My argument will proceed as follows. I will first sketch out the broad internalist case for pitching its normative account of sport in the abstract manner that following Dworkin’s lead in the philosophy of law its adherents insist upon. I will next show that the normative deficiencies in social conventions broad internalists uncover are indeed telling but misplaced since they hold only for what David Lewis famously called ‘coordinating’ conventions. I will then distinguish coordinating conventions from deep ones (...) and make my case not only for the normative salience of deep conventions but for their normative superiority over the abstract normative principles broad internalists champion. (shrink)

The Essential William James covers the primary topics for which James is still closely studied: the nature of experience, the functions of the mind, the criteria for knowledge, the definition of “truth,” the ethical life, and the religious life. His notable terms, still resonating in their respective fields, are all covered here, from “stream of consciousness” and “pure experience” to the “will to believe,” the “cash-value of truth,” and the distinction between the religiously “healthy soul” and the “sick soul.” (...) This volume’s eighteen selections receive the bulk of the attention and citation from scholars, provide excellent coverage of core topics, and have a broad appeal across many academic disciplines. (shrink)

How a designer gets from thought to thing is, at least in broad strokes, straightforward: (1) A designer conceives a purpose. (2) To accomplish that purpose, the designer forms a plan. (3) To execute the plan, the designer specifies building materials and assembly instructions. (4) Finally, the designer or some surrogate applies the assembly instructions to the building materials.

Since the term ‘pragmatism’ was first coined, there have been debates about who is or is not a ‘real’ pragmatist, and what that might mean. The division most often drawn in contemporary pragmatist scholarship is between William James and Charles Peirce. Peirce is said to present a version of pragmatism which is scientific, logical and objective about truth, whereas James presents a version which is nominalistic, subjectivistic and leads to relativism. The first person to set out this division was (...) in fact Peirce himself, when he distinguished his own ‘pragmaticism’ from the broad pragmatism of James and others. Peirce sets out six criteria which defines ‘pragmaticism’: the pragmatic maxim; a number of ‘preliminary propositions’; prope-positivism; metaphysical inquiry; critical common-sensism; and scholastic realism. This paper sets out to argue that in fact James meets each of these criteria, and should be seen as a ‘pragmaticist’ by Peirce’s own lights. (shrink)

In the past two decades, reinforcement learning has become a popular framework for understanding brain function. A key component of RL models, prediction error, has been associated with neural signals throughout the brain, including subcortical nuclei, primary sensory cortices, and prefrontal cortex. Depending on the location in which activity is observed, the functional interpretation of prediction error may change: Prediction errors may reflect a discrepancy in the anticipated and actual value of reward, a signal indicating the salience or novelty of (...) a stimulus, and many other interpretations. Anterior cingulate cortex has long been recognized as a region involved in processing behavioral error, and recent computational models of the region have expanded this interpretation to include a more general role for the region in predicting likely events, broadly construed, and signaling deviations between expected and observed events. Ongoing modeling work investigating the interaction between ACC and additional regions involved in cognitive control suggests an even broader role for cingulate in computing a hierarchically structured surprise signal critical for learning models of the environment. The result is a predictive coding model of the frontal lobes, suggesting that predictive coding may be a unifying computational principle across the neocortex. (shrink)

In this paper, I examine the role of attention in Kant’s aesthetic theory in the Critique of the Power of Judgment. While broadly Kantian aestheticians have defended the claim that there is a distinct way that we attend to objects in aesthetic experience, Kant himself is not usually acknowledged as offering an account of aesthetic attention. On the basis of Kant’s more general account of attention in other texts and his remarks on attention in the Critique of the Power of (...) Judgment, I reconstruct Kant’s account of aesthetic attention. On this account, aesthetic attention is simultaneously directed at the form of an object and at the judging subject’s own mental states as she attends to the object. In the experience of beauty, we specifically attend to the harmonious relation between the faculties of imagination and understanding. (shrink)

Two extremely detailed accounts of temporal experience can be found in the work of C. D. Broad. These accounts have been subject to considerable criticism. I argue that, when we look more carefully at Broad’s work, we find that much of this criticism fails to find its target. I show that the objection that ultimately proves troubling for Broad stems from his commitment to two principles: i) the Thin-PSA, and ii) the ‘Overlap’ claim. I use this result (...) to demonstrate that we can learn two extremely important lessons from Broad’s work on temporal experience. -/- The first lesson is that there is a structural problem facing any account that commits to these two principles. This is significant given that a number of recent accounts of temporal experience are so committed. The second lesson is that the problem facing these accounts stems only from commitment to the Thin-PSA and ‘Overlap’, rather than to commitment to a particular conception of how experiences are to be individuated. This, I argue, gives us reason to reject Tye’s recent claim that the problems facing accounts of temporal experience can be dissolved simply by making stipulations about how experiences are to be individuated. (shrink)

In the Western philosophical tradition logical investigation and philosophical advance have been inextricably linked, each having stimulated and shaped the other. In Logic and Philosophy William H. Brenner examines a broad range of logical concepts and methods as they relate to the larger context of philosophical investigation and thus bring to light the philosophical depth of logic and its relevance to philosophy in general.

This article describes some historical precursors that led to William James’s participation in the Hibbert Lectures and his subsequent publication of A Pluralistic Universe. William James viewed the monism–pluralism issue as the greatest issue the human mind can frame, and he returned to this issue again and again in his psychological and philosophical works. The Hibbert Lectures afforded an opportunity to explore the problem of monism and pluralism in a broadly religious or spiritual context. We describe James’s logical (...) and experiential attacks on monistic thinkers, his seemingly paradoxical introduction of Gustav Fechner’s panpsychism to English-speaking philosophers, and his spirited defense of pluralism. We conclude by discussing the relevance of James’s pluralism for current questions of unification in psychology. (shrink)

The concept of ‘science’ occupies a distinctive place within our rhetorical inheritance. Tangential to science's actual practices and institutions, this rhetoric holds that science comprises an arsenal of techniques, or a pervasive mentality, that have broadly shaped and even defined modern society. Such notions have been the subject of more or less constant discussion for two or three centuries, with early critics of scientific thought targeting its links to the religious and political radicalism of the Enlightenment and the troubles of (...) industrialization. (shrink)

Artworks are attentional engines. They are artifacts intentionally designed to direct attention to what we might call their artistically salient features. The artistically salient features of a work are those aspects of their formal-compositional structure that carry information about what they express, their point, purpose, or meaning. These aspects of a work reflect the range of compositional strategies and choices an artist has employed to produce their work. Critically, artists deploy exogenous and endogenous perceptual strategies tailored to direct attention and (...) reveal what they mean to express. Painters, for instance, manipulate the perceptual salience of different areas of the canvas to directly engage perceptual systems, e.g. manipulating contrasts in the tonal properties, hue value, or scale of spatial frequency information. However, shared art critical knowledge can also be exploited to indirectly engage endogenous attentional processes, shape perception, and guide a consumer’s understanding of what is expressed in a work. The range of exogenous and endogenous perceptual strategies an artist employs shape what an artifact affords a consumer as an artwork. Access to these affordances depends upon the structure of the works, the structure of perceptual systems, and an understanding of the broad range of art critical and cultural practices that define the artworld for a community at a time. In this chapter I will employ a diagnostic recognition framework and a biased competition theory of selective attention to develop a model for understanding the way artists exploit exogenous and endogenous perceptual strategies in their works and map the complex environment of an artwork. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Selected Letters by William, Henry JamesWilliam James EarleWilliam and Henry James. Selected Letters. Edited by Ignas K. Skrupskelis and Elizabeth M. Berkeley. Introduction by John J. McDermott. Charlottesville VA: University Press of Virginia, 1997. Pp. xxxi + 570. $ 39.95.Almost fifty years of letters to and from the very diversely brilliant James brothers: in this volume a generous, and probably ample, selection of 216 from a total (...) of 740 surviving letters or postcards, from an original total, according to the present editors, of twice as many. This volume of correspondence reflects the deep, unquestioned, unshakable familial (and virtually statutory) closeness of William and Henry who happened, as adults, to be seldom in the same place. There is, it must be said, very little explicit philosophy, narrowly or broadly defined, in these letters, but the philosophical reader will—or ought to—find much raw material for philosophical reflection. For example, a reasonable historicist thesis of how brotherhood, or family connection generally, plays itself out is supported by these documents. The nineteenth century is not the same as the twentieth. For example, here is William’s comment on the will of his sister, Alice, who left more to her companion and care-giver, Katherine Loring, a [End Page 479] women of extraordinary virtue and burden, than to her brother Robertson: “I can well sympathize with Alice’s desire to leave her something handsome; but I must say that her own consent (being apparently privy to the will) strikes me as tant soit peu lacking in delicacy. Surely no one of us would like to be in such a position in her family or any other” (271). This would be, in 1998, a rather unenlightened and ungenerous attitude, but is natural enough in 1892, even if not quite inevitable, not being shared by Alice herself. There is, incidentally, much discussion of wills and bequests, for the Jameses were of the genteel class, people with small family money and modest private incomes for whom the wherewithal to maintain homes with servants and to provide themselves with country houses and recuperative European vacations was always a faintly embarrassing, and occasionally a pressing, problem.It is probably also true that the much-discussed question of Henry’s homosexuality has, somehow, to be recast in historically relative terms. Here is an early report—1869—of Henry’s from Oxford: “As I walked along the river I saw hundreds of the mighty lads of England, clad in white flannel & blue, immense, fair-haired, magnificent in their youth, lounging down the stream in their punts or pulling in straining crews & rejoicing in their godlike strength” (41). This could not, the point is, be said by anyone, gay or straight, in 1998. Yet Henry is neither generally naive nor uncritically anglophile. He says of the Warwickshire scenery, which in a way he likes, that it is “too monotonously sweet & smooth—too comfortable, too ovine, too bovine, too English in a word.” And he adds, a little surprisingly: “It seems like a vast show region kept up at the expense of the poor” (41). This is only one of many appealing comments not sparsely scattered, but unpredictably, in letters of more ordinary news. Here’s one I liked occasioned by seeing theater in Paris: “We talk about it & write about it & criticize & dogmatize & analyse to the end of time: but those brave players stand forth & exemplify it & act—create—produce!” (66).Of course the “wit and wisdom” are not the monopoly of Henry. Here is William being wise: “We all learn sooner or later that we must gather ourselves up and more or less arbitrarily concentrate our interests, throw much overboard to save any” (55–56). Again: “It is a sweet world, in the interstices of its bedevilment & brutality” (321). And William being funny: “Boils are surely the most slowly evolving things in nature—Christian doctrine is nothing to them” (393). He is talking about his own boils and was subject, at every period, to ailments and infirmities: “Since writing to you, I have been swimming in deep seas of influenza, gout and Erysipelas of the face” (443). Or as he, in 1900, sums it up: “My... (shrink)

What ethical principles should autonomous machines follow? How do we implement these principles, and how do we evaluate these implementations? These are some of the critical questions Vivek Nallur asks in his essay “Landscape of Machine Implemented Ethics (2020).” He provides a broad, insightful survey of answers to these questions, especially focused on the implementation question. In this commentary, I will first critically summarize the main themes and conclusions of Nallur’s essay and then expand upon the landscape that Nallur (...) presents by suggesting additional approaches to machine ethics. The approaches I discuss reflect normative ethical theories and need not be applied only to machines, although machine ethics is the focus here. The overall goal is to open up further questions and research possibilities as society searches for the best approach to machine ethics. (Due to an unfortunate miscommunication with the copy editor an important reference was omitted from this article. The reference that should be included is: Nallur, V. (2020). Landscape of Machine Implemented Ethics. Science and Engineering Ethics 26 (5):2381-2399.). (shrink)

Research in education and cognitive development suggests that explaining plays a key role in learning and generalization: When learners provide explanations—even to themselves—they learn more effectively and generalize more readily to novel situations. This paper proposes and tests a subsumptive constraints account of this effect. Motivated by philosophical theories of explanation, this account predicts that explaining guides learners to interpret what they are learning in terms of unifying patterns or regularities, which promotes the discovery of broad generalizations. Three experiments (...) provide evidence for the subsumptive constraints account: prompting participants to explain while learning artificial categories promotes the induction of a broad generalization underlying category membership, relative to describing items (Exp. 1), thinking aloud (Exp. 2), or free study (Exp. 3). Although explaining facilitates discovery, Experiment 1 finds that description is more beneficial for learning item details. Experiment 2 additionally suggests that explaining anomalous observations may play a special role in belief revision. The findings provide insight into explanation’s role in discovery and generalization. (shrink)

Toby Handfield has advanced a subtle form of dispositionalism that purports to reconcile the concept of causal powers with broadly Humean convictions by dissolving the requirement for objectively modal relations between powers and their manifestations. He suggests we should identify manifestations with certain types of causal processes, and identify powers with properties that are parts of their structures. The modal features of causal powers can then be explained in terms of internal relations between a power and the property of being (...) a certain type of causal process, but these relations are supervenient and do not add anything to the basic ontology. In this way, causal powers may be ‘connected’ to their manifestations without admitting objectively modal relations. I disagree with this characterisation of causal powers and its identification of manifestations with types of causal processes: I question the assumption that causal processes can be isolated in quantum physics in the way Handfield requires and confront Humean dispositionalism with the problem of individuating powers in an entangled world. (shrink)

Combining engaging discussions and stimulating new case studies, BUSINESS ETHICS: A TEXTBOOK WITH CASES gives students a comprehensive survey of business ethics that will guide them toward becoming ethical professionals, even if they have never studied philosophy before. Rich with real-world examples, BUSINESS ETHICS: A TEXTBOOK WITH CASES invites students to critically analyze and apply a broad range of philosophical concepts and principles to today's most important issues in business and beyond. BUSINESS ETHICS: A TEXTBOOK WITH CASES is a (...) concise (without readings) and updated version of the eleventh edition of MORAL ISSUES IN BUSINESS. BUSINESS ETHICS: A TEXTBOOK WITH CASES is also available in an eBook format. Important Notice: Media content referenced within the product description or the product text may not be available in the ebook version. (shrink)

G. E. Moore famously observed that to say, “ I went to the pictures last Tuesday but I don’t believe that I did” would be “absurd”. Why should it be absurd of me to say something about myself that might be true of me? Moore suggested an answer to this, but as I will show, one that fails. Wittgenstein was greatly impressed by Moore’s discovery of a class of absurd but possibly true assertions because he saw that it illuminates “the (...) logic of assertion”. Wittgenstein suggests a promising relation of assertion to belief in terms of the idea that one “expresses belief” that is consistent with the spirit of Moore’s failed attempt to explain the absurdity. Wittgenstein also observes that “under unusual circumstances”, the sentence, “It’s raining but I don’t believe it” could be given “a clear sense”. Why does the absurdity disappear from speech in such cases? Wittgenstein further suggests that analogous absurdity may be found in terms of desire, rather than belief. In what follows I develop an account of Moorean absurdity that, with the exception of Wittgenstein’s last suggestion, is broadly consistent with both Moore’s approach and Wittgenstein’s. (shrink)

"Rich in new and stimulating ideas, and based on the breadth of reading and depth of knowledge which its wide-ranging subject matter requires, _The Greek Praise of Poverty_ argues impressively and cogently for a relocation of Cynic philosophy into the mainstream of Greek ideas on material prosperity, work, happiness, and power." —_A. Thomas Cole, Professor Emeritus of Classics, Yale University _ "This clear, well-written book offers scholars and students an accessible account of the philosophy of Cynicism, particularly with regard to (...) the Cynics' attachment to a life of poverty and their disdain for wealth. I have truly profited from reading William Desmond’s book." —_Luis Navia, New York Institute of Technology_ William Desmond, taking issue with typical assessments of the ancient Cynics, contends that figures such as Antisthenes and Diogenes were not cultural outcasts or marginal voices in the classical culture of the fifth and fourth centuries B.C. Rather, the Cynic movement had deep and significant roots in what Desmond calls "the Greek praise of poverty." Desmond demonstrates that classical attitudes toward wealth were complex and ambivalent, and allowed for an implicit praise of poverty and the virtues it could inspire. From an economic and political point of view, the poor majority at Athens and elsewhere were natural democrats who distrusted great concentrations of wealth as potentially oligarchical or tyrannical. Hence, the poor could be praised in contemporary literature for their industry, honesty, frugality, and temperance. The rich, on the other hand, were often criticized as idle, unjust, arrogant, and profligate. These perspectives were reinforced by typical Greek experiences of war, and the belief that poverty fostered the virtues of courage and endurance. Finally, from an early date, Greek philosophers associated wisdom with the transcendence of sense experience and of such worldly values as wealth and honor. The Cynics, Desmond asserts, assimilated all of these ideas in creating their distinctive and radical brand of asceticism. Theirs was a startling and paradoxical outlook, but it had broad appeal and would persist to exert a manifold influence in the Hellenistic period and beyond. (shrink)

First published in 1973, Karl Llewellyn and the Realist Movement is a classic account of American Legal Realism and its leading figure. Karl Llewellyn is the best known and most substantial jurist of the group of lawyers known as the American Realists. He made important contributions to legal theory, legal sociology, commercial law, contract law, civil liberties and legal education. This intellectual biography sets Llewellyn in the broad context of the rise of the American Realist Movement and contains an (...) overview of his life before focusing on his most important works, including The Cheyenne Way, The Bramble Bush, The Common Law Tradition and the Uniform Commercial Code. In this second edition the original text is supplemented with a preface by Frederick Schauer and an afterword in which William Twining gives a fascinating account of the making of the book and comments on developments in relevant legal scholarship over the past forty years. (shrink)

In her Remarks Upon Some Writers (1743), Catharine Trotter Cockburn takes a seemingly radical stance by asserting that it is possible for atheists to be virtuous. In this paper, I examine whether or not Cockburn’s views concerning atheism commit her to a naturalistic ethics and a so-called radical enlightenment position on the independence of morality and religion. First, I examine her response to William Warburton’s critique of Pierre Bayle’s arguments concerning the possibility of a society of virtuous atheists. I (...) argue that this response shows Cockburn vacillating between a moral naturalism, on the one hand, and a theistic morality, on the other. Second, I draw on Cockburn’s letters to her niece Ann Arbuthnot, and her opinions concerning mystical ideas about “the will of God” in north-east Scotland in the mid-eighteenth century. I maintain that these letters give us a fuller appreciation of Cockburn’s naturalistic position. My conclusion is that Cockburn’s ideas concerning atheism prompt us to consider the close interplay between secular and religious principles in so-called radical ideas of the period. (shrink)

"This 2-volume set within the SAGE Reference Series on Leadership tackles issues relevant to leadership in the realm of science and technology. To encompass the key topics in this arena, this handbook features 100 topics arranged under eight headings. Volume 1 concentrates on general principles of science and technology leadership and includes sections on social-scientific perspectives on S&T leadership; key scientific concepts about leading and innovating in S&T; characteristics of S&T leaders and their environments; and strategies, tactics, and tools of (...) S&T leadership. Volume 2 provides case studies of leadership in S&T, with sections considering leadership in informal communities of scientists and engineers; leadership in government projects and research initiatives; leadership in industry research, development, and innovation; and finally, leadership in education and university-based research. By focusing on key topics within 100 brief chapters, this unprecedented reference resource offers students more detailed information and depth of discussion than typically found in an encyclopedia entry but not as much jargon, detail or density as in a journal article or a research handbook chapter. Entries are written in language and style that is broadly accessible, and each is followed by cross-references and a brief bibliography and further readings. A detailed index and an online version of the work enhances accessibility for today's student audience"--Provided by publisher. (shrink)

In this article, I present a case for a kind of existential theology which would be philosophical and metaphysical, though not broadly Platonic and classical, and biblical though not illogical. What I present will be an attempt to clarify and justify what I call "existential hayatological theism". In so doing I will draw on insights from what Edmond La B Cherbonnier and Claude Tresmontant designated as "biblical philosophy" and "biblical metaphysics" as well as from the neo-classical philosophies of Charles Hartshorne (...) and Alfred North Whitehead, especially that of Whitehead. (shrink)

In the founding documents of this country one finds appeals both to the sovereignty of the people and to abstract notions of rights, "justice," and "the common good". These two ideas are evoked almost as if there were no sense on behalf of the framers that these two ideas simultaneously held create a philosophic tension. Yet as history informs us, they are often contradictory in content. This theme was explored by Rousseau in his distinction of the general will versus the (...) will of all. For Rousseau, the answer to political legitimacy was simple: it was found in the general will, the embodiment of transcendent political ideas. ;Rousseau's choice is one which mirrors that of the American founders. And in doing so they have taken a necessary step in law and state formation: the appeal to Platonism. But, ironically, this appeal does not mean that the popular will has no place in the law. In fact, a careful reading of Plato will render precisely the opposite conclusion: that a sound state built upon transcendent ideas must take into account a number of important empirical considerations, perhaps most significant among these being the will of the people. These ideas are not, however, the determinate Forms from the Phaedo, but rather the indeterminate concepts which guide the Athenian Stranger in his construction of the constitution of Magnesia in the Laws. Given this ontological characteristic of the Forms, the author of a state must have a broad understanding of empirical circumstances including human nature, while serving the demands of the universal ideas. In this light, one must realize that the law will be of no service to its highest aspirations unless it can be written in a manner that the people will act in accordance with it But the lawgiver also relies on this body for the articulation of the higher ideas. Thus the people are at once an obstacle to and a conduit of a higher law. To the extent, however, that democratic theory fails to confront its foundations in such a manner, it becomes mired in confusion. (shrink)

This article proposes a way of connecting two levels at which scholars have studied discursive practices from a normative perspective: on the one hand, local transactions-face-to-face arguments or dialogues-and broadly dispersed public debates on the other. To help focus my analysis, I select two representatives of work at these two levels: the pragmadialectical model of critical discussion and Habermas's discourse theory of politicallegal deliberation. The two models confront complementary challenges that arise from gaps between their prescriptions and contexts of actual (...) discourse. In response, I propose a theory of argument cogency that distinguishes three kinds of merit: content, transactional, and public. Normative links between the two levels arise through the ways argument contents spread across multiple transactions in a social space whose structure and composition favor collective reasonableness. (shrink)

In Elephant , director Gus Van Sant dramatises a massacre at a suburban American high school in order to examine narrative cinema's ethical capacity to respond to that which resists being framed as a meaningful event. In the film, this stubborn stuff is experience shot through with contingency. Van Sant depicts acts of violence that are indiscriminate and, at best, ambiguously motivated, as well as school-day activities that appear coincidental and insignificant. This essay argues that the director aims to screen (...) contingency to mount a critique of conventional narrative film's terror of contingency, its anxious drive to convert all cinematic time to good, signifying use. It also argues that Van Sant complicates or crosses up this aim by constructing a self-reflexive text attuned to the inherent irresponsibility in assuming that radical contingency's dead time could be fully and faithfully animated on screen. While the film camera and a still camera used by a student photographer in the film shoot people with the ostensible aim of capturing contingency in all its otherness, both projects are, at the same time, linked, in complex ways, to the student killers who shoot people with the aim of eliminating all otherness. The film's recognition of its own drive to plot in a deadly fashion thus illustrates Van Sant's profound sensitivity to the challenges of responding responsibly to a time of terror and, more broadly, to the terrors of time. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:James J. Gibson's Ecological Approach:Perceiving What ExistsWilliam M. Mace (bio)Environmental Philosophy and EpistemologyThe purpose of this paper is to help an audience attracted to environmental philosophy get to the core of Gibson's system in a compact form and to appreciate the necessity for an account of the environment in epistemology. I hope to show that Gibson's is a consistent and scientifically progressive account of knowing that gives the environment (...) its due and that this is not a simple matter of fiat but a call to extended scientific investigation. I want to stress that Gibson's work is scientifically progressive in the sense that it has consistently opened new avenues for research. If one could be assured tomorrow that Gibson was correct and his critics wrong, the ecological psychology enterprise would not have to be shut down with nothing left to do. The goal of the enterprise, certainly for Gibson, was not to be declared a winner but to open doors for discovery. Because Gibson has developed a theory of perceiving the environment, it would be worth exploring as an important topic for environmental philosophers covering a wide range of issues. It offers an intriguing, environmentally based, grounding for epistemology; it offers ways to deal [End Page 195] with practical issues within "pure science"; and it is open to reorganizing ways to conceptualize problems beyond epistemology.Gibson developed a richly articulated system that grew steadily over a period of 50 years, 1929 to 1979, which he devoted to "puzzling over" the "perplexities" of vision (1979, xiii). From Gibson's standpoint, knowledge begins with perception, and perception is perceiving the environment. The environment, for Gibson, is at least as essential as the brain to the existence and exercise of "the mind."As an empiricist, knowledge is based on perception for Gibson. But perception, at root, turns out to be perception of the environment. Entities like sense data and representations become "after the fact" curiosities for Gibson, and have no role to play in the foundations of perceptual experience and, a fortiori, knowledge. If Gibson is correct, then scientific accounts of perception must converge on environmental perception. A philosopher whose primary focus is epistemology, and who works within Gibson's system, would perforce be an environmental philosopher—not (first) because of a special concern for the environment, but because an adequate appreciation of relevant facts requires it. Of great importance to environmental philosophers is that Gibson not only provides an account of perceiving grounded in access to environmental properties, but he establishes a basis for perceiving this particular world as a specific arrangement of surfaces. The world we perceive, according to Gibson, is a connected, public world that we share. It is, again, the world, the logical individual world and not an abstraction. This is not an account of the experience of abstract shapes, distances, and motions. It is a system in which travelers can visit the pyramids and in which I can trip over your garbage.Is there a symmetric direction of influence? Just as a commitment to understanding knowledge scientifically and philosophically can lead one to focal considerations of the environment, could a deep concern for the environment as a value lead to the serious study of perception and, more broadly, epistemology? It seems entirely plausible. Gibson's is a "yin and yang" system of scientific complementarities beginning with animal and environment and extending to knowledge and value (in his concept of affordance). In each complementarity, the terms are differentiable but not entirely independent. Animals and their environments are different entities and should not be confused with one another, but they also are so [End Page 196] mutually dependent that one should not imagine a thorough account of one without the other. In like manner, objects and value (first through use) are not independently comprehensible in Gibson's system. This is a theme worthy of careful examination of detailed examples. I am not doing that in this paper, but hope that enough of the flavor of Gibson's work will come through to allow a reader to understand how one might be steered to epistemology from an initial concern with environment and values and... (shrink)

For much of 2021, allocating the scarce supply of Covid‐19 vaccines was the world's most pressing bioethical challenge, and similar challenges may recur for novel therapies and future vaccines. In the United States, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) identified three fundamental ethical principles to guide the process: maximize benefits, promote justice, and mitigate health inequities. We argue that critical components of the recommended protocol were internally inconsistent with these principles. Specifically, the ACIP (...) violated its principles by recommending overly broad health care worker priority in phase 1a, using being at least seventy‐five years of age as the only criterion to identify individuals at high risk of death from Covid‐19 during phase 1b, failing to recommend place‐based vaccine distribution, and implicitly endorsing first‐come, first‐served allocation. More rigorous empirical work and the development of a complete ethical framework that recognizes trade‐offs between principles may have prevented these mistakes and saved lives. (shrink)

ABSTRACTIn a recent article in this Journal, Eric Moore criticized an earlier essay of mine published in this same Journal on two fronts. On the first, he criticized my criticisms of broad internalism for relying on abstract moral principles too far removed from the practice of sport to adjudicate normative conflicts in which disputants cannot agree on what is the purpose of sport. On the second front, he criticized my reliance on what he called Rorty’s “controversial” views of truth (...) and rationality to back up my criticisms of broad internalism. I find both criticisms forceful but not persuasive. In my reply, therefore, I defend both use of Rorty’s and other similar historicist takes on rational justification and my criticisms of broad internalism principles-based approach to normative inquiry in sport. (shrink)

"We hold these truths to be self-evident..." So begins the U.S. Declaration of Independence. What follows those words is a ringing endorsement of universal rights, but it is far from self-evident. Why did the authors claim that it was? William Talbott suggests that they were trapped by a presupposition of Enlightenment philosophy: That there was only one way to rationally justify universal truths, by proving them from self-evident premises. With the benefit of hindsight, it is clear that the authors (...) of the U.S. Declaration had no infallible source of moral truth. For example, many of the authors of the Declaration of Independence endorsed slavery. The wrongness of slavery was not self-evident; it was a moral discovery. In this book, William Talbott builds on the work of John Rawls, Jurgen Habermas, J.S. Mill, Amartya Sen, and Henry Shue to explain how, over the course of history, human beings have learned how to adopt a distinctively moral point of view from which it is possible to make universal, though not infallible, judgments of right and wrong. He explains how this distinctively moral point of view has led to the discovery of the moral importance of nine basic rights. Undoubtedly, the most controversial issue raised by the claim of universal rights is the issue of moral relativism. How can the advocate of universal rights avoid being a moral imperialist? In this book, Talbott shows how to defend basic individual rights from a universal moral point of view that is neither imperialistic nor relativistic. Talbott avoids moral imperialism by insisting that all of us, himself included, have moral blindspots and that we usually depend on others to help us to identify those blindspots. Talbott's book speaks to not only debates on human rights but to broader issues of moral and cultural relativism, and will interest a broad range of readers. (shrink)

Imprisonment is often said to be the ultimate back-up sanction for offenders who do not abide by their non-custodial sentence. From a standard consequentialist perspective this is morally justified, if it is a cost-effective means to crime prevention. In contrast, the use of imprisonment as a back-up is much harder to justify from retributivist perspectives, with their emphasis on just desert or deserved censure. The crux is this: if the reason for a non-custodial sentence is that a prison sentence risks (...) being a disproportionate or inappropriate sanction, retributivists need to explain how a prison term can be warranted as the backup sanction for those who breach the requirements of their non-custodial sentence, even though their original crime wasn’t serious enough to warrant imprisonment in the first place. The aim in this paper is to critically assess the extent to which retributivists can justify the use of imprisonment as the ultimate back-up sanction. In doing so, I first examine two broad strategies that are discussed in the literature, and which retributivists could employ in order to respond to this problem. The first strategy stresses how desert has only a limited role in sentencing such that it demarcates a range of deserved punishment. On this view, associated with limiting retributivism, one could initially opt for a less harsh yet deserved punishment, leaving room for the imposition of back-up sanctions when needed. The second strategy focuses on how the act of breach is a reprehensible act that can allow for a penalty increase, and thereby lead to imprisonment. Although it is argued that both strategies fail, the paper proposes an alternative solution to this problem. (shrink)

Powers often depend on structures. It is because of the eye’s structure that it confers the power of sight; destroy that structure, and you destroy the power. I sketch an antireductive yet broadly naturalistic account of the relation between powers and structures. Powers, it says, are embodied in structures. When applied to philosophy of mind, this view resembles classic emergentist theories. I nevertheless argue that it differs from them in crucial respects that insulate it from the problems that beset them (...) – including the problem of emergence and the problem of mental causation. (shrink)

Metamathematics and the Philosophical Tradition is the first work to explore in such historical depth the relationship between fundamental philosophical quandaries regarding self-reference and meta-mathematical notions of consistency and incompleteness. Using the insights of twentieth-century logicians from Gödel through Hilbert and their successors, this volume revisits the writings of Aristotle, the ancient skeptics, Anselm, and enlightenment and seventeenth and eighteenth century philosophers Leibniz, Berkeley, Hume, Pascal, Descartes, and Kant to identify ways in which these both encode and evade problems of (...) a priori definition and self-reference. The final chapters critique and extend more recent insights of late 20th-century logicians and quantum physicists, and offer new applications of the completeness theorem as a means of exploring "metatheoretical ascent" and the limitations of scientific certainty. Broadly syncretic in range, Metamathematics and the Philosophical Tradition addresses central and recurring problems within epistemology. The volume’s elegant, condensed writing style renders accessible its wealth of citations and allusions from varied traditions and in several languages. Its arguments will be of special interest to historians and philosophers of science and mathematics, particularly scholars of classical skepticism, the Enlightenment, Kant, ethics, and mathematical logic. (shrink)

Based on a review of the literature and historical evidence, I argue that the use of the methodological principle known as the priority principle in Anglo-American Nietzsche scholarship is inconsistent and irreconcilable with historical evidence. It attempts to demarcate between the published works and the Nachlass. However, there are no agreed upon necessary and sufficient conditions of a particular textual object being considered “Nachlass.” This absence leads to implicit and often tacit value demarcation criteria that can be broadly grouped into (...) four types of consideration: publication, authorization, publicness, and audience. Each of these criteria pick out a different set of texts as “Nachlass.” Thus, despite the veneer of agreement, the most broadly accepted methodological approach in the Anglo-American tradition of Nietzsche scholarship is applied inconsistently. I argue that we must either offer necessary and sufficient conditions for a piece of text being Nachlass, or we ought to abandon such abstract criteria altogether and embrace a contextual and historical approach. I then argue that the first option is impossible given historical evidence. I conclude this article by explicating several recent German approaches to the Nachlass which I think can offer a new possible approach. (shrink)

This book explores the tradition of the 'science of man' in French medicine of the era 1750-1850, focusing on controversies about the nature of the 'physical-moral' relation and their effects on the role of medicine in French society. Its chief purpose is to recover the history of a holistic tradition in French medicine that has been neglected because it lay outside the mainstream themes of modern medicine, which include experimental, reductionist, and localistic conceptions of health and disease. Professor Williams also (...) challenges existing historiography, which argues that the 'anthropological' approach to medicine was a short-term by-product of the leftist politics of the French Revolution. This work argues instead that the medical science of man long outlived the Revolution, that it spanned traditional ideological divisions, and that it reflected the shared aim of French physicians, whatever their politics, to claim broad cultural authority in French society. (shrink)

The scientific study of emotion faces a potentially serious problem: after over a hundred years of psychological study, we lack consensus regarding the very definition of emotion. We propose that part of the problem may be the tendency to define emotion in contrast to cognition, rather than viewing both “emotion” and “cognition” as being comprised of more elemental processes. We argue that considering emotion as a type of cognition (viewed broadly as information processing) may provide an understanding of the mechanisms (...) underlying domains that are traditionally thought to be qualitatively distinct. (shrink)

Functional contexts have long been recognized to support evaluative judgments of a certain kind, even where there is no element of design: we speak, for example, of such things as good roots or defective hearts in connection with judgments about proper functions; an animal might even be judged defective for failing to possess a certain species-typical, functional behavioral disposition. These are obviously not moral judgments, but it is interesting to wonder whether the latter might be understood in a similar way. (...) Can moral virtues, for example, be understood as dispositions to function properly in certain spheres of human life involving the will, so that someone lacking them might be said to have a defective character? ;One possibly tempting way of pursuing this broadly Aristotelian line, which has been proposed in recent work by Philippa Foot, would be to argue that there is a single type of functional framework within which to understand both function-related evaluations in biology generally, and function-related evaluations pertaining to ethics and practical rationality; in both cases, it might be thought, talk of species-typical functions and proper functioning is to be understood in relation to the flourishing of the organisms in question, the difference being that the functions relevant to ethics would involve the will. ;I argue that this way of fleshing out a neo-Aristotelian approach to ethics and practical rationality is misguided. Much of the dissertation is devoted to showing this by developing a positive account of functional teleology in biology which makes clear that the flourishing or welfare-promotion of organisms is neither a general nor an ultimate end within the biological functional framework. The view I defend recognizes the crucial role played by natural selection history in shaping facts about present functional teleology, but it is importantly different from what are generally known as "etiological" views. In particular, it does not involve any direct reduction of facts about function to facts about causal history, and it suggests a non-reductionist view of functional teleological explanation, which I also defend. The rejection of etiological views of function in general leaves open the possibility that there is some kind of functional framework, distinct from the biological one, that might be relevant to ethics; I explore this in the last chapter. (shrink)

This paper extends previous work of mine on a view of human well-being that is a hybrid of objective-list theories and desire theories. Though some of what I say traverses old ground, much of what I say is new – new, that is, not in terms of ultimate conclusions, but rather in terms of (a) routes toward these ultimate conclusions and (b) certain implications of these ultimate conclusions (e.g., implications concerning the measurement of well-being). There are two different visions of (...) what human beings are that I privilege and attempt to synthesize in this paper. One of these visions pushes us toward an objective-list theory. This vision is a broadly Aristotelian one according to which humans have various capacities that are central to their functioning well as the kinds of things they are, that is, as human beings. Though this broadly Aristotelian vision captures something necessary for well-being, it is, as it were, only half of the story. The other half of the story derives from a vision of human beings as unique individuals with different sets of intrinsic desires, and this desire-focused vision of humans is itself informed by Jacques Lacan and his view that each human self is constituted by a particular and dynamic chains-of-signifiers-plus-desire-flow structure. I start by briefly discussing mental state theories (section 1). Then I discuss objective-list theories at some length (sections 2-3), and, while doing this, I occasionally comment on pro-attitude theories (e.g., desire theories). After that, I present the hybrid theory of well-being that I favor and defend it against some objections (section 4). Lastly, I conclude the paper (section 5). (shrink)

Defends confrontational modes of citizenship as a means to reinvigorate democratic participation and regime accountability. A growing number of people are enraged about the quality and direction of public life, despise politicians, and are desperate for real political change. How can the contemporary neoliberal global political order be challenged and rebuilt in an egalitarian and humanitarian manner? What type of political agency and new political institutions are needed for this? In order to answer these questions, Confrontational Citizenship draws on a (...) broad base of perspectives to articulate the concept of confrontational citizenship. William W. Sokoloff defends extra-institutional and confrontational modes of political activity along with new ways of conceiving political institutions as a way to create political orders accountable to the people. In contrast to many forms of democratic theory, Sokoloff argues that confrontational modes of citizenship (e.g., protest) are good because they increase the accountability of a regime to the people, increase the legitimacy of regimes, lead to improvements in a political order, and serve as a means to vent frustration. The goal is to make the word citizen relevant and dangerous to the settled and closed practices that structure our political world and to provide a hopeful vision of what it means to be politically progressive today. William W. Sokoloff is Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Texas, Rio Grande Valley. (shrink)

This important book brings findings and theories in biology and psychology to bear on the fundamental question in ethics of what it means to behave morally. It explains how we acquire and put to work our capacities to act morally and how these capacities are reliable means to achieving true moral beliefs, proper moral motivations, and successful moral actions. By presenting a complete model of moral agency based on contemporary evolutionary theory, developmental biology and psychology, and social cognitive theory, the (...) book offers a unique perspective. It will be read with profit by a broad swathe of philosophers, as well as psychologists and biologists. (shrink)

Objective: To determine the usefulness of Q methodology to locate and describe shared subjective influences on clinical decision making among participant physicians using hypothetical cases containing common ethical issues. Design: Qualitative study using by-person factor analysis of subjective Q sort data matrix. Setting: University medical center. Participants: Convenience sample of internal medicine attending physicians and house staff (n = 35) at one midwestern academic health sciences center. Interventions: Presented with four hypothetical cases involving urgent decision making near the end of (...) life, participants selected one of three specific clinical actions offered for each case. Immediately afterward and while considering their decision, each respondent sorted twenty-five subjective self-referent items in terms of the influence of each statement on their decision-making process. By-person factor analysis, where participants are defined as variates, yielded information about the attitudinal background the physicians brought to their consideration of each hypothetical case. We performed a second-order factor analysis on all of the subjective viewpoints to determine if a smaller core of shared attitudes existed across some or all of the four case vignettes. Factor scores for each item and post-sort comments from interviews conducted individually with each respondent guided the interpretation of ethical perspective used by these respondents in making clinical decisions about the cases. Measurements and Main Results: Second-order factor analysis on seventeen viewpoints used by physicians in the four hypothetical urgent decision cases revealed three moderately correlated (r 2 < 40%) subjective core attitudinal guides used broadly among all the cases and among sixteen of the seventeen original factors. Across all the cases, our participants were guided in general by: (1) patient-focused beneficence, (2) a patient- and surrogate-focused perspective that includes risk avoidance, and (3) best interest of the patient guided by ethical values. Economic impact on the physician, expediency in resolution of the situation, and the expense of medical treatment were not found to be influential determinants in this study. Conclusions: Q sorting and by-person factor analysis are useful qualitative methodological tools to study the complex structure of subjective attitudes that influence physicians in making medical decisions. This study revealed the subjective viewpoints used by our physician participants as they made ethically challenging treatment decisions. The three second-order factors identified here are grounded in current bioethical values as well as the personal traits of physicians. The participants' decision methods appear to resemble casuistry more than principle-based decision making. Generalizability of results will require further studies. (shrink)