TCCS - Việt Nam đang đứng trước ngưỡng cửa thập niên thứ hai, thế kỷ XXI. Tuy vậy, mốc thời gian không quan trọng bằng những đổi thay chóng mặt của quá trình quốc tế hóa đời sống kinh tế, và những biến đổi sâu sắc nó sẽ mang lại. Quá trình ấy, ngay bây giờ, lại được phóng đại qua lăng kính của những biến động toàn cầu do khủng hoảng kinh tế - tài chính 2007 - 2009, điều (...) có thể dẫn tới những biến đổi lớn về cấu trúc kinh tế nhân loại, cũng như diễn tiến địa - chính trị khắp nơi trên thế giới. (shrink)

(Third edition with additions) -/- This is a collection of short stories centering around the protagonist character, Kingfisher, originally written in Vietnamese by myself. -/- The book aims to introduce international readers to snippets of Vietnamese culture through the ordinary yet humorous life of the bird village. -/- The first 15 of these short stories were published in the Khoảng Lặng (Quiet Moment) column of the Vietnamese magazine Kinh Tế và Dự Báo (Economy and Forecast Review) from 2017 to 2019. (...) -/- However, this is the first time that the collection of all the Kingfisher stories has been published in its entirety, covering stories that have not been published elsewhere, including new stories written during 2023-2024. -/- The stories of Kingfisher are full of humor and satire while also deep in social commentary. I hope that the book brings readers joy and some food for thought, for beyond satire is genuine contemplation of the humanistic values in our lives. -/- Hanoi, August 21, 2024 -/- Quan-Hoang Vuong -/- (Incld. Artworks by Bui Quang Khiem and Dam Thi Thu Ha). (shrink)

SummaryNeither an infant one week old nor a snail is a rational creature. If the infant survives long enough, he will probably become rational, while this is not true of the snail. If we like, we may say of the infant from the start that he is a rational creature because he will probably become rational if he survives, or because he belongs to a species with this capacity. Whichever way we talk, there remains the difference, with respect to rationality, (...) between the infant and the snail on one hand, and the normal adult person on the other; this difference is discussed here.The difference consists, it is argued, in the having of propositional attitudes such as belief, desire, intention and shame. This raises the question how to tell when a creature has propositional attitudes; snails, we may agree, do not, but how about dogs or chimpanzees? The question is not empirical; the question is what sort of empirical evidence is relevant to deciding when a creature has propositional attitudes.It is next contended that language is a necessary concomitant of any of the propositional attitudes. This idea is not new, but there seem to be few arguments in its favor in the literature; one is attempted here.Crucial to the considerations advanced is the idea that belief depends on having the concept of objective truth, and that this comes only with language.RéuméNi un bébé d'une semaine, ni un serpent ne sont des créatures rationnelles. Si le bébé survit assez longtemps, il deviendra probablement rationnel, mais ce n'est pas vrai pour le serpent. Sil'on veut, on peut dire d'emblee du bébé qu'il est une créature rationnelle parce qu'il le deviendra s'il survit ou parce qu'il appartient à une espèce qui possède cette faculté. Quoi qu'on dise, la différence subsiste, en ce qui concerné la rationalité, entre le bébé et le serpent d'une part, la per‐sonne adulte normale de lcar;autre, et c'est cette différence qui sera discutée ici.La différence consiste, selon l'auteur, en une capacityé d'avoir des attitudes propositionnelles telles que la croyance, le désir, l'intention et la honte. Ceci pose la question de savoir quand on peut dire qu'une créature a des attitudes propositionnelles; on peut se mettre d'accord sur le fait que les serpents n'en ont pas, mais qu'en est‐il des chiens et des chimpanzés? La question n'est pas empirique, elle est de savoir quelle donnée empirique va décider si oui ou non une créature a des attitudes propositionnelles.L'auteur prétend que les attitudes propositionnelles s'accompagnent nécessairement du langage. Cette idèe n'est pas nouvelle, mais il semble qu'il y a peu d'arguments qui la soutiennent dans la littérature. On en trouvera un ici, où l'on montre qu'un élément crucial de a croyance dépend de l'acquisition du concept de vérité objective, qui ne se développe qu'avec le langage.ZusammenfassungWeder ein eine Woche altes Kind noch eine Schlange sind rationale Wesen. Wenn das Kind lange genug überlebt, wird es sich wahrscheinlich zu einem vernünftigen Wesen entwickeln, wäh‐rend das für die Schlange nicht zutrifft. Wenn wir wollen, können wir vom Kind sagen, dass es von Anfang an cin rationales Wesen ist, weil es im Fallc des Ubcrlebens vernünftig werden wird oder weil es zu einer Spezies mit dieser Fähigkeit gehört. Wie auch immer wir das ausdrücken, bleibt bezüglich der Rationalität der Unterschied zwischen dem Kind und der Schlange einerseits und der erwachsenen Person andererseits zurück. Dieser Unterschied wird hier diskutiert.Es wird argumentiert, dass der Unterschied in der Fähigkeit besteht, psychologische Haltun‐gen wie Glauben, Begierden, Absichten und Scham zu haben. Damit erhebt sich die Frage, wie man entscheiden kann, wann ein Wesen solchc Einstellungcn hat; Schlangen, wird man zugeben, haben keine; wie steht es aber mit Hunden Oder Schimpansen? Die Frage ist keine empirische, sondern betrifft die Frage, welche Art von empirischen Belegen für den Entscheid relevant ist, ob ein Wesen derartige Einstellungen hat.Es wird die These aufgestellt, dass Sprachen ein notwendiger Begleitumstand einer jeglichen propositionalen Haltung ist. Der Gedanke ist zwar nicht neu, aber es finden sich wenige Argu‐mente zu seiner Stützung in der Literatur; eines wird hier ausgeführt.Entscheidend für die vorgelegten Betrachtungen ist die Auffassung, wonach Glaube vom Begriff der objektiven Wahrheit abhängt, und dieser kommt erst mit der Sprache. (shrink)

Dem Erscheinen der seit etwa zwanzig Jahren angekündigten Edition der Vita des Andreas Salos (im folgenden VA) durch L. Rydén (im folgenden R.) ist mit großem Interesse entgegengesehen worden, zumal R. in der Zwischenzeit schon mehrere Arbeiten vorgelegt hat, die auf seinem neuen Text basierten. Möglicherweise hat dieser lange Zeitraum dafür gesorgt, daß man besonders hohe Erwartungen in das Werk gesetzt hat, an denen es nun nach seinem Erscheinen gemessen wird. Das Werk umfaßt zwei Bände, von denen der erste das (...) Abkürzungsverzeichnis, eine ausführliche Einleitung und die Indizes, der zweite den Text, eine Übersetzung ins Englische und den Kommentar enthält. (shrink)

Recent discussion of Scanlon's account of value, which analyses the value of X in terms of agents' reasons for having certain pro-attitudes or contra-attitudes towards X, has generated the problem (WKR problem): this is the problem, for the buck-passing view, of being able to acknowledge that there may be good reasons for attributing final value to X that have nothing to do with the final value that X actually possesses. I briefly review some of the existing solutions offered to the (...) WKR problem, including those by Philip Stratton-Lake and Jonas Olson, and offer a new, better one, which accommodates all the relevant cases presented in the literature. (shrink)

As sophisticated artificial intelligence software becomes more ubiquitously and more intimately integrated within domains of traditionally human endeavor, many are raising questions over how responsibility (be it moral, legal, or causal) can be understood for an AI’s actions or influence on an outcome. So called “responsibility gaps” occur whenever there exists an apparent chasm in the ordinary attribution of moral blame or responsibility when an AI automates physical or cognitive labor otherwise performed by human beings and commits an error. Healthcare (...) administration is an industry ripe for responsibility gaps produced by these kinds of AI. The moral stakes of healthcare are often life and death, and the demand for reducing clinical uncertainty while standardizing care incentivizes the development and integration of AI diagnosticians and prognosticators. In this paper, we argue that (1) responsibility gaps are generated by “black box” healthcare AI, (2) the presence of responsibility gaps (if unaddressed) creates serious moral problems, (3) a suitable solution is for relevant stakeholders to voluntarily responsibilize the gaps, taking on some moral responsibility for things they are not, strictly speaking, blameworthy for, and (4) should this solution be taken, black box healthcare AI will be permissible in the provision of healthcare. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Berel Lang PLOTTING PHILOSOPHY: BETWEEN THE ACTS OF PHILOSOPHICAL GENRE When Hegel wrote that philosophy's Owl of Minerva takes wing only at the falling of dusk, he did not mean that philosophy is always tardy, only that it comes late in the day. It may, however, seem both late and tardy to call attention now to the role of genres in philosophical writing, and still more beside the (...) point to assess the importance of philosophical genres to our philosophical and not only to our literary understanding. Even if we find a way past the varieties of aesthetic nominalism for which any allocation to genres is a snare and a trap— recall here Croce's declaration of"eternal war" against the obscurantism of genres1—we confront the growing skepticism of literary theory as it now disputes not only the formalism presupposed in the taxonomic distinctions of genre, but also the mimetic or representational function of discourse more generally.2 If texts as such can no longer rely on a mimetic ground, it would be impossible for the formal features ofgenre, rooted in the then archaic distinction between form and content, to represent a literary (or indeed any kind of) idea; that is, it would be impossible for them to be philosophically significant. This difficulty only intensifies, of course, for philosophical writing: philosophy, we learn, ought no longer to delude itself with hopes for success as a "mirror of nature" (in Rorty's phrase of opprobrium),3 and it would then be delusion added to delusion to believe that the genres of philosophical discourse might, at another remove, mirror an object which philosophy had mistakenly been supposed to represent in the first place. That original "representation" turns out now to represent nothing at all—and Plato's attack on the deceptions ofart thus discovers a new and finer object in philosophy itself: his indictment of art at least 190 Berel Lang191 supposed that there was something for art to be deceptive about. On this postmodernist account, then, there could be no philosophical point in plotting the course of philosophical genres; and indeed there could hardly be any other point except perhaps for antiquarians intent on finding a place for genres among the other historical curiosities which philosophers, quite inexplicably, once took seriously, like Descartes's piece of wax or Plato's aviary or Berkeley's tar water. Such intimations of the death of genres, however, may be not only premature but misdirected in rather a special way. For even in a less suspicious age, when the prima facie claims for the existence of genres might have been accepted at face value, their role was shadowy, fixed in a rhetorical limbo. Evidently (or so I would argue), there have existed generic conventions of which philosophical writers have been aware and to which their writings conformed. But even among writers in whom this pattern is most explicit and self-conscious, it is not as though the writer, after first reviewing a list of genres, would then simply choose the one among them that most recommended itself. No doubt, a writer's style—including the genre of his writing—is deliberate, in some sense a matter of choice. But the conception of "choice" in this context is an unusual one. Plotting genre could not be like trying on suits until one finds a likely fit— because this would imply that when the philosopher is trying out various possibilities, what he measures them by exists in his own mind as a philosophical Ur-genre, something which itself transcends the requirements of genre. We might suspect the presence here of the genre of all genres that is not itself, however, the member of a genre. And although it is possible that such a philosophical bedrock exists—this would be, in a way, a true philosopher's stone—all that philosophers have turned up in their history as a matter offact is a considerable number and variety of—well, we have to say it—philosophical genres. Genres, in other words, have rarely been read or written as "natural kinds," and yet they have surely been read and written. The distinctions among them and even the broad tide... (shrink)

We model the forgetting of propositional variables in a modal logical context where agents become ignorant and are aware of each others’ or their own resulting ignorance. The resulting logic is sound and complete. It can be compared to variable-forgetting as abstraction from information, wherein agents become unaware of certain variables: by employing elementary results for bisimulation, it follows that beliefs not involving the forgotten atom(s) remain true.

Luck, Value, and Commitment comprises eleven new essays which engage with, or take their point of departure from, the influential work in moral and political philosophy of Bernard Williams (1929-2003).

The ‘standard interpretation’ of John Taurek’s argument in ‘Should the Numbers Count?’ imputes two theses to him: first, ‘numbers scepticism’, or scepticism about the moral force of an appeal to the mere number of individuals saved in conflict cases; and second, the ‘equal greatest chances’ principle of rescue, which requires that every individual has an equal chance of being rescued. The standard interpretation is criticized here on a number of grounds. First, whilst Taurek clearly believes that equal chances are all-important, (...) he actually argues for a position weaker than the equal greatest chances principle. Second, the argument Taurek gives for the importance of equal chances ought to commit him to being more hospitable to the significance of numbers than he seems to be. Third, and as a result, Taurek should not have dismissed the significance of numbers but embraced a form of pluralism instead. Fourth, this result should be welcomed, because pluralism is more plausible than either the equal greatest chances principle or the saving the greater number principle. (shrink)

Republican liberty, as recently defended by Philip Pettit and Quentin Skinner, characterises liberty in terms of the absence of domination, instead of, or in addition to, the absence of interference, as favoured by Berlin-style negative liberty. This article considers several claims made on behalf of republican liberty, particularly in Pettit's and Skinner's recent writings, and finds them wanting. No relevant moral or political concern expressed by republicans, it will be contended here, fails to be accommodated by negative liberty.

In recent years, interest in pre-reflective self-consciousness has increased significantly. One of the central points of inquiry is whether pre-reflective self-consciousness ubiquitously accompanies phenomenal consciousness. This paper explores a phenomenological justification for the thesis that pre-reflective self-consciousness ubiquitously accompanies phenomenal consciousness. Allegedly, the ubiquity of pre-reflective self-consciousness can be proved on the basis of phenomenological description. The aim of this paper is to develop a new objection against this justification of the ubiquity thesis.

John Taurek famously argued that, in ‘conflict cases’, where we are confronted with a smaller and a larger group of individuals, and can choose which group to save from harm, we should toss a coin, rather than saving the larger group. This is primarily because coin-tossing is fairer: it ensures that each individual, regardless of the group to which he or she belongs, has an equal chance of being saved. This article provides a new response to Taurek’s argument. It proposes (...) that there are two possible types of unfairness that have to be avoided in conflict cases, as far as possible: ‘selection unfairness’, which is the unfairness of not giving individuals an equal chance of being saved; and ‘outcome unfairness’, which is the unfairness of not actually saving them, when others are saved. Since saving the greater number generates less outcome unfa-irness than coin-tossing, it is argued that, in many conflict cases, fairness demands that we save the greater number. (shrink)

In a series of influential papers, John McDowell has argued that the rule‐following considerations explored in Wittgenstein’s later work provide support for a particularist form of moral objectivity. The article distinguishes three such arguments in McDowell’s writings, labelled the Anthropocentricism Argument, the Shapelessness Argument, and the Anti‐Humean Argument, respectively, and the author disputes the effectiveness of each of them. As far as these metaethical debates are concerned, the article concludes that the rule‐following considerations leave everything in their place.

Uwe Steinhoff’s The Ethics of War and the Force of Law contains an extended critique of ‘moral fundamentalism’, or the project of uncovering an individualist ‘deep morality’ of war governed by the same moral principles and rules that govern ordinary moral life, as well as a more positive account of war that depicts it as a social practice. Much of Steinhoff’s account is indebted to a series of claims involving the standing to blame, reciprocity, and the necessity and proportionality conditions (...) on self-defence. On all these claims, Steinhoff is open to challenge. First, he is arguably over-dependent on ‘standing to blame’ considerations. Second, his commitment to reciprocity is under-explained. Third, the necessity condition does not clearly explain how conventional elements explain the formation of defensive standards. Fourth, there are problems in explaining how the distinct defensive conventions adopted by distinct communities can actually be made to get on to the same page when these communities go to war with each other. (shrink)

The authors put forward an interesting response to detractors of black box algorithms. According to the authors, what is of ethical relevance for medical artificial intelligence is not so much their transparency, but rather their reliability as a process capable of producing accurate and trustworthy results. The implications of this view are twofold. First, it is permissible to implement a black box algorithm in clinical settings, provided the algorithm’s epistemic authority is tempered by physician expertise and consideration of patient autonomy. (...) Second, physicians are not expected to possess exhaustive knowledge or understanding of the algorithmic computation by which they verify or augment their medical opinions. The potential of these algorithms to improve diagnostic and procedural accuracy alongside the quality of patient decision-making is undoubtedly a boon to modern medicine, but blind deference to them is neither feasible nor responsible, as several logistical and ethical quagmires noted by the authors still remain inherent in algorithmic software. I concur …. (shrink)

Our view is that fundamental appetitive and defensive motivation systems evolved to mediate a complex array of adaptive behaviors that support the organism’s drive to survive—defending against threat and securing resources. Activation of these motive systems engages processes that facilitate attention allocation, information intake, sympathetic arousal, and, depending on context, will prompt tactical actions that can be directed either toward or away from the strategic goal, whether defensively or appetitively determined. Research from our laboratory that measures autonomic, central, and somatic (...) reactions when processing emotional scenes is described which indicates that motivationally relevant cues, whether appetitive or defensive, capture attention preferentially, prompt enhanced perceptual processing and information gathering, and occasion metabolic arousal that mobilizes the organism for coping actions. (shrink)

The present article is an elaborated and upgraded version of the Early Career Award talk that I delivered at the IAPR 2019 conference in Gdańsk, Poland. In line with the conference’s thematic focus on new trends and neglected themes in psychology of religion, I argue that psychology of religion should strive for firmer integration with evolutionary theory and its associated methodological toolkit. Employing evolutionary theory enables to systematize findings from individual psychological studies within a broader framework that could resolve lingering (...) empirical contradictions by providing an ultimate rationale for which results should be expected. The benefits of evolutionary analysis are illustrated through the study of collective rituals and, specifically, their purported function in stabilizing risky collective action. By comparing the socio-ecological pressures faced by chimpanzees, contemporary hunter-gatherers, and early Homo, I outline the selective pressures that may have led to the evolution of collective rituals in the hominin lineage, and, based on these selective pressures, I make predictions regarding the different functions and their underlying mechanisms that collective rituals should possess. While examining these functions, I echo the Early Career Award and focus mostly on my past work and the work of my collaborators, showing that collective rituals may stabilize risky collective action by increasing social bonding, affording to assort cooperative individuals, and providing a platform for reliable communication of commitment to group norms. The article closes with a discussion of the role that belief in superhuman agents plays in stabilizing and enhancing the effects of collective rituals on trust-based cooperation. (shrink)

Machine learning is an increasingly significant part of modern healthcare, transforming the way clinical decisions are made and health resources are managed. These developme...

In this paper, we outline the policy implications of mobile health research conducted at the international level. We describe the manner in which such research may have an international dimension and argue that it is not likely to be excluded from conventionally applicable international regulatory tools. We suggest that closer policy attention is needed for this rapidly proliferating approach to health research.

Defence cases with an escalatory structure, in which the levels of violence between aggressor and defender start out as minor and then become major, even lethal, raise sharp problems for defence theory, and for our understanding of the conditions of defence: proportionality, necessity, and imminence. It is argued here that defenders are not morally required to withdraw from participation in these cases, and that defensive escalations do not offend against any of the conditions of defence, on an adequate understanding of (...) them. No plausible interpretation of proportionality or necessity excludes defensive permissions in escalatory cases. Moreover, the structure of escalatory defensive cases also sheds useful light on permissible responses to conditional deadly threats. This is because we can analyse conditional deadly threats as disguised cases of escalation. Because defensive resistance is permissible in escalatory cases, it is also permissible in cases involving conditional deadly threats. (shrink)

One Rawlsian response to G. A. Cohen’s criticisms of justice as fairness which Cohen canvasses, and then dismisses, is the 'Freedom Objection'. It comes in two versions. The 'First Version' asserts that there is an unresolved trilemma among the three principles of equality, Pareto-optimality, and freedom of occupational choice, while the 'Second Version' imputes to Rawls’s theory a concern to protect occupational freedom over equality of condition. This article is mainly concerned with advancing three claims. First, the 'ethical solution' Cohen (...) advances against the First Version of the Freedom Objection does not grant a fair hearing to the Freedom Objection. Second, the distinction Cohen presses between the legal and moral right of occupational choice in his response to the Second Version cannot save him from worries about Stalinist coercion. Third, Cohen’s response to the First Version of the Freedom Objection is actually in tension with his response to the Second Version of the Freedom Objection. (shrink)

Hannah Arendt's approach to politics focuses on action and conduct, rather than institutions, constitutions, and states. In light of Arendtian conceptions of politics, essays in this book challenge conventional IR theories. The contributions on agency explore concepts and categories of political action that enable individuals to act politically and to re-make the world in new, unpredictable ways. The contributions on structure explore how Arendt provides new critical purchase upon often reified structures and categories.

Unified explanations seek to situate the traits of human beings in a causal framework that also explains the trait values found in nonhuman species. Disunified explanations claim that the traits of human beings are due to causal processes not at work in the rest of nature. This paper outlines a methodology for testing hypotheses of these two types. Implications are drawn concerning evolutionary psychology, adaptationism, and anti-adaptationism.

Act-utilitarianism comes in two standard varieties: ‘subjective’ act-utilitarianism, which tells agents to attempt to maximize utility directly, and ‘objective’ act-utilitarianism, which permits agents to use non-utilitarian decision-making procedures. This article argues that objective actutilitarianism is exposed to a dilemma. On one horn of it is the contention that objective act-utilitarianism makes inconsistent claims about the rightness of acts. On the other horn of it is the contention that objective act-utilitarianism collapses back into what is, essentially, subjective act-utilitarianism. Three objective act-utilitarian (...) responses to this dilemma are explored and rejected. The recommended conclusion is that a consistent utilitarian must either embrace subjective act-utilitarianism, or abandon act-utilitarianism altogether. Key Words: act-utilitarianism • subjective • objective • decision-making procedure • criterion of rightness • dilemma. (shrink)

Imagine a two-person distributive case in which Ernest's choices yield X and Bertie's choices yield X + Y, producing an income gap between them of Y. Neither Ernest nor Bertie is responsible for this gap of Y, since neither of them has any control over what the other agent chooses. This is what Susan Hurley calls the “Boring Problem” for luck egalitarianism. Contrary to Hurley's relatively dismissive treatment of it, it is contended that the Boring Problem poses a deep problem (...) for standard luck egalitarianism. To counter it, luck egalitarianism needs to be recast as a baseline-relative theory. This new version of luck egalitarianism is then put to work against some significant problems that have been encountered by luck egalitarianism: Saul Smilansky's “Paradox of the Baseline,” the “Partiality Worry,” and the “Pluralism Worry.” But baseline-relative luck egalitarianism is not without problems of its own. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Journal of the History of Ideas 63.1 (2002) 129-149 [Access article in PDF] Lord Acton and "the Insanity of Nationality" Timothy Lang "I hope I need not warn you against Montalembert's declamation about Poland—He has no idea of the insanity of nationality...." Acton to Richard Simpson, 25 September 1861 The sixty-year period that culminated in the First World War witnessed a momentous transformation in the European state system. (...) Italian and German unification, the expulsion of the Ottomans from southeastern Europe, the destruction of the three remaining empires—the Austrian, German, and Russian—as casualties of the war, their replacement by a band of successor states stretching from the Baltic to the Balkans: these developments completely altered the face of Europe, as dynastic states gave way to nation-states. Looking back on this transformation once the war was over, many Europeans believed the decision to rebuild their continent on the basis of nation-states made perfect sense. To establish the principles of self-determination and democracy would contribute to peace and prosperity by solving the nationalities problem that had caused such mischief in the past. But in the 1860s, as this transformation was just beginning, the question looked very different, especially to the young John Dalberg Acton—the future Lord Acton, famous for the Cambridge Modern History—as he contemplated without benefit of hindsight the rise of the modern nation-state. 1 [End Page 129]Acton's views on the nation-state appeared in an article on "Nationality," which he wrote in 1862 for the Home and Foreign Review. 2 Nationality—today we would call it nationalism—was, Acton pointed out to his colleague Richard Simpson, a "new question in political philosophy" 3 ; and Acton's essay was a remarkably precocious treatment of the subject. In this tour de force he placed nationalism in its historical context, enabling readers to understand its significance for their own time and to see in nationalism the most potent force unleashed by the French Revolution. For Acton the Revolution had given a new direction to social protest. Whereas in the past, people had resisted oppression by calling for a return to traditional ways, now, after 1789, they demanded a new social and political order. The Revolution thus spawned protest movements of a wholly unprecedented kind. These movements were "spontaneous and aggressive," he warned. They were "popular, unreasoning, and almost irresistible." They appealed to the masses, encouraging them to be "arbitrary as well as insubordinate" and to disregard tradition, prescription, and established rights. Nationalism, with Mazzini as its representative figure, was the most formidable of these new mass movements; for it subverted the existing order by attacking the territorial arrangement and sovereignty of legitimate states, and it provided the impetus behind contemporary revolution. 4 In contrast to later generations, who may have regarded nation-states as likely to promote peace and prosperity, Acton believed that to create these states by imposing the principle of nationality would damage irreparably the Europe he knew and valued.Acton clearly appreciated the power of nationalism—and for this he deserves credit—but too much can, and has, been made of his foresight. He was disturbed by nationalism not because he was clairvoyant, not because he saw in nationalism the twentieth century's totalitarian nightmare, but rather because he was preoccupied with very nineteenth-century concerns. 5 When in 1859 Cavour and Louis Napoleon contrived their war against Austria, hoping to drive the [End Page 130] Habsburgs from Italy and capture the provinces of Lombardy and Venetia for Piedmont, they exacerbated the nationalities problem in much of southern Europe. In Italy this problem was solved by the creation of a unified nation-state. The war against Austria was the first step in the process of unification that culminated in 1861 with the founding of the Kingdom of Italy. As a result of unification, inhabitants of the Italian peninsula found themselves subject to a highly centralized state, with an administration modeled on the Napoleonic system that was adverse to regional autonomy. The Italian war also aggravated the nationalities problem in... (shrink)

In this article, I appeal to the phenomenon of moral hazard in order to explain how at least some of the inequalities permitted by Luck Egalitarianism can be given an alternative, more plausible grounding than that which is supplied by Luck Egalitarianism. This alternative grounding robs Luck Egalitarianism of a potentially significant source of intuitive support whilst enabling conditional welfare policies to survive the attacks on them made by Elizabeth Anderson, Jonathan Wolff, and others.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Journal of Speculative Philosophy 14.1 (2000) 79-81 [Access article in PDF] Books Received July 1999 through December 1999Asmuth, Christoph. 1999. Das Begriefen des Unbegreiflich. Abt. II, Band 41 of Spekulation and Erfahrung. Stuttgart: Frommann-holzboog. 411 pp.Badiou, Alain. 1999. Manifesto for Philosophy. Trans. and ed. Norman Madarasz. Albany: SUNY Press. 181 pp. h.c. 0-7914-4219-5, $14.95 pbk. 0-7914-4220-9.Barwise, Jon, and John Perry. 1999. Situations and Attitudes. New York: Cambridge UP. (...) lxxxviii + 352 pp. $22.95 pbk. 1-57586-193-3.Benson, Bruce L. 1998. To Serve and Protect: Privatization and Community in Criminal Justice. New York: New York UP. xxviii + 372 pp. $37.50 h.c. 1-8147-1327-0.Bonsdorff, Pauline von, and Arto Haapala, eds. 1999. Aesthetics in the Human Environment. Lahti, Finland: International Institute of Applied Aesthetics. 204 pp. h.c. 952-5069-07-09.Bratman, Michael E. 1999. Intention, Plans, and Practical Reason. Stanford, CA: CSLI Publications. vi + 200 pp. $22.95 pbk. 1-57586-192-5.Brencick, Janice M., and Glenn A. Webster. 2000. Philosophy of Nursing: A New Vision for Health Care. Albany: SUNY Press. ix + 247 pp. h.c. 0-7914-4379-5, $19.95 pbk. 0-7914-4380-9.Clendenning, John. 1999. The Life and Thought of Josiah Royce. 2d ed. Nashville, TN: Vanderbilt UP. xvii + 446 pp. $49.95 h.c. 0-8265-1312-3, $24.95 pbk. 0-8265-1322-0.Curtis, Kimberley. 1999. Our Sense of the Real: Aesthetic Experience and Arendtian Politics. Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP. xv + 197 pp. $39.95 h.c. 0-8014-3577-3, $16.95 pbk. 0-8014-8640-8.Frederick, Robert E., ed. 1999. A Companion to Business Ethics. Malden, MA: Blackwell. xvi + 464 pp. $99.95 h.c. 0-631-20130-0.Gallois, André. 1996. The World Without, the Mind Within: An Essay on First-Person Authority. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge UP. xii + 213 pp. h.c. 0-521-56093-4.Gracia, Jorge J. E. 1999. Metaphysics and its Task: The Search for the Categorial Foundation of Knowledge. Albany: SUNY Press. xix + 247 pp. h.c. 0-7914-4213-6, $17.95 pbk. 0-7914-4214-4.Grosz, Elizabeth, ed. 1999. Becomings: Explorations in Time, Memory, and Futures. Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP. vi + 250 pp. $45.00 h.c. 0-8014-3632-X, $18.95 pbk. 0-8014-8590-8.Heidegger, Martin. 1999. Ontology--The Hermeneutics of Facticity. Trans. John van Buren. Bloomington: Indiana UP. xii + 138 pp. $24.95 h.c. 0-253-33507-8.Heyde, Ludwig. 1999. The Weight of Finitude: On the Philosophical Question of God. Trans. Alexander Harmsen and William Desmond. Albany: SUNY Press. xviii + 177 pp. h.c. 0-7914-4265-9, $17.95 pbk. 0-7914-4266-7.Lang, Berel. 1999. The Future of the Holocaust: Between History and Memory. Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP. xiv + 198 pp. $45.00 h.c. 0-8014-3588-9, $17.95 pbk. 0-8014-8569-X.Levinas, Emmanuel. 1999. Alterity and Transcendence. Trans. Michael B. Smith. New York: Columbia UP. xxiv + 195 pp. $29.50 h.c. 0-231-11650-0.Lorraine, Tamsin. 1999. Irigaray and Deleuze: Experiments in Visceral Philosophy. Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP. xiv + 272 pp. h.c. 0-8014-3623-0, $19.95 pbk. 0-8014-8586-X.Margolis, Eric, and Stephen Laurence, eds. 1999. Concepts: Core Readings. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. x + 652 pp. h.c. 0-262-13353-9, $37.50 pbk. 0-262-63193-8.McCumber, John. 1999. Metaphysics and Oppression: Heidegger's Challenge to Western Philosophy. Bloomington: Indiana UP. xiv + 338 pp. $49.95 h.c. 0-253-33473-X, $24.95 pbk. 0-253-21316-9.McWhorter, Ladelle. 1999. Bodies and Pleasures: Foucault and the Politics of Sexual Normalization. Bloomington: Indiana UP. xx + 260 pp. $39.95 h.c. 0-253-33558-2, $18.95 pbk. 0-253-21325-8.Raposa, Michael L. 1999. Boredom and the Religious Imagination. Charlottesville, VA: UP of Virginia. xiii + 199 pp. $40.00 h.c. 0-8139-1898-7, $13.95 pbk. 0-8139-1925-8.Redding, Paul. 1999. The Logic of Affect. Ithaca, NY: Cornell... (shrink)

Volume 19, Issue 10, October 2019, Page 93-94.

Food security policy, programs, and infrastructure have been incorporated into Public Health and other areas of the Provincial Government in British Columbia, including the adoption of food security as a Public Health Core Program. A policy analysis of the integration into Public Health is completed by merging findings from 48 key informant interviews conducted with government, civil society, and food supply chain representatives involved in the initiatives along with relevant documents and participant/direct observations. The paper then examines the results within (...) the context of historic and international trends and theoretical models of food policy, community food security, and applied policy research. Public Health re-emerged as a driver of food security in BC—both as a key player and in positing the public’s health as a driver in food security and food systems. While Public Health’s lead role supported an increase in legitimacy for food security in BC, interviewees described a clash of cultures between Public Health and civil society. The clash of cultures occurred partly as a result of Public Health’s limited food security mandate and top down approach. Consequently civil society voice at the provincial level was marginalized. A social policy movement toward a new political paradigm—regulatory pluralism—calls for greater engagement of civil society, and for all sectors to work together toward common goals. A new, emerging policy map is proposed for analyzing the dynamics of food security and health promotion initiatives in BC. (shrink)

This essay develops a new interpretation of Moses Mendelssohn’s ontological argument in the Morning Hours: Lectures on God’s Existence. At the beginning, Immanuel Kant’s famous criticism of the ontological proof of God’s existence in the Critique of Pure Reason is presented. Then I offer an in-depth analysis of Mendelssohn’s original ontological argument in the Morning Hours. It is shown that with Mendelssohn’s new proof of God, Kant’s objections are answered. Finally, it is explained why Mendelssohn does not succeed in completely (...) refuting Kant’s objections. (shrink)

As given, the case presents at least two questions for the ethics consultant to explore: to what extent should Declan’s parent, Karesha, be involved in his health care decisions, and why is...

Recently, the effort to counter Fake News faced a counter attack: academic »postmodernism « and »social constructivism« it was said—because they say that facts are soaked in prior interpretations—are either purveyors of Fake News or set the cultural context in which it flourishes. They do so by undermining confidence in inquiry governed by simple facts. That is erroneous, argues William E. Connolly, because postmodernism never said that facts or objectivity are ghostly, subjective or »fake«. However, that what was objective at (...) one time may become less so at a later date through the combination of a paradigm shift in theory, new powers of perception, new tests with refined instruments, and changes in natural processes such as species evolution. But the emergence of new theories and tests does not reduce objectivity to subjective opinion. Facts are real. Objectivity is important. But as you move up the scale of complexity with respect to facts and objectivity, it becomes clear that what was objective at one time may become subjective at another. Not because of Fake News or postmodernism. But because the complex relationships between theory, evidence and conduct periodically open up new thresholds. Colin Lang in turn rhetorically asks if »fake news« or »alternative facts« are a new carnival and Trump its dog and pony show? The idea of »fake news« and »alternative facts« as a carnival could not only help to see the constructedness of the media spectacle, but also provides a new perspective on Trump as an actor who is playing a particular role in this carnival, and that role is not one that any of us would describe as presidential. Many in the popular press have assumed it is just what it looks like, an infantilized narcissist, a parody of some Regan-era New York real estate tycoon straight out of a Bret Easton Ellis novel. The problem is that this description is all too obvious, and misses something fundamental about alternative facts, and the part that Trump is playing. A central assumption is, then, that the creation of alternative facts is one symptom of a more structural, paradigmatic shift in the persona of a president, one which has few correlates in the annals of political history. The closest analogy for his kind of performance is actually hinted at in the title of Trump’s greatest literary achievement: The Art of the Deal. Trump is playing the part of an artist, pilfering from the tactics of the avant-garde and putting them to very different ends. (shrink)