Within the overarching framework of considering the purpose of education, this book addresses issues such as the standards movement, high-stakes testing and accountability, and corporate education reform. It raises ethical questions related to school practices and considers the question of who should decide the purpose of education.

Jeff McMahan urges us to reject the view, dominant throughout history, that mere participation in an unjust war is not wrong.

However much one may wish for nonviolent solutions to the problems of unjust and unrestrained human violence that Glover explores in Humanity, some of those problems at present require violent responses. One cannot read his account of the Clinton administration’s campaign to sabotage efforts to stop the massacre in Rwanda in 1994 – a campaign motivated by fear that American involvement would cost American lives and therefore votes – without concluding that Glover himself believes that military intervention was morally required (...) in that case. Military intervention in another state that is intended to stop one group within that state from brutally persecuting or violating the human rights of members of another group is now known as “humanitarian intervention.” Those against whom the intervention is directed are almost always the government and its supporters, though this is not a necessary feature of humanitarian intervention. It is, however, a conceptual condition of humanitarian intervention that it does not occur at the request or with the consent of the government. The use of force within another state with the consent of the government counts as assistance rather than intervention. The principal reason that humanitarian intervention is contentious is that it seems to violate the target state’s sovereign right to control its own domestic affairs. Because humanitarian intervention is a response to human rights violations within the target state, it is regarded as altogether different from wars of defense against aggression. Indeed, since aggression is normally understood to be war against a state that.. (shrink)

Self-creation and autonomy -- Creation, society and the imaginary -- Self and world -- The living body -- The human psyche -- The whole world and more : the meaning of the monadic psyche and its fate -- Magmas -- Determination and the logic of indeterminate being -- Indeterminacy and interpretation -- Autonomy and meaning.

Most people are skeptical of the claim that the expectation that a person would have a life that would be well worth living provides a reason to cause that person to exist. In this essay I argue that to cause such a person to exist would be to confer a benefit of a noncomparative kind and that there is a moral reason to bestow benefits of this kind. But this conclusion raises many problems, among which is that it must be (...) determined how the benefits conferred on people by causing them to exist weigh against comparable benefits conferred on existing people. In particular, might the reason to cause people to exist ever outweigh the reason to save the lives of existing people? (shrink)

Sustaining Loss explores the uncanny, traumatic weaving together of the living and the dead in art, and the morbid fascination it holds for modern philosophical aesthetics. Beginning with Kant, the author traces how aesthetic theory has been drawn back repeatedly to the moving power of the undead body of the work of art. He locates the most potent expressions of this philosophical compulsion in Hegel's thesis that art is a thing of the past, and in Freud's view that the work (...) of art is the haunting of the present by the endless suffering of what is dead but still has claims over the living. Sustaining Loss examines not only Kant, Hegel, and Freud, but also the contemporary artists Gerhard Richter and Ilya Kabakov, whose art turns fruitfully against art's own past. (shrink)

Bruno Latour has been attempting to transform his sociological account of science into an ambitious theory of democracy. In a key early moment in this project, Latour alleges that Plato’s Gorgias introduces an impossibly ratio-nalistic and deeply anti-democratic philosophy which continues to this day to distort our understandings of science and democracy. Latour reckons that if he can successfully refute the Gorgias , then he will have opened up a space in which to authorize his own theory of democracy. I (...) argue that Latour’s refutation of the Gorgias is a failure. Hence, his political theory is, by his own standards, horribly underdetermined. I present another reading of the Gorgias , and consider the dialogue’s possible relevance for current theories of deliberative democracy. Key Words: Latour • Gorgias • Socrates • rhetoric • elenchus • deliberative democracy. (shrink)

This paper exposes a common mistake concerning the division of linguistic labor. I characterize the mistake as an overgeneralization from natural kind terms; this misleads philosophers about which terms are subject to the division of linguistic labor, what linguistic labor is, how linguistic labor is divided, and how the extensions of non-natural kind terms subject to the division of linguistic labor are determined. I illustrate these points by considering Sally Haslanger’s account of the division of linguistic labor for social kind (...) terms and raising an objection to it. Then, I draw on Tyler Burge’s work to characterize a conception of the division of linguistic labor that avoids the mistaken overgeneralization and grounds 1–4 above in social norms and practices. (shrink)

This article looks at the rare instances in Dewey’s collected works where psychiatry is addressed. Interestingly, Dewey draws on psychiatry as a way of demonstrating the flaws of excessively student-centered approaches to education. I take this to be of interest because it both clarifies Dewey’s philosophy of education while also suggesting that Dewey does not shy away from confronting truths disclosed by psychoanalysis. In fact, learning from advances in any and every field of inquiry is central to his philosophy of (...) education. While some readers of Dewey dismiss him as naïve or overly optimistic, this paper argues that Dewey invites the challenges offered by psychoanalytic work and that his understanding education for growth must be grounded in a psychoanalytically informed vision of the person. (shrink)

What place does consciousness have in the natural world? If we reject materialism, could there be a credible alternative? In one classic example, philosophers ask whether we can ever know what is it is like for bats to sense the world using sonar. It seems obvious to many that any amount of information about a bat's physical structure and information processing leaves us guessing about the central questions concerning the character of its experience. A Place for Consciousness begins with reflections (...) on the existence of this gap. Is it just a psychological shortcoming in our merely human understanding of the physical world? Is it a trivial consequence of the simple fact that we just cannot be bats? Or does it mean there really are facts about consciousness over and above the physical facts? If so, what does consciousness do? Why does it exist? Rosenberg sorts out these problems, especially those centering on the causal role of consciousness. He introduces a new paradigm called Liberal Naturalism for thinking about what causation is, about the natural world, and about how to create a detailed model to go along with the new paradigm. Arguing that experience is part of the categorical foundations of causality, he shows that within this new paradigm there is a place for something essentially like consciousness in all its traditional mysterious respects. A striking feature of Liberal Naturalism is that its central tenets are motivated independently of the mind-body problem, by analyzing causation itself. Because of this approach, when consciousness shows up in the picture it is not introduced in an ad hoc way, and its most puzzling features can be explained from first principles. Ultimately, Rosenberg's final solution gives consciousness a causally important role without supposing either that it is physical or that it interacts with the physical. (shrink)

In its original context Hawking was writing about the significance of physics for questions about God's existence and responsibility for creation. I am co-opting the sentiment for another purpose, though. As stated Hawking could equally be directing the question at concerns about the seemingly abstract information physics conveys about the world, and the full body of facts contained in the substance of the world. Would even a complete and adequate physics tell us all the general facts about the stuff the (...) world is made of? In this chapter I am going to argue that the answer is "no." I am also going to argue that the missing facts are like the kinds of facts we can use to cross the explanatory gap. I am going to argue, in short, that we have reasons to re-enchant matter that are independent of the mind-body problem. In a recent anthology on consciousness (1997) G. (shrink)

There are many algorithm texts that provide lots of well-polished code and proofs of correctness. Instead, this book presents insights, notations, and analogies to help the novice describe and think about algorithms like an expert. By looking at both the big picture and easy step-by-step methods for developing algorithms, the author helps students avoid the common pitfalls. He stresses paradigms such as loop invariants and recursion to unify a huge range of algorithms into a few meta-algorithms. Part of the goal (...) is to teach the students to think abstractly. Without getting bogged with formal proofs, the book fosters a deeper understanding of how and why each algorithm works. These insights are presented in a slow and clear manner accessible to second- or third-year students of computer science, preparing them to find their own innovative ways to solve problems. (shrink)

Pragmatic arguments seek to justify the performance of an action by appealing to the benefits that may follow from that action. Pascal’s wager, for instance, argues that one should inculcate belief in God because there is everything to gain and little to lose by doing do. In this chapter I critically examine Pascal’s wager and William James’s famous “Will-to-Believe” argument by first explaining the logic of each argument and then by surveying the objections commonly arrayed against them. Finally, I suggest (...) that among the various versions of the wager found in Pascal’s Pensées is a neglected version that anticipates the Jamesian argument and that avoids the many-gods objection. (shrink)

The first interdisciplinary study of place, bringing together many of the key thinkers writing on the concept in the twenty-first century.

Jewish learning and thought in Languedoc -- 1250-1300: implications of original philosophic work and the diffusion of philosophic learning in Languedoc -- 1250-1300: Jewish contacts with Christian intellectuals and Jewish thought regarding Christianity -- Meiri's transformation of Talmud study: philosophic spirituality in a halakhic key -- 1300: on the eve of the controversy -- 1300-1304: knowledge and authority in dispute -- 1304-1306: the controversy peaks -- The effects of the expulsion: Jewish philosophic culture in Roussillon and Provence.

This book, originally published in 1989 discusses an issue central to all philosophical argument – the relation between persuasion and truth. The techniques of persuasion are indirect and not always fully transparent. Whether philosophers and theoreticians are for or against the use of rhetoric, they engage in rhetorical practice none the less. Focusing on Plato, Descartes, Kant, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche and Wittgenstein, this book uncovers philosophical rhetoric at work and reminds us of the rhetorical arena in which philosophical writings are produced (...) and considered. (shrink)

In the ever-expanding field of nuclear history, studies of ‘nuclear culture’ are becoming increasingly popular. Often situated within national contexts, they typically explore responses to the nuclear condition in the cultural modes of literature, art, music, theatre, film and other media, as well as nuclear imagery more generally. This paper offers a critique of current conceptions of ‘nuclear culture’, and argues that the term has little analytical coherence. It suggests that historians of ‘nuclear culture’ have tended to essentialize the nuclear (...) to the detriment of historical analysis, and that the wide variety of methodological approaches to ‘nuclear culture’ are simultaneously a strength and a more significant weakness, in that they have little shared sense of the meaning of the term, its theoretical underpinnings or its analytical purchase. The paper then offers a study of Ewan MacColl's 1946 playUranium 235, whose career reveals much about the diversity of cultures of the nuclear in post-war Britain. The study moves us away from a single, homogeneous ‘British nuclear culture’ towards a pluralistic critical history of cultural responses to nuclearization. These responses, I conclude, should be seen as collectively constitutive of the nuclear condition rather than as passive reflections of it. (shrink)

The author interprets the relation to Heidegger's ontology to theology in terms of a correlation. He develops his inquiry from several different perspectives: a brief overview of Heidegger's thought; an overview of the traditional connections of God and being, between ontology and theology, and of the necessity of the connection; an overview of the theological reception of Heidegger's work; and finally a discussion of the current situation in theology.

In 2020, COVID-19, the Australia bushfires, and other global threats served as vivid reminders that human and nonhuman fates are increasingly linked. Human use of nonhuman animals contributes to pandemics, climate change, and other global threats which, in turn, contribute to biodiversity loss, ecosystem collapse, and nonhuman suffering. Jeff Sebo argues that humans have a moral responsibility to include animals in global health and environmental policy. In particular, we should reduce our use of animals as part of our pandemic (...) and climate change mitigation efforts and increase our support for animals as part of our adaptation efforts. Applying and extending frameworks such as One Health and the Green New Deal, Sebo calls for reducing support for factory farming, deforestation, and the wildlife trade; increasing support for humane, healthful, and sustainable alternatives; and considering human and nonhuman needs holistically. Sebo also considers connections with practical issues such as education, employment, social services, and infrastructure, as well as with theoretical issues such as well-being, moral status, political status, and population ethics. In all cases, he shows that these issues are both important and complex, and that we should neither underestimate our responsibilities because of our limitations, nor underestimate our limitations because of our responsibilities. Both an urgent call to action and a survey of what ethical and effective action requires, Saving Animals, Saving Ourselves is an invaluable resource for scholars, advocates, policy-makers, and anyone interested in what kind of world we should attempt to build and how. (shrink)

Avia Pasternak’s book makes a significant contribution to our understanding of citizen responsibility for historical wrongs. This review nevertheless offers some scepticism about resting citizen liability exclusively on the idea of intentional participation. It argues that the necessity of the state possessing continuing legal responsibility over time is so intrinsic to the function of statehood that the question of citizen liability should be seen as part of the general theory of political obligation. So seen, fair play duties provide a more (...) plausible general ground for citizen liability, even when adapted to unjust regimes. The model of intentional participation may by contrast harbour a muted connection between the ideas of blameworthiness and responsibility that the book in the main wishes to deny. And the practical problems of resting responsibility on intentional participation alone are substantial. Pasternak’s major contribution, untouched by this critique, is to explain how the special obligations undertaken by intentional citizenship strengthen and extend beyond that more foundational duty of responsible citizens. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy and Literature 27.1 (2003) 134-150 [Access article in PDF] Deception and Intentional Transparency:The Case of Writing Jeff Karon Intention never to deceive lays us open to many a deception. —La Rochefoucauld, MaximsWE LIVE IN DECEPTIVE TIMES. We anticipate the latest exposé of corporate greed, personal aggrandizement, or government cover-up, and yearn for yesterday's supposed truthfulness and integrity. Lies and other forms of deceptive behavior degrade our characters, (...) unravel the fabric of civil society, and threaten our progress toward the good life.We also fear the loss of public civility and etiquette, wishing instead that others still treated us with the respect we deserve. Deception is bad enough; now we must bear rude neighbors, supervisors, colleagues, merchants, and all manner of strangers. Yet deception and rudeness together generate a paradox: the lost standards we lament—ones that direct people to treat others as valuable ends rather than means—include specific forms of conduct that avoid inflicting unnecessary pain or creating unnecessary conflict. Whether in the personal or professional sphere, the written and unwritten rules of etiquette often bid us to employ euphemisms and other misdirections so that our listeners or readers will not be offended, thus maintaining the social fabric by means of benign deceit. How, then, can we possibly hope to live ethical lives without necessarily employing deception?The answer is that we cannot. By expanding the category of acts usually analyzed in ethics to include the extended writing act, we can appreciate how deception is wound tightly into the moral life, a result that is not widely accepted in moral philosophy. Sissela Bok's seminal [End Page 134] books Secrets and Lying, for example, advocate deception in extraordinary circumstances of personal or national security, but do not allow for its constant deployment to navigate life's daily vicissitudes. 1 The complex, everyday act of writing helps us see past this simplification.Recent books by David Nyberg, Jeremy Campbell, John Vignauz Smyth, Dariusz Galasinski, and Charles V. Ford attest to our fascination with social deception, providing philosophical, literary, linguistic, and psychological insights into real-life examples. 2 As instances pile up, we begin to appreciate how deception is woven closely into our lives. This point receives a brash formulation in Arnold Ludwig's 1965 The Importance of Lying: "[W]hen we find the lie, hypocrisy and deception used so widely by man, we are forced to wonder whether this behavior represents some moral failure or weakness or whether, in fact it plays some more important biological or survival role for man. Perhaps, without resorting to lying or self-deception, man would find life intolerable and existence impossible." 3 More recent authors have tried to rehabilitate deception by choosing familiar cases that seem benign in both intention and effect, thus avoiding a justification built solely on survival needs. The next step, however, should move us beyond the empirical question of just how common deception is to a different one: are there widely shared features that make these cases candidates for moral approval, even if subsequent events require that we ultimately withhold that approval? Writing, by its very nature, demonstrates that moral reasoning always must take account of deception by triangulating between an author's supposed intentions, supposed character, and the eventual reception in the world by a real audience. And as writing pervades our lives, so do the possibilities for justified deception. I Those who study deception rarely agree on any universal characteristic except one: lying, a particularly direct form of deception, always is intentional. A corresponding minimal assumption for writing would be the following: Writing, in the absence of some very peculiar story-telling, is intentional. This minimal assumption ought to be admitted, though one fashionable current in literary studies runs against it. Language works by itself, "deconstructs itself," for example, without the direct intervention of an agent. Language "speaks us," and so on, in lyrical, mystifying formulations that offer inspiration for the critic as an [End Page 135] explorer of a far, exotic land, but little solid geography for those who wonder at what point in the... (shrink)

Governments today often apologize for past injustices and scholars increasingly debate the issue, with many calling for apologies and reparations. Others suggest that what matters are victims of injustice today, not injustices in the past. Spinner-Halev argues that the problem facing some peoples is not just the injustice of the past, but that they still suffer from injustice today. They experience what he calls enduring injustices, and it is likely that these will persist without action to address them. The history (...) of these injustices matters, not as a way to assign responsibility or because we need to remember more, but in order to understand the nature of the injustice and to help us think of possible ways to overcome it. Suggesting that enduring injustices fall outside the framework of liberal theory, Spinner-Halev spells out the implications of arguments for conceptions of liberal justice and progress, reparations, apologies, state legitimacy and post-nationalism. (shrink)

The current essay introduces the guidance theory of representation, according to which the content and intentionality of representations can be accounted for in terms of the way they provide guidance for action. The guidance theory offers a way of fixing representational content that gives the causal and evolutionary history of the subject only an indirect role, and an account of representational error, based on failure of action, that does not rely on any such notions as proper functions, ideal conditions, or (...) normal circumstances. Moreover, because the notion of error is defined in terms of failure of action, the guidance theory meets the “meta-epistemological requirement” that representational error should be potentially detectable by the representing system itself. In this essay, we offer a brief account of the biological origins of representation, a formal characterization of the guidance theory, some examples of its use, and show how the guidance theory handles some traditional problem cases for representation: the representation of fictional and abstract entities. Being both representational and actiongrounded, the guidance theory may provide some common ground between embodied and cognitivist approaches to the study of the mind. (shrink)

As philosophical and scientific arguments for free will skepticism continue to gain traction, we are likely to see a fundamental shift in the way people think about free will and moral responsibility. Such shifts raise important practical and existential concerns: What if we came to disbelieve in free will? What would this mean for our interpersonal relationships, society, morality, meaning, and the law? What would it do to our standing as human beings? Would it cause nihilism and despair as some (...) maintain or would it rather have a humanizing effect on our practices and policies, freeing us from the negative effects of belief in free will? In this chapter we consider the practical implications of free will skepticism and argue that life without free will and basic desert moral responsibility would not be as destructive as many people believe. We argue that prospects of finding meaning in life or of sustaining good interpersonal relationships, for example, would not be threatened. On treatment of criminals, we argue that although retributivism and severe punishment, such as the death penalty, would be ruled out, preventive detention and rehabilitation programs would still be justified. While we will touch on all these issues below, our focus will be primarily on this last issue. -/- We begin in section I by considering two different routes to free will skepticism. The first denies the causal efficacy of the types of willing required for free will and receives its contemporary impetus from pioneering work in neuroscience by Benjamin Libet, Daniel Wegner, and John-Dylan Haynes. The second, which is more common in the philosophical literature, does not deny the causal efficacy of the will but instead claims that whether this causal efficacy is deterministic or indeterministic, it does not achieve the level of control to count as free will by the standards of the historical debate. We argue that while there are compelling objections to the first route—e.g., Al Mele (2009), Eddy Nahmias (2002, 2011), and Neil Levy (2005)—the second route to free will skepticism remains intact. In section II we argue that free will skepticism allows for a workable morality, and, rather than negatively impacting our personal relationships and meaning in life, may well improve our well-being and our relationships to others since it would tend to eradicate an often destructive form of moral anger. In section III we argue that free will skepticism allows for adequate ways of responding to criminal behavior—in particular, incapacitation, rehabilitation, and alternation of relevant social conditions—and that these methods are both morally justified and sufficient for good social policy. We present and defend our own preferred model for dealing with dangerous criminals, an incapacitation account built on the right to self-protection analogous to the justification for quarantine (see Pereboom 2001, 2013, 2014a; Caruso 2016a), and we respond to recent objections to it by Michael Corrado and John Lemos. (shrink)

The author proposes an in-class Rawls game to help teach Rawls’ idea of the veil of ignorance. This game is contrasted to another Rawls game (developed by Ronald M. Green) which emphasizes the importance of reaching an impartial unanimous decision. Unlike Green’s game, the game detailed in this paper illustrates Rawls’ justification for the veil of ignorance by showing how one’s natural assets and initial starting point in society are undeserved and arbitrary from a moral point of view. The lessons (...) delivered by each game are contrasted and the author argues for their complementarity. (shrink)

Davidson aimed to explain predication in terms of truth. I explain what is distinctive about his approach by contrasting it with the widely held view that predication and truth must both be explained in terms of the properties of propositions. I consider Davidson's arguments against this propositionalist alternative, and conclude by exploring some commonalities between Davidson's approach and the more recent propositionalist views of King and Soames.

The Meaning Circuit Hypothesis (MCH) is a synthesis of ideas providing John Wheeler’s outline of ultimate physics, which he fine-tuned over several decades from the 1970s onward. It is a ‘working hypothesis’ in which ‘existence is a ‘meaning circuit”’ that portrays the world as a “system self-synthesized by quantum networking.” It was strongly advocated by him for roughly two decades and since then has had an increasingly strong impact on the approach of many investigators of quantum theory; in particular, elements (...) such as the quantum participator and ‘it from bit’ are now considered by others as candidate components of a foundation for quantum theory in which information is involved essentially. Therefore, it is worthy of review and critique. (shrink)

Alternative dispute resolution occurs outside the litigation process. The alternative dispute resolution (ADR) movement in North America has emphasized viable alternatives to the litigation framework, such as arbitration, mediation, med-arb, multi-party facilitation, non-legal negotiation, mini-trials, administrative hearings, private judging (“renta-judge”), fact finding, and moderated settlement conferences. This essay addresses argument in the dominant alternatives: arbitration, mediation, and multi-party facilitation. Prior to comparing argument in these ADR systems, each will be briefly described.

Within the criminal justice system, one of the most prominent justifications for legal punishment is retributivism. The retributive justification of legal punishment maintains that wrongdoers are morally responsible for their actions and deserve to be punished in proportion to their wrongdoing. This book argues against retributivism and develops a viable alternative that is both ethically defensible and practical. Introducing six distinct reasons for rejecting retributivism, Gregg D. Caruso contends that it is unclear that agents possess the kind of free (...) will and moral responsibility needed to justify this view of punishment. While a number of alternatives to retributivism exist - including consequentialist deterrence, educational, and communicative theories - they have ethical problems of their own. Moving beyond existing theories, Caruso presents a new non-retributive approach called the public health-quarantine model. In stark contrast to retributivism, the public health-quarantine model provides a more human, holistic, and effective approach to dealing with criminal behavior. (shrink)

We often evaluate belief-forming processes, agents, or entire belief states for reliability. This is normally done with the assumption that beliefs are all-or-nothing. How does such evaluation go when we’re considering beliefs that come in degrees? I consider a natural answer to this question that focuses on the degree of truth-possession had by a set of beliefs. I argue that this natural proposal is inadequate, but for an interesting reason. When we are dealing with all-or-nothing belief, high reliability leads to (...) high levels of truth-possession. However, when it comes to degrees of belief, reliability and truth-possession part ways. The natural answer thus fails to be a good way to evaluate degrees of belief for reliability. I propose and develop an alternative method based on the notion of calibration, suggested by Frank Ramsey, which does not have this problem and consider why we should care about such assessments of reliability even if they are not tied directly to truth-possession. (shrink)

I argue that Husserlian phenomenology is metaphysically neutral, in the sense of being compatible with multiple metaphysical frameworks. For example, though Husserl dismisses the concept of an unknowable thing in itself as “material nonsense”, I argue that the concept is coherent and that the existence of such things is compatible with Husserl’s phenomenology. I defend this metaphysical neutrality approach against a number of objections and consider some of its implications for Husserl interpretation.

Young children learn about the power of God's love and creation through simple text and illustrations.

"Nietzche and Dostoevsky"are collectedessays on Nietzsche Dostoevsky andtwentieth-century intellectual history.".

Benj’s paper is a characteristically thoughtful, imaginative, and wide-ranging exploration of the relationship between certain direct realist theories of perception and the nature of perceptual justification — with some formal semantics thrown in for good measure. Here I’ll focus on just one of the many topics about which Benj has something to say: his remarks on the topic of the relationship that must obtain between a perceptual state and a belief in order for the former to immediately justify the latter.