In metaethics, empirical approaches are not just complementary to, but continuous with, traditional approaches to the subject. This chapter addresses traditional and empirical approaches to metaethics. It discusses how empirical approaches have been brought to bear on some central metaethical questions. The chapter illustrates not just the diversity of topics within metaethics itself but also the diversity of empirical methods and approaches that philosophers and psychologists working on these topics are using. The debate between internalists and externalists is a debate (...) concerning the psychology of moral judgment, but also a debate about our concept of moral judgment. As such, it has implications for other metaethical debates. Antirealists such as relativists and noncognitivists often defend internalism, and argue that their views are best equipped to explain the link between moral judgment and motivation. (shrink)

ABSTRACT This study investigated the effect of conspiracy ideation, moral disengagement, and intolerance of uncertainty on compliance with the anti-SARS-COV-2 social distancing rules and two other facets of people’s reactions toward the coronavirus crisis. A convenience sample of 245 Romanians completed an online survey in March 2020. Results indicate that conspiracy ideation is associated with lower assessments of virus risk and lower compliance with the confinement measures. Moral disengagement had a parallel effect of undermining personal compliance to the social distancing (...) regulations, highlighting the need to define social distancing as morally relevant and prevent individual justifications for noncompliance. (shrink)

Every language has a way of talking about seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting and touching. This can be done through lexical means, and through grammatical evidentials. The studies presented here focus on the experssions of perception and cognition in languages of Africa, Oceania, and South America.

The article argues that there are different ways of justifying suspension of judgement. We suspend judgement not only privatively, that is, because we lack evidence, but also positively, that is, because there is evidence that provides reasons for suspending judgement: suspension is more than the rational fallback position in cases of insufficient evidence. The article applies the distinction to recent discussions about the role of suspension for inquiry, Turri's puzzle about withholding, and formal representations of suspension.

In this paper, I provide an account of the wrong that is done to women when everyday people fail to believe allegations of sexual assault made by women. I argue that an everyday person wrongs both the accuser and women causally distant from the accuser when they fail to believe the accuser’s allegation. First, I argue that there are responses that we, as everyday members of society, owe to victims of sexual assault. A condition enabling everyday people to respond in (...) the way owed to victims is that they have an outright belief that the accuser was assaulted. Actively suspending judgement about whether a crime occurred is in tension with the ability to respond to the victim in a way that supports and validates them. When an everyday person fails to have an outright belief in the truth of an allegation, they wrong the accuser because they risk failing to satisfy the conditions enabling them to fulfill their obligation to her. Second, I argue that everyday people wrong women who are causally distant from the accuser because in our social context, women are often treated in particular ways – especially in the sexual domain – because they are women. As a result, when women hear that an everyday person fails to believe a particular allegation, they easily project themselves into the accuser’s position and reasonably worry that if they were to be assaulted, they too would be met with doubt and disbelief by the people in their community. (shrink)

In _The Cosmic Perils of Qadi Ḥusayn Maybudī in Fifteenth-Century Iran_ Alexandra Dunietz explores the life and works of a provincial judge whose life exemplifies the intellectual, spiritual and political tensions of the Timurid, Ak Koyunlu and Safavid spheres.

Previous research suggested a role of gaze in preference formation, not merely as an expression of preference, but also as a causal influence. According to the gaze cascade hypothesis, the longer subjects look at an item, the more likely they are to develop a preference for it. However, to date the connection between viewing and liking has been investigated predominately with self-paced viewing conditions in which the subjects were required to select certain items from simultaneously presented stimuli on the basis (...) of perceived visual attractiveness. Such conditions might promote a default, but non-mandatory connection between viewing and liking. To explore whether the connection is separable, we examined the evaluative processing of single naturalistic food images in a 2 x 2 design, conducted completely within subjects, in which we varied both the type of exposure (self-paced versus time-controlled) and the type of evaluation (non-exclusive versus exclusive). In the self-paced exclusive evaluation, longer viewing was associated with a higher likelihood of a positive evaluation. However, in the self-paced non-exclusive evaluation, the trend reversed such that longer viewing durations were associated with lesser ratings. Furthermore, in the time-controlled tasks, both with non-exclusive and exclusive evaluation, there was no significant relationship between the viewing duration and the evaluation. The overall pattern of results was consistent for viewing times measured in terms of exposure duration (i.e., the duration of stimulus presentation on the screen) and in terms of actual gaze duration (i.e., the amount of time the subject effectively gazed at the stimulus on the screen). The data indicated that viewing does not intrinsically lead to a higher evaluation when evaluating single food images; instead, the relationship between viewing duration and evaluation depends on the type of task. We suggest that self-determination of exposure duration may be a prerequisite for any influence from viewing time on evaluative processing, regardless of whether the influence is facilitative. Moreover, the purported facilitative link between viewing and liking appears to be limited to exclusive evaluation, when only a restricted number of items can be included in a chosen set. (shrink)

This Article points to a widening gap between citizenship theories and practices. Although discourses of citizenship resonate widely and are used extensively by scholars and policy makers, the author argues that the social, economic, political and even psychological processes of citizenship are shrinking in a contemporary context of global insecurity where im/migration and ever more restrictive national security concerns have become enmeshed in law, as well as in the public consciousness. As a result, this Article explores new trends of securitization (...) and related processes of marketization, racialization and the invisibilization and/or instrumentalization of women and evaluates their impact on citizenship in Canada and Britain. A citizenship regime framework structures the analysis and highlights the contraction of citizenship in both countries. In the end, despite their purported concern with citizenship, social exclusion and social cohesion, British and Canadian state’s responses serve to perpetuate feelings of insecurity on the part of both citizens and non-citizens. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to propose a systematic classification of emotions which can also characterize their nature. The first challenge we address is the submission of clear criteria for a theory of emotions that determine which mental phenomena are emotions and which are not. We suggest that emotions as a subclass of mental states are determined by their functional roles. The second and main challenge is the presentation of a classification and theory of emotions that can account for (...) all existing varieties. We argue that we must classify emotions according to four developmental stages: 1. pre-emotions as unfocussed expressive emotion states, 2. basic emotions, 3. primary cognitive emotions, and 4. secondary cognitive emotions. We suggest four types of basic emotions (fear, anger, joy and sadness) which are systematically differentiated into a diversity of more complex emotions during emotional development. The classification distinguishes between basic and non-basic emotions and our multi-factorial account considers cognitive, experiential, physiological and behavioral parameters as relevant for constituting an emotion. However, each emotion type is constituted by a typical pattern according to which some features may be more significant than others. Emotions differ strongly where these patterns of features are concerned, while their essential functional roles are the same. We argue that emotions form a unified ontological category that is coherent and can be well defined by their characteristic functional roles. Our account of emotions is supported by data from developmental psychology, neurobiology, evolutionary biology and sociology. (shrink)

The development of empathy is central to positive social adjustment. However, issues remain with integrating empathy research conducted with children, adolescents, and adults. The current article (...

Democracy and the Divine articulates a democracy that is based on the principle of giving oneself to another. For this project, the author highlights two traditions that rarely have been read side by side or considered seminal to the philosophical idea of democracy: nineteenth-century German romanticism and French postmodernism.

This book focuses on how gender in its many guises - Linguistic, Natural, Social - is reflected in human languages, how it features in myths and metaphors, and the role it plays in human cognition. Examples are drawn from all over the world, with a special focus on Aikhenvald's extensive fieldwork in Amazonia and New Guinea.

In this issue of the journal Mark Brown has offered a new argument against my potential future of value theory. I argue that even though the premises of this new argument are far more defensible than the premises of his old argument, the new argument does not show that the potential future of value theory of the wrongness of killing is false. If the considerations to which Brown appeals are used, not to show that the potential future of value theory (...) is false, but to show that abortion is morally permissible, they are also unsuccessful. I also argue that Brown's clarified self-represented future of value account and Simon Parsons's account of the wrongness of killing are both subject to major difficulties. Finally, I show, in an appendix, that Brown's assertion that my discussion of his views suffers from major logical errors is false. (shrink)

ObjectiveOur research aim is to enrich the conceptualization of high conflict post-divorce co-parenting by understanding the dynamic process involved.BackgroundThe studied phenomena were explored by linking previous scientific knowledge to practice.MethodWe cross-referenced the previous study results with the experiences reported by eight professionals and tried to answer the following research question: how professionals’ experience and previous scientific knowledge contribute to a better understanding of HC post-divorce co-parenting? Individual face to face interviews were conducted and analyzed regarding the qualitative theoretical reasoning of (...) thematic analysis.ResultsAnalysis allowed us to highlight how four main axes are related to HC post-divorce co-parenting: Parents for life, Acting in the child’s best interests, Managing disagreements, and Healing the separation.ConclusionOur findings capture high conflict post-divorce co-parenting as a multidimensional dynamic process. As such, dealing with co-parenting disagreements must be understood as a moment in a process that is influenced by, and influences, other dimensions.ImplicationsInterventions must consider the four dimensions and their reciprocal interactions. The essential elements underlying parents’ difficulties may reside at a multiplicity of levels: inter-relational, contextual, and intrapsychic. Each level contains key potential factors in understanding these families, and in formulating intervention guidelines. (shrink)

Reports from integrative researchers who have followed calls for sociotechnical integration emphasize that the potential of interdisciplinary collaboration to inflect the social shaping of technoscience is often constrained by their liminal position. Integrative researchers tend to be positioned as either adversarial outsiders or co-opted insiders. In an attempt to navigate these dynamics, we show that attending to affective disturbances can open up possibilities for productive engagements across disciplinary divides. Drawing on the work of Helen Verran, we analyze “disconcertment” in three (...) sociotechnical integration research studies. We develop a heuristic that weaves together disconcertment, affective labor, and responsivity to analyze the role of the body in interdisciplinary collaborations. We draw out how bodies do affective labor when generating responsivity between collaborators in moments of disconcertment. Responsive bodies can function as sensors, sources, and processors of disconcerting experiences of difference. We further show how attending to disconcertment can stimulate methodological choices to recognize, amplify, or minimize the difference between collaborators. Although these choices are context-dependent, each one examined generates responsivity that supports collaborators to readjust the technical in terms of the social. This analysis contributes to science and technology studies scholarship on the role of affect in successes and failures of interdisciplinary collaboration. (shrink)

In my essay, Why abortion is immoral, I criticised discussions of the morality of abortion in which the crucial issue is whether fetuses are human beings or whether fetuses are persons. Both argument strategies are inadequate because they rely on indefensible assumptions. Why should being a human being or being a person make a moral difference? I argued that the correct account of the morality of abortion should be based upon a defensible account of why killing children and adults is (...) wrong. I claimed that what makes killing us wrong is that our premature deaths deprive us of our futures of value, that is, the goods of life we would have experienced had we survived. This account of the wrongness of killing explains why killing is one of the worst of crimes and how killing greatly harms the victim. It coheres with the attitudes of those with cancer or HIV facing premature death. It explains why we believe it is wrong to kill infants. It does not entail that it wrongs a human being to end her life if she is in persistent vegetative state or if her future must consist only of unbearable physical suffering and she wants to die. This account of the wrongness of killing implies that abortion is immoral because we were fetuses once and we know those fetuses had futures of value. Mark Brown claims that this potential future of value account is unsound because it implies that we have welfare rights to what we need to stay alive that most people would reject. I argue that Brown is incorrect in two ways: a welfare right to what we need to stay alive is not directly implied by my account and, in addition, most of us do believe that dependent human beings have substantial welfare rights to what they need to stay alive. Brown argues that depriving us of a future of value of which we have mental representations both is a better explanation of the wrongness of killing and does not imply that abortion is immoral. I reply that if Brown's arguments against my view were sound, those arguments could be easily adapted to show that his view is unsound as well and Brown's view is both ambiguous and unsound on any interpretation. The most popular class of pro-choice argument strategies appeals to the view that some or all fetuses lack either a mental state or function or a capacity for a mental state or function necessary for possession of the right to life. Desires, interests, sentience, various concepts, moral agency, and rationality have all been suggested as candidates for this crucial mental role. Brown's analysis is one member of this class of strategies. I believe that it is possible to show that none of these strategies is reasonable. However, there are so many of these strategies that the required argument demands something more like a book and less like a short essay. The argument of the following essay is a piece of this larger argument. (shrink)

Eighteenth-Century Stoic Poetics: Shaftesbury, Akenside, and the Discipline of the Imagination offers a fresh perspective on the eighteenth-century poetics of Lord Shaftesbury and Mark Akenside. This book traces the two authors' debt to Roman Stoic spiritual exercises and early modern conceptions of the care of the self, which informs their view of the poetic imagination as a bundle of techniques designed to manage impressions, cultivate right images in the mind and rectify judgement. Alexandra Bacalu traces the roots of this (...) articulation in early modern writings on the imagination, as well as in Restoration and Augustan debates on wit, exploring the fruitful tension between ideas of imaginative enthusiasm and imaginative regulation that it provokes. (shrink)

Contrary to the contemporary view that negation is a logical operation that modifies the mere content of a thought or judgment, but not the act of thinking or judging it, Kant maintains that negation is an act of logical apperception through which I exclude a thought or judgment from what ‘I think.’ In this paper, I argue against two interpretations of Kant’s account of logical negation. According to the first, negation is a subjective psychological act of excluding an erroneous judgment. (...) Against this, I will show that for Kant, negation is an operation of logical, not empirical apperception. The second interpretation views logical negation as an objective representation either of a relation of opposition or of non-being. I argue that, on the contrary, the logical function of negation is merely formal, not material, and therefore does not have semantic content. The paper’s final section develops a positive conception of logical negation as a formal function of judging. (shrink)

I strongly agree with the criticisms of the restrictive isomorphic matching definition of empathy made by Murphy, Lilienfeld, and Algoe, and largely agree with their conceptualization of empathy as a dynamic process best defined by its function. In this commentary, I extend this argument by emphasizing the relational, interpersonal aspects of empathy. It is my view that in order to understand the functions of empathy, we must take into account not only the internal experience of the individual empathizing, but also (...) the individual whose perspective the empathizer is attempting to take. I highlight how the emotional needs of others are dynamic and require flexible adaptation and underscore the role of context in appreciating the function of empathy. (shrink)

Résumé La présente étude aborde la notion de « changement » dans le cadre de la cité grecque de l’époque classique, mais du côté opposé, celui de la continuité historique. Pour ce faire, elle examine les mots et expressions désignant le passé ancestral d’un peuple : elle étudie les significations du terme patrios et des termes apparentés dans la littérature grecque des Ve et IVe siècles, présente le cadre politique dans lequel les générations qui vivent à l’époque classique font appel (...) à leurs ancêtres et recherche, enfin, les éléments qui construisent l’identité de la cité classique. D’abord, il en ressort que les notions d’« ancestral » et de « traditionnel » sont floues et que leur connotation dépend des individus qui en font usage, ainsi que du moment historique dans lequel vivent les intéressés. Ensuite, il apparaît qu’elles sont le moyen qui permet aux Anciens d’exprimer leur réaction – positive ou négative – face aux transformations multiples que subissent les sociétés classiques. (shrink)

We present two prudent semantics within Dung's theory of argumentation. They are based on two new notions of extension, referred to as p-extension and c-extension. Two arguments cannot belong to the same p-extension whenever one of them attacks indirectly the other one. Two arguments cannot belong to the same c-extension whenever one of them indirectly attacks a third argument while the other one indirectly defends the third. We argue that our semantics lead to a better handling of controversial arguments than (...) Dung's ones. We compare the prudent inference relations induced by our semantics w.r.t. cautiousness; we also compare them with the inference relations induced by Dung's semantics. (shrink)

Name der Zeitschrift: Apeiron Jahrgang: 47 Heft: 2 Seiten: 141-171.

Is there anything wrong with publishing philosophical work which one does not believe (publishing without belief, henceforth referred to as ‘PWB’)? I argue that there is not: the practice isn’t intrinsically wrong, nor is there a compelling consequentialist argument against it. Therefore, the philosophical community should neither proscribe nor sanction it. The paper proceeds as follows. First, I’ll clarify and motivate the problem, using both hypothetical examples and a recent real-world case. Next, I’ll look at arguments that there is something (...) wrong with PWB, and show that none is sound. Then, I’ll give some reasons for thinking a norm against PWB is detrimental to the profession. Do I believe these arguments? If I’m right, it shouldn’t matter. (shrink)

Feeling, for any animal, is a faculty of comparing objects or representations with regard to whether they promote its vital powers or hinder them. But whereas these comparisons presuppose a species-concept in non-rational animals, nature has not equipped the human being with a universal principle or life-form that would determine what agrees or disagrees with it. As humans, we must determine our mode of life for ourselves. Contrary to other interpretations, I argue that this places the human capacity for pleasure (...) and displeasure outside of nature and in a realm of spirit. (shrink)

Lucy Allais’s Manifest Reality presents a systematic discussion of the role that Kant assigns to concepts in making knowledge of objects possible. In this paper, I ascribe to Allais a version of non-conceptualism, according to which knowledge is a ‘hybrid’ or loose unity of concept and intuition; concept relates to intuition as form relates to matter in an artefact. I will show how this view has trouble accommodating the distinction between knowledge and accidentally true belief, and how it leads to (...) objectionable forms of idealism. (shrink)

In this paper, I introduce the idea that some important parts of contemporary pure mathematics are moving away from what I call the extensional point of view. More specifically, these fields are based on criteria of identity that are not extensional. After presenting a few cases, I concentrate on homotopy theory where the situation is particularly clear. Moreover, homotopy types are arguably fundamental entities of geometry, thus of a large portion of mathematics, and potentially to all mathematics, at least according (...) to some speculative research programs. (shrink)

This article explores the strategies followed by the International Olympic Committee for the achievement of gender equality. It is argued that this international body can go beyond simply adopting an equality of opportunities approach to gender equality. It suggests which other strategies can be incorporated for which it draws on the different ways of understanding gender equality in gender political theory.

According to the future of value argument for the immorality of abortion, the best explanation for the presumptive serious wrongness of killing innocent post-natal children and adults is that killing them deprives them of all of the goods of life that they would have experienced had they not been killed. These future goods can be called their “futures of value”. Fetuses have futures like ours. Therefore, given some assumptions, ending their lives is seriously presumptively wrong, or so the argument goes.1iThe (...) future of value argument has two parts. It is an account of what is sufficient to make killing presumptively seriously wrong in the cases of all those individuals whom, we all agree, it is wrong to kill. It endorses the implication that it is presumptively seriously wrong to end the life of a fetus. In the first part of this essay I briefly shall discuss the virtues of the future of value account of the wrongness of killing. In the second part I shall discuss how this theory of the wrongness of killing is one aspect of a larger plausible portion of morality. Finally, I shall discuss how, when the future of value account is placed within this larger bit of morality, the relation of the future of value account to some other issues in bioethics can be illuminated.THE VIRTUES OF THE FUTURE OF VALUE ACCOUNTAlthough I may, with some justification, be accused of bias in this matter, I believe that the future of value account of the wrongness of killing has a number of virtues.1. The future of value view is one aspect of a more general understanding of why premature death, whether caused by a human agent or caused by something else, is a misfortune. It reflects why persons who are facing premature death from …. (shrink)

In his lectures on general logic Kant maintains that the generality of a representation (the form of a concept) arises from the logical acts of comparison, reflection and abstraction. These acts are commonly understood to be identical with the acts that generate reflected schemata. I argue that this is mistaken, and that the generality of concepts, as products of the understanding, should be distinguished from the classificatory generality of schemata, which are products of the imagination. A Kantian concept does not (...) provide mere criteria for noting sameness and difference in things, but instead reflects the inner nature of things. Its form consists in the self-consciousness of a capacity to judge (i.e. the Concept is the ‘I think’). (shrink)

The doctrine that it is wrong to end the existence of something because it is a human life I call “the standard view.” I argue that attempts by proponents of abortion choice to avoid the implications of the standard view by suggesting that we don't know when life begins or by suggesting that fetuses are only potential lives fail. Nevertheless, opponents of abortion choice should not base their arguments on the standard view, for the standard view is false. I propose (...) a substitute for the standard view that avoids the difficulties with it, that explains why most people believe that the standard view is true and that also underwrites opposition to abortion choice. (shrink)

Durkheim's functional and structural sociology is examined with an eye to the two structuralist modes of inquiry that it inspired, French structuralism and British structuralism. French structuralism comes from Levi-Strauss's inverting the basic ideas of Durkheim and others in the French circle, including Marcell Mauss, Robert Hertz, and Ferdinand de Saussure. British structuralism comes from A.R. Radcliffe-Brown's adoption of Durkheimian ideas to ethnographic interpretation and theoretical speculation. French structuralism produced a broad intellectual movement, whereas British structuralism culminated in network analysis, (...) which is beginning only now to become a broad intellectual movement. In both cases, the intellectual children and grandchildren of functionalism may prove to be more influential in sociology and elsewhere than Durkheimian functionalism, the parent. (shrink)

Regulatory agencies vary widely in their classification of FMT, with significant impact on patient access. This article conducts a global survey of national regulations and collates existing FMT classification statuses, ultimately suggesting that the human cell and tissue product designation best fits FMT's characteristics and that definitional objectives to that classification may be overcome.

This essay is a response to Julian Savulescu’s objections to the future of value argument for the immorality of abortion published in the Journal of Medical Ethics, June 2002. Firstly, Savulescu’s claim that the future of value argument has implausible implications is considered. The author argues that the argument does not have these implications. Secondly, properties which, according to Savulescu, could underwrite the wrongness of killing and that are acquired only after implantation, are considered. It is argued that none of (...) these properties is an adequate basis for the distinction between wrongful and permissible killing. (shrink)