In this paper, my aim is to offer some comments on the study of Mu‘tazilite kalām, framed around the study of a particular episode in the Mu‘tazilite dispute about man – a question with a deceptively Aristotelian cadence that is not too difficult to dispel. Within this episode, my focus is on one of the major arguments used by the late Baṣrans to hold up their side of the dispute, and on the relationship between the mental and the physical which (...) emerges from it. The most interesting – and most surprising – aspect of this relationship is that the mental and the physical do not seem to be treated as distinct terms, thus creating the space for questions about how the two relate. The first person perspective seems to be identified with the physical body. My interest then is in the response of the reader to this surprising presentation – or rather, in a certain kind of reader response, and thus a certain kind of interpretive mode, whose value and viability it is part of my aim to help clarify. (shrink)

This book defends an original and pluralist theory of when and why discrimination wrongs people, in particular, through unfair subordination, through the violation of their right to a particular deliberative freedom, or through the denial to them of access to a basic good.

This volume features more than 20 essays that explore the work of one of the most important contemporary philosophers of mathematics. It will help readers to better appreciate this significant and prolific philosopher. Within philosophy of mathematics, Penelope Maddy initially advocated realism. She then went on to advance naturalism. Both of her positions became very influential in the field, along with her other work in the philosophy of logic. The contributors comment on and otherwise engage with Maddy’s work. They also (...) weigh in on the state of set theory and its philosophy, the philosophy and history of logic, naturalism, skepticism, and the myriad other areas to which Maddy left her mark. Overall, coverage traces her influence on these various ideas over the years. It will also help readers to better understand how philosophers working at the forefront of these areas see these concepts today. These essays will be essential reading for the wide group of philosophers working in these different areas as well as graduate students studying philosophy of mathematics and logic and the other related issues to which Maddy has contributed. The volume will also appeal to logicians and set theorists in general, as well as to philosophers working in analytic philosophy more widely, as well as to those working in the history of philosophy. (shrink)

We have two theses about scientific knowledge in the age of computation. Our general claim is that scientific Knowledge Management practices emerge as second-order practices whose aim is to systematically collect, take care of and mobilise first-hand disciplinary knowledge and data. Our specific thesis is that knowledge management practices are transforming biological research in at least three ways. We argue that scientific Knowledge Management a. operates with founded concepts of biological knowledge as explicated and computable, b. enables new outputs and (...) ways of knowing within biology, and c. risks enforcing objectivist epistemologies of knowledge as some one objective thing. (shrink)

With its pessimistic vision and bleak message of world-denial, it has often been difficult to know how to engage with Schopenhauer's philosophy. Schopenhauer's arguments have seemed flawed and his doctrines marred by inconsistencies; his very pessimism almost too flamboyant to be believable. Yet a way of redrawing this engagement stands open, Sophia Vasalou argues, if we attend more closely to the visionary power of Schopenhauer's work. The aim of this book is to place the aesthetic character of Schopenhauer's standpoint (...) at the heart of the way we read his philosophy and the way we answer the question: why read Schopenhauer - and how? Approaching his philosophy as an enactment of the sublime with a longer history in the ancient philosophical tradition, Vasalou provides a fresh way of assessing Schopenhauer's relevance in critical terms. This book will be valuable for students and scholars with an interest in post-Kantian philosophy and ancient ethics. (shrink)

Wahrend Friedrich Nietzsche als eine der bedeutendsten Figuren innerhalb der deutschen Kulturgeschichte gilt, wird sein Einfluss auf den juristischen Diskurs als marginal beurteilt. Es scheint, als hatten sich die Rechtsphilosophen und -theoretiker einer vertieften Auseinandersetzung mit dem Denker enthalten. Sophia Gluth hinterfragt diesen Umstand und beleuchtet, ob und wie theoretisierende Juristen mit Nietzsche umgegangen sind. Dabei deckt sie ein Phanomen auf, das bisher weder gesehen noch beschrieben wurde: die konstante Rezeption Friedrich Nietzsches in der Rechtswissenschaft. Untersucht werden die Rezeptionsansatze (...) vom Kaiserreich bis in die Gegenwart. Die juristischen Nietzsche-Lekturen u.a. des Freirechts, der "Konservativen Revolution", der Nationalsozialisten sowie der Postmoderne werden dabei stets eingebettet in ihre kulturelle und soziologische Umwelt. Erzahlt wird so eine - nicht zuletzt bedruckende - juristische Ideen- und Mentalitatsgeschichte des 20. Jahrhunderts. (shrink)

Addressing a gap in political thought, this book examines the interplay between ethos and practical reason in everyday life. It suggests that the burgeoning literature on the ‘ethotic’ dimension of democracy leaves untreated the issue of practical reason and how it infuses political judgment and action.

This book explores "real" valuation through tracing the pragmatic meanings of "mattering." Employing Peirce's overall pragmatic method and realism to understand what we mean when we say something "matters," it encourages consideration of the practices we engage in, the values attached to those practices, and their consequences.

Il s’agit ici de comprendre, à partir des arguments développés dans le volume par Krassimira Daskalova et Susan Zimmermann, comment l’histoire des femmes et du genre a été intégrée dans les différentes contributions à cet effort de synthèse portant sur l’Europe centrale de l’Est. Le chapitre « Women’s and Gender History » que l’on doit à ces deux spécialistes du genre donne un aperçu de ce champ de recherche à travers l’analyse de six thématiques ainsi présentées (p. 279) : « (...) éducation ; trav... (shrink)

This essay demonstrates, and critiques, the pervasiveness of economic assumptions in the jurisprudence of privacy in US constitutional law as it extends from birth control and abortion rights to the so-called right to die. Finding in these cases metaphors of neoliberal productive practices and the assumption of the self as human capital, the self understood as a site of investment rather than a repository of worth, the essay brings privacy law into conversation with Kristin Luker's empirical work on abortion politics (...) and teenage pregnancy. The essay does not treat the right to die as a moral or political problem to be resolved, but is instead interested in the revelatory character of the jurisprudence of privacy — namely, in what it can tell us about the contemporary political economic order. Are recent developments in contemporary political economy, in the emerging neoliberal order, potentially illiberal? (shrink)

Ukraine's war of self-defense against Russia is one of the clearest examples of a nation fighting a just war in recent history. Ukraine is clearly entitled to defend itself, and Russia is clearly obligated to cease hostilities, withdraw troops, and make repair. In light of this, some of the most salient moral questions related to Russia's war of aggression in Ukraine involve the international community; namely, what moral duties it has toward Ukraine, especially in light of Russia's extreme and pervasive (...) human rights abuses. The first section of the essay argues that there is a pro tanto moral duty to intervene militarily in Ukraine to stop Russian human rights abuses and ensure that Ukraine achieves a military victory. This duty is grounded in duties of rescue, promissory obligations, and reliance obligations, as well as duties to nations’ own citizens and to the international community. The second section of the essay argues that the most relevant consideration in determining whether there is an all-things-considered duty for the international community to intervene militarily in Ukraine is Russia's nuclear coercion and the associated risk of nuclear war. This section highlights the nuclear risks involved in compliance with Russian nuclear coercion, which I argue have been neglected in prominent discussions. The moral stakes involved in this determination are very high, and succumbing to Russian nuclear coercion in the face of massive human rights violations would set a dangerous precedent. Any course of action should be guided by a thorough analysis of all the risks involved, both nuclear and moral. (shrink)

The present study investigates Taiwanese graduate students’ general understanding and misunderstanding of Responsible Conduct of Research. A total of 580 graduate students responded to the self-developed Responsible Conduct of Research Reasoning Test. The results reveal that, first, students did not have sufficient knowledge to reason why a particular instance of research conduct was doable or not. Second, the statistical results show that female students, students majoring in the humanities or the social sciences, doctoral-level students, and students with RCR-related training outperformed (...) others. In addition, the misbehaviors that students judged relatively uncritically comprise the following nine categories: seeing authorship as a property or power, misinterpreting research coauthors’ responsibilities, inaccurately conducting the informed-consent process, fabricating and falsifying research data, misinterpreting the correct citation of research sources, holding vague concepts of self-plagiarism, misinterpreting the Taiwan Copyright Act, accepting duplicate-publication practices, and accepting piecemeal publication practices. The present study discusses participative students’ major misunderstandings of actual RCR-related practices. The study also presents further implications and suggestions based on the findings. (shrink)

Very often, when a belief or a method of reasoning strikes us as morally wrong, it also seems to wrong someone in particular. For instance, if an acquaintance j.

Mobile applications and socio-sexual networking websites are used by outreach workers to respond synchronously to questions and provide information, resources, and referrals on sexual health and STI/HIV prevention, testing, and care to gay, bisexual and other men who have sex with men. This exploratory study examined ethical issues identified by online outreach workers who conduct online sexual health outreach for GB2M. Semi-structured individual interviews were conducted between November 2013 and April 2014 with online providers and managers to explore the benefits, (...) challenges, and ethical implications of delivering online outreach services in Ontario, Canada. Interviews were digitally recorded and transcribed verbatim. Thematic analyses were conducted, and member-checking, analyses by multiple coders, and peer debriefing supported validity and reliability. Four themes emerged on the ethical queries of providing online sexual health outreach for GB2M: managing personal and professional boundaries with clients; disclosing personal or identifiable information to clients; maintaining client confidentiality and anonymity; and security and data storage measures of online information. Participants illustrated familiarity with potential ethical challenges, and discussed ways in which they seek to mitigate and prevent ethical conflict. Implications of this analysis for outreach workers, researchers, bioethicists, and policy-makers are to: understand ethical complexities associated with online HIV prevention and outreach for GB2M; foster dialogue to recognize and address potential ethical conflict; and identify competencies and skills to mitigate risk and promote responsive and accessible online HIV outreach. (shrink)

The idea that ethics might be fruitfully understood in analogy with, or indeed as a form of, medicine has enjoyed a long and distinguished history. A staple of ancient philosophical thinking, it also achieved wide expression in the Islamic world. This essay explores the role of the medical analogy in the work of the eleventh-century Muslim intellectual Abū Ḥāmid al-Ghazālī. Al-Ghazālī’s use of this analogy offers a unique vantage point for approaching several key features of his ethics of virtue, as (...) notably expressed in the Revival of the Religious Sciences. These include his understanding of the nature of virtue and moral education; the fundamental structure of value; and most importantly, the place of human reasoning in the ethical life. This analogy also illuminates the rhetorical context of the Revival, taken as a book that aims to foster skills of practical reasoning and train its readers to become their own physicians. (shrink)

In this paper, I explore a mode of concern with the question of personal identity in which the latter is raised as a problem of a practical order. What provokes this is a concern with the experience of discontinuity within the self and with the perception of continuity as a fragile and uncontrollable good. I discuss the relation which this practically oriented perspective bears to the philosophical form of engagement with personal identity, and the reasons which make the perspective of (...) the latter particularly enticing to the former, yet at the same time entirely inadequate to its needs. Finally, I consider how the need in question can instead appropriately be met, within a broader (and broadly Wittgensteinian) interest in the tendency of philosophical questions to mask?and thus sometimes betray?the need that inspires them. (shrink)

In this paper, I consider certain remarks raised by Wittgenstein in his Lecture on Ethics in connection with the effability of absolute value. My focus is on the expressions we use to talk about the experience of wonderment at the existence of the world, which he dismisses as nonsensical owing to the way they deviate from the conditions of ordinary usage (specifically, to wonder at something, one must be able to imagine its contrary). I suggest that the concept of imagination (...) that Wittgenstein invokes cannot carry great weight as a ground for judging utterances of wonderment to be nonsense. Yet this does not seem to give one a wholly adequate defence of their sense, and I explore whether or not an invocation of the religious form of life can provide a solution, considering some of the special difficulties that this range of utterances presents within the context of questions about how the identity of separate language‐games (especially the religious) affects the sense of words. (shrink)

Berichte zur Wissenschaftsgeschichte, Volume 45, Issue 1-2, Page 55-86, June 2022.

Aristotle's account of female nature has received mostly negative treatment, emphasising what he says females cannot do. Building on recent research, this book comprehensively revises such readings, setting out the complex and positive role played by the female in Aristotle's thought with a particular focus on the longest surviving treatise on reproduction in the ancient corpus, the Generation of Animals. It provides new interpretations of the nature of Aristotle's sexism, his theory of male and female interaction in generation, and his (...) account of inherited features. It also discusses a range of more general issues which can and should be re-examined in light of Aristotle's account of female animals: his methodology, hylomorphism, teleology and psychology. Aristotle on Female Animals will be valuable to all those interested in Aristotle's philosophy and the history of gender. (shrink)

This paper offers a moral history of the industrialisation of seaweed harvesting in Norway. Industrialisation is often seen as degrading natural resources. Ironically, we argue, it is precisely the scale and scope of industrial utilisation that may enable non-instrumental valuations of natural resources. We use the history of the Norwegian seaweed industry to make this point. Seaweed became increasingly interesting to harvest as a fruit and then as a crop of the sea in the early twentieth century following biochemical applications (...) for alginates derived from seaweed. When harvesting was mechanised, however, attention turned to the environmental and aesthetic value of kelp forests. Further, the sale of the industry to the American FMC corporation flagged the national value of these plants. In sum epistemic, aesthetic and moral appreciations of natural resources are tangled up and co-evolve with their industrial utilisation, in an ecology of values. Our account uses interview and ethnographic material from key sites in Norway. (shrink)

Building on appraisal theory of emotions and theories on moral emotions, we contend that ethical leadership triggers other-praising moral emotions directed at the supervisor and leads to feedback-seeking behavior. We further predict that the affective processes of ethical leadership have implications for workplace behaviors, namely organizational citizenship behavior directed at the supervisor and employee voice. We develop a new measure of supervisor-directed, other-praising moral emotions and test the validity of the measure. Then, we test and find support for the proposed (...) hypotheses using a sample of 231 full-time employees in China with a time-lagged survey design and structural equation modeling. Theoretical and practical implications for ethical leadership and moral emotions are discussed. (shrink)

This paper argues that challenges that are grand in scope such as "lifelong health and wellbeing", "climate action", or "food security" cannot be addressed through scientific research only. Indeed scientific research could inhibit addressing such challenges if scientific analysis constrains the multiple possible understandings of these challenges into already available scientific categories and concepts without translating between these and everyday concerns. This argument builds on work in philosophy of science and race to postulate a process through which non-scientific notions become (...) part of science. My aim is to make this process available to scrutiny: what I call founding everyday ideas in science is both culturally and epistemologically conditioned. Founding transforms a common idea into one or more scientifically relevant ones, which can be articulated into descriptively thicker and evaluatively deflated terms and enable operationalisation and measurement. The risk of founding however is that it can invisibilise or exclude from realms of scientific scrutiny interpretations that are deemed irrelevant, uninteresting or nonsensical in the domain in question-but which may remain salient for addressing grand-in-scope challenges. The paper considers concepts of "wellbeing" in development economics versus in gerontology to illustrate this process. (shrink)

Attending to the rich entanglements of scientific and critical theory, contributors to this issue scrutinize phenomena in nature to explore new territory in feminist science studies. With a special focus on relating theory to method, these scholars generate new feminist approaches to scientific practice. Contributors probe this relationship by way of topics from poetics of human-jellyfish interactions to a feminist reconsideration of a well-known thought experiment in thermodynamics. Two contributors analyze plant-insect encounter research to spin their own symbiotically inflected account (...) of “affective ecologies.” Technologies of human memory storage and retrieval lead one writer to interrogate how our understandings of memory and amnesia are currently under revision. Another contributor tracks the lively evolutionary and morphological theories that textile artisans manifest in material models of sea creatures. What emerges from these diverse essays is an approach to critical thinking that inhabits, elaborates, and feeds upon scientific theory, holding feminist theory accountable to science and vice versa. _Sophia Roosth_ is Assistant Professor of the History of Science at Harvard University. _Astrid Schrader_ is Visiting Assistant Professor of Science, Technology, and Society at Sarah Lawrence College. _Contributors_: Karen Barad, Lina Dib, Eva Hayward, Carla Hustak, Vicki Kirby, Natasha Myers, Sophia Roosth, Astrid Schrader. (shrink)

How are we disposed to the problem of natural resources scarcity that we face today and to the fact that certain natural sources remain unused, whereas the exploitation of others puts further strain on the already degraded biosphere? The scarcity of natural resources not only imposes a series of ecological issues on us; it also challenges democracy as organizational system and way of life, because it increases inequality, conflict, authoritarianism, and repression. One way to address this predicament would be the (...) re-appropriation of our relation with the biosphere by ceasing to see it as a limitless source of extraction and consumption. This essay suggests that a certain part of this.. (shrink)

Die Aussagen des Aristoteles über Frauen sind berüchtigt. Er bezeichnet sie als unvollkommen und als von Natur dem Mann untergeordnet. Als herausragender Naturwissenschaftler bietet Aristoteles uns jedoch auch eine Beschreibung und Erklärung der biologischen Verfasstheit weiblicher Lebewesen, zumindest in einem gewissen Umfang.

Journal Name: Semiotica - Journal of the International Association for Semiotic Studies / Revue de l'Association Internationale de Sémiotique Volume: 2013 Issue: 196 Pages: 79-99.

The Supreme Court’s reversal of the right to abortion has significantly changed reproductive rights in the United States, and adversely affected the lives of potentially pregnant persons. The political fragility of the privacy right to abortion also raises questions about the practice and epistemic rules of American constitutionalism itself. In this essay, I situate the history of privacy under the Fourteenth Amendment’s due process clause in the tradition of legal reasoning. With Ludwig Wittgenstein’s On Certainty, I argue that the majority (...) in Dobbs v. Jackson (2022) departs from this tradition. The upshot of this departure is that we now have a new interpretive language game battling a long established language game of interpretation–battling, that is, a constitutional tradition–in a contest to redefine how disagreement is transacted among justices and between the people and their government. (shrink)

Objectives: Mental disorders are vastly underdiagnosed in low-income countries that disproportionately affect women. We aimed to evaluate the prevalence of common mental disorders in newly postpartum women, and stigma associated with mental health reporting in an Ethiopian community using a validated World Health Organization survey.Methods: The Self Reporting Questionnaire for psychological distress was administered in Amharic by nurses to 118 women aged 18–37 years who had given birth in the prior 3 months in the Glenn C. Olsen Memorial Primary Hospital (...) in Yetebon. Mental health stigma among the four nursing staff was assessed using Link and Phelan's Components of Stigma.Results: Among 118 women surveyed, 18% had a probable common mental disorder using the SRQ 4/5 cutoff and 2% admitted to suicidal thoughts. Presence of stigma in the healthcare staff was verified, including labeling, stereotyping, separating, and status loss and discrimination.Conclusion: Postpartum mental health disorders as well as stigma against such diagnoses are common in the Yetebon community. There is an urgent need for increased availability of properly trained and supervised healthcare staff in the identification and referral of postpartum women with common mental disorders. (shrink)

This satirical book review humorously attacks two targets. The first is the formality and audacity of the book review proper; the second is the book Hating Perfection, the two copies sent to every APA member (American Philosophical Association). The book review was written for the Lighthearted Philosophers' Society and submitted for publication in their special anniversary journal.

Following the initiative of Abū Hāshim al-Jubbā'ī, the Baṣran Mu'tazilites rejected the view of language, dominant till then in the Islamic milieu, according to which humanity had received it by way of divine revelation, and defended the position that language had arisen by means of a human convention. On the Baṣran understanding of this convention, the connection between words and things was effected by means of a momentous act of intention to assign a name, which was revealed to another through (...) a bodily gesture or act of pointing. In considering the signifying powers of this bodily manifestation of intention, I discuss two points of difficulty, one internal and one external (grounded in Wittgenstein's critical framework) which beset the Baṣran Mu'tazilite account. (shrink)

In this paper my aim is to consider the picture of God's immediate knowledge of the mind as this appears in Wittgenstein's work, where its soundness seems to be brought into question. My argument is that the response to this denial should take the form, not of an investigation of a theological position concerning God's knowledge ("can God look into the human mind?"), but of a negotiation of the difficulties affecting our use of this picture. A great part of the (...) latter can be seen as difficulties in mastering the communicative relation between God and man which lies at the heart of the religious form of life, and which arises from the dislocation which familiar language-games undergo within it. (shrink)

In cases of self-gaslighting, the subject worries that other people will be skeptical of one of her beliefs—for instance, the belief that she has been sexually harassed. Prompted by this worry, she...

This study explored the priming effects of discriminated experiences on emotion recognition accuracy of Asian Americans. We hypothesized that when Asian Americans were reminded of discriminated experiences due to their race, they would detect subtle negative emotional expressions on White faces more accurately than would Asian Americans who were primed with a neutral topic. This priming effect was not expected to emerge in detecting negative facial expressions on Asian faces. To test this hypothesis, 108 participants were randomly assigned to one (...) of two conditions: write about their experiences with racial discrimination or write about a neutral topic. Then, they were given an emotion recognition test consisting of White and Asian faces. The current study found a significant interaction effect of priming condition by target race. When Asian Americans were reminded of discriminated experiences, they displayed heightened sensitivity to negative emotional expressions on White faces, but not to the negative expressions on Asian faces. The implications of these findings were discussed. (shrink)