Author note: Matthew Lipman, Professor of Philosophy at Montclair State College and Director of the Institute for the Advancement of Philosophy for Children, is ...

"Notes toward a metaphysic of wonder" is the outcome of a "Reciprocal Inquiry" in which Leoni Henning and I participated. In our correspondence, we moved very fast: I thought each of us surprised the other. As a result, I found myself writing about astonishment more elaborately than I'd intended to. Before long I was involved not only with wondering but with awe and bewilderment and amazement, and eager to connect it all with philosophy in Latin America. So these "Notes..." are (...) just a foretaste of what I hope will someday be a more extensive article, but which is only hinted at in the present version. Leoni Maria Padillha Henning’s thoughtful and informative paper, “Pragmatism in Matthew Lipman and its influence in Latin America” is singularly helpful in showing the relevance of Philosophy for Children to Latin-American education. Indeed, the intellectual momentum it generates is a powerful invitation to other educators and scholars to take up the issues where she leaves off. I’d like to take up just one of these issues, one that, on the surface at least, seems to be particularly unpromising. I’m referring to the near-unanimity that exists among scholars with regard to the tradition, descended from Aristotle, that philosophy begins in wonder. My intention is not to attempt to refute this claim, but to show its complicity in defending the traditional non-reflective paradigm of education, which has sturdily resisted the introduction of philosophy into the schools, just as it resists the conversion of the classroom into a community of inquiry. With the proper pedagogy, philosophy can readily be taught to children, and the teaching of philosophy for children can readily be taught to teachers. It is not essential that wonder precede philosophy: it can just as well follow it. (shrink)

Some authors have called for increased research on various forms of geoengineering as a means to address global climate change. This paper focuses on the question of whether a particular form of geoengineering, namely deploying sulfate aerosols in the stratosphere to counteract some of the effects of increased greenhouse gas concentrations, would be a just response to climate change. In particular, we examine problems sulfate aerosol geoengineering (SAG) faces in meeting the requirements of distributive, intergenerational, and procedural justice. We argue (...) that SAG faces obstacles to meeting the requirements of all three considered kinds of justice, because its impacts can harm some persons and communities much more than others; it poses serious risks to future generations; and SAG is especially prone to unilateral implementation. While we do not claim that SAG ought not to be implemented, we argue that it is the responsibility of proponents of SAG to recognize and address these ethical obstacles before advocating its implementation. (shrink)

Humanity stands at a precipice. -/- Our species could survive for millions of generations — enough time to end disease, poverty, and injustice; to reach new heights of flourishing. But this vast future is at risk. With the advent of nuclear weapons, humanity entered a new age, gaining the power to destroy ourselves, without the wisdom to ensure we won’t. Since then, these dangers have only multiplied, from climate change to engineered pandemics and unaligned artificial intelligence. If we do not (...) act fast to reach a place of safety, it may soon be too late. -/- The Precipice explores the science behind the risks we face. It puts them in the context of the greater story of humanity: showing how ending these risks is among the most pressing moral issues of our time. And it points the way forward, to the actions and strategies we can take today to safeguard humanity’s future. (shrink)

Some risks have extremely high stakes. For example, a worldwide pandemic or asteroid impact could potentially kill more than a billion people. Comfortingly, scientific calculations often put very low probabilities on the occurrence of such catastrophes. In this paper, we argue that there are important new methodological problems which arise when assessing global catastrophic risks and we focus on a problem regarding probability estimation. When an expert provides a calculation of the probability of an outcome, they are really providing the (...) probability of the outcome occurring, given that their argument is watertight. However, their argument may fail for a number of reasons such as a flaw in the underlying theory, a flaw in the modeling of the problem, or a mistake in the calculations. If the probability estimate given by an argument is dwarfed by the chance that the argument itself is flawed, then the estimate is suspect. We develop this idea formally, explaining how it differs from the related distinctions of model and parameter uncertainty. Using the risk estimates from the Large Hadron Collider as a test case, we show how serious the problem can be when it comes to catastrophic risks and how best to address it. (shrink)

We think we know what healers do: they build on patients' irrational beliefs and treat them in a 'symbolic' way. If they get results, it's thanks to their capacity to listen, rather than any influence on a clinical level. At the same time, we also think we know what modern medicine is: a highly technical and rational process, but one that scarcely listens to patients at all. In this book, ethnopsychiatrist Tobie Nathan and philosopher Isabelle Stengers argue that this commonly (...) posed opposition between traditional and modern medicine is misleading. They show instead that healers are interesting precisely because they don't listen to patients, using techniques of 'divination' rather than 'diagnosis'. Healers construct genuine therapeutic strategies by identifying the origins of symptoms in external forces, outside of the mind of the sufferer, and in this regard African healers are virtuosos. Though it may claim otherwise, modern medicine, for its part, is characterised by empiricism rather than rationality. What appears to be the pursuit of rationality is ultimately only a means to dismiss and exclude other forms of treatment. Blurring the distinctions between traditional and modern practices and drawing on perspectives from across the globe, this ethnopsychiatric manifesto encourages us to think in radically new ways about illness, challenging accepted notions on the relationship between sufferer and symptom. It will be of great interest to those working in medicine and healthcare, as well as anthropologists, social scientists and those in the humanities more broadly. (shrink)

In this book, Toby Svoboda develops and defends a Kantian environmental virtue ethic, challenging the widely-held view that Kant's moral philosophy takes an instrumental view toward nature and animals and has little to offer environmental ethics. On the contrary, Svoboda posits that there is good moral reason to care about non-human organisms in their own right and to value their flourishing independently of human interests, since doing so is constitutive of certain virtues. Svoboda argues that Kant’s account of indirect (...) duties regarding nature can ground a compelling environmental ethic: the Kantian duty to develop morally virtuous dispositions strictly proscribes unnecessarily harming organisms, and Svoboda argues that this duty compels us to act in ways that benefit non-human organisms, given that doing so can enhance one’s virtues. Svoboda’s argument engages the recent literature on environmental virtue and provides an original argument for an environmental virtue ethic firmly rooted in Kant’s moral philosophy. (shrink)

The deliberative systems approach is a recent innovation within the tradition of deliberative democratic theory. It signals an important shift in focus from the political legitimacy produced within isolated and formal sites of deliberation (e.g., Parliament or deliberative mini-publics), to the legitimacy produced by a number of diverse interconnected sites. In this respect, the deliberative systems (DS) approach is better equipped to identify and address defects arising from the systemic influences of power and coercion. In this article, I examine one (...) of the least explored and least understood defects: the exclusion of non-speaking political actors generated by the uniform privileging of speech in all sites within a system. Using the examples of prefigurative protest, Indigenous refusal to deliberate, and the non-deliberative agency of disabled citizens, I argue that the DS approach allows theorists to better understand forms of domination related to the imposition of speech on those who are either unwilling or unable to speak. (shrink)

As a direct consequence of the sophisticated arrangement of its intrinsic neurons, the gastrointestinal tract is unique among peripheral organs, in its ability to mediate its own reflexes. Neurons of the enteric nervous system are intimately associated with enteric glial cells. These supporting cells do not resemble Schwann cells, the glial cell found in all other parts of the peripheral nervous system, but share many similarities with astrocytes of the central nervous system. Ablation of enteric glial cells in adult transgenic (...) mice has demonstrated that these cells are essential to maintain the integrity of the small intestine. Acute loss of enteric glial cells induces massive pathological changes with similarities to necrotizing enterocolitis (NEC) and early Crohn's disease. These human conditions share some mechanistic similarities. Identification of enteric glial cell dysfunction/loss as sufficient to induce necrotic/inflammatory bowel disease may be important to understand the pathogenesis of both NEC and Crohn's disease. BioEssays 24:130–140, 2002. © 2002 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. (shrink)

Según la Regla de Atención que formula David Lewis, la mera consideración de una posibilidad que supondría que la proposición que creemos fuera falsa, basta, si no la podemos descartar y por muy improbable que ésta sea, para hacer desaparecer nuestro conocimiento de tal proposición. El propósito de este artículo es combatir tal regla y sustituirla por una versión mucho más moderada. Si la consideración de la posibilidad no descartada no afecta a nuestro grado de certeza previo, tal posibilidad no (...) puede hacer desaparecer nuestro conocimiento.According to David Lewis’s Rule of Attention, the mere fact of attending to a possibility,that we cannot discard, in which the proposition believed would be false, is sufficient, to make our knowledge of that proposition disappear, no matter how far-fetched that possibility may be. The aim of this paper is to criticize such a rule and to offer a much more moderate version of it. If attending to the non-ignored possibility does not affect our prior degree of certainty, such a possibility cannot make our knowledge disappear. (shrink)

For couples for whom assisted reproduction is the only way to have genetically related offspring, the donation of gametes by others makes available enhanced reproductive options. There has been an increasing demand for such services, as evidenced by the Web site launched by fashion photographer Ron Harris in the fall of 1999. Although the sale of such gametes is not new, this Web site does speak to a different set of priorities and values than has been witnessed in the context (...) of assisted reproduction: the selection of particular traits, in effect, the creation of designer babies. With the expanding demand for such services come expanded liabilities, which are the focus of this article. The author argues that this kind of commodification of gametes reinforces dubious social attitudes, leads to potential harms for the children created by this technology, and suggests a departure from traditional paradigms in medicine: a departure in an ill-advised direction. (shrink)

The fairy tale The Three Princes of Serendip can be taken to be allegorical of not only chance discovery (serendipity) but of other aspects of scientific discovery as well. Just as Horace Walpole coined serendipity, so can the term bahramdipity be derived from the tale and defined as the cruel suppression of a serendipitous discovery. Suppressed, unpublished discoveries are designated nulltiples. Several examples are presented to make the case that bahramdipity is an existent aspect of scientific discovery. Other examples of (...) non-ideal scientific research and discovery are provided in order to contrast and clarify the meaning and use of bahramdipity. Additional allegories of scientific discovery are taken from the tale and a hope for the strengthening of scientific integrity is expressed. (shrink)

It is often claimed that from the moment of conception embryos have the same moral status as adult humans. This claim plays a central role in many arguments against abortion, in vitro fertilization, and stem cell research. In what follows, I show that this claim leads directly to an unexpected and unwelcome conclusion: that natural embryo loss is one of the greatest problems of our time and that we must do almost everything in our power to prevent it. I examine (...) the responses available to those who hold that embryos have full moral status and conclude that they cannot avoid the force of this argument without giving up this key claim. (shrink)

Objects often manifest themselves in incompatible ways across perspectives that are epistemically on a par. The standard response to such cases is to deny that the properties that things appear to have from different perspectives are properties that things really have out there. This type of response seems worrying: too many properties admit of perspectival variance and there are good theoretical reasons to think that such properties are genuinely instantiated. So, we have reason to explore views on which things can (...) have the incompatible properties they appear to have across perspectives. This paper explores the view that things can have incompatible properties if the world is not a metaphysically unified place but is instead fragmented. There is a sensible notion of co-obtainment, on which two facts can each obtain without co-obtaining. Using this notion, we can step back from our embedded perspectives on the world without deeming the contents of those perspectives to be mere appearances. This renders th.. (shrink)

The important philosophers in history aren’t all that great. First, their works are full of bad arguments, confused concepts, falsehoods, implausible claims, and lack of clarity. We can see this by using a “peer-review test,” which asks us to evaluate these claims and arguments as if they were submitted to us as anonymous work. Second, I make the case that canonizing some philosophers as great is damaging to the philosophical project of seeking truth regardless of its source. I suggest an (...) alternative hypothesis. The putatively great philosophers were just intelligent individuals who had the right ideas at the right time. They are worth reading not because of their intellectual genius but rather for their creativity and insight, offering novel solutions to certain problems and noticing implications others had missed. Accordingly, my position does not entail that the “great” figures are of no philosophical interest. However, we should do away with the idea of a “great philosopher.” Philosophy might then come to resemble other disciplines that seek the truth, which generally do not revere their historically important predecessors. (shrink)

There is a type of metaphysical picture that surfaces in a range of philosophical discussions, is of intrinsic interest, and yet remains ill-understood. According to this picture, the world contains a range of standpoints relative to which different facts obtain. Any true representation of the world cannot but adopt a particular standpoint. The aim of this paper is to propose a regimentation of a metaphysics that underwrites this picture. Key components are a factive notion of metaphysical relativity, a deflationary notion (...) of adopting standpoints, and two kinds of valid inference, one that allows one to abandon standpoints and one that does not. To better understand how theories formulated in terms of this framework are situated in dialectical space, I sketch a theory in the philosophy of time that admits both temporal and atemporal standpoints. (shrink)

Anil Gupta’s book Empiricism and Experience (2006) is a rich and complex piece of work, whose main aim is to elucidate the rational contribution of experience to knowledge. A minimally complete acc...

For Lipman, philosophy needs to approximate human interests by being dramatized, as proposed here with a new viewpoint: “to reveal life is to reveal drama.” The life of a philosopher is “revitalized in a comprehensive re-telling,” in the philosophical question and the reflective concerns of wh..

As a response to climate change, geoengineering with solar radiation management has the potential to result in unjust harm. Potentially, this injustice could be ameliorated by providing compensation to victims of SRM. However, establishing a just SRM compensation system faces severe challenges. First, there is scientific uncertainty in detecting particular harmful impacts and causally attributing them to SRM. Second, there is ethical uncertainty regarding what principles should be used to determine responsibility and eligibility for compensation, as well as determining how (...) much compensation ought to be paid. Significant challenges loom for crafting a just SRM compensation system. (shrink)

It is a pleasure to be able to thank the editors of Ethik und Sozialwissenschaften for inviting me to write this paper about the Philosophy for Children program, with which I have been associated since it began at the end of the 1960's.

The Church-Turing Thesis is widely regarded as true, because of evidence that there is only one genuine notion of computation. By contrast, there are nowadays many different formal logics, and different corresponding foundational frameworks. Which ones can deliver a theory of computability? This question sets up a difficult challenge: the meanings of basic mathematical terms are not stable across frameworks. While it is easy to compare what different frameworks say, it is not so easy to compare what they mean. We (...) argue for some minimal conditions that must be met if two frameworks are to be compared; if frameworks are radical enough, comparison becomes hopeless. Our aim is to clarify the dialectical situation in this bourgeoning area of research, shedding light on the nature of non-classical logic and the notion of computation alike. (shrink)

This essay has examined a women's subculture within a broader discipline. In the Victorian era physiology, understood in its then-dominant meaning as hygiene, en- tered the women's colleges and was likely also to have been found in modified form in other types of colleges. Toward the turn of the century physiology began to be redefined as a male-oriented experimental biomedical science. Physiology in the five women's colleges under discussion was transformed in light of that new meaning, but in such a (...) manner as to preserve a female network with an identity of its own. (shrink)

Virtue words, such as justice, fairness, care, and integrity, frequently feature in organizational codes of conduct and theories of ethical leadership. And yet our modern organizations remain blemished by examples lacking virtue. The philosophy of virtue ethics and numerous extant theories of leadership cite virtues as essential to good leadership. But we seem to lack understanding of how to develop or embed these virtues and notions of good leadership in practice. In 2012, virtue ethicist Julia Annas pointed to a training (...) program which she touted as a practical application of virtue ethics. The program Annas identified is called The Virtues Project, and while promising, she warned that in its current state, it lacked theorizing. We address this by aligning its practical strategies to extant theory and evidence to understand what virtues it might develop and how it might facilitate good leadership. Doing so makes two key contributions. First, it lends credence to The Virtues Project’s potential as a leadership development program. Second, it provides a means of applying theories of good leadership in practice. Our overarching objective is to advance The Virtues Project as a means of incorporating virtues into workplace dynamics and embedding virtues in the practice of organizational leadership. (shrink)

Drawing on theoretical arguments from the psychology discipline, we investigate the implications of employee entitlement in organizational settings. Specifically, we utilize workplace engagement theory to suggest that due to their skewed sense of deservingness, employees high in entitlement are less likely to experience workplace engagement. Furthermore, the negative relationship between employee entitlement and workplace engagement is strengthened when ethical leadership is low, yet mitigated when ethical leadership is high. Finally, we predict that under conditions of low ethical leadership, reductions in (...) engagement explain why employee entitlement results in hindered job performance. This mediated effect does not hold when ethical leadership is high. We tested our theoretical model utilizing field data from employees and their direct supervisors in the financial services industry. Our results support our theoretical model. Theoretical and practical implications are discussed. (shrink)

This essay is dedicated to the memory of Katherine Hawley.1Bitcoin was invented to serve as a digital currency that demands no trust in financial institutions, such as commercial and central banks. This paper discusses metaphysical aspects of bitcoin, in particular the view that bitcoin is socially constructed, non-concrete, and genuinely exists. If bitcoin is socially constructed, then one may worry that this reintroduces trust in the communities responsible for the social construction. Although we may have to rely on certain communities, (...) I argue that social construction doesn’t imply a demand for trust because the relevant communities don’t take on any relevant commitments. Bitcoin is indeed trust-free. (shrink)

This paper argues against Zoltán Szabó’s claim in “Compositionality as Supervenience” that we ought to understand the principle of compositionality as the idea that in natural language, the meanings of complex expressions strongly supervene on the meanings of their constituents and how the constituents are combined. The argument is that if we understand compositionality Szabó’s way, then compositionality can play no role in explanations of the acquirability of natural languages, because it makes these explanations circular. This, in turn, would undermine (...) the primary motivation for thinking that natural language is compositional, and would thus undermine the importance of the principle in natural language semantics. Thus, even if Szabó’s reading of the principle best accords with theorists’ intuitions about what sorts of languages are compositional—as he claims it does—there is good reason to reject that reading. Finally, the paper defends the claim that we ought to think of the principle as the idea that in natural language, the meanings of complexes weakly supervene on the meanings of their constituents and how they are combined. (shrink)

Este artículo trata de profundizar en nuestra comprensión de la naturaleza de la creenciaen tanto que actitud proposicional. Tras contextualizar la cuestión, discutimos y rechazamosdiversas caracterizaciones de la creencia —como apuesta y como alta probabilidad subjetiva—, para acabar defendiendo que creer que p consiste meramente en atribuiruna mayor probabilidad subjetiva a p que a no-p —entendiendo no-p como cualquiera delas alternativas a p y a todas en su conjunto. Propondremos además que la pregunta a la quetrata de responder una creencia (...) es fundamental para determinar el grado de creencia y lasrazones que cuentan a su favor. (shrink)