Wilson et al. focus on one class of AGL tasks: the cognitively demanding task of detecting non‐adjacent dependencies (NADs) among items. They provide a typology of the different types of NADs in natural languages and in AGL tasks. A range of cues affect NAD learning, ranging from the variability and number of intervening elements to the presence of shared prosodic cues between the dependent items. These cues, important for humans to discover non‐adjacent dependencies, are also found to facilitate NAD learning (...) in several nonhuman animal species. (shrink)

Wilson et al. focus on one class of AGL tasks: the cognitively demanding task of detecting non‐adjacent dependencies (NADs) among items. They provide a typology of the different types of NADs in natural languages and in AGL tasks. A range of cues affect NAD learning, ranging from the variability and number of intervening elements to the presence of shared prosodic cues between the dependent items. These cues, important for humans to discover non‐adjacent dependencies, are also found to facilitate NAD learning (...) in several nonhuman animal species. (shrink)

Josef Pieper wrote about “the silence of St. Thomas”—faced with some of philosophy’s toughest questions, Thomas does not give “a textbook reply.” In this paper, I note an instance of such silence: Thomas gives no dogmatic, unequivocal answer to the question “What is freedom?” and this omission seems to have been deliberate. While his predecessors and contemporaries discussed the definition of freedom formally, Thomas does not do so, nor does he offer a precise account of libertas. Why would Thomas avoid (...) this debate? An answer is necessarily tentative, but I argue that Thomas wanted to simplify his treatment of the power of choice. In addition, he may be convinced that freedom is best understood as instantiated within a nature or its powers, making any abstract consideration fundamentally unfruitful. (shrink)

Descartes’s description of his method for discovering truth provides a helpful tool for interpreting his writings. In this article I offer a sample of how to interpret Descartes by understanding his algebraic method. My test case is the Cartesian teaching on divine freedom, which is well known to be inconsistent and often considered unfounded. I reconstruct the equations that led to these doctrines, arguing that Descartes held that the divine act of creation was both necessary and arbitrary because of the (...) equations that resulted when he applied his method to the natural world. (shrink)

Science and Technology Ethics re-examines the ethics by which we live and asks the question: do we have in place the ethical guidelines through which we can incorporate these developments with the minimum of disruption and disaffection? It assesses the ethical systems in place and proposes new approaches to our scientific and engineering processes and products, our social contacts, biology and informatics, the military industry and our environmental responsibilities. The volume is multidisciplinary and reflects the aim of the book to (...) promote a state of the art assessment of these issues. Science and Technology Ethics is a much-needed discussion of the scientific developments that have major effects on the way we live. It will be of interest to all students of science and technology and all professionals involved with administrating laws in these fields. (shrink)

This article explores the themes of trust and ethical conduct in social research, with particular attention to the trust that can develop between the members of a research team as well as between researchers and the researched. The authors draw upon a three-year empirical study of destinations and outcomes for young people excluded from alternative educational provision. They also make reference to a contemporary exposition of Aristotle's writing on friendship in order to explore two sets of relevant distinctions that have (...) a bearing upon our understanding of relationships that emerge in the context of social research projects. These distinctions are between impartiality and selectivity on the one hand, and between universality and particularity on the other. The authors attempt to demonstrate that these distinctions influence the development of trust and the conduct of ethical research, arguing that the latter is not synonymous with compliance to ethical guidelines. (shrink)

Two experiments were run to demonstrate the presence of a partial reinforcement extinction effect (PREE) and a partial punishment effect (PPE) 4 weeks after training in a 1-trial/day procedure. In the PREE paradigm, two groups of animals were trained to run a straight alley for food reward; one group was rewarded on every trial (CRF), whereas the other was rewarded on only 50% of the trials (PRF). In the test phase, extinction, no reward was present on any trial. Four weeks (...) after the end of acquisition, and subsequent to 7 days of CRF retraining, PRF animals showed greater resistance to extinction than did their CRF controls. The PPE paradigm resembled the PREE paradigm in all aspects, except that mild electric foot shock, together with the food reward, was used instead of nonreward on 50% of the acquisition trials. In the test phase, all animals were shocked and given a food reward on every trial. Four weeks after the end of acquisition and retraining, the animals with previous experience of shock in acquisition showed greater resistance to punishment than did their controls. (shrink)

This article focuses on the ethical implications of so-called ‘collateral damage’. It develops a moral typology of collateral harm to innocents, which occurs as a side effect of military or quasi-military action. Distinguishing between accidental and incidental collateral damage, it introduces four categories of such damage: negligent, oblivious, knowing and reckless collateral damage. Objecting mainstream versions of the doctrine of double effect, the article argues that in order for any collateral damage to be morally permissible, violent agents must comply with (...) high standards of care. In order for incidental harm to be permissible, an agent must take pains to avoid such harm even at higher cost to him- or herself. It is argued that accidentally but negligently caused collateral damage may be just as difficult to excuse as incidental harm. Only if high precautionary standards of care are met, can unintended harm to innocents – incidental or accidental – be permissible. In practice, such a strong commitment to avoiding harm to civilians may well lead us to question more generally and rethink more radically how violent conflicts ought to be fought, how military violence ought to be used and whether there are better ways of achieving those aims that we think are legitimate than those we are currently using. (shrink)

Sculptors, architects, and painters are three professional groups that require a comprehensive understanding of how to manipulate spatial structures. While it has been speculated that they may differ in the way they conceive of space due to the different professional demands, this has not been empirically tested. To achieve this, we asked architects, painters, sculptors, and a control group questions about spatially complex pictures. Verbalizations elicited were examined using cognitive discourse analysis. We found significant differences between each group. Only painters (...) shifted consistently between 2D and 3D concepts, architects were concerned with paths and spatial physical boundedness, and sculptors produced responses that fell between architects and painters. All three differed from controls, whose verbalizations were generally less elaborate and detailed. Thus, for the case of sculptors, architects, and painters, profession appears to relate to a different spatial conceptualization manifested through a systematically contrasting way of talking about space. (shrink)

The feminist philosopher and social scientist shows how "gendering" has affected the social and natural sciences as she reconciles the long-standing dichotomy between the quantitative and qualitative methods and demonstrates the tandem use of both experimental and intuitive approaches.

A fallibilist theory of knowledge is employed to make sense of the idea that agents know what they are doing 'without observation' (as on Anscombe's theory of practical knowledge).

WINNER BEST SOCIAL PHILOSOPHY BOOK IN 2021 / NASSP BOOK AWARD 2022 -/- Together we can often achieve things that are impossible to do on our own. We can prevent something bad from happening or we can produce something good, even if none of us could do it by herself. But when are we morally required to do something of moral importance together with others? This book develops an original theory of collective moral obligations. These are obligations that individual moral (...) agents hold jointly, but not as unified collective agents. To think of some of our obligations as joint or collective is the best way of making sense of our intuitions regarding collective moral action problems. Where we have reason to believe that our efforts are most efficient as part of a collective endeavor we may incur collective obligations together with others who are similarly placed as long as we are able to establish compossible individual contributory strategies towards that goal. The book concludes with a discussion of “massively shared obligations” to large-scale moral problems such as global poverty. (shrink)

The standard view of ignorance is that it consists in the mere lack of knowledge or true belief. Duncan Pritchard has recently argued, against the standard view, that ignorance is the lack of knowledge/true belief that is due to an improper inquiry. I shall call, Pritchard’s alternative account the Normative Account. The purpose of this article is to strengthen the Normative Account by providing an independent vargument supporting it.

Together we can achieve things that we could never do on our own. In fact, there are sheer endless opportunities for producing morally desirable outcomes together with others. Unsurprisingly, scholars have been finding the idea of collective moral obligations intriguing. Yet, there is little agreement among scholars on the nature of such obligations and on the extent to which their existence might force us to adjust existing theories of moral obligation. What interests me in this paper is the perspective of (...) the moral deliberating agent who faces a collective action problem, i.e. the type of reasoning she employs when deciding how to act. I hope to show that agents have collective obligations precisely when they are required to employ ‘we-reasoning’, a type of reasoning that differs from I-mode, best response reasoning, as I shall explain below. More precisely, two (or more) individual agents have a collective moral obligation to do x if x is an option for action that is only collectively available (more on that later) and each has sufficient reason to rank x highest out of the options available to them. (shrink)

Theories of perception have traditionally dismissed the sense of smell as a notoriously variable and highly subjective sense, mainly because it does not easily fit into accounts of perception based on visual experience. So far, philosophical questions about the objects of olfactory perception have started by considering the nature of olfactory experience. However, there is no philosophically neutral or agreed conception of olfactory experience: it all depends on what one thinks odors are. We examine the existing philosophical methodology for addressing (...) our sense of smell: on the one hand appeals to phenomenology that focus on the experiential dimensions of odor perception and on the other approaches that look at odor sources and their material dimensions. We show that neither strategy provides enough information to account for the human sense of smell and argue that the inclusion of the missing dimension of biology, with its concern for the function (or functions) of olfaction, provides the means to develop a satisfactory and empirically informed philosophy of smell. (shrink)

In international law, ‘humanitarian intervention’ refers to the use of military force by one nation or group of nations to stop genocide or other gross human rights violations in another sovereign nation. If humanitarian intervention is conceived as military in nature, it makes sense that only the most horrible, massive, and violent violations of human rights can justify intervention. Yet, that leaves many serious evils beyond the scope of legal intervention. In particular, violations of women's rights and freedoms often go (...) unchecked. To address this problem, I begin from two basic questions: When are violations of human rights sufficiently serious to require an international response of some sort? What should that response be? By re-orienting the aim and justification of international law to focus on individual autonomy rather than on peace between nations, I argue that women's rights violations other than genocide and mass rape can warrant intervention. Military intervention is often counter-productive to the aim of achieving autonomy, however. I suggest a range of responses to human rights violations that includes military intervention as one end of the spectrum, and combine this with a greater understanding of the scope of human rights violations that require international response. (shrink)

What is it that makes us as citizens liable for the actions – including the wrongdoings – of our state? Answering this question is part of the larger debate on the nature of complicity and collective action. When are we connected to joint endeavours and collective outcomes in a way that makes us (on some level) responsible for them? -/- Of particular interest within this debate is the normative relationship of citizens to their state. For instance, when states pay reparations (...) for past crimes the costs are – one way or another – borne by their citizens. In Responsible Citizens, Irresponsible States (OUP 2021), Avia Pasternak examines with admirable clarity and circumspection if states are justified in imposing the cost of their past wrongdoings on all of their citizens, including those who played no obvious part in those crimes. (shrink)

Humans are prone to producing morally suboptimal and even disastrous outcomes out of ignorance. Ignorance is generally thought to excuse agents from wrongdoing, but little attention has been paid to group-based ignorance as the reason for some of our collective failings. I distinguish between different types of first-order and higher order group-based ignorance and examine how these can variously lead to problematic inaction. I will make two suggestions regarding our epistemic obligations vis-a-vis collective (in)action problems: (1) that our epistemic obligations (...) concern not just our own knowledge and beliefs but those of others, too and (2) that our epistemic obligations can be held collectively where the epistemic tasks cannot be performed by individuals acting in isolation, for example, when we are required to produce joint epistemic goods. (shrink)

Cherche à mettre en évidence les principes théoriques qui peuvent être au fondement de toute recherche ou réflexion en sociologie de la musique.

Local opposition to infrastructure projects implementing renewable energy (RE) such as wind farms is often strong even if state-wide support for RE is strikingly high. The slogan “Not In My BackYard” (NIMBY) has become synonymous for this kind of protest. This paper revisits the question of what is wrong with NIMBYs about RE projects and how to best address them. I will argue that local opponents to wind farm (and other RE) developments do not necessarily fail to contribute their fair (...) share to producing a desirable public good (clean energy). In fact, with landscape concerns being at the heart of much protest, the question of fair burden distribution becomes sidelined: landscape impacts cannot be distributed nor compensated for. Protests may be attempts to express a true conflict of (incommensurable) values. Understanding them as such will help us better address NIMBY concerns and overcome such opposition through ensuring procedural justice. (shrink)

"Deleuze plonge la critique kantienne transcendantale dans le bain dissolvant d'un empirisme renouvelé. Ce livre se propose de restituer cette entreprise, et d'analyser l'étonnante création de ce concept, que Deleuze mène depuis ses premières monographies jusqu'à Différence et Répétition dans un dialogue fécond avec l'histoire de la philosophie. Par quelles opérations de distorsion et de collage, Deleuze compose-t-il l'empirisme de Hume, la théorie du signe comme force de Nietzsche, le virtuel et les multiplicités de Bergson, les modes de Spinoza, les (...) individualisations impersonnelles de Simondon pour renouveler la théorie kantienne du transcendantal? C'est tout l'objet de cette enquête, qui permet d'entrer dans le laboratoire du penseur, pour saisir la philosophie se faisant, mais qui permet également d'expliquer l'insistance du transcendantal dans toute son oeuvre"--P. [4] of cover. (shrink)

It is often argued that our obligations to address structural injustice are collective in character. But what exactly does it mean for ‘ordinary citizens’ to have collective obligations visà- vis large-scale injustice? In this paper, I propose to pay closer attention to the different kinds of collective action needed in addressing some of these structural injustices and the extent to which these are available to large, unorganised groups of people. I argue that large, dispersed and unorganised groups of people are (...) often in a position to perform distributive collective actions. As such, ordinary citizens can have massively shared obligations to address structural injustice through distributive action, but, ultimately, such obligations are ‘collective’ only in a fairly weak sense. (shrink)

In early China, was it correct for a woman to disobey her father, contradict her husband, or shape the public policy of a son who ruled over a dynasty or state? According to the _Lienü zhuan_, or_ Categorized Biographies of Women_, it was not only appropriate but necessary for women to step in with wise counsel when fathers, husbands, or rulers strayed from the path of virtue. Compiled toward the end of the Former Han dynasty (202 BCE-9 CE) by Liu (...) Xiang (79-8 BCE), the _Lienü zhuan_ is the earliest extant book in the Chinese tradition solely devoted to the education of women. Far from providing a unified vision of women's roles, the text promotes a diverse and sometimes contradictory range of practices. At one extreme are exemplars resorting to suicide and self-mutilation as a means to preserve chastity and ritual orthodoxy. At the other are bold and outspoken women whose rhetorical mastery helps correct erring rulers, sons, and husbands. The text provides a fascinating overview of the representation of women's roles in early legends, formal speeches on statecraft, and highly fictionalized historical accounts during this foundational period of Chinese history. Over time, the biographies of women became a regular feature of dynastic and local histories and a vehicle for expressing and transmitting concerns about women's social, political, and domestic roles. The _Lienü zhuan_ is also rich in information about the daily life, rituals, and domestic concerns of early China. Inspired by its accounts, artists across the millennia have depicted its stories on screens, paintings, lacquer ware, murals, and stone relief sculpture, extending its reach to literate and illiterate audiences alike. (shrink)

Three periods in the development of Whitehead's thought are generally recognized : ()-: The period of the writing of Universal Algebra, ...

Die vorliegende Schrift unternimmt eine Revision des vorherrschenden Bildes der Rolle und der Konzeptionen von Moral und Ethik im Wiener Kreis. Dieses Bild wird als zu einseitig und undifferenziert zurückgewiesen. Die Ansicht, die Mitglieder des Wiener Kreises hätten kein Interesse an Moral und Ethik gezeigt, wird widerlegt. Viele Mitglieder waren nicht nur moralisch und politisch interessiert, sondern auch engagiert. Des Weiteren vertraten nicht alle die Standardauffassung logisch-empiristischer Ethik, die neben der Anerkennung deskriptiv-empirischer Untersuchungen durch die Ablehnung jeglicher normativer und inhaltlicher (...) Ethik und der Verfechtung eines extremen Nonkognitivismus geprägt ist. Am meisten entspricht die Standardauffassung den Ansichten Rudolf Carnaps, weniger bereits jenen Karl Mengers, Otto Neuraths oder Philipp Franks. Am weitesten weichen Moritz Schlick, Victor Kraft sowie Herbert Feigl von der Standardauffassung ab. Entgegen dem herkömmlichen Bild weltabgewandter Logiker und Metaethiker wurde im Wiener Kreis sogar Angewandte Ethik betrieben, und dies bereits unter diesem Namen. Neben den ethischen Hauptthemen und Ansichten der jeweiligen Philosophen in ihrer Entwicklung im Rahmen ihres persönlichen und kulturellen Kontextes zeigt die Untersuchung, dass allen Ansätzen eine aufgeklärte und humanistische Version von Moral und Ethik gemeinsam ist. Dieser wissenschaftliche Humanismus, der sich schon in der Programmschrift Wissenschaftliche Weltauffassung. Der Wiener Kreis findet, liegt jedoch in verschiedenen Ausprägungen vor. Was die Abweichungen von der Standardauffassung wesentlich betrifft, ist ihre unterschiedliche Auffassung von Moral als gemeinsames oder individuelles Unternehmen. Carnap führt ein extremer Individualismus zu einem extremen Nonkognitivismus, in dem ihm Menger folgt. Bei Schlick ist die Lage zweideutig, was sich in unterschiedlichen Moralbegriffen widerspiegelt. Bei Kraft und Feigl tritt das Verständnis von Moral als gemeinschaftlich geteilte Praxisform klar hervor. Auf der Basis eines gemeinsamen Begriffs des moralisch Guten, der auch eine Sachkomponente enthält, ist eine Verständigung über moralische Fragen möglich. Von einem extremen Nonkognitivismus kann dort nicht mehr die Rede sein. Mit diesen Ergebnissen verbietet es sich, dem Wiener Kreis allgemein eine Ablehnung normativer Ethik und einen extremen Nonkognitivismus zuzuschreiben. Eine systematische Ethik, die Moral als Gemeinschaftspraxis begreift, steht einigen im Wiener Kreis näher, als das vorherrschende Bild suggerieren möge. Wer meint, mit engem Bezug zur Tradition des Wiener Kreises nur Carnap folgen zu können und Ethik als suspektes Unternehmen betrachten zu müssen, irrt. Ethik war in der Tradition Analytischer Philosophie nicht immer so marginalisiert, wie sie es in manchen ihrer Teilrichtungen heute noch ist und Gegner(innen) der Analytischen Philosophie vorwerfen. Die vorliegende Untersuchung liefert die nötige Revision einer verfänglichen Fehlentwicklung. (shrink)

The challenges facing us today require practical wisdom to allow us to react appropriately. In this paper, we argue that at a group level, we will make better decisions if we respect and take into account the moral judgment of agents with diverse styles of cognition and moral reasoning. We show this by focusing on the example of autism, highlighting different strengths and weaknesses of moral reasoning found in autistic and non-autistic persons respectively.

How should we make choices when we know so little about our futures? L. A. Paul argues that we must view life decisions as choices to make discoveries about the nature of experience. Her account of transformative experience holds that part of the value of living authentically is to experience our lives and preferences in whatever ways they evolve.

Many philosophers have defended the view that we are subject to the following evidential ought: “One ought to believe in accordance with one's evidence.” Although they agree on this, a more fundamental question keeps dividing them: from where does the evidential ought derive its normative force? The instrinsicalist answer to this question is sometimes described as the claim that "there is a brute epistemic value in believing in accordance with one's evidence" (Cowie, 2014, 4005). But what does this really mean? (...) Intrinsicalists' negative claim is that the normative source of the evidential ought has nothing to do with the fulfilment of our epistemic purposes. But what is their positive claim exactly? This paper aims at improving our understanding of intrinsicalism. Its conclusion is that there is only one possible way of being an intrinsicalist. Intrinsicalists need to be constitutivists. (shrink)

In this article, I will consider whether, and in what way, doxastic states can harm. I’ll first consider whether, and in what way, a person’s doxastic state can harm her, before turning to the question of whether, and in what way, it can harm someone else.

The book presents a new conceptual framework and a set of research principles with which to study and interpret technology from a phenomenological perspective.

I RELIGION AND POLITICS: THE LAW Islam, like Judaism and Christianity, believes in the divine origin of government. It follows, therefore, that political ...

Why do people read novels, go to the theater, or listen to beautiful music? Do we seek out aesthetic experiences simply because we enjoy them--or is there another, deeper, reason we spend our leisure time viewing or experiencing works of art? Aesthetics, the first short introduction to the contemporary philosophy of aesthetics, examines not just the nature of the aesthetic experience, but the definition of art, and its moral and intrinsic value in our lives. Anne Sheppard divides her work (...) into two parts: In the first, she summarizes the major theories defining art and beauty; in the second, she explores the nature of aesthetic evaluation and appreciation. As Sheppard explains, there are three main approaches to defining art, all focused on what art objects share. One proposes that all art imitates something in life, another that it expresses something (such as anger or ecstasy), still another suggests that all art has formal qualities. There is also a fourth which offers that all art shares the quality of beauty. In the second part, which concentrates on literary art, Sheppard explores such philosophic topics as critical judgment, meaning and truth in literature, and the relationship between art and morals. She raises such questions as whether there is one correct interpretation of a work of art and whether art has a moral effect on its audience and, citing specific examples, explores the views that have been put forth. A wide-ranging, intriguing book, which assumes no formal knowledge on the part of its readers, Aesthetics opens the door to a greater understanding and appreciation of art. (shrink)

This book explores the way in which, working within the investigative tradition associated with the Royal Society, the philosopher John Locke (1632-1704) used ...

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Wild LoveCynthia Willett’s Biosocial Eros EthicsAnn V. MurphyI’ll frame my comments in honor of Cynthia Willett’s work in light of two recent anecdotes:Anecdote I: It happened that one evening as I was reading Willett’s most recent monograph Interspecies Ethics—in particular the chapter on animals’ capacity for laughter and humor—my wonderful (if somewhat insubordinate) Airedale terrier, Nora Mae Murphy, heard me laughing, trotted into the living room, jumped on the (...) couch, looked at me with concern, stared down at the book in my hand, then placed her paw on my arm as if to check my pulse, eyes wide and ears slicked back. Nora is used to me reading philosophy at night; but she is not used to me laughing loudly while doing so. Clearly, she was curious. I smiled in recognition of what Nora’s behavior had enabled me to realize: I don’t often laugh when I read philosophy, not like I did that night while reading Willett’s work.Anecdote II: Cindy came out to New Mexico last spring to give the keynote address at our department’s annual graduate student conference. The afternoon she arrived, a few graduate students had arranged to take her on a hike in a nature preserve, a beautiful tract of land alongside the Rio Grande, which winds through Albuquerque. The next day, two of [End Page 50] the graduate students were in my office and I asked how the hike went. The students looked at each other, shuffled a bit, and stared at the floor until one announced, “Well, we kind of got locked in the preserve.” Me: “You got locked in the nature preserve?” “Yep, but it all worked out okay. She was cool with it,” one student reported. The other added: “Yeah, she’s pretty wild.”That conversation happened months before I was asked to speak on and to Willett’s work, but that conversation, that compliment, that word—“wild”—came to mind many times as I was preparing these comments in her honor. And I mean “wild” in the best sense: as rowdy and irreverent and joyful. There is a wildness to Willett’s texts in their performative aspect, one that marks them as singular. Bucking certain philosophical tendencies to overindulge a metaphorics of war and violence, Willett’s own work evinces an entirely different philosophical orientation, one that takes love, and more specifically eros, as its bedrock. The wildness of Willett’s ethical philosophy comes into play in the truly variable scenes in which Willett locates eros and its promise. It’s a wild kind of love that informs Willett’s ethics, one that refuses domestication, refuses to be hemmed in by the borders between species, refuses to be fixed. The scope that Willett assigns eros is broad, countering the tendency to reduce it to the sexualized and sentimental contexts in which it is often placed.1At the heart of Willett’s deliberations across her four monographs and many articles is an abiding concern with, and celebration of, eros as a site of social, political, and ethical promise. A preoccupation with eros is evident in her work from the very beginning. In her first monograph, Maternal Ethics and Other Slave Moralities (1995), Willett frames her project in reference to Audre Lorde’s claim (in Lorde’s essay “Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power”) that European American culture has perpetuated an understanding of power that parses the erotic from the spiritual and political and as a consequence has “suppressed the deepest source of power and knowledge in our lives” (Lorde 1984, 55, cited in Willett 1995, 7). This first book suggests new conceptions of freedom and ethical subjectivity based on social eroticism, a project furthered in her second monograph The Soul of Justice: Social Bonds and Racial Hubris (2001), where hubris is understood with and against the Greeks as an assault on this primary sociality. “In response to the Greeks we might say that the person is born, not of honor, but of love. Sociality, or social eros, and not honor is the origin and the goal of the person and the positive core of freedom... (shrink)