Notions of the cosmos are deep-rooted in human consciousness. They are expressed in our earliest monumental constructions as explanations of the world around us and in the practices of many indigenous peoples. Here we examine the physical cosmos from the perspective of life on Earth. We note a central importance for the Earth in the vastness of space, as a planetary oasis for a highly complex and long-lived biosphere, one now being fundamentally altered by humans. We refer to other notions (...) of the cosmos that may enable us to navigate a better path for life in the Anthropocene. (shrink)

‘Natural-History’ is one of the key concepts in the thought of the Frankfurt School critical theorist Theodor W. Adorno, appearing from his very earliest work through to his very last. Unfortunately, the existing literature provides little illumination as to what Adorno’s concept of natural-history is, or what it is supposed to do. This paper thus seeks to supply the required understanding. Ultimately, I argue that ‘natural-history’ is best understood as a sort of ‘therapeutic’ concept, intended to dissolve certain philosophical anxieties (...) which might otherwise present obstacles to our being able to obtain a critical-theoretical understanding of reality. (shrink)

In this paper, I do three things. First, I unpack and outline an intriguing but neglected aspect of the thought of the Frankfurt School critical theorist Theodor W. Adorno—namely, his critique of Aristotle, which can be found in two of his lecture series: the unpublished 1956 lectures on moral philosophy and the 1965 lectures published as Metaphysics: Concept and Problems. Second, I demonstrate how Adorno's Aristotle critique constitutes a powerful critique of contemporary neo-Aristotelian ethical naturalism, of the sort advocated by (...) thinkers such as Philippa Foot, Michael Thompson and John McDowell. Third, I expound upon where this critique leaves the prospect of formulating a robust ethical naturalism more generally. (shrink)

Interest inThe German Ideologyhas largely focused on the ‘chapter’ on Feuerbach—invariably the focus of the various abridgements in which the work is usually read. But this does not reflect the weighting of the text itself, which is dominated by Marx and Engels's critique of the radical egoist philosopher Max Stirner. Which begs the question: just why did they spend so much time and effort writing about Stirner? In this paper, I will provide an answer—which comes down to three related points. (...) The first concerns the critique of reason; the second, egoistic self-interest. On both of these two points, Stirner makes a novel contribution—contributions which Marx and Engels feel clear affinities with. However, Stirner can ultimately be seen to get these two points, as it were,the wrong way around. This then leads to the third point: Stirner's misunderstanding of the nature of Communism. To clarify the nature of Communism, then, Marx and Engels were compelled to turn Stirner on his head. (shrink)

In a recent article, Fabian Freyenhagen argues that we should understand first-generation Frankfurt School critical theory (in particular, the work of Adorno and Horkheimer) as being defined by a kind of ‘linguistic turn’ analogous to one present in the later Wittgenstein. Here, I elaborate on this hypothesis – initially by calling it into question, by detailing Herbert Marcuse’s extensive criticisms of Wittgenstein (and other analytic philosophers of language) in One-Dimensional Man. While Marcuse is harshly critical of analytic ordinary language philosophy, (...) he is much more sympathetic to a different sort of ordinary language philosophy, which he unpacks with reference to Karl Kraus. I show how, by getting Marcuse’s criticisms of Wittgenstein and other analytic philosophers, and lauding of Kraus, into view, we can better understand the first generation of the Frankfurt School as having practised a sort of ‘non-quietistic’ philosophical therapy (that may or may not have been the sort of thing that Wittgenstein himself had in mind). (shrink)

This text develops students' ability to philosophise and learn about philosophy and education. It challenges readers to use philosophy as a tool within education and as a set of theories to understand education by developing solutions to problems as they occur within practice. Assuming no pre-existing philosophical background, this book explores topics such as: the limits of a religious-based education; the desire for 'alternative facts' or 'truths'; and the struggle in the teacher-student relationship. This book will support all those on (...) Education, Childhood or Youth Studies courses in developing a critical perspective and understanding the true value of philosophy within education. (shrink)

In this paper, I argue for two principles to determine the temporal interpretation of modal sentences in English, given a theory in which modals are interpreted against double conversational backgrounds and an ontology in which possible worlds branch towards the future, The Disparity Principle requires that a modal sentence makes distinctions between worlds in the modal base. The Non- disparity Principle requires that a modal sentence does not make distinctions on the basis of facts settled at speech time. Selection of (...) the modal base will set these principles against each other, or allow for their cooperative interaction. For a root modal base, there is a conflict and disparity wins. The resulting interpretation is future. For a non-root modal base, the principles cooperate. Non-disparity determines a non-future interpretation and disparity requires the sentence to go beyond what is known by the speaker. (shrink)

Embodiment has become an important concept in many areas of cognitive science. There are, however, very different notions of exactly what embodiment is and what kind of body is required for what type of embodied cognition. Hence, while many nowadays would agree that humans are embodied cognizers, there is much less agreement on what kind of artifact could be considered embodied. This paper identifies and contrasts six different notions of embodiment which can roughly be characterized as structural coupling between agent (...) and environment, historical embodiment as the result of a history of struct ural coupling, physical embodiment, organismoid embodiment, i.e. organism-like bodily form, organismic embodiment of autopoietic, living systems, and social embodiment. (shrink)

What conditions on a person’s knowledge must be satisfied in order for them to be morally responsible for something they have done? The first two decades of the twenty-first century saw a surge of interest in this question. Must an agent, for example, be aware that their conduct is all-things-considered … Continue reading Epistemic Conditions of Moral Responsibility →.

Many theories and models of machine consciousness emphasize the role of embodiment. However, there are different interpretations of exactly what kind of embodiment would be required for an artifact to be at least potentially conscious. This paper contrasts the sensorimotor approach, which holds that consciousness emerges from the mastery of sensorimotor knowledge resulting from the interaction between agent and environment, with the view that the living body's homeostatic regulation is crucial to self and consciousness.

In this article, I identify – and clear up – two problems for contemporary neo-Aristotelian ethical naturalism. The first I call the problem of alienation; the second the problem of conservatism. I argue that these problems will persist, both for ‘hard’ and ‘soft’ forms of ethical naturalism, unless ethical naturalists adopt what I call ‘Practical Realism’ about essential human form. Such a Practical Realism leaves open the possibility of radical social and political criticism – I therefore suggest that contemporary ethical (...) naturalists ought to be more interested in exploring the affinities their view shares with Marxist political thought. (shrink)

From the first co-operative trust school at Reddish Vale in Manchester in 2006, the following decade would witness a remarkable growth of ‘co-operative schools’ in England, which at one point numbered over 850. This paper outlines the key development of democratic education by the co-operative schools network. It explains the approach to democracy and explores the way values were put into practice. At the heart of co-operativism lay a tension between engaging with technical everyday reforms and utopian transformative visions of (...) an educational future. A new arena of debate and practice was established with considerable importance for our understanding of democratic education within the mainstream. (shrink)

European Journal of Philosophy, EarlyView.

Die Entdeckung des Straßburger Empedokles-Papyrus und seine 1999 erfolgte Publikation war für die Erforschung der antiken Philosophie ein einzigartiger Glücksfall. Die neu hinzugekommenen Texte ergänzten die fragmentarische Überlieferung von Empedokles’ naturphilosophischem Lehrgedicht Physika (so der in der Antike gebräuchliche Titel) an entscheidenden Stellen. Allerdings wurde das Potenzial des Papyrus zur Klärung ungelöster Interpretationsprobleme in der auf die Veröffentlichung folgenden Forschungsdiskussion noch nicht ausgeschöpft. In der vorliegenden Arbeit wird auf der Basis einer kontinuierlichen inhaltlichen und sprachlichen Analyse des Textes eine Gesamtrekonstruktion (...) des empedokleischen Theoriegebäudes vorgelegt. Untersucht werden dabei vor allem die zyklische Struktur allen Werdens, die Funktionen von Liebe und Streit, die einzelnen Stadien von Kosmogonie und Zoogonie und das inhaltliche Verhältnis von Physika und einem weiteren Gedicht des Autors, den Katharmoi. Die Ergebnisse werden abschließend auch in einer neuen Übersetzung der durch Einbeziehung des Straßburger Papyrus wiedergewonnenen Teile des Gedichts zusammengeführt. (shrink)

(2005). Reflections on the Appointment of Dr. Edmund Pellegrino to the President's Council on Bioethics. The American Journal of Bioethics: Vol. 5, No. 6, pp. W8-W9. doi: 10.1080/15265160500388640.

This paper has outlined the theoretical framework for constructing a survey instrument designed to elicit attitudes that contribute to perceived legitimacy of corporate environmental sustainability policies or initiatives. It posits six attitudinal components of legitimacy that can be influenced independently, and that combine to yield an overall attitude regarding the legitimacy of sustainability as a factor in managerial decision-making. It discusses how a survey instrument could be developed to measure these attitudinal components, and suggests practical and pedagogical applications.

Like many other bioethicists, I often give talks on clinical topics that may touch on the patient's right of autonomy with regard to medical treatment and, from there, may move to questions about whether said patient has the capacity to exercise said right. When I get to that subject, I might ask, “Is this person competent to refuse treatment?” A stunned silence falls over the room, until finally a hand shoots up. “‘Competent’ is a legal term,” I am instructed. “Don't (...) you mean to ask whether he has the capacity to make decisions for himself?” The tone suggests that I'm being helped to make a very important distinction. But it's not a very important distinction; and it's misleading to boot. (shrink)

Contrary to the revised Common Rule, and contrary to the views of many bioethicists and researchers, we argue that broad consent should be sought for anticipated later research uses of deidentified biospecimens and health information collected during medical care. Individuals differ in the kinds of risk they find concerning and in their willingness to permit use of their biospecimens for future research. For this reason, asking their permission for unspecified research uses is a fundamental expression of respect for them as (...) persons and should be done absent some compelling moral consideration to the contrary. We examine three moral considerations and argue that each of them fails: that there is a duty of easy rescue binding on all, that seeking consent creates a selection bias that undermines the validity of biospecimen research, and that seeking and documenting consent will be prohibitively expensive. (shrink)

(1994). Moral authority in law and criminal justice: Some reflections on Wilson's The Moral Sense. Criminal Justice Ethics: Vol. 13, No. 2, pp. 44-53.

Previous research into the formalisation of statute law identified a number of uses of language which posed problems for formalisation. A previous paper argued that these uses establish the requirement that a formalisation be isomorphic, but noted that this has odd consequences. This paper expands on what these consequences are and argues that they undermine the very idea of formalisation. Therefore, the whole argument constitutes a reductio ad absurdum of the idea of formalising statute law. The paper provides reasons why (...) this activity is impossible and places the conclusion in the context of the development of modem logic, in which context it appears uncontroversial. (shrink)

Although space limitations do not permit including all the responses received after the passing of David Thomasma, some representative expressions are included below. As these remembrances attest, Edmund Pellegrino spoke for all of us when he said at David's memorial service, “It has been said that we die only when forgotten; if so, David will live a long time. He remains a presence for his family, friends, collaborators, and all who met him.”.

In a special issue of this journal, a range of authors addressed the critical problem of difference in bioethics. To what extent do class, culture, ethnicity, and race affect the ethical decisions that patients and professionals must make in a medical context? Those arguing for an understanding of cultural influences in bioethical decisionmakingtypically argue from the perspective of individual case studies to demonstrate the importance of these social constructs. Others, like Erika Blacksher, however, worry that this approach will obscure the (...) uniqueness of individual decisionmakng patterns, allowing all persons of a single group to be aggregated as if their class, cultural construct, or religious affiliation were the single motive element in their medicolegal decisionmaking. There is, she cautions, a risk of misuse if a professional care provider reflexively assumes individual patient or surrogate reactions on the basis of ethnicity or culture. (shrink)

A recent issue of CambridgeQuarterlyofHealthcareEthics provides a fascinating look into the uncertainties surrounding the subject of human cloning. As Nelkin and Lindee point out, for example, the popular assumption is that this technology will lead to individual immortality. life everlasting for the deserving.considers the use of cloning for the replication of human individuals to be ethically unacceptable.”.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Things Merely Are: Philosophy in the Poetry of Wallace StevensTom McBrideThings Merely Are: Philosophy in the Poetry of Wallace Stevens, by Simon Critchley. 137 pp. New York: Routledge, 2005; $22.50.This book—a brief meditation on the poetry of Wallace Stevens and an even shorter one on the cinema of Terrence Malick—might have been a disaster. The author, a philosopher, is sometimes in worried denial that Stevens is an "anti-realist" (...) or a "transcendental realist," and one occasionally senses that in the ancient tension between philosophy and poetry, herding the poets into the philosopher's pen is a bullying way to resolve the conflict. But the book isn't a catastrophe at all; it's a lucid, ruminative, and personable reading of Stevens (and Malick) that even offers a good general guide to the reading of poetry in what Critchley calls "the wake of romanticism" (motto: "God is dead; therefore I am").Critchley's major idea is twofold: that poetry is a therapeutic art form because it slows us down and encourages, about countless subjects, "the whole voluptuousness of looking"; and that Stevens's poetry is informed by a contest between a poetry of "supreme fictions" (in which phenomena come under the [End Page 503] dominion of a potent imagination) and a poetry of "antipodes" (in which phenomena resist the imagination—they "merely are"—and thus reduce the imagination to impotence). Here Critchley affirms a usual view of Stevens as a poet of the weather—another way of saying that he is a modernist with strong roots in the Romantic movement—and he notes that the supreme fiction poems often tend to be set in summer, when the imagination seems especially yeasty, while the antipodean poems tend to be set in winter, when the miserly realness of things seems to rule the earth. In his sensitive and astute reading, however, Critchley remarks upon something else: that in his late poems Stevens seems more overtly metaphysical (Critchely says Stevens is the most philosophically interesting poet of the twentieth century) and that his later poems are set more and more in the seasons of transition (late autumn/early spring). Late in Stevens's career the battle between supreme fictions and antipodes is therefore played out in the same, often overtly philosophical poems. Here Critchley's commentary is at its most astute. Occasional lovers of Wallace Stevens's poetry will remember why they adore his work, and have a better idea why.However, lest readers get the wrong idea, some careful qualifications about the dialectic between Stevens's summer and winter poems are in order. For one thing, the poems of supreme fictions always leave phenomena with their particularity, their ordinariness, their concreteness. To cite one such poem, "Anecdote of the Jar," although the poet imaginatively places "a jar in Tennessee" that makes "the lovely wilderness / Surround that hill," the wilderness' birds and bushes, even the jar itself, remain birds and bushes and jars ("gray and bare"). Here Critchley reinterprets Samuel Taylor Coleridge's distinction between "fancy" and "imagination." Fancy dreams of what does not exist, while imagination transfigures what does. Stevens's poems of supreme fiction are always imaginative, never fanciful.A second qualification: Critchley argues that for Stevens (as well as for a number of philosophers) human ways of knowing are always informed, sooner or later, by the conceptual imagination. In that sense a rose is never just a rose, although we need not become overly fanciful about what a cigar might be. And this leads us to a third one: When readers get to the wintry, antipodean poems—the poems of "anti-poetry"—they will find Stevens suggesting that the only way to view objects without imagination is to imagine what that would be like. Even earlier in his career Stevens became interested in this paradox, as in "The Snow Man" where he muses:One must have a mind of winter To regard the frost and boughs Of the pine-trees crusted with snow; And have been cold a long time To behold the junipers shagged with ice, The spruces rough in the distant glitter [End Page 504] Of the January sun; and not... (shrink)