Academic careers between the completion of a PhD and the acquisition of tenure are characterized by short term contracts, high levels of competition, and future uncertainty. Existing research indicates that uncertainty is a primary cause for postdocs in all disciplines to constantly question the continuation of their career. Despite this commonality between disciplines, we argue that future imaginations, coping strategies and ultimately the decision-making practices to exit or remain in academia differ in each discipline. Drawing from 60 qualitative interviews with (...) physicists and historians, we compared imaginations of the labor market inside and outside of academia, as well as narratives on how they perceive their agency to exit or remain. Our data shows that imaginations of the labor market outside of academia, have considerable consequences for their sense of precarity and planning of career paths. We propose that the uniform concept of future uncertainty must be separated into ‘existential uncertainty’ and ‘secured uncertainty’, which more accurately reflect the problems postdocs are confronted with and the resulting coping strategies. While those who consider their uncertainty as existential either evoke narratives of survival to continue in adverse conditions or begin parallel careers as added security. Those who perceive their future as uncertain but generally secured rely either on their ability to decide when necessary or postpone the question indefinitely. These differences that correlate with our chosen disciplines have important implications for research quality as well as mental-health hazards and further our understanding of self-exploitation and precarity in academia. (shrink)

We have various everyday measures for identifying the presence of consciousness, such as the capacity for verbal report and the intentional control of behavior. However, there are many contexts in which these measures are difficult to apply, and even when they can be applied one might have doubts as to their validity in determining the presence/absence of consciousness. Everyday measures for identifying consciousness are particularly problematic when it comes to ‘challenging cases’—human infants, people with brain damage, nonhuman animals, and AI (...) systems. There is a pressing need to identify measures of consciousness that can be applied to challenging cases. This paper explores one of the most promising strategies for identifying and validating such measures—the natural-kind strategy. The paper is in two broad parts. Part I introduces the natural-kind strategy, and contrasts it with other influential approaches in the field. Part II considers a number of objections to the approach, arguing that none succeeds. (shrink)

Elliott Sober and his defenders think of selection, drift, mutation, and migration as distinct evolutionary forces. This paper exposes an ambiguity in Sober's account of the force of selection: sometimes he appears to equate the force of selection with variation in fitness, sometimes with ‘selection for properties’. Sober's own account of fitness as a property analogous to life-expectancy shows how the two conceptions come apart. Cases where there is selection against variance in offspring number also show that selection and drift (...) cannot be distinguished in the way Sober hopes for. These issues have significance beyond the parochial matter of the coherence of Sober's system. There is no good principled answer to the question of which features of a population should count among the contributors to fitness. This means there is no non-arbitrary account of the nature of selection. (shrink)

An argument against the view that natural norms are constituted out of some form of historical success.

This paper discusses the familiar question of whether expressions of faith or conviction offered by religious believers really express their beliefs, in the standard sense of ‘belief’ used in philosophy and psychology. Some hold that these expressions do not express genuine beliefs because they do not meet the standards of rationality, coherence and integration which govern beliefs. So they must serve some other function. But this picture of ‘genuine belief’ is inadequate, for reasons independent of the phenomenon of religion. Once (...) we get a better picture of belief, we can see that religious beliefs conform to this picture, and that typical expressions of faith really are expressions of belief in the proper sense. (shrink)

This collection of essays focuses on the interface between delusions and self-deception.

This handbook gives an overview of cognition and emotion research. It provides readers with the historical background and the philosophical arguments on the debate, before moving on to outline the general aspects of various research traditions. Split into comprehensive sections, it discusses cognitive processes, including memory, decision-making, and reasoning, and also emotions such as anger, anxiety, sadness, and jealousy. With contributions from leading researchers in the subject, this volume examines the main theories, and also the application of these to other (...) areas of psychology. (shrink)

This book provides an in-depth analysis of consumerism that draws from a wide range of theoretical, clinical and methodological approaches. Contributors demonstrate that consumerism and the culture that surrounds it exert profound and often undesirable effects on both people's individual lives and on society as a whole. Far from being distant influences, advertising, consumption, materialism and the capitalistic economic system affect personal, social and ecological well-being on many levels. Contributors also provide a variety of potential interventions for counteracting the negative (...) influence of consumerism. (shrink)

The car has become ubiquitous in late modern society and has become the leading object in the ordinary social relations of mobility. Despite its centrality to the culture and material form of modern societies, the relationship between the car and human beings has remained largely unexplored by sociology. This article argues that cars are combined with their drivers into an assemblage, the ‘driver-car’, which has become a form of social being that brings about distinctive social actions in modern society – (...) driving, transporting, parking, consuming, polluting, killing, communicating and so on. To understand the nature of this assemblage a number of theoretical perspectives that describe the interaction and collaboration between human beings and complex objects are explored; the process of driving, ‘affordance’, actor-network theory, and the embodied relationship between driver and car. This theoretical account of the driver-car is intended as a preliminary to the empirical investigation of the place of the driver-car in modern societies. (shrink)

Don Marquis argues that abortion is prima facie seriously wrong because it deprives the foetus of a valuable future. This paper argues that there is no morally relevant difference between the relations that foetuses stand in to valuable futures and those that gametes stand in to such futures. Therefore, Marquis’ account implies that contraception is prima facie seriously wrong. My argument for this conclusion has a significant advantage over existing criticisms of Marquis based on controversial accounts of personal identity. It (...) shows that the problem with his account is not his view that identity across time is a matter of merely biological relations, but his investment of those relations with moral significance. This criticism has force no matter which account of personal identity is true. (shrink)

In this lively Very Short Introduction, Tim Bayne looks at the nature of thought. Exploring questions such as 'What are thoughts?' and 'How is thought realized in the brain?', he draws on research in philosophy, psychology, neuroscience, and anthropology to look at what we know - and don't know - about the capacity for thought.

What does it mean to be a citizen in a multicultural society? And what role must patriotism play in defining our relationship with our country and fellow citizens? In The Virtuous Citizen Tim Soutphommasane answers these questions with a critical defence of liberal nationalism. Considering a range of contemporary political debates from Europe, North America and Australia, over issues including multiculturalism, national history, civic education and immigration, Soutphommasane argues that a love of country should be valued alongside tolerance, mutual respect (...) and public reasonableness as a civic virtue. A liberal form of patriotism, grounded in national identity, is, if anything, essential for political stability in a diverse society. This book is required reading not only for political theorists and philosophers but also for researchers and professionals in political science, sociology, history and public policy. (shrink)

This article explores the circulation of ‘anti-psychiatry’ in British film and television during the long 1960s, focusing on the controversial BBC television play In Two Minds and its cinema remake Family Life. These films were inspired by R. D. Laing's ideas on the aetiology of schizophrenia, and were understood as uniting the personal and political motivations of progressive film-makers and progressive psychiatrists. Drawing upon practitioner interviews with producer Garnett and director Loach, and extensive archival research on the production and reception (...) of these films, this article contests previous scholarship on the popular circulation of anti-psychiatry and the movement's perceived polarisation from mainstream British psychiatry. While the reception of In Two Minds and Family Life did intensify an adversarial relationship between ‘rebel’ anti-psychiatrists and hard-line behaviourists such as William Sargant, the wider psychiatric field largely welcomed the films' contributions to mental health awareness and used the publicity to counter the idea of a ‘battle’ within the profession. This included leading UK mental health organisation the National Association for Mental Health looking to Loach and Laing as models for engaging contemporary audiences as it rebranded to MIND in 1972. This article contributes to historical understandings of the complex interactions between the fields of media and mental health, as well as recent scholarship challenging the idea of a clear split between anti-psychiatry and British medical orthodoxy. (shrink)

In this paper we develop a participatory model of the Christian doctrine of the atonement, according to which the atonement involves participating in the death and resurrection of Christ. In part one we argue that current models of the atonement—exemplary, penal, substitutionary and merit models—are unsatisfactory. The central problem with these models is that they assume a purely deontic conception of sin and, as a result, they fail to address sin as a relational and ontological problem. In part two we (...) argue that a participatory model of the atonement is both exegetically and philosophically plausible, and should be taken seriously within philosophical theology.i.. (shrink)

This paper begins by exploring a subspecies of assertion. Under some circumstances an utterance intuitively counts as an assertion, even though it is Cynical: that is, it is insincere, and made without the reasonable expectation of even appearing sincere to its audience. The paper explores the contextual and cognitive workings of Cynical assertion – directly, in part, but also by comparison with superficially similar but non-assertoric utterances, namely, those made under duress. Finally, the paper examines the broader relevance of Cynical (...) assertion, by considering two philosophical applications of the notion: first, in support of Michael Dummett’s conventionalist account of assertion; and second, in illuminating an aspect of Moore’s paradox. (shrink)

Climate change is one of the greatest collective action problems ever faced. The social and cultural barriers to intersubjectively motivating concern and agency are sweeping. It seems all but impossible to imagine politically viable solutions commensurate with the realities of the problem, and likewise find visionary ways of framing this problem to inspire meaningful solutions. One therefore perceives an abyss between ‘problem’ and ‘solution,’ as expressed in irreconcilable debates between problem-driven and solution-driven strategies for motivating climate action. Drawing on Merleau-Ponty’s (...) dialectical phenomenology of motivation and class consciousness in particular, I argue that his call for a “thinkable politics” can help activists bring problem-driven and solution-driven motives for climate response into productive relation. (shrink)

This paper demonstrates that John Wheeler and Richard Feynman's strategy for avoiding causal paradoxes threatened by backward causation and time-travel can be defeated by designing self-interacting mechanisms with a non-simple topological structure. Time-travel therefore requires constraints on the allowable data on space-like hypersurfaces. The nature and significance of these constraints is discussed.

In part because “imagination” is a slippery notion, its exact role in the production of scientific knowledge remains unclear. There is, however, one often explicit and deliberate use of imagination by scientists that can be (and has been) studied intensively by epistemologists and historians of science: thought experiments. The main goal of this article is to document the varieties of thought experimentation, not so much in terms of the different sciences in which they occur but rather in terms of the (...) different functions they fulfil. I argue that thought experimentation (and hence imagination) plays a role not only in theory choice but in singular causal analysis and scientific discovery as well. I pinpoint, moreover, some of the rules governing the use of thought experiments in theory choice and in singular causal analysis, that is, some of the criteria they should meet in order to fulfil those functions successfully. (shrink)

Although our moral lives would be unrecognisable without them, roles have received little attention from analytic moral philosophers. Roles are central to our lives and to our engagement with one another, and should be analysed in connection with our core notions of ethics such as virtue, reason, and obligation. This volume aims to redress the neglect of role ethics by confronting the tensions between conceptions of impartial morality and role obligations in the history of analytic philosophy and the Confucian tradition. (...) Different perspectives on the ethical significance of roles can be found by looking to debates within professional and applied ethics, by challenging existing accounts of how roles generate reasons, by questioning the hegemony of ethical reasons, and by exploring the relation between expertise and virtue. The essays tackle several core questions related to these debates: What are roles and what is their normative import? To what extent are roles and the ethics of roles central to ethics as opposed to virtue in general, and obligation in general? Are role obligations characteristically incompatible with ordinary morality in professions such as business, law, and medicine? How does practical reason function in relation to roles? Perspectives in Role Ethics is an examination of a largely neglected topic in ethics. It will appeal to a broad range of scholars in normative ethics, virtue ethics, non-Western ethics, and applied ethics interested in the importance of roles in our moral life. (shrink)

In this paper, I evaluate the adequacy of various multiverse hypotheses relative to classical theism in explaining the fine tuning of the universe to life and the fine tuning of our life to the universe. I conclude that, despite its rational attractiveness in explaining the fine tuning of the universe to us in a more conclusive and arguably simpler manner than the God hypothesis, due to its failure to explain the continuing fine tuning of us to the universe, we should (...) discard even the explanatorily strongest multiverse hypothesis, what I call the ’maximal multiverse’ hypothesis, and instead believe in the God hypothesis. (shrink)

Volume 24, Issue 6, September 2019, Page 657-661.

This essay examines the variety of ways that historians have engaged with material culture in their work over the last few decades. Although textual records from the archive remain privileged sources, the diversity of historiographical approach has led to a range of historiographical practices including a material turn. Two major approaches to objects have dominated. Dubbed ‘object driven’ and ‘object centred’, these variously use objects as evidence for a very wide range of research questions, and focus on past material cultures (...) respectively. Focusing on a case study of Holocaust historiography, the essay identifies the challenges for contemporary archaeology generated by these two historiographical traditions, as well as by the self-reflectivity over narrating material pasts/past materialities that characterizes historical practice. (shrink)

Brief article on this hedonist, follower of Socrates, and founder of the Cyrenaic school.

This article replies to criticism of my article, “Is Religious Belief a Kind of Belief?” by Sebastian Gäb, Eva Schmidt and Michael Scott.

A paper that explores the extent to which images remain resistant to their assimilation by the linguistic and technical systems that society has developed. It uses Damisch´s theory of /cloud/ to comment upon and refract Flusser´s notion of the technical image, proposing a productive incompleteness that the image continually feeds into our relationship to the world. With the image, laterality is as significant as linearity. Its form does not presuppose how it should be approached or understood; the provisionality heralded by (...) /cloud/ and by the nature of the image can problematise, confound, or even offer an antidote to a systematising drive in the mediated world we inhabit. (shrink)

We can address the issue of epistemic luck, the possibility that the world interferes with the activity of believing so as to keep that activity from achieving its aim, by rethinking the aim of that activity. So, if we give up truth, for example, as the aim of belief, and if we embrace a different aim—the aim of believing as my ideal self would have me believe—we can eliminate the possibility of luck and leave the world no room to interfere (...) in the affairs of the activity of believing. All this while at the same time preserving the epistemic’s responsiveness to the world. This way of seeing the epistemic is culled from the work of Kierkegaard’s pseudonyms. (shrink)

The paper follows Gottfried Semper's thesis that building – just like the textile – originates in practices of the knot. A comparison of the knot with dominant metaphors of the construction stone, the chain and the con tainer shows how knotting is inscribed in the fields of material, movement, perception and human relations. But the knot connects things with each other, instead of simply adding them; it is a connection by sympathy rather than by joints. That leads to a comparison (...) of tectonic and stereotomic aspects of building, especially of the wall. Is the wall constructed on the ground, like the skyscraper, or is it a fold in the ground itself, like the mountain? If one pursues the idea of the knot, one arrives at the latter conclusion. (shrink)