© 2017. The American Astronomical Society. All rights reserved.We present new observations of the low-mass companion to HD 984 taken with the Gemini Planet Imager as a part of the GPI Exoplanet Survey campaign. Images of HD 984 B were obtained in the J and H bands. Combined with archival epochs from 2012 and 2014, we fit the first orbit to the companion to find an 18 au orbit with a 68% confidence interval between 14 and 28 au, an eccentricity (...) of 0.18 with a 68% confidence interval between 0.05 and 0.47, and an inclination of 119°with a 68% confidence interval between 114°and 125°. To address the considerable spectral covariance in both spectra, we present a method of splitting the spectra into low and high frequencies to analyze the spectral structure at different spatial frequencies with the proper spectral noise correlation. Using the split spectra, we compare them to known spectral types using field brown dwarf and low-mass star spectra and find a best-fit match of a field gravity M6.5 ±1.5 spectral type with a corresponding temperature of K. Photometry of the companion yields a luminosity of log=2.88 ± 0.07 dex with DUSTY models. Mass estimates, again from DUSTY models, find an age-dependent mass of 34 ±1 to 95 ±4 M Jup. These results are consistent with previous measurements of the object. (shrink)

Here I consider the two most venerated arguments about the existence of God: the Ontological Argument and the Argument from Evil. The Ontological Argument purports to show that God’s nature guarantees that God exists. The Argument from Evil purports to show that God’s nature, combined with some plausible facts about the way the world is, guarantees (or is very compelling grounds for thinking) that God does not exist. Obviously, both arguments cannot be sound. But I argue here that they are (...) both unsound for the very same reason. (shrink)

This Element introduces the philosophical literature on models, with an emphasis on normative considerations relevant to models for decision-making. Chapter 1 gives an overview of core questions in the philosophy of modeling. Chapter 2 examines the concept of model adequacy for purpose, using three examples of models from the atmospheric sciences to describe how this sort of adequacy is determined in practice. Chapter 3 explores the significance of using models that are not adequate for purpose, including the purpose of informing (...) public decisions. Chapter 4 provides a basic framework for values in modelling, using a case study to highlight the ethical challenges in building models for decision making. It concludes by establishing the need for strategies to manage value judgments in modelling, including the potential for public participation in the process. (shrink)

We review and present a new meta‐analysis of research suggesting that ethicists in the United States appear to behave no morally better overall than do non‐ethicist professors. Measures include: returning library books, peer evaluation of overall moral behavior, voting participation, courteous and discourteous behavior at conferences, replying to student emails, paying conference registration fees and disciplinary society dues, staying in touch with one's mother, charitable giving, organ and blood donation, vegetarianism, and honesty in responding to survey questions. One multi‐measure study (...) found ethicists tending to embrace more stringent moral views, especially about meat eating and charitable donation. The same multi‐measure study found ethicists and other professors to show similarly small‐to‐medium correlations between their expressed normative attitudes and their self‐reported or directly measured behavior. (shrink)

El concepto de justicia aparece en la obra Spinoza de manera enigmática, bajo la forma de una aparente definición clásica o escolástica en una filosofía que no lo es: “justicia es el ánimo constante de dar a cada uno lo suyo”. A juzgar por esta definición que parece importada, el problema de la justicia podría leerse como uno de poco interés para Spinoza. En Contra las mujeres Justicia en Spinoza, Cecilia Abdo Ferez considera y argumenta que la justicia representa en (...) la obra de Spinoza un problema de primer orden, que permite apreciar su radicalidad. (shrink)

There are many alleged problems with trusting another person’s moral testimony, perhaps the most prominent of which is that it fails to deliver moral understanding. Without moral understanding, one cannot do the right thing for the right reason, and so acting on trusted moral testimony lacks moral worth. This chapter, however, argues that moral advice differs from moral testimony, differs from it in a way that enables a defender of moral advice to parry this worry about moral worth. The basic (...) idea is that an advisor and an advisee can together constitute a joint agent, and that this joint agent’s action can indeed have moral worth. So while the advisee himself might not do the right thing for the right reason (this because all alone he lacks the right reason), and while the advisor herself might not do the right thing for the right reason (this because all alone she does not do the right thing), they together do the right for the right reason. (shrink)

In 1970 a coalition of student activists opposing the Vietnam War circulated documents revealing the involvement of several prominent social scientists in U.S. counterinsurgency activities in Thailand--activities that could cause harm to the people who were the subject of the scholars' research. The disclosure of these materials, which detailed meetings with the Agency for International Development and the Defense Department, prompted two members of the Ethics Committee of the American Anthropological Association to issue an unauthorized rebuke of the accused. Over (...) the next two years, the AAA agonized over the allegations and the appropriate response to them. Within an academic community already polarized by the war, political and professional acrimony reached unprecedented levels. Although the association ultimately passed a code of ethics, the key issues raised in the process were never fully resolved. Now back in print, Eric Wakin's Anthropology Goes to War is the first comprehensive study of what became known as the Thailand Controversy--and a timely reminder of a debate whose echoes may be heard in our own time. (shrink)

This paper argues that under some conditions, when one person acts on the direction of another person, the two of them thereby act together, and that this explains why both the director and the directee can be responsible for what is done. In other words, a director and a directee can be a joint agent, one whose members are responsible for what they together do. This is most clearly so when the directive is a command. But it is also sometimes (...) so when the directive is a bit of advice. (shrink)

The fifteen “Messenger Leaves” poems Whitman assembled as part of the third (1860) edition of Leaves of Grass exhibit a tension between the prophetic and the sacramental that would become more significant as the United States entered the decade of the Civil War. Comprised of poems that provide warnings and admonitions (the prophetic) and poems that offer consolation and healing (the sacramental), in “Messenger Leaves” Whitman uses biblical models and texts to appeal to the religious sensibilities of the American people. (...) Although “Messenger Leaves” as a cluster was dissembled in the 1867 edition of Leaves of Grass, its religious themes draw attention to Whitman’s envisioning of the third edition as the “new Bible.”. (shrink)

In his work on Wu wei, Edward Slingerland argues that the classical Chinese ideal is an inherently paradoxical concept that is first and foremost spiritual and political only secondarily. Through a close reading of the Dao de Jing, the first major classical text to substantially deploy and develop the concept, I argue that Wu wei isn’t inherently paradoxical and that this is seen precisely when it is viewed in terms of its political primacy. On my reading, the emergence of Wu (...) wei in the Daoist canon is an equilibrating moment of political mediation between the highly intentionalized sphere of human pursuits and the purposeless fluidity and boundless flux of the natural world. Wu wei here takes on a different aspect—mystery rather than paradox—when considered within a form of political collectivity in which the intentional and the innate, purposive and natural are constantly juxtaposed and contending with one another. (shrink)

There has never been a greater need for reliable, truthful news to help citizens navigate and assess the veracity of what they are reading and viewing, especially on social media. Widespread concerns around ‘fake’ news demonstrate an enduring requirement for curated and trustworthy children’s news that addresses children as young citizens with certain rights. Drawing on recent UK events, we discuss the case for children’s news provision by public service broadcasting from a communication rights perspective by analyzing the BBC’s 2019 (...) plans to reduce the broadcast presence and originated hours of its flagship news service, Newsround, in favor of online distribution. (shrink)

Are philosophical arguments as effective as narratives in influencing charitable giving and attitudes toward it? In four experiments, we exposed online research participants to either philosophical arguments in favor of charitable giving, a narrative about a child whose life was improved by charitable donations, both the narrative and the argument, or a control text (a passage from a middle school physics text or a description of charitable organizations). Participants then expressed their attitudes toward charitable giving and were either asked how (...) much they would hypothetically donate if given $10 (Experiment 1) or told they had a 10% chance of winning $10 and given the opportunity to donate from their potential winnings (Experiments 2–4). Across the four experiments, participants in all of the narrative conditions and in some of the argument conditions tended to express more positive attitudes toward charitable giving and donated about $1 more on average than did participants in the control conditions. These effects appear to have been mediated by the “narrative transportation” scale, which suggests that appeals to donate can be effective if they engage participants’ emotions, imagery, and interest. (shrink)

As a contribution to current debates on the ‘social life of methods’, in this article we present an ethnomethodological study of the role of understanding within statistical practice. After reviewing the empirical turn in the methods literature and the challenges to the qualitative-quantitative divide it has given rise to, we argue such case studies are relevant because they enable us to see different ways in which ‘methods’, here quantitative methods, come to have a social life – by embodying and exhibiting (...) understanding they ‘make the social structures of everyday activities observable’ ( Garfinkel, 1967 : 75), thereby putting society on display. Exhibited understandings rest on distinctive lines of practical social and cultural inquiry – ethnographic ‘forays’ into the worlds of the producers and users of statistics – which are central to good statistical work but are not themselves quantitative. In highlighting these non-statistical forms of social and cultural inquiry at work in statistical practice, our case study is an addition to understandings of statistics and usefully points to ways in which studies of the social life of methods might be further developed from here. (shrink)

Most philosophers writing about personal identity in recent years claim that what it takes for us to persist through time is a matter of psychology. In this groundbreaking new book, Eric Olson argues that such approaches face daunting problems, and he defends in their place a radically non-psychological account of personal identity. He defines human beings as biological organisms, and claims that no psychological relation is either sufficient or necessary for an organism to persist. Olson rejects several famous thought-experiments (...) dealing with personal identity. He argues, instead, that one could survive the destruction of all of one's psychological contents and capabilities as long as the human organism remains alive--as long as its vital functions, such as breathing, circulation, and metabolism, continue. (shrink)

Debates about the ethical and social implications of research that aims to extend human longevity by intervening in the ageing process have paid little attention to the attitudes of members of the general public. In the absence of empirical evidence, conflicting assumptions have been made about likely public attitudes towards life-extension. In light of recent calls for greater public involvement in such discussions, this target article presents findings from focus groups and individual interviews which investigated whether members of the general (...) public identify ethical issues surrounding life-extension, and if so, what these ethical issues are? In this study, while some participants were concerned primarily with the likely personal consequences of life-extension, for others the question of whether or not to pursue interventions to extend longevity, and how they should be implemented, clearly raised important ethical issues, many of which have been prominent in debates among bioethicists. (shrink)

" Ce général expérimenté nous parle avec une grande sagesse des qualités humaines et de la conscience nécessaires pour combattre l'ennemi et diriger les hommes. Ses pages m'ont surpris par leur limpidité et leur profondeur. Nous sommes bien loin de l'armée archaïque que j'ai connue dans ma jeunesse ", père Guy Gilbert. Ce livre s'adresse au jeune étudiant qui réfléchit à devenir officier. Aucun ouvrage, récent en tout cas, n 'avait encore pris ces jeunes et leurs parents pour cible, afin (...) de tenter de leur parler, avec des mots du début du 21e siècle, de la guerre et du terrorisme, mais aussi de morale et d'amitié, de courage et de volonté. Et d 'amour et de vertus, et de principes. Et de discipline et de sacrifice et de générosité, qu'il a en quantité à condition qu'on lui explique comment il va en faire le meilleur usage. Ses propos intéresseront aussi tous ceux qui, même en dehors des corps armés, s 'interrogent sur l'énigme de l'homme face à la violence. (shrink)

Qui, de nos jours, veut encore " faire son âge "? Les enfants sont adolescents de plus en plus tôt, les jeunes le restent de plus en plus tard, les adultes rechignent à quitter leur jeunesse, et les vieux n'aspirent qu'à en connaître une seconde... Alors que la vie est plus longue et plus sûre que jamais, les étapes qui en rythmaient autrefois le cours semblent aujourd'hui confuses. Pourquoi grandir? Pourquoi vieillir? De telles questions sont désormais ouvertes. Incertitudes dans l'éducation, (...) crise de l'âge adulte, problème des retraites, drame de la grande vieillesse : autant de signes d'un désarroi inédit, reflétant l'ébranlement profond de l'idée même de maturité. L'examen des grandes philosophies du passé permet de mettre en lumière les nombreuses métamorphoses de l'idéal de la maturité adulte. Il se pourrait qu'une ultime recomposition s'opère sous nos yeux : la maturité, devenue " maturescence ", ne désigne plus un état stable, mais un processus indéfini par lequel nous gagnons en expérience, responsabilité et authenticité. Bref, l'adulte n'est pas mort, et sa cause mérite d'être défendue. En dépit des tentations " jeunistes ", l'idéal demeure, plus exigeant que jamais, invitant chacun d'entre nous à ce que la philosophie antique réservait aux plus sages des sages : devenir toujours plus grand. (shrink)

Justice, Sustainability, and Security not only enhances our knowledge of these issues, but it teases out our moral dimensions and offer prescriptions for how governments and global actors might craft their policies to better consider their effects on the global human condition.

I offer an account of theories useful in addressing the question of whether children are young theoreticians whose development can be regarded as the product of theory change. I argue that to regard a set of propositions as a theory is to be committed to evaluating that set in terms of its explanatory power. If theory change is the substance of cognitive development, we should see patterns of affect and arousal consonant with the emergence and resolution of explanation-seeking curiosity. Affect (...) has largely been ignored as a potential source of support or disconfirmation for the “theory theory” of development. (shrink)

Fyodor Dostoyevsky expressed a strange and surprising sentiment through one of the characters of The Brothers Karamazov. A dying young man named Markel declares: Every one of us has sinned against all men, and I more than others." He later says: "...every one of us is answerable for everyone else and for everything." Markel's absurd claims have engendered many reflections on the nature of suffering and what it means to be responsible for someone else's suffering. The world has no shortage (...) of pain and evil; what exactly is the relationship between suffering and responsibility? Markel's declarations press forward a question that drives this essay collection: how responsible should we consider ourselves for the suffering of the world? This volume is a collection of essays that struggle in various ways to understand and respond to several philosophical, theological and practical problems. In each case the authors grapple with issues surrounding suffering, immorality, evil, exploitation and oppression. The contributors share a clear concern for the ways that philosophers and theologians should respond to the problems of suffering and evil. They also share a conviction that these remain intense and central problems for philosophy and theology. Evil is an obstacle for belief, for morality, for hospitality, and for hope. This book struggles to address the particular and strong sense of responsibility that falls on Christians when it comes to understanding and, more importantly, responding to the problems of suffering and evil in the world. (shrink)

This is a book about Kant's views on causality as understood in their proper historical context. Specifically, Eric Watkins argues that a grasp of Leibnizian and anti-Leibnizian thought in eighteenth-century Germany helps one to see how the critical Kant argued for causal principles that have both metaphysical and epistemological elements. On this reading Kant's model of causality does not consist of events, but rather of substances endowed with causal powers that are exercised according to their natures and circumstances. This (...) innovative conception of Kant's view of causality casts a light on Kant's philosophical beliefs in general, such as his account of temporality, his explanation of the reconciliation of freedom and determinism, and his response to the skeptical arguments of Hume. (shrink)

Le courant évangélique est largement associé à une lecture conservatrice et orientée à droite. Cette affinité élective correspond à une réalité, au Guatemala comme ailleurs. Pourtant, les récents résultats de l’élection présidentielle, avec la victoire du candidat Bernardo Arévalo, ont montré qu’une forte présence évangélique (près de 45 % de la population guatémaltèque) n’obérait pas le potentiel électoral d’un candidat de gauche. Rendre compte de cette petite révolution politique nécessite d’abord de rappeler les fondements du conservatisme dominant, hérité de la (...) guerre civile et qui est sous-tendu par une relation particulière entre nation et religion, mais aussi de souligner l’existence d’un courant théologique propre au monde évangélique, largement ignoré, la « misión integral », qui constitue le noyau d’une « théologie contextualisée », porteuse d’une vision progressiste. (shrink)

This article provides a critical overview of competing theories of conceptual structure (definitional structure, probabilistic structure, theory structure), including the view that concepts have no structure (atomism). We argue that the explanatory demands that these different theories answer to are best accommodated by an organization in which concepts are taken to have atomic cores that are linked to differing types of conceptual structure.

Even though Kant’s theory of cognition (Erkenntnis) is central to his Critique of Pure Reason, it has rarely been asked what exactly Kant means by the term “cognition”. Against the widespread assumption that cognition (in the most relevant sense of that term) can be identified with knowledge or if not, that knowledge is at least a species of cognition, we argue that the concepts of cognition and knowledge in Kant are not only distinct, but even disjunct. To show this, we (...) first (I) investigate Kant’s explicit characterizations of the nature of cognition. As it turns out, he introduces several different notions that must be carefully distinguished before identifying the one that is central to his project in the first Critique. We then (II) consider the basic features of Kant’s conception of knowledge, indicating both how it involves assent and objective justification and how it relates to our contemporary conception. Next (III), we compare and contrast Kant’s understanding of cognition and his conception of knowledge in a way that allows us to present their fundamental differences and connections. We argue that while cognition, in the most relevant sense, is a species of representation that differs from other representations in that it involves the conceptual determination of a sensibly given object, knowledge (for Kant) is a kind of assent to a judgment that requires consciousness of a sufficient epistemic ground. Finally (IV), by appreciating the differences between cognition and knowledge, we explain several of the implications this conception of cognition has for some of Kant’s main claims in the Critique of Pure Reason as a whole. Among other things, we show how Kant can deny cognition of specific things in themselves while allowing philosophical knowledge about things in themselves in general (e.g. that they exist, are not in space and time, etc.). (shrink)

Standard animalists are committed to a stringent form of restricted composition, thereby denying the existence of brains, hands, and other proper parts of an organism . One reason for positing this near-nihilistic ontology comes from various challenges to animalism such as the Thinking Parts Argument, the Unity Argument, and the Argument from the Problem of the Many. In this paper, I show that these putatively distinct arguments are all instances of a more general problem, which I call the ‘Too Many (...) Candidates Problem’ . Given my formulation of the problem, it is evident that standard animalists are mistaken in believing that restricting composition is the only solution. I show that there is another option for solving the TMC. The advantage of such a position, which I call ‘unrestricted animalism’, is that it is compatible with unrestricted composition and the existence of brains and other proper parts of an organism. I conclude by sketching several strategies one can take regarding this latter solution to the TMC. (shrink)

kant’s critique of pure reason undertakes a systematic investigation of the possibility of synthetic cognition a priori so as to determine whether this kind of cognition is possible in the case of traditional metaphysics.1 While much scholarly attention has been devoted to the distinction between analytic and synthetic judgments as well as to that between the a priori and the a posteriori, less attention has been devoted to understanding exactly what cognition is for Kant. In particular, it is often insufficiently (...) clear what kind of mental state cognition is, what the exact nature of the conditions on cognition is, and how they are satisfied in the case of human beings. To bring greater clarity to... (shrink)

There is much to admire in this book. It is written in a pleasingly straightforward style, and offers insight on a wide range of important issues.