Many individual sentient wild animals are vulnerable to anthropogenic climate change. In this article, I suggest that animal ethicists who take sentient animals’ moral status seriously are likely to agree that, other things being equal, we have moral responsibilities to assist wild animals made vulnerable to climate change. However, I also argue that these ethicists are likely to diverge in terms of the strategies they believe would actually fulfil such moral responsibilities, depending on whether their primary concern is rectificatory justice (...) or duties of beneficence. To support this argument, I consider three plausible strategies for helping wild animals vulnerable to climate change: rescue and rehabilitation, habitat restoration, and assisted migration. I argue that different theoretical approaches to animal ethics are likely to diverge on aspects of all these strategies. These differences mean that the process of creating wide agreement among animal ethicists on climate adaptation strategies to assist vulnerable wild animals faces significant hurdles. (shrink)

In his paper The Opposite of Human Enhancement: Nanotechnology and the Blind Chicken problem (Nanoethics 2:305–316, 2008) Paul Thompson argues that the possibility of disenhancing animals in order to improve animal welfare poses a philosophical conundrum. Although many people intuitively think such disenhancement would be morally impermissible, it’s difficult to find good arguments to support such intuitions. In this brief response to Thompson, I accept that there’s a conundrum here. But I argue that if we seriously consider whether creating beings (...) can harm or benefit them, and introduce the non-identity problem to discussions of animal disehancement, the conundrum is even deeper than Thompson suggests. (shrink)

This book represents emerging alternative perspectives to the "constructivist" orthodoxy that currently dominates the field of science and technology studies. Various contributions from distinguished Americans and Europeans in the field, provide arguments and evidence that it is not enough simply to say that science is "socially situated." Controversial Science focuses on important political, ethical, and broadly normative considerations that have yet to be given their due, but which point to a more realistic and critical perspective on science policy.

It is widely agreed that because animals feel pain we should not make them suffer gratuitously. Some ethical theories go even further: because of the capacities that they possess, animals have the right not to be harmed or killed. These views concern what not to do to animals, but we also face questions about when we should, and should not, assist animals that are hungry or distressed. Should we feed a starving stray kitten? And if so, does this commit us, (...) if we are to be consistent, to feeding wild animals during a hard winter? In this controversial book, Clare Palmer advances a theory that claims, with respect to assisting animals, that what is owed to one is not necessarily owed to all, even if animals share similar psychological capacities. Context, history, and relation can be critical ethical factors. If animals live independently in the wild, their fate is not any of our moral business. Yet if humans create dependent animals, or destroy their habitats, we may have a responsibility to assist them. Such arguments are familiar in human cases-we think that parents have special obligations to their children, for example, or that some groups owe reparations to others. Palmer develops such relational concerns in the context of wild animals, domesticated animals, and urban scavengers, arguing that different contexts can create different moral relationships. (shrink)

'Philosophy in a world of women. I reflected, talking with Mary, Pip and Elizabeth, how much I love them.' Two brilliant young scholars uncover the major philosophical contributions of four women whose ideas could have changed the course of twentieth-century thought. Written with energy, expertise and panache, The Quartet is a page-turning blend of research and recovery, storytelling, and a call to arms. Iris Murdoch, Philippa Foot, Mary Midgley and Elizabeth Anscombe were great friends and comrades in the intellectual trenches, (...) rethinking the possibilities of moral philosophy when the men 'left the room' and taking on the establishment, ultimately embodied by President Truman. Mac Cumhaill and Wiseman bring these women out of the shadows and into vivid colour. (shrink)

Real Language Series General Editors:Jennifer Coates, Jenny Cheshire, Euan Reid This is a sociolinguistics series about the relationships between language, society and social change. Books in the series draw on natural language data from a wide range of social contexts. The series takes a critical approach to the subject, challenging current orthodoxies, and dealing with familiar topics in new ways. Gender and Discourse offers a critical new approach to the study of language and gender studies. Women moving into the public (...) domains of power traditionally monopolised by men are creating new identities for themselves, and the language that is used by them and about them offers an insight into gender roles. Clare Walsh reviews the current dominance/difference debates, and proposes a new analytical framework which combines the insights of critical discourse and feminist perspectives on discourse to provide a new perspective on the role of women in public life. A superbly accessible book designed for students and researchers in the field, the book features: - topical case studies from the arenas of politics, religion and activism- a new analytical framework, also summarised in chart form so the reader can apply their own critical analyses of texts. - written and visual text types for the reader's own linguistic and semiotic analysis. 'This important book takes up a neglected question in the study of language and gender - what difference women make to the discourse of historically male-dominated institutions - and brings to bear on it both the insights of feminist scholarship and evidence from women's own testimony. Clare Walsh's analysis of the dilemmas women face is both subtle and incisive, taking us beyond popular 'Mars and Venus' stereotypes and posing some hard questions for fashionable theories of language, identity and performance. (shrink)

We can learn much about perceptual experience by thinking about how it can mislead us. In this paper, I explore whether, and how, olfactory experience can mislead. I argue that, in the case of olfactory experience, the traditional distinction between illusion and hallucination does not apply. Integral to the traditional distinction is a notion of ‘object-failure’—the failure of an experience to present objects accurately. I argue that there are no such presented objects in olfactory experience. As a result, olfactory experience (...) can only mislead by means of a kind of property hallucination. The implications of my arguments are twofold. First, we see that accounts of representational content cannot always be based on the visual model. And, secondly, we see that we must recast the notion of nonveridicality, allowing for a notion of non-veridical experience that is disengaged from any particular object. (shrink)

Progress -- Loss -- Return -- Amenability -- Citation tactics -- Affective subjects.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Did Jesus Rise from the Dead? Historical and Theological Reflections by Matthew LeveringBrant PitreDid Jesus Rise from the Dead? Historical and Theological Reflections by Matthew Levering (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019), 272 pp.In his book Did Jesus Rise from the Dead? Historical and Theological Reflections, Matthew Levering writes "to make the case" that there is "good reason" to believe in the bodily resurrection of Jesus (1). In this (...) self-described work of "theological apologetics" (211), Levering argues from a threefold foundation for the credibility of Jesus's resurrection: (1) "the New Testament evidence," considered from the perspective of historical investigation; (2) the "sheer strangeness" of the apostolic claim that [End Page 1347] Jesus was "resurrected" and not just resuscitated or exalted into heaven as an immortal soul; (3) and the intrinsic credibility of the "supreme love" revealed through his death and resurrection (2–4). As this threefold foundation makes clear, Levering draws together both "historical and theological reasons for believing that Jesus' Resurrection happened" (4).In chapter 1, Levering contends that, while "faith does not stand or fall upon the results of historical research, those who insist that the truth of Jesus' Resurrection has nothing to do with the domain of historical investigation are mistaken" (30). To this end, he offers a survey of three figures: (1) the Belgian Dominican theologian Edward Schillebeeckx; (2) the American Protestant biblical scholar Dale C. Allison Jr.; and (3) the Anglican bishop and biblical theologian N. T. Wright. Levering exposes the serious flaws of contemporary attempts to reduce the resurrection claims of early Christians to hallucinations or visions of someone who has recently died. In particular, Levering finds compelling Wright's argument that the bodily resurrection of Jesus provides "the best historical explanation" of the early Christian claim that what first-century Jews expected to happen to everyone at the end of time had in fact happened to only one person—Jesus of Nazareth—in the middle of time. From a strictly historical point of view, claims that the disciples were merely moved by grace to a new experience Jesus being "alive" or that they simply experienced hallucinatory visions of Jesus after his death fail to explain the "radical change of eschatology" that took place in the early Church (56).In chapter 2, Levering explores the question of whether "the Church's mediation is truly effective in enabling us to share in the apostolic communion with the risen Jesus" (63). He first offers a sympathetic overview of the Protestant biblical scholar Richard Bauckham's book Jesus and the Eyewitnesses (2003; 2nd ed., 2017), in which he claims that the Gospels rest largely on "eyewitness testimony" (87–88). According to Levering, Bauckham's historical arguments show that "the ongoing presence of eyewitnesses provides a reason for not being skeptical about the major events of Jesus' life as reported by the Gospels, including his Resurrection" (89). At the same time, Levering insists that eyewitness memory is only one "mode of historical remembrance" utilized by the Church; in addition, Jesus also "willed that the historical remembrance of his Resurrection be an ecclesial reality" (90)—that is, a liturgical act of "remembrance" that takes place above all in the Eucharistic liturgy.In chapter 3, Levering aims to shed light on "the role of the Old Testament in aiding the discernment of the historical credibility of Jesus's Resurrection" (91). This chapter presents a stark contrast to contemporary [End Page 1348] studies of the resurrection that begin (and end) with the New Testament data. In it, Levering surveys the work of three contemporary scholars—Dale Allison, N. T. Wright, and the Jewish scholar Jon Levenson—and puts them in conversation with Thomas Aquinas's thirteenth-century commentary on the account of Jesus's resurrection in John 20–21. As this chapter amply demonstrates, it is "precisely in the scriptural history that the Creator God has guided, that we come to know that given such a God and such a history, Jesus' Resurrection is believable" (112). According to Levering, "the entire Old Testament" (113) is a necessary prolegomenon for understanding what it even means to say that Jesus has been raised in the first... (shrink)

On receiver-based teleosemantic theories of representation, the chemical states of the circadian clocks in animal, plant and cyanobacterial cells constitute signals of future states of affairs, often the rising and setting of the sun. This signalling is much more rigid than sophisticated representational systems like human language, but it is not simple on all dimensions. In most organisms the clock regulates many different circadian rhythms. The process of entrainment ensures that the mapping between chemical states of the clock and the (...) daily light-dark cycle is adjusted to deal with seasonal changes. In regulating anticipatory behaviour, the states of the clock look forward both to the time the behaviour is supposed to happen and the later time when the anticipated circumstances are supposed to arise. The case of the circadian clock shows that purely indicative signals can arise in very basic biological systems and brings into sharp relief the trade-offs involved in characterizing representational systems. On receiver-based teleosemantic theories, future-directed signals are not restricted to complex multicellular organisms but are ubiquitous in the biological world. (shrink)

Much of the philosophical work on perception has focused on vision. Recently, however, philosophers have begun to correct this ‘tunnel vision’ by considering other modalities. Nevertheless, relatively little has been written about the chemical senses—olfaction and gustation. The focus of this paper is olfaction. In light of new physiological and psychophysical research on olfaction, I consider whether olfactory experience is object-based. In particular, I explore the claim that “odor objects” constitute sensory individuals. It isn’t obvious—at least at the outset—whether they (...) meet the widely accepted principles of object individuation and recognition at work in the visual and auditory cases. Among the general issues I consider, then, is whether these traditional principles form necessary, or simply sufficient, conditions on object perception. As we see, at the very least, considering the object-recognition model of olfaction challenges us to look more closely at well-entrenched models of object perception. But the payoff of doing so is high. We not only learn something about a modality that philosophers have historically neglected; by asking new questions and challenging old assumptions, we also further our understanding of perception in general. (shrink)

It’s widely agreed that animal pain matters morally – that we shouldn’t, for instance, starve our animal companions, and that we should provide medical care to sick or injured agricultural animals, and not only because it benefits us to do so. But do we have the same moral responsibilities towards wild animals? Should we feed them if they are starving, and intervene to prevent them from undergoing other forms of suffering, for instance from predation? Using an example that includes both (...) wild and domesticated animals, I outline two contrasting ways of thinking about our moral responsibilities with respect to assisting animals that are apparently in need. One approach is based entirely around animals’ capacities; the other takes context and historical relations into account as well. While not attempting to adjudicate between these views, I’ll point out the advantages and difficulties of both. (shrink)

For a Better Worldliness is not only a statement of Abraham Kuyper's and Dietrich Bonhoeffer's theological concept and historical practice of discipleship. It is also--and perhaps more importantly--a call to engage in the fullness of the Christian life here and now. While this book goes to great efforts to establish sound historical and theological insights specifically in regards to Kuyper and Bonhoeffer, there is a strong underlying current that these particular insights deeply matter to the life of discipleship in the (...) world today. History shows us that discipleship is not a singular journey; because of Jesus Christ it is not a description of one set path with one set of guidelines. A disciple can be a prime minister who unabashedly and successfully campaigned on his Calvinistic principles, just as he can be a participant in a coup d'état launched against a tyrant, leading to the disciple's own imprisonment and death. Jesus Christ calls--whether to the height of political office, or to the dank prison cell, or (more likely for us) to somewhere in between. - Back cover. (shrink)

This paper considers what olfactory experience can tell us about the controversy over qualia and, in particular, the debate that focuses on the alleged transparency of experience. The appeal to transparency is supposed to show that there are no qualia—intrinsic, non-intentional and directly accessible properties of experience that determine phenomenal character. It is most commonly used to motivate intentionalism—namely, the view that the phenomenal character of an experience is exhausted by its representational content. Although some philosophers claim that transparency holds (...) for all of the sense modalities, any detailed discussion of it focuses on vision. But transparency seems unintuitive for olfactory experience. This paper argues that olfactory experience is indeed transparent and that explanations of what transparency is have been obscured by a reliance on the visual model. In this way, the paper clarifies and advances the debate about transparency. (shrink)

Legal decision-support systems have the potential to improve access to justice, administrative efficiency, and judicial consistency, but broad adoption of such systems is contingent on development of technologies with low knowledge-engineering, validation, and maintenance costs. This paper describes two approaches to an important form of legal decision support—explainable outcome prediction—that obviate both annotation of an entire decision corpus and manual processing of new cases. The first approach, which uses an attention network for prediction and attention weights to highlight salient case (...) text, was shown to be capable of predicting decisions, but attention-weight-based text highlighting did not demonstrably improve human decision speed or accuracy in an evaluation with 61 human subjects. The second approach, termed semi-supervised case annotation for legal explanations, exploits structural and semantic regularities in case corpora to identify textual patterns that have both predictable relationships to case decisions and explanatory value. (shrink)

For Aristotle, excellence is not an act but a habit, and Hume regards habit as ‘the great guide of life’. However, for Proust habit is problematic: ‘if habit is a second nature, it prevents us from knowing our first.’ What is habit? Do habits turn us into machines or free us to do more creative things? Should religious faith be habitual? Does habit help or hinder the practice of philosophy? Why do Luther, Spinoza, Kant, Kierkegaard and Bergson all criticise habit? (...) If habit is both a blessing and a curse, how can we live well in our habits? In this thought-provoking book Clare Carlisle examines habit from a philosophical standpoint. Beginning with a lucid appraisal of habit’s philosophical history she suggests that both receptivity and resistance to change are basic principles of habit-formation. Carlisle shows how the philosophy of habit not only anticipates the discoveries of recent neuroscience but illuminates their ethical significance. She asks whether habit is a reliable form of knowledge by examining the contrasting interpretations of habitual thinking offered by Spinoza and Hume. She then turns to the role of habit in the good life, tracing Aristotle’s legacy through the ideas of Joseph Butler, Hegel, and Félix Ravaisson, and assessing the ambivalent attitudes to habit expressed by Nietzsche and Proust. She argues that a distinction between habit and practice helps to clarify this ambivalence, particularly in the context of habit and religion, where she examines both the theology of habit and the repetitions of religious life. She concludes by considering how philosophy itself is a practice of learning to live well with habit. (shrink)

Contract cheating, or plagiarism via paid ghostwriting, is a significant academic ethical issue, especially as reliable methods for its prevention and detection in students’ assignments remain elusive. Contract cheating in academic assessment has been the subject of much recent debate and concern. Although some scandals have attracted substantial media attention, little is known about the likely prevalence of contract cheating by students for their university assignments. Although rates of contract cheating tend to be low, criminological theories suggest that people who (...) employ ghostwriters for their assignments are likely to re-offend, and little is known about re-offence rates in this form of academic misconduct. We combined previously-collected datasets and conducted additional, and previously-unreported, analyses on self-report measures of contract cheating prevalence. We found that few students, on aggregate, ever engaged in contract cheating but this varied substantially among samples. Of those who ever engaged in contract cheating, 62.5% did so more than once. The data also suggested that engagement in contract cheating is influenced by opportunity. These figures may help policy makers, and researchers who are creating contract cheating detection methods, to estimate base rates of contract cheating and the likelihood of re-offence. (shrink)

In this paper, we provide an overview of how the outcomes of the Uruguay Round affected the application of pharmaceutical intellectual property rights globally. Second, we explain how specific pharmaceutical policy tools can help developing states mitigate the worst effects of the TRIPS Agreement. Third, we put forward solutions that could be implemented by the World Bank to help overcome the divide between creating private incentives for research and development of innovative medicines and ensuring access of the poor to medicine. (...) Fourth, we evaluate these solutions on the basis of utilitarian considerations and urge that equitable pricing is morally preferable to the other solutions. (shrink)

In this paper, I consider whether we should offer assistance to both wild and domesticated animals when they are suffering. I argue that we may have different obligations to assist wild and domesticated animals because they have different morally-relevant relationships with us. I explain how different approaches to animal ethics, which, for simplicity, I call capacity-oriented and context-oriented, address questions about animal assistance differently. I then defend a broadly context-oriented approach, on which we have special obligations to assist animals that (...) we have made vulnerable to or dependent on us. This means that we should normally help suffering domesticated animals, but that we lack general obligations to assist wild animals, since we are not responsible for their vulnerability. However, we may have special obligations to help wild animals where we have made them vulnerable to or dependent on us. I consider some obvious difficulties with this context-oriented approach, and I conclude by looking more closely at the question whether we should intervene, if we could do so successfully, to reduce wild animal suffering by reducing predation. (shrink)

Companion Animal Ethics explores the important ethical questions and problems that arise as a result of humans keeping animals as companions. The first comprehensive book dedicated to ethical and welfare concerns surrounding companion animals Scholarly but still written in an accessible and engaging style Considers the idea of animal companionship and why it should matter ethically Explores problems associated with animals sharing human lifestyles and homes, such as obesity, behavior issues, selective breeding, over-treatment, abandonment, euthanasia and environmental impacts Offers insights (...) into practical ways of improving ethical standards relating to animal companions. (shrink)

This metaphysical and personal exploration of the nature of life provides a rare guide to living and dying fearlessly and with grace. Using the wisdom obtained over a lifetime of spiritual seeking, study, and practice, along with insights gained from the death of her significant other, Clare Goldsberry explores the fundamental nature of life and death, as well as their meaning and purpose. Sharing the wisdom and knowledge of the ancient sages, spiritual teachers like the Buddha, philosophers like Plato (...) and Seneca, and modern-day quantum physicists, Goldsberry walks us through the mystery of death and dying-and explores the meaning and purpose of life. Drawing from Buddhism, Hinduism, and her partner's cancer journey, she provides a profound view of living and dying as seen through the ages by those who have sought answers regarding the most mysterious aspect of life-this thing we call death. Clare Goldsberry has experienced Protestant Christianity, Mormonism, the Ageless Wisdom Teachings, Gnosticism, Hinduism, and Buddhism. She writes about religion and spiritual traditions for Quest magazine and other publications, and her book A Stranger in Zion: A Christian's Journey through the Heart of Utah Mormonism won the Arizona Book Publishers Association's Glyph Award for Best Religion Book in 2003. Goldsberry has also published six books on marketing and sales strategies for small- to mid-sized manufacturing companies, and she founded her own marketing and public relations business in 1989. She lives and works in Arizona. (shrink)

This study investigated whether temporal clustering of autobiographical memories around periods of self-development would also occur when imagining future events associated with the self. Participants completed an AM task and future thinking task. In both tasks, memories and future events were cued using participant-generated identity statements . Participants then dated their memories and future events, and finally gave an age at which each identity statement was judged to emerge. Dates of memories and future events were recoded as temporal distance from (...) the identity statement used to cue them. AMs and future events both clustered robustly around periods of self-development, indicating the powerful organisational effect of the self. We suggest that life narrative structures are used to organise future events as well as memories. (shrink)

Much of the philosophical work on perception has focused on vision, with very little discussion of the chemical senses—olfaction and gustation. In this paper, I consider the challenge that olfactory experience presents to upholding a representational view of the sense modalities. Given the phenomenology of olfactory experience, it is difficult to see what a representational view of it would be like. Olfaction, then, presents an important challenge for representational theories to overcome. In this paper, I take on this challenge and (...) argue for a representational account of olfactory experience that honors its phenomenology. (shrink)

Though far from new, the rhetoric of transparency is on the ascent in public and political life. It is cited as the answer to a vast array of social, political, financial and corporate problems. With the backing of a ‘movement’, transparency has assumed the position of an unassailable ‘good’. This article asks whether the value ascribed to transparency limits political thinking, particularly for the radical and socialist Left. What forms of politics, ethics, of being-in-common, might it be possible to think (...) if we pay attention to secrecy rather than transparency? (shrink)

George Berkeley is known as “The Good Bishop,” a name celebrating his faith, pastoral ministry and earnest commitment to his philosophical views. To mathematicians, he is known for his agitated performance in his 1734 critique of fluxions, The Analyst. That work and its petulant tone were occasioned by (i) his “philo-mathematical” opponents’ alleged admonitions on religious mysteries’ lack of logical respectability and (ii) what Berkeley saw as a related public appetite for reformist and deist religious movements. This paper questions Berkeley’s (...) saintly reputation by outlining the hostility and flippancy in his handling of Jacob Walton’s contributions to the debate. Berkeley’s interactions with Walton bear many of the hallmarks of contemporary “trolling” culture and this paper emphasises and explains these parallels. Finally, given Berkeley’s theological and political agenda in his mathematical interactions, I argue that we should not read his mathematical rhetoric as straightforwardly representing his philosophical views. (shrink)

Contract cheating is a major problem in Higher Education because it is very difficult to detect using traditional plagiarism detection tools. Digital forensics techniques are already used in law to determine ownership of documents, and also in criminal cases, where it is not uncommon to hide information and images within an ordinary looking document using steganography techniques. These digital forensic techniques were used to investigate a known case of contract cheating where the contract author has notified the university and the (...) student subsequently confirmed that they had contracted the work out. Microsoft Word documents use a format known as Office Open XML Format, and as such, it is possible to review the editing process of a document. A student submission known to have been contracted out was analysed using the revision identifiers within the document, and a tool was developed to review these identifiers. Using visualisation techniques it is possible to see a pattern of editing that is inconsistent with the pattern seen in an authentic document. (shrink)

Much of the philosophical work on perception has focused on vision. Recently, however, philosophers have begun to correct this ‘tunnel vision’ by considering other modalities. Nevertheless, relatively little has been written about the chemical senses—olfaction and gustation. The focus of this paper is olfaction. In this paper, I consider the question: does human olfactory experience represents objects as thus and so? If we take visual experience as the paradigm of how experience can achieve object representation, we might think that the (...) answer to this question is no. I argue that olfactory experience does indeed represent objects—just not in a way that is easily read from the dominant visual case. (shrink)

This article attempts to question modes of sharing and watching to rethink political subjectivity beyond that which is enabled and enforced by the current data regime. It identifies and examines a ‘shareveillant’ subjectivity: a form configured by the sharing and watching that subjects have to withstand and enact in the contemporary data assemblage. Looking at government open and closed data as case studies, this article demonstrates how ‘shareveillance’ produces an anti-political role for the public. In describing shareveillance as, after Jacques (...) Rancière, a distribution of the sensible, this article posits a politico-ethical injunction to cut into the share and flow of data in order to arrange a more enabling assemblage of data and its affects. In order to interrupt shareveillance, this article borrows a concept from Édouard Glissant and his concern with raced otherness to imagine what a ‘right to opacity’ might mean in the digital context. To assert this right is not to endorse the individual subject in her sovereignty and solitude, but rather to imagine a collective political subjectivity and relationality according to the important question of what it means to ‘share well’ beyond the veillant expectations of the state. (shrink)

I explore how some aspects of Foucoult’s work on power can be applied to human/animal power relations. First, I argue that because animals behave as “beings that react” and can respond in different ways to human actions, in principle at least, Foucoult’s work can offer insights into human/animal power relations. However, many of these relations fall into the category of “domination,” in which animals are unable to respond. Second, I examine different kinds of human power practices, in particular, ways in (...) which humans construct animal constitutions and animal subjectivities. Finally, I use a case study of a pet cat to show how such power practices may come together in a single instance. (shrink)

In a recent unit of study in an undergraduate Health Sciences pathway course, we identified a set of essays which exhibited similarity of content but demonstrated the use of bizarre and unidiomatic language. One of the distinct features of the essays was the inclusion of unusual synonyms in place of expected standard medical terminology.We suspected the use of online paraphrasing tools, but were also interested in investigating the possibility of the use of online language translation tools. In order to test (...) the outputs of these tools, we used as a seed document a corpus of text which had been provided to the students as prompt for the essay. This document was put through six free online paraphrasing tools and six separate iterative language translations through the online Google Translate™ tool.The results demonstrated that free online paraphrasing tools did not identify medical terminology as standardised or accepted nomenclature and substituted synonyms, whereas Google Translate™ largely preserved medical terminology.We believe that textual indicators such as the absence of standard discipline-based terminology may be of assistance in the identification of machine paraphrased text. (shrink)

How do people understand questions about cause and prevent? Some theories propose that people affirm that A causes B if A's occurrence makes a difference to B's occurrence in one way or another. Other theories propose that A causes B if some quantity or symbol gets passed in some way from A to B. The aim of our studies is to compare these theories' ability to explain judgements of causation and prevention. We describe six experiments that compare judgements for causal (...) paths that involve a mechanism, i.e. a continuous process of transmission or exchange from cause to effect, against paths that involve no mechanism yet a change in the cause nevertheless brings about a change in the effect. Our results show that people prefer to attribute cause when a mechanism links cause to effect. In contrast, prevention is sensitive both to the presence of an interruption to a causal mechanism and to a change in the outcome in the absence of a mechanism. In this sense, ‘prevent’ means something different than ‘cause not'. We discuss the implications of our results for existing theories of causation. (shrink)

This article argues that although post-truth is understood to pose a particular misogynistic threat to feminism, we cannot assume that feminists should simply oppose post-truth. The way the post-truth debate is constructed is problematic for feminism in three ways: it misconceives the relationship between democracy and truth; utilizes a questionable binary between reason and emotion; and propagates elitist assumptions about protecting democracy from the people. Recognizing the insufficiency of our understanding of post-truth, feminists have called for greater understanding of the (...) roles of language, affect and truth in the post-truth debate. In response, I suggest that the theories of Judith Butler and Bonnie Honig can help. However, I seek to emphasise that if feminists are to intervene meaningfully in the inequalities and intensified affective flows that structure the post-truth paradigm they would benefit from a deintensifying, confrontational but nonaggressive, approach. (shrink)

Logic-based approaches to legal problem solving model the rule-governed nature of legal argumentation, justification, and other legal discourse but suffer from two key obstacles: the absence of efficient, scalable techniques for creating authoritative representations of legal texts as logical expressions; and the difficulty of evaluating legal terms and concepts in terms of the language of ordinary discourse. Data-centric techniques can be used to finesse the challenges of formalizing legal rules and matching legal predicates with the language of ordinary parlance by (...) exploiting knowledge latent in legal corpora. However, these techniques typically are opaque and unable to support the rule-governed discourse needed for persuasive argumentation and justification. This paper distinguishes representative legal tasks to which each approach appears to be particularly well suited and proposes a hybrid model that exploits the complementarity of each. (shrink)

Seattle rain smelled different from New Orleans rain…. New Orleans rain smelled of sulfur and hibiscus, trumpet metal, thunder, and sweat. Seattle rain, the widespread rain of the Great Northwest, smelled of green ice and sumi ink, of geology and silence and minnow breath.— Tom Robbins, Jitterbug PerfumeMuch of the philosophical literature on perception has focused on vision. This is not surprising, given that vision holds for us a certain prestige. Our visual experience is incredibly rich, offering up a mosaic (...) of apparent three-dimensional objects. For this reason, it is commonplace to suppose that visual experience is world-directed, with the view taking its most popular form in the representational, or content, view. World-directed views contrast with what we might call subjectivist views — views according to which experiences are raw feels or mere sensations. (shrink)

Climate change confronts humanity with a challenge it has never faced before. It combines issues of global justice and intergenerational justice on an unprecedented scale. In particular, it stands to adversely affect the global poor. So far, the global community has failed to reduce emissions to levels that are necessary to avoid unacceptable risks for the future. Nor are the burdens of emission reductions and of coping with climate impacts fairly shared. The shortcomings of both political and individual climate action (...) thus seem like a paradigmatic case for non-ideal theory. Non-ideal theory can be understood as a form of political theorising that compares different responses to (i) failures of agents to comply with the demands of justice and (ii) unfavourable circumstances. Insofar as non-ideal theory also aims to be action-guiding, it asks normative theorists for a more thorough engagement with the empirical context so as to arrive at practical recommendations for the ‘here and now’. This volume examines the normative issues that become relevant when the non-ideal circumstances of the climate context are fully taken into account. It is comprised of three parts: The first collects chapters that reflect on general issues in responding to the shortcomings of current climate action. Chapters in the second part propose more specific practical reforms. The third part examines how moral values ought to be brought into the scientific, political, and public debates under the non-ideal circumstances of this world. (shrink)

The article addresses the pervasive global challenge of delayed justice, emphasizing its role as a catalyst for widespread judicial reforms. The study defines international and national court approaches to reasonable trial durations by employing systematic and comparative legal methods. It delves into essential technology courts and parties use to ensure timely proceedings, categorizing associated risks and problems. The authors advocate for the multi-door courthouse system, illustrating its efficacy in reducing delays. Furthermore, the article classifies technologies facilitating reasonable trial durations, acknowledging (...) and offering solutions for the challenges they present. This research contributes to the dynamic landscape of judicial reform, offering a holistic perspective on the multifaceted aspects of timely justice. (shrink)