As the first full-length book dedicated to the philosophical legacy of Hans Jonas, The Integrity of Thinking is largely dedicated to summarizing and integrating the diverse phases in Jonas’ lifework. But the book has another, more ambitious goal. David Levy attempts to demonstrate that Hans Jonas is, for matters of public policy, nothing less than the most important philosopher of the twentieth century. This alleged importance stems from his unique philosophical achievements and their manifold practical applications. According to Levy, Jonas’ (...) massive future importance will not be constrained to philosophy. Levy makes a series of admittedly “bold claims” regarding Jonas’ significance, culminating in the claim that he is “perhaps the pre-eminent practical thinker of our time”. This is excessive praise for a thinker who is still a relatively minor figure in twentieth-century philosophy, and who is still somewhat unknown by non-specialists outside his native Germany. Yet Levy hopes that the heightened public awareness of tensions between technology and ethics will create an audience for the thinker who has most successfully probed the origins of those tensions. Levy wishes to disseminate Jonas’ practical importance to a wider audience. But does Jonas merit these excessive claims, and therefore a wider audience? (shrink)

As the first full-length book dedicated to the philosophical legacy of Hans Jonas, The Integrity of Thinking is largely dedicated to summarizing and integrating the diverse phases in Jonas’ lifework. But the book has another, more ambitious goal. David Levy attempts to demonstrate that Hans Jonas is, for matters of public policy, nothing less than the most important philosopher of the twentieth century. This alleged importance stems from his unique philosophical achievements and their manifold practical applications. According to Levy, Jonas’ (...) massive future importance will not be constrained to philosophy. Levy makes a series of admittedly “bold claims” regarding Jonas’ significance, culminating in the claim that he is “perhaps the pre-eminent practical thinker of our time”. This is excessive praise for a thinker who is still a relatively minor figure in twentieth-century philosophy, and who is still somewhat unknown by non-specialists outside his native Germany. Yet Levy hopes that the heightened public awareness of tensions between technology and ethics will create an audience for the thinker who has most successfully probed the origins of those tensions. Levy wishes to disseminate Jonas’ practical importance to a wider audience. But does Jonas merit these excessive claims, and therefore a wider audience? (shrink)

I open my eyes and see that the lemon before me is yellow. States like this—states of seeing that $p$ —appear to be visual perceptual states, in some sense. They also appear to be propositional attitudes (and so states with propositional representational contents). It might seem, then, like a view of perceptual experience on which experiences have propositional representational contents—a Propositional View—has to be the correct sort of view for states of seeing that $p$ . And thus we can’t sustain (...) fully general non-Propositional but Representational, or Relational Views of experience. But despite what we might initially be inclined to think when reflecting upon the apparent features of states of seeing that $p$ , a non-propositional view of seeing that $p$ is, I argue, perfectly intelligible. (shrink)

In recent years restitution scholars have expended considerable energy in attempting to reveal the logical structure of the law of proprietary remedies. That project advances on the assumption that the strange rhetoric that pervades this area of law can be stripped away to reveal restitutionary principles. However, the doctrines in question have proved resistant to such endeavors. An appreciation of why this is so requires recognition of the very real anxiety generated by the judicial readjustment of property rights that takes (...) place in this area of law. The use of metaphors, fictions and evidential presumptions that characterizes the law tracing, subrogation and the provision of proprietary relief for wrongs serves to assuage this anxiety by manufacturing the appearance that these remedies are perfectly conventional instances of the enforcement of pre-existing property or consensual transfers of property. However, these property rites have a logic of their own - a logic that influences and constrains the development of the law of proprietary remedies and makes it impossible to neatly reduce this field to a set of restitutionary principles. This is illustrated by the work of Professor Peter Birks, which represents the most comprehensive attempt to cut away the abstruse rhetoric found in this area and reveal the restitutionary substructure of the law of proprietary remedies and makes it impossible to neatly reduce this field to a set of restitutionary principles. This is illustrated by the work of Professor Peter Birks, which represents the most comprehensive attempt to cut away the substructure of the law of proprietary remedies. In Birks' work this process has merely resulted in old metaphors being replaced with new ones. Ultimately, we must accept that if re are to rationalize this area we must be prepared to engage directly with the policy issues that arise in this context. (shrink)

A promising argument for divine timelessness is that temporal life is possessed only moment by moment, which is incompatible with the existence of a perfect being.Since the argument is based on the experience of time’s passage, it cannot be circumvented by appeal to a tenseless theory of time.Neither can the argument be subverted by appeals to a temporal deity’s possession of a specious present of infinite duration.Nonetheless, because the argument concerns one’s experience of time’s passage rather than the objective (...) reality of temporal becoming itself, it is considerably weakened by the fact that an omniscient being possessing perfect memory and foreknowledge, need not find such experience to be an imperfection. (shrink)

Tips, techniques, and inspiration for creating perfect poses Effectively posing the human body is a challenge for nearlyevery photographer, from amateur to professional. Understanding howa model's pose, body language, and posture affect a photograph iscrucial to success. Author and professional fashion photographerCraig Stidham shows you how to guide a subject's personalitythrough body language, with hundreds of examples andsuggestions. Answers critical questions such as: how can a photographeravoid having the subject look awkward? How does one direct bothexperienced and inexperienced models? (...) Shares helpful posing tips and techniques for posing models innew modern and fashion-forward ways Suggests ways to make strategic edits in post-production to fixcommon posing mistakes Offers hundreds of examples of strong and stunning posing Dynamic Posing Guide teaches you the skills you need toidentify strong modern posing techniques as you strengthen yourphotographic skills. (shrink)

"Cover"--"Dedication"--"Title" -- "Copyright" -- "Contents" -- "Acknowledgements" -- "1 Introduction: Dimensions of Fairness" -- "The Material and Formal Dimension of Concepts" -- "Two Concepts of Fairness" -- "Fairness and Respect for Persons" -- "2 Objectivity, Impartiality, and Fairness" -- "Taking Advantage and Disadvantaging" -- "Impartiality and Bias" -- "Disadvantaging and Personal Interests" -- "3. Fair Shares" -- "The Principle of Fairness" -- "Fairness and Equality" -- "Presumptive Equality" -- "Fairness and Associative Attachments" -- "4 Fairness and Following Rules" -- "Fairness (...) and Formal Justice" -- "Procedural and Background Fairness" -- "Following Rules and Acting Unfairly" -- "Fair Bargains and Bargaining Fairly" -- "5. Fidelity to Social Practice" -- "Social Practices" -- "The Fundamentals of Fairness" -- "Fairness and Distribution" -- "The Limits of Fairness" -- "6 Toward a Moral Theory of Fairness" -- "Traditions of Moral Discourse" -- "The Morality of Happiness" -- "Fairness and Interactive Morality" -- "Fairness and Associative Morality" -- "Fairness and Consent" -- "7. Simple Fairness" -- ""Being Fair To... "" -- "Facilitative Fairness: Simple Accommodation" -- "Facilitative Fairness: Lotteries" -- "Taking Turns and Respect For Others" -- "8 Fair Procedures" -- "Hard Bargains" -- "Fairness and Rational Choice" -- "Perfect and Imperfect Procedural Justice" -- "9 Fairness and Virtue" -- "The Fairness of Social Practices" -- "Fairmindedness" -- "Fairness as an End" -- "Bibliography. (shrink)

To their dismay, children look like their parents. They are not perfect copies, and over many generations some features evaporate; but even over fifty generations features relevant to an anthropologist persist. Children perhaps can find some comfort in the fact that we are not alone: organisms in general maintain remarkably stable structures through time. In What is Life? Erwin Schrödinger famously predicted the existence of the gene, but he also asked how life manages such stability in the face of (...) thermodynamics’ prescription that systems spontaneously move to increase their entropy. How does life escape the randomizing effects of the Second Law? Schrödinger of course recognized that there is no genuine conflict between life and thermodynamics. The Second Law applies only to closed, i.e., approximately energetically isolated, systems, yet living organisms are open systems. Although living creatures are not plugged into electrical sockets like your refrigerator, Schrödinger noted that organisms are dependent on the high quality energy of their environment. They maintain their structures at the expense of increased contributions of entropy (waste) to their environment. Life arises in the balance between the low entropy found in the environment and the entropy the organism itself throws off. Writing in the 1940’s, Schrödinger could see the general form of the answer to his question, but he lacked the resources to explain why these stable structures arose in the first place. (shrink)

The first three chapters of Eleonore Stump’s Atonement are devoted to a critique of atonement theories she styles “Anselmian,” including penal substitutionary theories. I focus on her critique of the latter. She presents three groups of objections labeled “internal problems,” “external problems,” and “further problems,” before presenting what she takes to be “the central and irremediable problem” facing such accounts. The external and further problems are seen to be irrelevant to penal substitutionary theories once they are properly understood. Her four (...) internal problems are shown to be far from conclusive. Finally, her identified central problem is seen to be spurious because given Stump’s definitions of love and forgiveness, it is not true that God, as characterized by penal substitutionary theories, fails to be perfectly loving and forgiving, and Stump’s entire approach to the doctrine of the atonement is mistakenly predicated on construing God as a private party involved in a personal dispute rather than as a Judge and Ruler. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:70 HUME'S LETTER TO STEWART A Note on a Paper by D. C. Stove In a recent paper, D. C. Stove raises an historical problem. There exists a letter, written in 1754 by Hume to John Stewart, then Professor of Natural Philosophy at Edinburgh, in which the following words occur:. „. J never asserted so absurd a Proposition, as that any thing might arise without a Cause: I only (...) maintained, that our Certainty of the Falsehood of that Proposition proceeded neither from Intuition nor Demonstration; but from another Source. Some commentators, most notably Norman Kemp-Smith, take this as telling strongly in favour of a non-sceptical reading of Hume. Stove undertakes to show beyond reasonable doubt that the claim made in the letter is in blatant contradiction with central theses of Hume's published philosophy, so that it has to be regarded as useless as evidence for the interpretation of the latter. There is a mystery as to how Hume came to say something so clearly false about what he himself had written; Stove offers certain conjectures, none of which he finds wholly satisfactory. As the conclusion of the first, exegetical, part of his article, Stove advances the thesis that Hume held the falsity of the Causal Principle to be possible in at least three senses of "possible". These senses he specifies accurately, but doesn't wish to rest anything on the detail of his specification of the third; it is important only that it be stronger than either of the preceding two. This done, he takes a look at the letter to Stewart, and says, with reference to the first part of the 71 passage quoted above: That something might begin to exist without a cause, is evidently equivalent to the proposition that it is possib Ie for something to begin to exist without a cause. That, in turn, is evidently equivalent to the proposition that the falsity of the Causal Principle is possible. (Stove's o underlining). It follows that what Hume says in the letter is simply false. It could be true only if the "might" referred to some sense of possibility even weaker than the weakest of Stove's three senses. But since that is mere self-consistency, there is no such sense. Now the argument to the contradiction relies on reading "might" as "it is possible", in some sense of those words. Stove says, as we have seen, that they are "evidently equivalent", but the equivalence is certainly not evident, and it may well be asked whether it exists at all. After all, there are English constructions with "might" which don't have modal force: "Do you think something might have happened to them without our knowing about it?" The hearer is not, of course, being asked whether it- is possible that something should have happened without their knowledge; he is being asked for his opinion on whether something actually has so happened. "Most unlikely", would be a perfectly natural and acceptable response. Again : "ïou stay here, to take care of any problem that might arise before we get back". Obviously it is not intended that the hearer should start taking precautions against all possibilities, only that he should cope with whatever actually arises, if anything. 72 This is quite normal modern usage, and I know no reason to think that it wasn't also norT.il usage in the 18th Century. Admittedly, it isn't modern philocophers ' usage - we would be very careful, in writing or; logical matters, not to use the word "might" unless it was definitely the modal proposition that we had in mind, but earlier times haven't always been so professional about their vocabulary. Certainly, if Hume, in the letter to Stewart, was denying that he had ever asserted the possibility of the falsehood of the Causal Principle it would be, as Stove shows, extremely hard to see what he could have been thinking of. But if what he meant could have been as well expressed by "I never asserted... that anything arises without a cause" then most of Stove's problems are over, for there is no 3 conflict with any of the theses (1) - (3) which he... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:70 HUME'S LETTER TO STEWART A Note on a Paper by D. C. Stove In a recent paper, D. C. Stove raises an historical problem. There exists a letter, written in 1754 by Hume to John Stewart, then Professor of Natural Philosophy at Edinburgh, in which the following words occur:. „. J never asserted so absurd a Proposition, as that any thing might arise without a Cause: I only (...) maintained, that our Certainty of the Falsehood of that Proposition proceeded neither from Intuition nor Demonstration; but from another Source. Some commentators, most notably Norman Kemp-Smith, take this as telling strongly in favour of a non-sceptical reading of Hume. Stove undertakes to show beyond reasonable doubt that the claim made in the letter is in blatant contradiction with central theses of Hume's published philosophy, so that it has to be regarded as useless as evidence for the interpretation of the latter. There is a mystery as to how Hume came to say something so clearly false about what he himself had written; Stove offers certain conjectures, none of which he finds wholly satisfactory. As the conclusion of the first, exegetical, part of his article, Stove advances the thesis that Hume held the falsity of the Causal Principle to be possible in at least three senses of "possible". These senses he specifies accurately, but doesn't wish to rest anything on the detail of his specification of the third; it is important only that it be stronger than either of the preceding two. This done, he takes a look at the letter to Stewart, and says, with reference to the first part of the 71 passage quoted above: That something might begin to exist without a cause, is evidently equivalent to the proposition that it is possib Ie for something to begin to exist without a cause. That, in turn, is evidently equivalent to the proposition that the falsity of the Causal Principle is possible. (Stove's o underlining). It follows that what Hume says in the letter is simply false. It could be true only if the "might" referred to some sense of possibility even weaker than the weakest of Stove's three senses. But since that is mere self-consistency, there is no such sense. Now the argument to the contradiction relies on reading "might" as "it is possible", in some sense of those words. Stove says, as we have seen, that they are "evidently equivalent", but the equivalence is certainly not evident, and it may well be asked whether it exists at all. After all, there are English constructions with "might" which don't have modal force: "Do you think something might have happened to them without our knowing about it?" The hearer is not, of course, being asked whether it- is possible that something should have happened without their knowledge; he is being asked for his opinion on whether something actually has so happened. "Most unlikely", would be a perfectly natural and acceptable response. Again : "ïou stay here, to take care of any problem that might arise before we get back". Obviously it is not intended that the hearer should start taking precautions against all possibilities, only that he should cope with whatever actually arises, if anything. 72 This is quite normal modern usage, and I know no reason to think that it wasn't also norT.il usage in the 18th Century. Admittedly, it isn't modern philocophers ' usage - we would be very careful, in writing or; logical matters, not to use the word "might" unless it was definitely the modal proposition that we had in mind, but earlier times haven't always been so professional about their vocabulary. Certainly, if Hume, in the letter to Stewart, was denying that he had ever asserted the possibility of the falsehood of the Causal Principle it would be, as Stove shows, extremely hard to see what he could have been thinking of. But if what he meant could have been as well expressed by "I never asserted... that anything arises without a cause" then most of Stove's problems are over, for there is no 3 conflict with any of the theses (1) - (3) which he... (shrink)

Penal substitution in a theological context is the doctrine that God inflicted upon Christ the suffering which we deserved as the punishment for our sins, as a result of which we no longer deserve punishment. Ever since the time of Faustus Socinus, the doctrine has faced formidable, and some would say insuperable, philosophical challenges. Critics of penal substitution frequently assert that God’s punishing Christ in our place would be an injustice on God’s part. For it is an axiom of retributive (...) justice that it is unjust to punish an innocent person. But Christ was an innocent person. Since God is perfectly just, He cannot therefore have punished Christ. Virtually every premiss in this argument is challengeable. Not all penal substitution theories affirm that Christ was punished for our sins. The argument makes unwarranted assumptions about the ontological foundations of moral duty independent of God’s commands. It presupposes without warrant that God is by nature an unqualified negative retributivist. It overlooks the possibility that the prima facie demands of negative retributive justice might be overridden in Christ’s case by weightier moral considerations. And it takes it for granted that Christ was legally innocent, which is denied by the classic doctrine of imputation. It thus fails to show any injustice in God’s punishing Christ in our place. (shrink)

A promising argument for divine timelessness is that temporal life is possessed only moment by moment, which is incompatible with the existence of a perfect being.Since the argument is based on the experience of time’s passage, it cannot be circumvented by appeal to a tenseless theory of time.Neither can the argument be subverted by appeals to a temporal deity’s possession of a specious present of infinite duration.Nonetheless, because the argument concerns one’s experience of time’s passage rather than the objective (...) reality of temporal becoming itself, it is considerably weakened by the fact that an omniscient being possessing perfect memory and foreknowledge, need not find such experience to be an imperfection. (shrink)

Hypotheses about the shape of causal reality admit of both theistic and non-theistic interpretations. I argue that, on the simplest hypotheses about the causal shape of reality—infinite regress, contingent initial boundary, necessary initial boundary—there is good reason to suppose that non-theism is always either preferable to, or at least the equal of, theism, at least insofar as we restrict our attention merely to the domain of explanation of existence. Moreover, I suggest that it is perfectly proper for naturalists to be (...) undecided between these simple hypotheses about the causal shape of reality: contrary to the proponents of cosmological arguments, there are no decisive objections to any of these simple hypotheses. (I argue this case in detail in connection with objections offered by William Lane Craig; however, I believe that the case holds quite generally.). (shrink)

Hypotheses about the shape of causal reality admit of both theistic and non-theistic interpretations. I argue that, on the simplest hypotheses about the causal shape of reality—infinite regress, contingent initial boundary, necessary initial boundary—there is good reason to suppose that non-theism is always either preferable to, or at least the equal of, theism, at least insofar as we restrict our attention merely to the domain of explanation of existence. Moreover, I suggest that it is perfectly proper for naturalists to be (...) undecided between these simple hypotheses about the causal shape of reality: contrary to the proponents of cosmological arguments, there are no decisive objections to any of these simple hypotheses. (I argue this case in detail in connection with objections offered by William Lane Craig; however, I believe that the case holds quite generally.). (shrink)

Over 50% of the world population will develop a psychiatric disorder in their lifetime.1 In the realm of psychiatric treatment, two primary modalities have been established: pharmacotherapy and psychotherapy. Yet, pharmacological interventions often take precedence as the initial treatment choice despite their comparable outcomes, severe side effects and disputed evidence of their efficacy. This preference for medication foregrounds a vital re-examination of what it means to be invasive in medical treatments, namely in psychiatric care. De Marco et al challenge the (...) standard account of invasiveness, presenting considerations that transcend the traditional criteria of physical intrusion.2 Through case studies centred on treatments for schizophrenia and depression, we aim to (1) reinforce De Marco et al ’s challenge to the standard account of invasiveness and (2) extend the dialogue to the moral imperative of redefining mental invasiveness. Our aims are to broaden the definition of mental invasiveness, aligning with De Marco et al ’s emphasis on context sensitivity, and to include the severity of side effects as a critical factor in this assessment. Redefining what is considered invasive in psychiatric treatment has profound implications for patient care and medical decision-making. Labelling treatments, namely medications, as invasive encourages both patients and healthcare providers to approach these options with a heightened level of scrutiny and care. This is …. (shrink)

Orthodox epistemological disjunctivism involves the idea that paradigm cases of visual perceptual knowledge are based on visual perceptual states which are propositional, and hence representational. Given this, the orthodox version of epistemological disjunctivism takes on controversial representational commitments in the philosophy of perception. Must epistemological disjunctivism involve these commitments? I don’t think so. Here I argue that we can take epistemological disjunctivism in a new direction and develop a version of the view free of these representational commitments. The basic idea (...) is that instead of conceiving of knowledge grounding perceptions as states in which one sees that such-and-such is the case, we should instead conceive of them as states or episodes in which one sees a thing, we should conceive of them as thing-seeings. I’ll suggest that we can cast such seeings in a knowledge grounding role without conceiving of them as representational. But this is because we can put thing-seeings to epistemological work, in the framework of epistemological disjunctivism, whilst remaining neutral on whether or not they are propositional, or representational at all. The point, then, is not to replace epistemological disjunctivism’s controversial representational commitments with controversial non-representational commitments. The point is, rather, that epistemological disjunctivism can be developed with fewer commitments in the philosophy of perception than is usually appreciated. (shrink)

A framework for pragmatic analysis is proposed which treats discourse as a game, with context as a scoreboard organized around the questions under discussion by the interlocutors. The framework is intended to be coordinated with a dynamic compositional semantics. Accordingly, the context of utterance is modeled as a tuple of different types of information, and the questions therein — modeled, as is usual in formal semantics, as alternative sets of propositions — constrain the felicitous flow of discourse. A requirement of (...) Relevance is satisfied by an utterance (whether an assertion, a question or a suggestion) iff it addresses the question under discussion. Finally, it is argued that the prosodic focus of an utterance canonically serves to reflect the question under discussion (at least in English), placing additional constraints on felicity in context. (shrink)

Politics pervades every aspect of our lives as human beings. As Aristotle said, we are "political animals.

In line with her hopes, Philosophical Psychology outlines a vision that seeks to do justice to the complexity of the human person.

Some have argued that unipersonal concepts of God collapse into incoherence, so that such a being is no more possible than a square circle, or at least that such theologies are, as non-trinitarian, significantly less probable than some trinitarian theologies. I discuss the general strategy and examine recent arguments by William Lane Craig, C. Stephen Layman, Thomas V. Morris, and Richard Swinburne based on divine love, flourishing, and glory. I show why none of these arguments is compelling, as each (...) has at least one weak premise. (shrink)

Given his view that the modern world is ‘radically evil’, Adorno is an unlikely contributor to business ethics. Despite this, we argue that his work has a number of provocative implications for the field that warrant wider attention. Adorno regards our social world as damaged, unfree, and false and we draw on this critique to outline why the achievement of good work is so rare in contemporary society, focusing in particular on the ethical demands of roles and the ideological nature (...) of management’s self-understanding. Nevertheless, we show that Adorno’s comments on activities such as art and philosophy mean that it is possible to draw on his work in a way that contributes constructively to the conversation about good and meaningful work within business ethics. (shrink)

What is addiction? Why do some people become addicted while others do not? Is the addict rational? In this book, Craig Hanson attempts to answer these questions and more. Using insights from the beginnings of philosophy to contemporary behavioral economics, Hanson attempts to assess the variety of ways in which we can and cannot, understand addiction. Special consideration is given to a challenging (and controversial) proposal dubbed “hyperbolic discounting.” Hanson proposes some modifications to the hyperbolic discounting view that permit (...) it to explain not only addiction, but also a variety of psychological maladies, such as self-deception. (shrink)

In the semantic literature, there is a class of examples involving anaphora in intensional contexts, i.e. under the scope of modal operators or propositional attitude predicates, which display anaphoric relations that appear at first glance to violate otherwise well-supported generalizations about operator scope and anaphoric potential. In Section 1,I will illustrate this phenomenon, which, for reasons that should become clear below, I call modal subordination; I will develop a general schema for its identification, and show how it poses problems for (...) most theories of scope and anaphoric relations. In Section 2, I will review the main approaches which have been considered in attempting to account for modal subordination and argue that only an approach involving accommodation can account for the full range of examples. The notion of accommodation is due to Lewis, who defines it as follows: If at time t something is said that requires presupposition P to be acceptable, and if P is not presupposed just before t, then - ceteris paribus and within certain limits - presupposition P comes into existence at t.(Lewis 1979: 340) The interesting question, of course, is what the limits on accommodation might be. I believe that the proper account of modal subordination has something to say about this. I will argue this briefly in section 3, where I draw some conclusions and also sketch some ... (shrink)

Ethical perspectives -- Components of personal ethical development -- Ethical decision making and action -- Ethical interpersonal communication -- Exercising ethical influence -- Ethical conflict management and negotiation -- Improving group ethical performance -- Leadership ethics -- Followership ethics -- Building an ethical organizational culture -- Managing ethical hotspots in organizations -- Promoting organizational citizenship in a global society.

Cowan, Ruth Schwartz (1983) More Work for Mother: The Ironies of Household Technology from the Open Hearth to the Microwave. New York: Basic. ...

The farms in the LEGO Farm theme are immaculate. They feature sparkling clean tractors, pristine fences, and the complete absence of dirt. Whether it is on purpose, or a limitation based on the number of pieces that can be placed inside a box, LEGO Farm presents an agricultural utopia. The farms are smaller, less dependent on toxic inputs, and friendlier to animals than real‐life commercial farms. LEGO Farm often features animals that are clean and well fed. Some animals even appear (...) to be smiling, and that's appropriate considering that they are viewed as living creatures rather than commodities. With LEGO, kids and adults can imagine farms as they would ideally make them. The beauty of LEGO is that anyone can be a Master Builder, building their own MOCs. As a Master Farmer the possibilities for representing environmentally friendly agriculture are endless. (shrink)

In common treatments of deontic logic, the obligatory is what is true in all deontically ideal possible worlds. In this article, I offer a new semantics for Standard Deontic Logic with Leibnizian intensions rather than possible worlds. Even though the new semantics furnishes models that resemble Venn diagrams, the semantics captures the strong soundness and completeness of Standard Deontic Logic. Since, unlike possible worlds, many Leibnizian intensions are not maximally consistent entities, we can amend the semantics to invalidate the inference (...) rule which ensures that all tautologies are obligatory. I sketch this amended semantics to show how it invalidates the rule in a new way. (shrink)

This article bridges a gap in the study of Aristophanic humour by better demonstrating how individual jokes (in this case, the para prosdokian ‘contrary to expectation’ joke) contribute to the wider comic scenes in which they are embedded. After analysing ancient and modern explanations and examples of para prosdokian jokes, this paper introduces the concept of ‘comic bit’, a discrete unit of comedy that builds humour around a central premise, and establishes how para prosdokian jokes contribute to comic bits in (...) a way that recent theories of para prosdokian cannot account for. (shrink)

The counterfactual mental state of negligent criminal activity invites skepticism from those who see mental states as essential to responsibility. Here, I offer a revision of the mental state of criminal negligence, one where the mental state at issue is actual and not merely counterfactual. This revision dissolves the worry raised by the skeptic and helps to explain negligence’s comparatively reduced culpability.

Various strands of religious thought distinguish veneration from worship. According to these traditions, believers ought to worship God alone. To worship anything else, they say, is idolatry. And yet many of these same believers also claim to venerate—but not worship—saints, angels, images, relics, tombs, and even each other. But what's the difference? Tim Bayne and Yujin Nagasawa (2006: 302) are correct that “it seems to be extremely difficult to distinguish veneration from worship.” Many have argued throughout history that veneration collapses (...) into worship and that those who venerate saints or icons are guilty of idolatry. In this essay, we distinguish worship from veneration in two stages. First, we give a formal account of their difference. Drawing from St. John of Damascus (c. 675-749 AD), we argue that worship is a determinate of the determinable veneration. Second, we give more substantive accounts of both that explain their differences and similarities. Drawing again from St John, we argue that acts of veneration and worship signify subordination. Their difference, however, lies in the fact that worship alone requires absolute subordination. (shrink)

In On What Matters, Derek Parfit enters the debate between actualists and possibilists. This debate concerns mere possibilia, possible but non-actual things such as golden mountains and talking donkeys. Roughly, possibilism says that there are such things, and actualism says that there are not. Parfit not only argues for possibilism but also argues that some self-proclaimed actualists are, in fact, unwitting possibilists. -/- I argue that although Parfit’s arguments do not fully succeed, they do highlight a tension within the frameworks (...) of many actualists. Many actualists conscript abstract objects into the role of "possible worlds" to avoid quantifying over mere possibilia. But, in doing so, actualists must quantify over mere possibilia anyway. When we alleviate this tension, a Parfit-friendly form of actualism arguably remains. This form of actualism says that while everything that exists is actual, it is also true in some sense that there are mere possibilia. (shrink)

In order to determine whether a particular course of conduct is ethically permissible it is important to have a concept of what it means to be harmed. The dominant theory of harm is the counterfactual account, most famously proposed by Joel Feinberg. This determines whether harm is caused by comparing what actually happened in a given situation with the ‘counterfacts’ i.e. what would have occurred had the putatively harmful conduct not taken place. If a person's interests are worse off than (...) they otherwise would have been, then a person will be harmed. This definition has recently faced challenges from bioethicists such as John Harris, Guy Kahane and Julian Savulescu who, believing it to be severely flawed, have proposed their own alternative theories of the concept. In this article I will demonstrate that the shortcomings Harris, Kahane and Savulescu believe are present in Feinberg's theory are illusory and that it is their own accounts of harm that are fraught with logical errors. I maintain that the arguments presented to refute Feinberg's theory not only fail to achieve this goal and can be accommodated within the counterfactual account but that they actually undermine the theories presented by their respective authors. The final conclusion will be that these challenges are misconceived and fail to displace the counterfactual theory. (shrink)

Drunk drivers and other culpably incapacitated wrongdoers are often taken to pose a problem for reasons-responsiveness accounts of moral responsibility. These accounts predicate moral responsibility upon an agent having the capacities to perceive and act upon moral reasons, and the culpably incapacitated wrongdoers lack exactly those capacities at the time of their wrongdoing. Many reasons-responsiveness advocates thus expand their account of responsibility to include a tracing condition: The culpably incapacitated wrongdoer is blameworthy despite his incapacitation precisely because he is responsible (...) for becoming incapacitated. As some skeptics have suggested, it is not clear that we need tracing. Here, however, I make a stronger case against tracing: I show that tracing gets things wrong. I consider a new sort of case, the case of the Odysseus agent, whose incapacitation is non-culpable (sometimes merely permissible and sometimes praiseworthy). Tracing would have us hold responsible and therefore blame unlucky Odysseus agents, Odysseus agents who commit a wrongdoing in the throes of their non-culpably induced incapacitation. But we should not hold these unlucky Odysseus agents responsible for their incapacitated wrongdoing. Because tracing gets these cases wrong, we should reject tracing. (shrink)

For many philosophers, bad-history wrongdoers are primarily interesting because of what their cases might tell us about the interaction of moral responsibility and history. However, philosophers focusing on blameworthiness have overlooked important questions about blame itself. These bad-history cases are complicated because blame and sympathy are both fitting. When we are careful to consider the rich natures of those two reactions, we see that they conflict in several important ways. We should see bad-history cases as cases about whether and how (...) we should blame, rather than as cases giving us ready insight into the nature of moral responsibility. (shrink)

Duress is a defense in both law and morality. The bank teller who provides an armed robber with the bank vault combination, the innocent suspect who fabricates a story after hours of interrogation, the Good Samaritan who breaks into a private cabin in the woods to save a stranded hiker, and the father who drives at high speed to rush his injured child to the hospital—in deciding how to respond to agents like these, we should take into account that they (...) have acted under duress. In this paper, I offer a new duress defense, which I call “distinctive duress.” The distinctive-duress defense is neither ordinary justification nor ordinary excuse. Rather, it is a defense available to agents who act wrongly because they are appropriately insensitive to certain reasons. In the distinctive-duress cases, an agent’s normative sensitivities are rightly directed elsewhere, leading them awry. (shrink)

This paper attempts to show how Adorno’s thought can illuminate our reflections on the future of work. It does so by situating Adorno’s conception of genuine activity in relation to his negativist critical epistemology and his subtle account of the distinction between true and false needs. What emerges is an understanding of work that can guide our aspirations for the future of work, and one we illustrate via discussions of creative work and care work. These are types of work which (...) cater to persistent human needs, albeit ones that are distorted under present social conditions. Adorno’s thought helps us to understand why this is the case. (shrink)

This study examines the presence and roles of female directors of U.S. Fortune 500 firms, focusing on committee assignments and director background. Prior work from almost two decades ago concludes that there is a systematic bias against females in assignment to top board committees. Examining a recent data set with a logistic regression model that controls for director and firm characteristics, director resource-dependence roles and interaction between director gender and director characteristics, we find that female directors are less likely than (...) male directors to sit on executive committees and more likely than male directors to sit on public affairs committees. There is little if any evidence of systematic gender bias in director assignment to other board committees. We find some evidence that boards evaluate resource dependence differently for women than men. (shrink)

Many contemporary theorists charge that naïve realists are incapable of accounting for illusions. Various sophisticated proposals have been ventured to meet this charge. Here, we take a different approach and dispute whether the naïve realist owes any distinctive account of illusion. To this end, we begin with a simple, naïve account of veridical perception. We then examine the case that this account cannot be extended to illusions. By reconstructing an explicit version of this argument, we show that it depends critically (...) on the contention that perceptual experience is diaphanous, or more minimally and precisely, that there can be no difference in phenomenal properties between two experiences without a difference in the scenes presented in those experiences. Finding no good reason to accept this claim, we develop and defend a simple, naïve account of both veridical perception and illusion, here dubbed Simple, Austere Naïve Realism. (shrink)

In deciding whether to forgive, we often focus on the wrongdoer, looking for an apology or a change of ways. However, to fully consider whether to forgive, we need to expand our focus from the wrongdoer and their wrongdoing, and we need to consider who we are, what we care about, and what we want to care about. The difference between blame and forgiveness is, at bottom, a difference in priorities. When we blame, we prioritize the wrong, and when we (...) forgive, we shift our priorities away from the wrong. Recognizing this essential role for priorities in forgiveness allows us to address a thorny puzzle in thinking about forgiveness: how is it that forgiveness can be both principled and elective? If there is sufficient reason to forgive, as will sometimes be the case because forgiveness is principled, how can it be reasonable to withhold forgiveness? Recognizing that forgiveness is a shift in our priorities dissolves this apparent tension between forgiveness being principled and forgiveness being elective. (shrink)