequately address social injustice, but in some instances, direct nurses to contribute to their very reproduction. We suggest that a critical interrogation of this human‐centric hegemony can identify avenues of rupture and introduce posthumanism as an additional philosophical perspective for consideration to help bridge the human‐social divide. (shrink)

The mindshaping hypothesis proposes a “de-intellectualized” explanation for human unique cooperation. In contrast to standard mindreading accounts, which emphasize the evolution of sophisticated reasoning about others’ propositional attitudes to explain how our ancestors became hyper cooperators, the hypothesis holds that sophisticated mindreading was a late-arriving product of our ancestors becoming better cooperators via the evolution of mechanisms that shape and regulate the minds of members of human groups to be suited to cooperation. Comparative research with nonhumans, especially our closest living (...) relatives, the great apes, is of utmost importance for evaluating the mindshaping hypothesis—for instance, to what extent can apes maintain relatively complex forms of culture and cooperation without reasoning about propositional attitudes? The concept of mindshaping also opens up new questions in comparative cognition that are worth exploring in their own right, such as whether apes regulate each other’s behavior via social norms. This chapter assesses what we currently do and do not know about the nature and extent of various mindshaping mechanisms in nonhuman great apes, focusing on culture and social learning, pedagogy, and social norms. (shrink)

Rational or epistemically justified beliefs are often said to be defeasible. That is, beliefs that have some otherwise justification conferring property can lose their epistemic status because they are defeated by some evidence possessed by the believer or due to some external facts about the believer’s epistemic environment. Accordingly, many have argued that we need to add a so-called no defeater clause to any theory of epistemic justification. In this paper, I will survey various possible evidentialist as well as responsibilitst (...) no-defeater clauses and develop a general taxonomy of defeater cases against which these clauses can be tested. Despite influential arguments that evidentialist understandings of justification are ill-equipped to handle the full spectrum of defeater cases, I will demonstrate that evidentialism has the right tools to make sense of all kinds of defeaters, including propositional and normative defeaters. Moreover, I will demonstrate that the proposed solution avoids recently influential objections against the notion of defeat. (shrink)

Citing the Lincoln Savings and Loan scandal, the Leo Frank murder trial, and other cases, author William Simon takes a fresh look at the ethics of lawyering.

Altmann, a mathematical physicist (Oxford U.) provides a philosophical framework for educated lay readers to understand the meaning of natural law, the scientific method, and causality in science. Reviewing the classical approach to time, space, and the laws of mechanics, he also explains key modern concepts such as randomness, probability, the nature of mathematics, Godel's theorems, and quantum mechanics. Altmann considers the reactions of various philosophical schools--including idealism, physicalism, cultural relativism, and social constructivism--to scientific developments. Annotation copyrighted by Book News (...) Inc., Portland, OR. (shrink)

This volume documents the 16th Münster Lectures in Philosophy and examines five themes that are prominent in the work of philosopher and political theorist Philip Pettit. These themes are: Epistemology and Semantics, Philosophy of Mind, Consequentialism, Group Agency, and Republicanism. The book provides insight into Pettit's work and demonstrates the central role his work plays in a number of contemporary philosophical debates. Pettit’s contributions to the philosophy of mind and action, rational choice theory, the philosophy of the social sciences, as (...) well as metaethics, normative ethics and political philosophy are main points of reference, and have advanced ongoing and initiated new discussions. The book shows that a striking feature of Pettit's work has been the depth of his analyses and arguments regarding individual topics – ranging from rule-following to free will, from group agency to social ontology and the methodology of the social sciences, from a defense of consequentialism to the revival of the republican tradition in the theory of democracy and to value theory, but also their systematic overall coherence. The book contains Pettit’s lecture "Freedom and Other Robustly Demanding Goods", nine critical papers on Pettit’s philosophy, and a reply article entitled "Self-Defense on Five Fronts: A Reply to My Commentators". (shrink)

In the present essay, imagination and its effects on the foundations of human life and thought, particularly those pertaining to desire and motivation, are investigated. It is then argued that the human as we know it cannot exist without imagination, and as such, it is an integral part of the self.

The paper defends a view of structural realism similar to that of French and Ladyman, although it differs from theirs in an important respect: I do not take indistinguishabiity of particles in quantum mechanics to have the significance they think it has. It also differs from Cao's view of structural realism, criticized in my "Critical Notice: Cao's `The Conceptual Development of 20th Century Field Theories".

One of the main contributions of Richard Bradley’s book is an elegant extension of Jeffrey’s Logic of Decision that countenances the evaluation of conditional prospects. This extension offers a promising new setting in which to model dynamic choice. In Bradley’s framework, plans can be understood as conditionals of an appropriate sort, while dynamic consistency can be viewed as providing a constraint on the evaluation of conditionals across time. In this paper, we study connections between planning conditionals and dynamic consistency.

In recent years, the hope to confirm the existence of dark matter by experimentally detecting it has diminished significantly. After more than 30 years of experimental searches, many of the most promising candidates have since been ruled out, leaving the epistemic and scientific condition of dark matter in a state of suspension. In efforts to improve the epistemic justification for the dark-matter hypothesis, physicists have turned to philosophical arguments and historical narratives. In this paper, I explicate two such strategies -- (...) explanatory unification and historical continuity -- applied in the context of dark matter. I argue that greater care and attention should be invested in the explanatory arguments to increase their strength, and that a survey of primary historical sources in astronomy renders the historical evidence for the continuity of dark matter substantially weaker. The quality and rigor of the philosophical and historical arguments which physicists are constructing could be substantially improved by increasing interdisciplinary practices. (shrink)

The reanalysis of genomic sequencing results has the potential to provide results that are of considerable medical and personal importance to recipients. Employing interviews with forty-seven predominantly medically underserved families and ethnographic observations we argue that there is pressing need to standardize the approach taken to reanalysis. Our findings highlight that study participants were unclear as to the likelihood of reanalysis happening, the process of initiating reanalysis, and whether they would receive revised results. Their reflections mirror the lack a specific (...) focus upon reanalysis within consent and results sessions as observed in clinical settings. Mechanisms need to be put into place that standardize the approach to reanalysis in research and in clinical contexts. This would enable clinicians and genetic counsellors to communicate clearly with research participants with respect to potential for reanalysis of results and the process of reanalysis. We argue that that the role of reanalysis is too important to be referred to in an ad-hoc manner. Furthermore, the ad-hoc nature of the current process may increase health inequities given the likelihood that only those families who have the means to press for reanalysis are likely to receive it. (shrink)

We should be suspicious of the idea that experiencing pain could enable animals to trade off different motivations in a common currency. It is not even clear that humans have a common motivational currency reflected in evaluative experience. Instead, pain may capture attention, inhibiting attention to competing motivations and needs, thereby making genuine trade-offs harder. Our criteria for pain in invertebrates should be part of a more subtle theory of the relationship between pain and decision-making.

Towards a Posthuman Theory of Educational Relationality critically reads the intersubjective theories on educational relations and uses a posthuman approach to ascribe agency relationally to humans and nonhumans alike. The book introduces the concept of ‘educational relationality’ and contains examples of nonhuman elements of technology and animals, putting educational relationality and other concepts into context as part of the philosophical investigation. Drawing on educational and posthuman theorists, it answers questions raised in ongoing debates regarding the roles of students and teachers (...) in education, such as the foundations of educational relations and how these can be challenged. The book explores educational relations within the field of philosophy of education. After critically examining intersubjective approaches to theories of educational relations, anthropocentrism and subject-centrism are localized as two problematic aspects. Post-anthropocentrism and intra-relationality are proposed as a theoretical framework, before the book introduces and develops a posthuman theory of educational relations. The analysis is executed through a diffractive reading of intersubjective theories, resulting in five co-concepts: impermanence, uniqueness-as-relationality, proximity, edu-activity, and intelligibility. The analysis provided through educational examples demonstrates the potential of using the proposed theory in everyday practices. Towards a Posthuman Theory of Educational Relationality will be of great interest to researchers and postgraduate students in the fields of philosophy of education, early childhood education, research methodology and curriculum studies. (shrink)

Journal of Philosophy of Education, EarlyView.

Empirical research on human–robot interaction has demonstrated how humans tend to react to social robots with empathic responses and moral behavior. How should we ethically evaluate such responses to robots? Are people wrong to treat non-sentient artefacts as moral patients since this rests on anthropomorphism and ‘over-identification’ —or correct since spontaneous moral intuition and behavior toward nonhumans is indicative for moral patienthood, such that social robots become our ‘Others’?. In this research paper, I weave extant HRI studies that demonstrate empathic (...) responses toward robots with the recent debate on moral status for robots, on which the ethical evaluation of moral behavior toward them is dependent. Patienthood for robots has standardly been thought to obtain on some intrinsic ground, such as being sentient, conscious, or having interest. But since these attempts neglect moral experience and are curbed by epistemic difficulties, I take inspiration from Coeckelbergh and Gunkel’s ‘relational approach’ to explore an alternative way of accounting for robot patienthood based on extrinsic premises. Based on the ethics of Danish theologian K. E. Løgstrup I argue that empathic responses can be interpreted as sovereign expressions of life and that these expressions benefit human subjects—even if they emerge from social interaction afforded by robots we have anthropomorphized. I ultimately develop an argument in defense of treating robots as moral patients. (shrink)

I show that frequentism, as an explanation of probability in classical statistical mechanics, can be extended in a natural way to a decoherent quantum history space, the analogue of a classical phase space. The result is a form of finite frequentism, in which Gibbs’ concept of an infinite ensemble of gases is replaced by the quantum state expressed as a superposition of a finite number of decohering microstates. It is a form of finite and actual frequentism (as opposed to hypothetical (...) frequentism) insofar as all the microstates exist, in keeping with the decoherence-based Everett interpretation, and some versions of pilot-wave theory. (shrink)

Probabilities may be subjective or objective; we are concerned with both kinds of probability, and the relationship between them. The fundamental theory of objective probability is quantum mechanics: it is argued that neither Bohr's Copenhagen interpretation, nor the pilot-wave theory, nor stochastic state-reduction theories, give a satisfactory answer to the question of what objective probabilities are in quantum mechanics, or why they should satisfy the Born rule; nor do they give any reason why subjective probabilities should track objective ones. But (...) it is shown that if probability only arises with decoherence, then they must be given by the Born rule. That further, on the Everett interpretation, we have a clear statement of what probabilities are, in terms of purely categorical physical properties; and finally, along lines laid out by Deutsch and Wallace, that there is a clear basis in the axioms of decision theory as to why subjective probabilities should track these objective ones. These results hinge critically on the absence of hidden-variables or any other mechanism (such as state-reduction) from the physical interpretation of the theory. The account of probability has traditionally been considered the principal weakness of the Everett interpretation; on the contrary it emerges as one of its principal strengths. (shrink)

In this article, I attempt to explore the relation between two sets of terms in Derrida's work: friendship and democracy, and ethics and politics. On the basis of a reading of Derrida's interpretation of Blanchot in The Politics of Friendship, I argue that Blanchot's notion of a non-traditional conception of friendship is a reconstruction of Levinas's notion of the ethical relation to the other, which in turn provides the basis for the formalistic ethical affirmation of Derrida's work, an affirmation found (...) most clearly in his remarks on justice. I then move from the The Politics of Friendship to Derrida's more recent text on Levinas, Adieu, and try to explore the relation between ethics and politics in Derrida's work, with particular reference to the question of democracy. My concluding thesis is that Derrida's recent work is attempting to articulate, through notions such as democracy to come and the new international, what I call 'a repoliticization of Marxism'. (shrink)

In this study, Paola Marrati approaches—in an extremely insightful, rigorous, and well-argued way—the question of the philosophical sources of Derrida's thought through a consideration of his reading of both Husserl and Heidegger. A central focus of the book is the analysis of the concepts of genesis and trace as they define Derrida's thinking of historicity, time, and subjectivity. Notions such as the contamination of the empirical and the transcendental, dissemination and writing, are explained as key categories establishing a guiding thread (...) that runs through Derrida's early and later works. Whereas in his discussion of Husserl Derrida problematizes the relationship between the ideality of meaning and the singularity of its historical production, in his interpretation of Heidegger he challenges the very idea of the originary finitude of temporality. This book is essential reading not only for those interested in the philosophical roots of deconstruction, but for all those interested in the central questions of history and temporality, subjectivity and language, that pervade contemporary debates in cultural, literary, and visual theory alike. (shrink)