When the policies and activities of one country or generation harm both other nations and later generations, they constitute serious injustices. Recognizing the broad threat posed by anthropogenic climate change, advocates for an international climate policy development process have expressly aimed to mitigate this pressing contemporary environmental threat in a manner that promotes justice. Yet, while making justice a primary objective of global climate policy has been the movement's noblest aspiration, it remains an onerous challenge for policymakers. -/- Atmospheric Justice (...) is the first single-authored work of political theory that addresses this pressing challenge via the conceptual frameworks of justice, equality, and responsibility. Throughout this incisive study, Steve Vanderheiden points toward ways to achieve environmental justice by exploring how climate change raises issues of both international and intergenerational justice. In addition, he considers how the design of a global climate regime might take these aims into account. Engaging with the principles of renowned political philosopher John Rawls, he expands on them by factoring in the needs of future generations. Vanderheiden also demonstrates how political theory can contribute to reaching a better understanding of the proper human response to climate change. By showing how climate policy offers insights into resolving contemporary controversies within political theory, he illustrates the ways in which applying normative theory to policy allows us to better understand both. -/- Thoroughly researched and persuasively argued, Atmospheric Justice makes an important step toward providing us with a set of carefully elaborated first principles for achieving environmental justice. (shrink)

How should billions of species observations worldwide be shared and made reusable? Many biodiversity scientists assume the ideal solution is to standardize all datasets according to a single, universal classification and aggregate them into a centralized, global repository. This ideal has known practical and theoretical limitations, however, which justifies investigating alternatives. To support better community deliberation and normative evaluation, we develop a novel conceptual framework showing how different organizational models, regulative ideals and heuristic strategies are combined to form shared infrastructures (...) supporting data reuse. The framework is anchored in a general definition of data pooling as an activity of making a taxonomically standardized body of information available for community reuse via digital infrastructure. We describe and illustrate unified and pluralistic ideals for biodiversity data pooling and show how communities may advance toward these ideals using different heuristic strategies. We present evidence for the strengths and limitations of the unification and pluralistic ideals based on systemic relationships of power, responsibility and benefit they establish among stakeholders, and we conclude the pluralistic ideal is better suited for biodiversity data. (shrink)

The purpose of the Cambridge Edition is to offer translations of the best modern German edition of Kant's work in a uniform format suitable for Kant scholars. When complete the edition will include all of Kant's published writings and a generous selection from the unpublished writings such as the Opus postumum, handschriftliche Nachlass, lectures, and correspondence. This volume contains the first translation into English of notes from Kant's lectures on metaphysics. These lectures, dating from the 1760s to the 1790s, touch (...) on all the major topics and phases of Kant's philosophy. Most of these notes have appeared only recently in the German Academy Edition; this translation offers many corrections of that edition. As is standard with the volumes in the Cambridge Edition there is an extensive editorial apparatus, including extensive linguistic and explanatory notes, a detailed subject index, and glossaries of key terms. (shrink)

Dementia is now a leading cause of both mortality and morbidity, particularly in western nations, and current projections for rates of dementia suggest this will worsen. More than ever, cost effective and creative non-pharmacological therapies are needed to ensure we have an adequate system of care and supervision. Music therapy is one such measure, yet to date statements of what music therapy is supposed to bring about in ethical terms have been limited to fairly vague and under-developed claims about an (...) improvement in well-being. This article identifies the relevant sense of wellbeing at stake in the question of dementia therapies of this type. In broad terms the idea is that this kind of therapy has a restorative effect on social agency. To the extent that music arouses a person through its rhythms and memory-inducing effects, particularly in communal settings, it may give rise to the recovery of one's narrative agency, and in turn allow for both carer and patient to participate in a more meaningful and mutually engaging social connection. (shrink)

The development and publication of Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, fifth edition produced a peak in mainstream media interest in psychiatry, and a large and generally critical set of scientific commentaries. The coverage has focused mainly on the expansion of some categories, and loosening of some criteria, which together may lead to more people receiving diagnoses, and accompanying accusations of the medicalisation of normal living. Instructions given to members of DSM-5 work groups appear to have encouraged this.1 This (...) has not been the only source of disquiet. The influence of the pharmaceutical industry on the members of the appointees to DSM diagnostic work groups, which constructed the new rubrics, has caused concern,2 as remuneration and insurance coverage in the USA depends partly on DSM diagnosis, and the pharmaceutical industry has been accused of encouraging the development of new diagnoses as a way to increase profitability.3 Societal impact has been an explicit part of the development of DSM-5, as outlined in the article in this issue.4 Reasons for decisions by DSM-5 workgroups have included enabling sufferers to receive treatment which would not be available without a DSM diagnosis , or …. (shrink)

This article is concerned with two concepts. The first is a coinage of the author, 'Protscience', a contracted form of 'Protestant science', made in reference to the 16th—17th century Protestant Reformation, when the members of Western Christendom took their religion into their hands, specifically by reading the Bible for themselves and interpreting its relevance fortheir lives.Today we witness a similar tendency with regard to the dominant epistemic authority, science, whose 'reformation' often portrayed as 'democratisation'. However, a more exact understanding draws (...) on the article's second key concept, the distinction drawn in marketing between 'customer' and 'consumer'. The former purchases to sell (i.e. a retailer), whereas the latter purchases to use. Many of the so-called 'anti-science' movements of recent times can be explained as a rise in 'science customisation', whereby people who have acquainted themselves with the latest science adopt a discretionary attitude towards what they will and will not believe of what they have learned. Keywords: anticipatory governance, democracy, New Age, placebo effect, Protestant Reformation, Protscience, science customisation. (shrink)

The “adaptive toolbox” model of the mind is much too uncritical, even as a model of bounded rationality. There is no place for a “meta-rationality” that questions the shape of the decision-making environments themselves. Thus, using the ABC Group's “fast and frugal heuristics,” one could justify all sorts of conformist behavior as rational. Telling in this regard is their appeal to the philosophical distinction between coherence and correspondence theories of truth.

Bryan Van Norden’s _Taking Back Philosophy: A Multicultural Manifesto_ draws on his expertise in Chinese philosophy to launch a comprehensive and often scathing critique of contemporary Anglo-American philosophy. I focus on the sense in which “China” figures as a “non-Western culture” in Van Norden’s argument. Here I identify an equivocation between what I call a “functional” and a “substantive” account of culture. I argue that Van Norden, like perhaps most others who have discussed Chinese philosophy, presupposes a “functional” conception, whereby (...) the relevant sense in which “China” matters is exactly as “non-Western,” which ends up incorporating some exogenous influences such as Indian Buddhism but not any of the Western philosophies that made major inroads in the twentieth century. I explore the implications of the functional/substantive distinction for the understanding of cross-cultural philosophy generally. (shrink)

Finn Collin has been the honest broker of social epistemology. In this article, I attempt to come clean on the nature and sources of what I have always regarded as the ‘normative’ horizon of the field. It basically turns on a social constructivist reading of Plato’s Phaedrus, the dialogue from which modern analytic epistemology also takes its inspiration. I pursue the implications of this approach in various normative fields of philosophy.

This paper continues a conversation about Wittgenstein’s picture of language and meaning and its potential applications for educational theorising. It takes the form of a response to Wolff-Michael Roth’s earlier paper “Heeding Wittgenstein on “understanding” and “meaning”: A pragmatist and concrete human psychological approach in/for education,” in which Roth problematizes the use of the terms “understanding” and “meaning” in education discourse and proposes their abandonment. Whilst we agree with Roth about a series of central points, at the same time we (...) maintain that he has taken his argument in directions antithetical to our reading of Wittgenstein’s work. We offer four points of departure, exploring themes of: appropriate questioning; eliminativism; language-games and grammar; and productivity, explanation, and a science of learning. We conclude by discussing ways consistent with Wittgenstein’s thought to go on in thinking about education. (shrink)

In what sense is a person addicted to drugs or alcohol incompetent, and so a legitimate object of coercive treatment? The standard tests for competence do not pick out the capacity that is lost in addiction: the capacity to properly regulate consumption. This paper is an attempt to sketch a justificatory framework for understanding the conditions under which addicted persons may be treated against their will. These conditions rarely obtain, for they apply only when addiction is extremely severe and great (...) harm threatens. It will be argued also that to widen the measures currently in place in some jurisdictions, though philosophically well-motivated, would require very strong evidence of a set of conditions disposing a person to an addictive future. It is doubtful that any such currently available evidence is strong enough to justify coercive treatment. Nevertheless, coercive treatment of addiction is already a reality, with the potential for more, and so some discussion will be presented regarding the extraordinary safeguards necessary to prevent misapplication of such treatment policies. (shrink)

This article is a response to William Lynch’s, ‘Social Epistemology Transformed: Steve Fuller’s Account of Knowledge as a Divine Spark for Human Domination,’ an extended and thoughtful reflection on my Knowledge: The Philosophical Quest in History. I grant that Lynch has captured well, albeit critically, the spirit and content of the book – and the thirty-year intellectual journey that led to it. In this piece, I respond at two levels. First, I justify my posture towards my predecessors and contemporaries, (...) which Lynch shrewdly sees as my opposition to deference. However, most of the response concerns an elaboration of my theodicy-focussed sense of social epistemology, which is long-standing but only started to become prominent about ten years ago, in light of my involvement in the evolution controversies. Here I aim to draw together a set of my abiding interests – scientific, theological and philosophical – in trying to provide a normative foundation for the future of humanity. (shrink)

Assuming AD + (V = L(R)), it is shown that for κ an admissible Suslin cardinal, o(κ) (= the order type of the stationary subsets of κ) is "essentially" regular and closed under ultrapowers in a manner to be made precise. In particular, o(κ) ≫ κ +, κ ++ , etc. It is conjectured that this characterizes admissibility for L(R).

What marks ours as the "post-epistemic era" is that it refuses to confer any special privilege on knowledge production as a social practice: whatever normative strictures apply to social practices in general, they apply specifically to epistemic practices as well. I trace how we have reached this state by distinguishing two conceptions of normativity in the history of epistemology: a top-down approach epitomized by Kant and Bentham, and a bottom-up approach associated with the Scottish Enlightenment. The advantage of the latter (...) is that it clearly distinguishes the emergence of norms from the conditions of their maintenance. I then show how more recent evolutionary epistemology has, in a pejorative way, "naturalized" socially constructed norms of cognitive competence, whereas the logical positivists — long the bane of "progressive" epistemologists — recognized the fully artificial character of epistemic norms and hence qualify as the first social epistemologists. (shrink)

Tradition compels me to write dissertation acknowledgements that are long, effusive, and unprofessional. Fortunately for me, I heartily endorse that tradition.

This book examines the significance and meaning of undergraduate online learning using a hermeneutic phenomenological study, asking what is lost when there is no face-to-face contact and exploring the essence of technology itself. Drawing on data from undergraduate students across various higher education institutions, including both interview recordings and written reports of their lived experiences, the author seeks to uncover the essence of the phenomenon by engaging with themes around the philosophy of technology and the purpose of post-secondary education, using (...) Heidegger's essay The Question Concerning Technology as a crucial interpretive lens. Rather than offering generalized conclusions, it presents a basis for further understanding of the experience of online learning, and ultimately asks whether the efficiency afforded to undergraduates by online classes or degrees can ever replace what is learned in a classroom with other people. Providing a novel approach to the topic of online learning which centers the concept of experience, and drawing links to current conditions and pedagogy in online higher education, it will appeal to scholars working across education and philosophy with interests in higher education, technology and education, phenomenology of education and philosophy of education. (shrink)

It is suggested that some limitations of current designs for medical AI systems stem from the failure of those designs to address issues of artificial consciousness. Consciousness would appear to play a key role in the expertise, particularly the moral expertise, of human medical agents, including, for example, autonomous weighting of options in diagnosis; planning treatment; use of imaginative creativity to generate courses of action; sensorimotor flexibility and sensitivity; empathetic and morally appropriate responsiveness; and so on. Thus, it is argued, (...) a plausible design constraint for a successful ethical machine medical or care agent is for it to at least model, if not reproduce, relevant aspects of consciousness and associated abilities. In order to provide theoretical grounding for such an enterprise we examine some key philosophical issues that concern the machine modelling of consciousness and ethics, and we show how questions relating to the first research goal are relevant to medical machine ethics. We believe that this will overcome a blanket skepticism concerning the relevance of understanding consciousness, to the design and construction of artificial ethical agents for medical or care contexts. It is thus argued that it would be prudent for designers of MME agents to reflect on issues to do with consciousness and medical expertise; to become more aware of relevant research in the field of machine consciousness ; and to incorporate insights gained from these efforts into their designs. (shrink)

When Bloor's Knowledge and Social Imagery was first published in 1976, it was not the first time that a “strong programme” in the sociology of knowledge was treated to a hostile reception by philosophers. But never before has such a dialectically unproductive encounter with philosophers led to such a methodologically fruitful response, for, when an array of positivist, historicist, Popperian, and realist philosophers argued against Bloor and his Edinburgh colleagues that normative accounts of scientific rationality could not be refuted by (...) empirical accounts of what scientists do, an entire line of research was launched that sought to explain science without having to make reference to the philosophers' cherished norms. This is the field now known as Science and Technology Studies. Although STS is normally taken to be intellectually centered in sociology, its main practitioners are just as likely to have been drawn from philosophy and the natural sciences as from the social sciences proper. The unmistakable mark of Bloor's influence is that, unlike the sociology of science most recognizable to sociologists, the STS practitioner is committed to studying science in the same spirit of analytic detachment and epistemic neutrality as she would any other aspect of society. In practice, this has amounted to a preference for methods that incorporate “ethnographic distance”, although in recent years theoretical debate has increasingly focused on the appropriate attitude that STS practitioners should adopt toward science, given their findings to date. I will return to this debate at the end of this essay. (shrink)

The most important and exciting recent development in the philosophy of science is its merging with the sociology of scientific knowledge. Here is the first text book to make this development available.

In the life sciences and beyond, new developments in science and technology and the creation of new social orders go hand in hand. In short, science and society are simultaneously and reciprocally coproduced and changed. Scientific research not only produces new knowledge and technological systems but also constitutes new forms of expertise and contributes to the emergence of new modes of living, at times empowering and at times disempowering citizens. These dynamic processes are tightly connected to significant redistributions of wealth (...) and power, and they sometimes threaten and sometimes enhance democracy. Understanding this phenomenon poses important intellectual and normative challenges: neither traditional social sciences nor prevailing modes of democratic governance have fully grappled with the deep and growing significance of knowledge-making in twenty-first century politics. Building on new work in science and technology studies (STS), this book advances the systematic analysis of the coproduction of knowledge and power in contemporary societies. Using case studies in the new life sciences, supplemented with cases on informatics and other topics such as climate science, this book presents a theoretical framing of coproduction processes while also providing detailed empirical analyses and nuanced comparative work. It will be interesting for students of sociology, science and technology studies, the history of science, genetics, political science and public administration. (shrink)

Drawing on several issues and methods in Western philosophy, from analytical philosophy to semiotics and hermeneutics, the author throws new light on the ancient Zhuangzi text. Engaging Daoism and contemporary Western philosophical logic, and drawing on new developments in our understanding of early Chinese culture, Coutinho challenges the interpretation of Zhuangzi as either a skeptic or a relativist, and instead seeks to explore his philosophy as emphasizing the ineradicable vagueness of language, thought and reality. This new interpretation of the Zhuangzi (...) offers an important development in the understanding of Daoist philosophy, describing a world in flux in which things themselves are vague and inconsistent, and tries to show us a Way (a Dao) to negotiate through the shadows of a "chaotic" world. (shrink)