How can we talk meaningfully about the past if it does not exist to be talked about? What gives time its direction? Is time travel possible? This defence of presentism - the view that only the present exists - makes an original contribution to a fast growing and exciting debate.

Is there any difference between playing video games in which the player’s character commits murder and video games in which the player’s character commits pedophilic acts? Morgan Luck’s “Gamer’s Dilemma” has established this question as a puzzle concerning notions of permissibility and harm. We propose that a fruitful alternative way to approach the question is through an account of aesthetic engagement. We develop an alternative to the dominant account of the relationship between players and the actions of their characters, and (...) argue that the ethical difference between so-called “virtual murder” and “virtual pedophilia” is to be understood in terms of the fiction-making resources available to players. We propose that the relevant considerations for potential players to navigate concern (1) attempting to make certain characters intelligible, and (2) using aspects of oneself as resources for homomorphic representation. (shrink)

Most of us would want to say that it is true that Socrates taught Plato. According to realists about past facts,1 this is made true by the fact that there is, located in the past, i.e., earlier than now, at least one real event that is the teaching of Plato by Socrates. Presentists, however, in denying that past events and facts exist2 cannot appeal to such facts to make their past-tensed statements true. So what is a presentist to do?

Les femmes ont des yeux, des cheveux, une peau, des idées, des jambes, un sexe, une date de naissance, des hommes dans la tête, un problème avec Isaac Newton, de petits poudriers qu'elles sortent de leur sac, et le pouvoir d'arrêter les voitures... Il fallait sans doute le regard d'un homme pour s'en rendre compte. Dominique Quessada est philosophe et écrivain. Il regarde ce qu'il y a pour lui de plus mystérieux et de plus proche à la fois : (...) les femmes. Ce livre s'adresse à elles, mais il peut aussi servir de guide à l'usage des aveugles, sourds et malentendants : les hommes. (shrink)

Most of us would want to say that it is true that Socrates taught Plato. According to realists about past facts, this is made true by the fact that there is, located in the past, i.e., earlier than now, at least one real event that is the teaching of Plato by Socrates. Presentists, however, in denying that past events and facts exist cannot appeal to such facts to make their past-tensed Statements true. So what is a presentist to do?There are (...) at least three conditions that would ideally be met in a satisfactory solution to this problem:a) It must preserve our views about which Statements are true and which falseb) It must be transparent what the truthmakers are for those Statementsc) It must accommodate the truth-value links between various times. (shrink)

pt. 1. Gaston Bachelard's historical epistemology.--pt. 2. For a critique of epistemology.

Kathleen Stock’s engaging and careful book demonstrates that ‘extreme intentionalism’ – the view that a fiction’s content is determined by what its author actually intended – has for too long been held back by a set of familiar objections.1 1 It is often thought to have implausible consequences involving disregarding conventional meaning, permitting undetectable fictional content, denying that authorial intentions can be unsuccessful, or giving too much importance to extraneous indications of intention and too little to the work itself. All (...) these objections, Stock argues, are overplayed, all are answerable, and several ultimately favour extreme intentionalism over its rivals. Stock’s defence of extreme intentionalism grounds a view of imaginative resistance, an account of the fiction/non-fiction distinction and of what an individual fiction is, and a characterization of propositional imagining and of the nature of supposition. (shrink)

Dominique Lecourt argues that a counter-revolution in French intellectual life has seen the period of the master thinkers of the 1960s succeeded by an era of ...

Qu'un interet renouvele se manifeste aujourd'hui pour la versant epistemologique de l'oeuvre de Gaston Bachelard peut se comprendre au regard de l'histoire contemporaine de la philosophie des sciences. Cette histoire a ete dominee durant la plus grande partie du XXe siecle par une doctrine - celle de l'empirisme (ou positivisme) logique - promue a Vienne a la fin des annees 1920 par une institution originale, le Cercle de Vienne qui publie son manifeste en 1929, et s'organise comme un mouvement a (...) visee universelle et progressiste - celui de la conception scientifique du monde. La tradition francaise de la philosophie des sciences a pris d'entree de jeu un tout autre chemin. Si elle ne les a pas ignorees, elle a refuse de souscrire aux theses majeures du positivisme logique lorsqu'il s'est presente a elle. Elle a toujours lie etroitement philosophie et histoire des sciences. Dans le titre de ce petit livre ecrit durant l'annee universitaire 1967-1968 sous la direction de Georges Canquilhem, Dominique Lecourt a avance l'expression d'epistemologie historique pour signaler, a propos de Gaston Bachelard, cette particularite. (shrink)

Hospital-based professionals who manage cases of family violence are often unclear about the benefits and costs of particular interventions to their clients. Operating under conditions of potential lethality, both to them and family members, clinicians often experience conflict between legal and ethical recommendations or between strategies intended to provide safety to victims of domestic (spousal) violence and those meant to protect children from abuse. This article presents a situation of family violence and the dilemmas of decision-making confronting both social worker (...) and lawyer. It discusses such issues as professional role, reporting requirements, and duties to warn, emphasizing the difficulty of implementing a plan and of predicting its consequences. It recommends substantive and procedural guidelines that may help protect victims while allowing professionals to emotionally sustain themselves during the management ordeal. (shrink)

Hospital-based professionals who manage cases of family violence are often unclear about the benefits and costs of particular interventions to their clients. Operating under conditions of potential lethality, both to them and family members, clinicians often experience conflict between legal and ethical recommendations or between strategies intended to provide safety to victims of domestic (spousal) violence and those meant to protect children from abuse. This article presents a situation of family violence and the dilemmas of decision-making confronting both social worker (...) and lawyer. It discusses such issues as professional role, reporting requirements, and duties to warn, emphasizing the difficulty of implementing a plan and of predicting its consequences. It recommends substantive and procedural guidelines that may help protect victims while allowing professionals to emotionally sustain themselves during the management ordeal. (shrink)

Public surveys conducted in many countries report widespread willingness of individuals to donate a kidney while alive to a family member or close friend, yet thousands suffer and many die each year while waiting for a kidney transplant. Advocates of financial incentive programs or “regulated markets” in kidneys present the problem of the kidney shortage as one of insufficient public motivation to donate, arguing that incentives will increase the number of donors. Others believe the solutions lie—at least in part—in facilitating (...) so-called “altruistic donation;” harnessing the willingness of relatives and friends to donate by addressing the many barriers which serve as disincentives to living donation. Strategies designed to minimize financial barriers to donation and the use of paired kidney exchange programs are increasingly enabling donation, and now, an innovative program designed to address what has been termed “chronologically incompatible donation” is being piloted at the University of California, Los Angeles, and elsewhere in the United States. In this program, a person whose kidney is not currently required for transplantation in a specific recipient may instead donate to the paired exchange program; in return, a commitment is made to the specified recipient that priority access for a living-donor transplant in a paired exchange program will be offered when or if the need arises in the future. We address here potential ethical concerns related to this form of organ “banking” from living donors, and argue that it offers significant benefits without undermining the well-established ethical principles and values currently underpinning living donation programs. (shrink)

Der Beitrag fragt danach, was einem Subjekt durch ein psychisches Trauma angetan wird. In diesem Zusammenhang setzt er sich mit Tendenzen auseinander, die derzeit in der Psychoanalyse im Umgang mit Traumata zu beobachten sind: Steht ein Trauma im Zentrum ihrer Aufmerksamkeit, tendierten Psychoanalytiker dazu, darin ein für ihre klinische Arbeit spezielles oder gar außergewöhnliches Problem zu sehen, das nach »etwas Anderem« als der grundlegenden Methode der Psychoanalyse verlangt. Demgegenüber wird die Auffassung vertreten, dass ein Trauma untrennbar mit dem Seelenleben verwoben (...) ist. So etwas wie eine nichttraumatische Psychopathologie, so der Autor, gibt es nicht. Jede traumatisierte Psyche, unabhängig von der Intensität des Traumas, stehe darum im Grunde vor demselben Problem: Wie lässt sich der grundsätzliche Mechanismus der Wiederholung überwinden und eine ergebnisoffene Symbolisierung erreichen? Um diese Prozesse beschreiben zu können – die auch anhand einer Vignette illustriert werden –, schlägt der Autor die Unterscheidung zwischen »Subjektivität« und »Subjektalität« vor. (shrink)

How can we talk meaningfully about the past if it does not exist to be talked about? What gives time its direction? Is time travel possible? This defence of presentism - the view that only the present exists - makes an original contribution to a fast growing and exciting debate.

The analysis of identity in cases of memory loss, particularly in Alzheimer’s disease, sheds light on relevant philosophical and practical concerns, such as decision-making processes, autonomy, and the improvement of interaction with patients. Literature on psychological continuity recognizes identity when there are no disruptions in memory, which is certainly not the case in Alzheimer´s disease. Narrative identity, particularly in its relational and non-relational versions, delivers tools which are not exempt from difficulties. Either the caregivers’ narrative or the patient’s narrative is (...) dismissed. Furthermore, if there is a contradiction of narratives in relational theories, we are advised to either find the best narrative or seek agreement. However, one option rejects one narrative, while the other is unattainable in practice for the case in question. Hence, we propose drawing from ironism (Rorty, 1989), which suggests duality of dialogues when dealing with problems. This will be used to defend that the narratives of both, a person with Alzheimer and those close to them, are valid when constituting identity of the former. In this case, we will articulate and defend relational ironism, which allows us to embrace inconsistent narratives without seeking agreements. According to this, personal identity in this case is in constant tension between the narratives of those who suffer Alzheimer’s disease and the narratives of those close to them. We close illustrating possible benefits for how best to interact with patients. (shrink)

Event summary: The conference focuses on metafiction, taken to cover any fiction which represents itself as a fiction. Because metafictions acknowledge their own status as fictions, they are sometimes known as ‘reflexive’ or ‘self-conscious’ fictions, and sometimes generate apparently paradoxical results. The conference will explore what this reflexivity amounts to, how it distinguishes the metafictional from the non-metafictional works, and what impact this has on questions about the nature of fiction in general. Metafiction amounts to a significant – but not (...) uncommon – distortion of the standard relationship between a fiction and what it represents. This two-day interdisciplinary conference will explore how metafictional representation works by bringing together research on the nature of fiction within philosophy and research on metafiction in literary criticism, film studies and art theory. Questions to Explore Understanding how metafiction works is important to understanding how fiction works. For it raises interesting questions about what fictional representation is, what distinguishes it from non-fictional representation, how fictions represent, how we engage with fiction, and what relations the representation bears to its contents. How should we accommodate metafictions within an account of truth in fiction? Are there any peculiarities of audience engagement with metafictions – do our emotional reactions to a scenario change if we are told by the work that it is ‘just fictional’? What are the different metafictional narrative techniques, and do they all have the same impact on the content of the fiction? What constraints, if any, do metafictions place on the ontology of fiction and the nature of fictional objects? (shrink)

Event synopsis: -What does it mean to claim that the future is open? -Are future contingent statements like "There will be a sea battle tomorrow" now true or false? -Is the claim that future contingents are now true or false compatible with the claim that the future is open? -What is the relation between future contingents and future ontology? -What metaphysical picture is required in order to make sense of the claim that the future is open? Multiple, branching futures? A (...) ‘thin red line’? Metaphysical indeterminacy? Presentism? (shrink)

Understanding how meaning mechanisms are unleashed in film has been at the center of numerous theoretical surveys of the last few years. Emphasis has especially fallen on seeing as a constructive, meaningful activity and on the diegetic implications of vision. This book is an attempt to extend film theorizing into a new realm, where hearing proves as important as seeing and where the relevance of filmic narrative is differently explored. New paths for future research are suggested by means of associations (...) with the works of linguists or philosophers who have never addressed film theory directly in their writings. Nonetheless, several concepts posited by them (relevance, natural versus non-natural meaning or the notion of Mental spaces) find their application in the present survey. A wide range of examples starting with point-of-view and editing occurrences, passing through the use of music and sound and culminating with the study of whole filmic ensembles, enables the reader to re-examine code-bound or, on the contrary, deviational structures. These are often drawn from familiar sources, proving that not only art films of the Eisenstein or Godard type enhance innovative meaning spaces. Finally, the viewer is seen as a «silly little kitty», an active not passive receiver of textual structures who relies on patterns of known visual or aural backgrounds open to an unlimited field of perspectives. (shrink)

Alors que la guerre était associée au masculin, quelques femmes en France ont combattu au cours des guerres civiles des XVIe-XVIIe siècles ou ont servi dans les armées royales, qu’accompagnaient de plus de nombreuses civiles. Avec la Révolution française, le service dans la garde nationale et, moins directement, dans l’armée est lié à la citoyenneté. En réclamant le port des armes au sein de la garde nationale, des militantes révolutionnaires revendiquaient ainsi un des droits politiques du citoyen, ce qui provoqua (...) un ferme refus. Mues par le désir de défendre la République et de partager avec les hommes la gloire de se battre pour elle, des citoyennes s’engagèrent par ailleurs individuellement dans les armées, où elles continuèrent à servir après le décret du 30 avril 1793 qui les en chassait. Les demandes d’armement des militantes et les réponses qui leur sont apportées, ainsi que les histoires, les propos des soldates et les réactions qu’elles ont suscitées permettent d’analyser l’association entre masculin, armes et citoyenneté et d’étudier les mécanismes de l’exclusion des femmes des armées. (shrink)

This paper develops an inventory and conceptual map of espoused organizational values. We suggest that espoused values are fundamentally different to other value forms as they are collective value statements that need to coexist as a basis for organizational activity and performance. The inventory is built from an analysis of 3112 value items espoused by 554 organizations in the UK and USA in both profit and not-for-profit sectors. We distil these value items into 85 espoused value labels, and these are (...) assessed in terms of their similarity and difference through judgements made by 53 experienced individuals. The resulting conceptual map facilitates the evaluation of values which are espoused at the organizational level, as opposed to aggregations of personal values, an important distinction that is often ignored in the literature. This analysis identifies a number of distinct areas of emphasis occupied by espoused values. In particular, the richness of value labels that relates to broader ethical issues may be aimed at external stakeholder management, but also may have an increasing influence on organizational behaviour as they are embedded into organizational practices. By advancing our understanding of espoused values, through an analysis of those being used in practice, we provide a means by which future research into organizational values and ethical issues can progress. (shrink)

Dans Les Tragiques (1616, « Les feux »), Agrippa d’Aubigné raconte que, alors que dans sa prison le célèbre martyr du Bourg était prêt de flancher : Ce cœur tremblant revint à la voix d’une Caille :Pauvre femme, mais riche, et si riche que lorsUn plus riche trouva l’aumône en ses trésors.O combien d’efficace est la voix qui console,Quand le conseiller joint l’exemple à sa parole,Comme fit celle-là qui, pour ainsi prêcher,Fit en ces mêmes jours sa chaire d’un bûcher. Cette (...) Caille célébrée par... (shrink)

The Principle of Procreative Beneficence (PB) holds that when a couple plans to have a child, they have significant moral reason to select, of the possible children they could have, the child who is most likely to experience the greatest wellbeing – that is, the most advantaged child, the child with the best chance at the best life.1 PB captures the common sense intuitions of many about reproductive decisions. PB does not posit an absolute moral obligation – it does not (...) dictate what people must do. Instead it holds that there is a significant moral reason to select the best child, but one that must be weighed against other reasons.Recent research suggests that it may become possible to derive gametes (eggs and sperm) from human stem cells in vitro, a process which we will term in vitro gametogenesis (IVG). The ability to create large numbers of eggs or sperm through IVG greatly increases our capacity to select the best child possible. (shrink)