Intentional action is, in some sense, non-accidental, and one common way action theorists have attempted to explain this is with reference to control. The idea, in short, is that intentional action implicates control, and control precludes accidentality. But in virtue of what, exactly, would exercising control over an action suffice to make it non-accidental in whatever sense is required for the action to be intentional? One interesting and prima facie plausible idea that we wish to explore in this paper is (...) that control is non-accidental in virtue of requiring knowledge—either knowledge-that or knowledge-how (e.g., Beddor and Pavese 2021; cf., Setiya 2008; 2012 and Habgood-Coote 2018). We review in detail some key recent work defending such knowledge-centric theories of control, and we show that none of these accounts holds water. We conclude with some discussion about how control opposes the sort of luck intentional action excludes without doing so by requiring knowledge (that- or how). (shrink)

Philosophy of mind and cognitive science have recently become increasingly receptive to the hypothesis of extended cognition, according to which external artifacts such as our laptops and smartphones can—under appropriate circumstances—feature as material realizers of a person's cognitive processes. We argue that, to the extent that the hypothesis of extended cognition is correct, our legal and ethical theorizing and practice must be updated by broadening our conception of personal assault so as to include intentional harm toward gadgets that have been (...) appropriately integrated. We next situate the theoretical case for extended personal assault within the context of some recent ethical and legal cases and close with critical discussion. (shrink)

This paper examines how digital technologies might be used to improve ethical attitudes towards nonhuman animals, by exploring the case study of nonhuman apes kept in modern zoos. The paper describes and employs a socio-ethical framework for undermining anti-ape prejudice advanced by philosopher Edouard Machery which draws on classic anti-racism strategies from the social sciences. We also discuss how digital technologies might be designed and deployed to enable and enhance rather than impede the three anti-prejudice strategies of contact and interaction, (...) enlightenment, and individualization. In doing so, the paper illuminates the broad potential and limitations of digital technology to both harm and benefit animals via its effects on human ethical attitudes. This examination provides guidance for future projects and empirical work on using digital technologies to promote moral respect for a range of nonhuman animals in different settings. (shrink)

The Bible in Arabic: The Scriptures of the “People of the Book” in the Language of Islam. By Sidney H. Griffith. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2013. Pp. xiii + 255. $29.95.

First, a theoretical background to the volume’s topic, extended epistemology, is provided by a brief outline of its cross-disciplinary theoretical lineage and some key themes. In particular, it is shown how and why the emergence of recent and more egalitarian thinking in the cognitive sciences about the nature of human cognizing and its bounds—viz., the so-called ‘extended cognition’ program, and the related idea of an ‘extended mind’—has important and interesting ramifications in epistemology. Second, an overview is provided of the papers (...) included as chapters in the volume. The sixteen contributions are divided into two categories: those that engage with foundational issues to do with extended epistemology, and those that pursue applications of extended epistemology to new areas of research. (shrink)

This paper takes as a starting point certain notions from Peirce's writings and uses them to propose a picture of the part of mathematical practice that consists of hypothesis formation. In particular, three processes of hypothesis formation are considered: abstraction, generalisation, and an abductive-like inference. In addition Peirce's pragmatic conception of truth and existence in terms of higher-order concepts are used in order to obtain a kind of pragmatic realist picture of mathematics.

Advanced practice nursing is an expanding field within many healthcare environments around the world. The scope and particular focus of an advanced practice nurse’s role is highly variable and thus the ethical challenges they face are equally diverse. Yet, the dominant existing ethics pedagogies used in the nursing context have been described as not fit-for-purpose. Existing pedagogies do not adequately prepare APN candidates to meet the ethical challenges they will encounter in practice. Applying an arts-based pedagogy in ethics education for (...) advanced practice nurses has the capacity to provide effective ethics learning. This article reports on the value of a multidisciplinary pedagogy used in a graduate course in nursing leadership, law and ethics for advanced practice at an Australian university. Written in a multidisciplinary mode that allies with the pedagogy it presents, it addresses the key pedagogical challenges and opportunities of teaching ethics through an innovative arts-based pedagogy centred upon the changing depictions of the human person in works of art housed in a major state-funded art gallery. (shrink)

Mainstream epistemology has typically taken for granted a traditional picture of the metaphysics of mind, according to which cognitive processes (e.g. memory storage and retrieval) play out entirely within the bounds of the skull and skin. But this simple ‘intracranial’ picture is falling in- creasingly out of step with contemporary thinking in the philosophy of mind and cognitive science. Likewise, though, proponents of active exter- nalist approaches to the mind—e.g. the hypothesis of extended cognitition (HEC)—have proceeded by and large without (...) asking what epistemological ramifications should arise once cognition is understood as criss-crossing the bounds of brain and world. This paper aims to motivate a puzzle that arises only once these two strands of thinking are brought in contact with one another. In particular, we want to first highlight a kind of con- dition of epistemological adequacy that should be accepted by proponents of extended cognition; once this condition is motivated, the remainder of the paper demonstrates how attempts to satisfy this condition seem to inevitably devolve into a novel kind of epistemic circularity. At the end of the day, proponents of extended cognition have a novel epistemological puzzle on their hands. (shrink)

We aim to move the externalism and self-knowledge debate forward by exploring two novel sceptical challenges to the prospects of self-knowledge of a paradigmatic sort, both of which result from ways in which our thought content, cognitive processes and cognitive successes depend crucially on our external environments. In particular, it is shown how arguments from extended cognition ; Clark A. Supersizing the mind: Embodiment, action, and cognitive extension. Oxford: Oxford University Press ) and situationism, Alfano M. Expanding the situationist challenge (...) to reliabilism about inference. In Fairweather A Virtue epistemology naturalized, Springer, Dordrecht, pp 103–122 ; Doris JM. Noûs 32:504–530, Doris JM. Lack of character: Personality and moral behavior. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge ; Harman G. Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society. 99:315–331, Harman G. Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 100:223–226 ) pose hitherto unexplored challenges to the prospects of self-knowledge as it is traditionally conceived. It is shown, however, that, suitably understood, these apparent challenges in fact only demonstrate two ways in which our cognitive lives can be dependent on our environment. As such, rather than undermining our prospects for attaining self-knowledge, they instead illustrate how self-knowledge can be extended and expanded. (shrink)

ASHÉ: Ritual Poetics in African Diasporic is a collection of interdisciplinary essays contributed by international scholars and practitioners. Having distinguished themselves across such disciplines as Anthropology, Art, Music, Literature, Dance, Philosophy, Religion, and Theology and conjoined to construct a defining approach to the study of Aesthetics throughout the African Diaspora with the Humanities at the core, this collection of essays will break new ground in the study of Black Aesthetics. This book will be of great interest to scholars, practitioners, and (...) students interested in tracing African heritage identities throughout the African Diaspora through close examination of a variety of discourses directly connected to expressive elements of cultural production and religious rituals. (shrink)

Impaired control over drug use is a defining characteristic of addiction in the major diagnostic systems. However there is significant debate about the extent of this impairment. This qualitative study examines the extent to which leading Australian addiction neuroscientists and clinicians believe that addicted individuals have control over their drug use and are responsible for their behaviour. One hour semi-structured interviews were conducted during 2009 and 2010 with 31 Australian addiction neuroscientists and clinicians (10 females and 21 males; 16 with (...) clinical experience and 15 with no clinical experience). Although many addiction neuroscientists and clinicians described uncontrolled or compulsive drug use as characteristic of addiction, most were ambivalent about whether or not addicted people could be said to have no control of their drug use. Most believed that addicted individuals have fluctuating levels of impaired control over their drug use but they nonetheless believed that addicted persons were responsible for their behaviour, including criminal behaviour engaged in to fund their drug use. Addiction was not seen as exculpating criminal behaviour but as a mitigating factor. (shrink)

Representations, in particular diagrammatic representations, allegedly contribute to new insights in mathematics. Here I explore the phenomenon of a “free ride” and to what extent it occurs in mathematics. A free ride, according to Shimojima, is the property of some representations that whenever certain pieces of information have been represented then a new piece of consequential information can be read off for free. I will take Shimojima’s framework as a tool to analyse the occurrence and properties of them. I consider (...) a number of different examples from mathematical practice that illustrate a variety of uses of free rides in mathematics. Analysing these examples I find that mathematical free rides are sometimes based on syntactic and semantic properties of diagrams. (shrink)

Name der Zeitschrift: Jahrbuch für Wissenschaft und Ethik Jahrgang: 19 Heft: 1 Seiten: 163-188.

We shall proceed as follows: In section ii, we shall give a brief over-view of the literature on Gilbert, more to indicate general directions of interest than to present any in-depth analysis. Then, in the main body of this presentation, section iii, we will present three ways in which we think it is accurate to claim that Gilbert influenced Descartes. These are: (1) Gilbert gave Descartes a new definition of an organ; (2) Gilbert gave Descartes a new definition of what (...) constitutes life and animation; (3) Gilbert gave Descartes a new view of natural motion. (shrink)

The idea of nothingness has been viewed as neither a vital nor a positive element in Western philosophy or theology. With the exception of a handful of mystics, nothingness has been taken to refer to the negation of being, or to some theoretical void. By contrast, the Japanese philosopher Nishida Kitarō gave nothingness a central role in philosophy. The strategy of this essay is to use the German mystic Meister Eckhart as a more familiar thinker who did take nothingness seriously, (...) and then to look closely at Nishida’s philosophy, and at the work of his contemporary Ueda Shizuteru, in exploring the central importance of nothingness in Zen Buddhist thought. Eckhart writes of the nothingness of the godhead, whereas Nishida and Ueda speak of nothingness “pure and simple.” Eckhart remains within the being of the godhead and theology. Nishida moves directly to nothingness. Some have claimed that Nishida is not a mystic, and Nishida himself concurred, yet it is Ueda who explains why Nishida can rightly be read as a mystic and as not a mystic. He argues that Zen includes mysticism, but then goes beyond it to a “non-mysticism.” Mystic or non-mystic, the guidance that Nishida and Ueda offer leads to a compelling outlook on life. (shrink)

Recent evidence suggests that historical boundary precedents play a central role in the outbreak, character, and long-term consequences of territorial disputes. The institutional theory of borders holds promise in explaining why leaders find old borders to be attractive as new borders. However, the mechanisms that link historical precedents to territorial claims and their consequences are not fully specified in the extant literature. I argue that there are three key arguments that can explain why boundary precedents are associated with subsequent disputes: (...) ease of justification, perpetual conflict over territories of particular value, and persistent coordination around old borders. I argue that the coordination mechanism is essential to understanding the connections between historical boundary precedents and territorial disputes. (shrink)

In order to show that freedom is measurable, one must show that the different kinds of constraint on freedom can be aggregated so as to provide overall freedom judgements. This can be done by reducing all of these kinds of constraint to the constraint of physical impossibility. This solution does not involve a “restrictivist” conception of constraints on freedom. Once it is recognized that overall freedom is a function of the physical compossibility of actions, it should also be recognized that (...) agents for whom particular actions are difficult or costly, or who are subjected to coercion, generally suffer reductions in their degrees of overall freedom. Further analysis of the notion of constraints shows that this liberal conception of freedom is not, as is often supposed, ultimately distinguishable either from traditionally socialist conceptions or from the republican conception recently proposed by Philip Pettit. (shrink)

This Element introduces a young field, the 'philosophy of mathematical practice'. We first offer a general characterisation of the approach to the philosophy of mathematics that takes mathematical practice seriously and contrast it with 'mathematical philosophy'. The latter is traced back to Bertrand Russell and the orientation referred to as 'scientific philosophy' that was active between 1850 and 1930. To give a better sense of the field, the Element further contains two examples of topics studied, that of mathematical structuralism and (...) visual thinking in mathematics. These are in part presented from a methodological point of view, focussing on mathematics as an activity and questions related to how mathematics develops. In addition, the Element contains several examples from mathematics, both historical and contemporary, to illustrate and support the philosophical points. (shrink)

Mapping figures in cinema as an experiential process inscribed within historically specific aesthetic regimes. The three long essays in this book explore mapping as a process of violent inscription on colonial landscapes (Malcomess); a practice of c.