This handbook article gives a critical overview of recent discussions of epistemic authority. It favors an account that brings into balance the dictates of rational deference with the ideals of intellectual self-governance. A plausible starting point is the conjecture that neither should rational deference to authorities collapse into total epistemic submission, nor the ideal of mature intellectual self-governance be conflated with (illusions of) epistemic autarky.

The essays that Jill Stauffer and Bettina Bergo collect in this volume locate multiple affinities between the philosophies of Nietzsche and Levinas. Both philosophers question the nature of subjectivity and the meaning of responsibility after the "death of God." While Nietzsche poses the dilemmas of a self without a ground and of ethics at a time of cultural upheaval and demystification, Levinas wrestles with subjectivity and the sheer possibility of ethics after the Shoah. Both argue that goodness exists independently (...) of calculative reason—for Nietzsche, goodness arises in a creative act moving beyond reaction and ressentiment; Levinas argues that goodness occurs in a spontaneous response to another person. In a world at once without God and haunted by multiple divinities, Nietzsche and Levinas reject transcendental foundations for politics and work toward an alternative vision encompassing a positive sense of creation, a complex fraternity or friendship, and rival notions of responsibility. Stauffer and Bergo group arguments around the following debates, which are far from settled: What is the reevaluation of ethics (and life) that Nietzsche and Levinas propose, and what does this imply for politics and sociality? What is a human subject—and what are substance, permanence, causality, and identity, whether social or ethical—in the wake of the demise of God as the highest being and the foundation of what is stable in existence? Finally, how can a "God" still inhabit philosophy, and what sort of name is this in the thought of Nietzsche and Levinas? (shrink)

Der Download enthält die penultimative Fassung (noch unter dem vorläufigen Titel "Molina über Vorsehung und Freiheit"). Diese ausführliche Einleitung zu dem Band "Luis de Molina: Göttlicher Plan und menschliche Freiheit", hg. und übersetzt von C. Jäger, H. Kraml und G. Leibold, Hamburg: Meiner 2018, rekonstruiert auf 165 S. Molinas berühmte Theorie der Willensfreiheit und die Frage ihrer Vereinbarkeit mit göttlichem Vorherwissen und göttlicher Vorsehung. Sie zeichnet wesentliche Stationen der Debatte um den theologischen Determinismus nach, wie sie sich von Augustinus und (...) Boethius über Anselm, Thomas von Aquin, Scotus, Ockham und andere bis zu Molina und von dort bis in die jüngste, vor allem analytische Religionsphilosophie hinein entwickelt. (shrink)

Logoi : the history and definition of art and aesthetics -- The broader context -- An ontological foundation -- Doxa : the nature of art -- Inspired by the spirit -- Universal beauty -- Aesthetics of hope -- Praxis : the purpose of art -- Art and creation as play -- Serious art qo -- Church art.

OCR Religious Ethics for AS and A2 is a textbook for students of Advanced Subsidiary or Advanced Level courses, endorsed by OCR for use with the OCR GCE Religious Studies specification. The book covers all the topics of the Religious Ethics component of the A Level specification in an enjoyable and student-friendly fashion. This second edition has been restructured for the revised specification and now includes a section on business ethics. Each chapter includes: a list of key issues, to introduce (...) students to the topic OCR specification checklist, to allow students to see which topics from the specification are covered in each chapter explanations of key terminology exam-style practice questions self-test review questions helpful summaries annotated further reading suggestions. To maximize students' chances of exam success, the book includes a chapter dedicated to answering examination questions. The book comes complete with lively illustrations, a comprehensive glossary, a full bibliography and a companion website at www.routledge.com/textbooks/9780415468251. (shrink)

The Renaissance, known primarily for the art and literature that it produced, was also a period in which philosophical thought flourished. This two-volume anthology contains 40 new translations of important works on moral and political philosophy written during the Renaissance and hitherto unavailable in English. The anthology is designed to be used in conjunction with The Cambridge History of Renaissance Philosophy, in which all of these texts are discussed. The works, originally written in Latin, Italian, French, Spanish, and Greek, cover (...) such topics as: concepts of man, Aristotelian, Platonic, Stoic, and Epicurean ethics, scholastic political philosophy, theories of princely and republican government in Italy and northern European political thought. Each text is supplied with an introduction and a guide to further reading. (shrink)

We discuss several ontological properties of explicit mathematics and operational set theory: global choice, decidable classes, totality and extensionality of operations, function spaces, class and set formation via formulas that contain the definedness predicate and applications.

An important finding of the game theoretic research on signaling games is the insight that under many circumstances, a signal obtains credibility by incurring costs to the sender. Therefore it seems questionable whether or not cheap talk—signals that are not payoff relevant—can serve to transmit information among rational agents. This issue is non-trivial in strategic interactions where the preferences of the players are not aligned. Researchers like Crawford & Sobel, Rabin, and Farrell demonstrated, however, that even in the case of (...) partially divergent interests, cheap talk may be informative. They assume that signals have an exogenously given meaning that is common knowledge between the players, and they explore the conditions under which such a signal is credible. This discussion has obvious relevance to the program of Gricean pragmatics in linguistics. According to Grice’s "Cooperative Principle”, this research tradition only considers scenarios where the interests of the players are aligned. Nevertheless, the assumption of differential signaling costs introduces an element of non-aligned interests. The present paper proposes a framework that combines these two research strands. Using an inference protocol of iterated best response, it gives a recipe for how the interlocutors derive rationalizable strategies from exogeneously given "literal” meanings of signals. No special assumptions about the alignment of interests or signaling costs are made. After introducing the formal model, the paper sketches several applications of this model to problems in linguistic pragmatics, like scalar implicatures, the division of pragmatic labor, and the interpretation of measure terms. (shrink)

The comments focus on a presumed circular reasoning in the operator hierarchy and the necessity of understanding life’s origin for defining life. Below it is shown that its layered structure prevents the operator hierarchy from circular definitions. It is argued that the origin of life is an insufficient basis for a definition of life that includes multicellular and neural network organisms.

Jill North offers answers to questions at the heart of the project of interpreting physics. How do we figure out the nature of the world from a mathematically formulated theory? What do we infer about the world when a physical theory can be mathematically formulated in different ways? The notion of structure is crucial to North's answers.

We are used to talking about the “structure” posited by a given theory of physics, such as the spacetime structure of relativity. What is “structure”? What does the mathematical structure used to formulate a theory tell us about the physical world according to the theory? What if there are different mathematical formulations of a given theory? Do different formulations posit different structures, or are they merely notational variants? I consider the case of Lagrangian and Hamiltonian classical mechanics. I argue that, (...) contrary to standard wisdom, these are not genuinely equivalent theories: they differ in statespace structure. I suggest that we should be realists about statespace structure. (shrink)

Altered Reading will interest philosophers, literary critics, scholars of religion, and others drawn to Levinas's work.

I discuss two accounts of rational religious faith that have recently been proposed by Peter Rohs and Volker Gerhardt, respectively, and critically explore the relations between (i) faith and knowledge and (ii) faith and hope. I argue that, if faith essentially involves some form of eschatological hope, then a theory of rational faith will have to include an analysis of rational hope.

I argue that the fundamental space of a quantum mechanical world is the wavefunction's space. I argue for this using some very general principles that guide our inferences to the fundamental nature of a world, for any fundamental physical theory. I suggest that ordinary three-dimensional space exists in such a world, but is non-fundamental; it emerges from the fundamental space of the wavefunction.

We should see the debate over the existence of spacetime as a debate about the fundamentality of spatiotemporal structure to the physical world. This is a non-traditional conception of the debate, which captures the spirit of the traditional one. At the same time, it clarifies the point of contention between opposing views and offsets worries that the dispute is stagnant or non-substantive. It also unearths a novel argument for substantivalism, given current physics. Even so, that conclusion can be overridden by (...) future physics. I conclude that this debate is a substantive one, which the substantivalist is currently winning. (shrink)

There has been a massive advocacy movement over the last 15 years that has sought to advance the case of religion into view of decision-makers in the international development sector. This advocacy effort has been dispersed and not centrally organised, and is made up of the efforts of multiple development actors, religious institutions, researchers and others. This article shows how this advocacy approach has been highly successful in increasing acceptance of the fact that religion is relevant to development, and religious (...) communities and institutions make contributions to the development effort - and this acceptance can now be seen at the highest levels. However, the article highlights several challenges that have come with this advocacy approach. It therefore supports urgent reflection on the direction of this advocacy going forward and suggests that major and uncomfortable adaptations might now be required. (shrink)

Or better: time asymmetry in thermodynamics. Better still: time asymmetry in thermodynamic phenomena. “Time in thermodynamics” misleadingly suggests that thermodynamics will tell us about the fundamental nature of time. But we don’t think that thermodynamics is a fundamental theory. It is a theory of macroscopic behavior, often called a “phenomenological science.” And to the extent that physics can tell us about the fundamental features of the world, including such things as the nature of time, we generally think that only fundamental (...) physics can. On its own, a science like thermodynamics won’t be able to tell us about time per se. But the theory will have much to say about everyday processes that occur in time; and in particular, the apparent asymmetry of those processes. The pressing question of time in the context of thermodynamics is about the asymmetry of things in time, not the asymmetry of time, to paraphrase Price ( , ). I use the title anyway, to underscore what is, to my mind, the centrality of thermodynamics to any discussion of the nature of time and our experience in it. The two issues—the temporal features of processes in time, and the intrinsic structure of time itself—are related. Indeed, it is in part this relation that makes the question of time asymmetry in thermodynamics so interesting. This, plus the fact that thermodynamics describes a surprisingly wide range of our ordinary experience. We’ll return to this. First, we need to get the question of time asymmetry in thermodynamics out on the table. (shrink)

Gaston Bachelard's thought remains a continual source of inspiration for a phenomenological psychology that takes human habitation as a fundamental given and as an abiding mystery of the human condition. the following essay explores the ideas Bachelard developed in the course of his study of poetry. It examines in particular his vision of imagination as a unique passage way by means of which we reach an inhabitable, intersubjective and fully human world. Within that perspective, our lives are constantly renewed by (...) the appearance of a revealing image or a telling metaphor. Each time that we are awakened by this appeal we commemorate the birth and rebirth of a human world. (shrink)

We describe a set of two computer‐implemented models that solve physics problems in ways characteristic of more and less competent human solvers. The main features accounting for different competences are differences in strategy for selecting physics principles, and differences in the degree of automation in the process of applying a single principle. The models provide a good account of the order in which principles are applied by human solvers working problems in kinematics and dynamics. They also are sufficiently flexible to (...) allow easy extension to several related domains of physics problems. (shrink)

Discusses values from the perspective of different health care professionals and why teams and collaborations may succeed or fail.

This chapter explores Marcel’s relationship with German idealism, the impact idealism had on his existentialism, his philosophical evolution beyond idealist conceptions of objectivity and consciousness, and his own move towards the authentic “ethical self,” whose goal is a reciprocal, intersubjective relationship with others who are freely seeking the inner meaning of experience. It will argue that the authentic self is fundamentally personal because it is embodied, non-objective, and creates opportunities for others to existentially flourish. The continuing progress of the ethical, (...) authentic self in a world that threatens it establishes Marcel’s existentialism as way to flourish in the midst of absurdity, and so establishes it as more than a mere reaction to German idealism. (shrink)

Ethical loneliness is the experience of being abandoned by humanity, compounded by the cruelty of wrongs not being heard. It is the result of multiple lapses on the part of human beings and political institutions that, in failing to listen well to survivors, deny them redress by negating their testimony and thwarting their claims for justice. Jill Stauffer examines the root causes of ethical loneliness and how those in power revise history to serve their own ends rather than the (...) needs of the abandoned. Out of this discussion, difficult truths about the desire and potential for political forgiveness, transitional justice, and political reconciliation emerge. Moving beyond a singular focus on truth commissions and legal trials, she considers more closely what is lost in the wake of oppression and violence, how selves and worlds are built and demolished, and who is responsible for re-creating lives after they are destroyed. Stauffer boldly argues that rebuilding worlds and just institutions after violence is a broad obligation and that those who care about justice must first confront their own assumptions about autonomy, liberty, and responsibility before an effective response to violence can take place. In building her claims, Stauffer draws on the work of Emmanuel Levinas, Jean Améry, Eve Sedgwick, and Friedrich Nietzsche, as well as concrete cases of justice and injustice across the world. (shrink)

The concept of meaningful work has recently received increased attention in philosophy and other disciplines. However, the impact of the increasing robotization of the workplace on meaningful work has received very little attention so far. Doing work that is meaningful leads to higher job satisfaction and increased worker well-being, and some argue for a right to access to meaningful work. In this paper, we therefore address the impact of robotization on meaningful work. We do so by identifying five key aspects (...) of meaningful work: pursuing a purpose, social relationships, exercising skills and self-development, self-esteem and recognition, and autonomy. For each aspect, we analyze how the introduction of robots into the workplace may diminish or enhance the meaningfulness of work. We also identify a few ethical issues that emerge from our analysis. We conclude that robotization of the workplace can have both significant negative and positive effects on meaningful work. Our findings about ways in which robotization of the workplace can be a threat or opportunity for meaningful work can serve as the basis for ethical arguments for how to—and how not to—implement robots into workplaces. (shrink)

We often use symmetries to infer outcomes’ probabilities, as when we infer that each side of a fair coin is equally likely to come up on a given toss. Why are these inferences successful? I argue against answering this with an a priori indifference principle. Reasons to reject that principle are familiar, yet instructive. They point to a new, empirical explanation for the success of our probabilistic predictions. This has implications for indifference reasoning in general. I argue that a priori (...) symmetries need never constrain our probability attributions, even when it comes to our initial credences. (shrink)

In a recent paper, Malament (2004) employs a time reversal transformation that differs from the standard one, without explicitly arguing for it. This is a new and important understanding of time reversal that deserves arguing for in its own right. I argue that it improves upon the standard one. Recent discussion has focused on whether velocities should undergo a time reversal operation. I address a prior question: What is the proper notion of time reversal? This is important, for it will (...) affect our conclusion as to whether our best theories are time-reversal symmetric, and hence whether our spacetime is temporally oriented. *Received February 2007; revised March 2008. †To contact the author, please write to: Department of Philosophy, Yale University, P.O. Box 208306, New Haven, CT 06520-8306; e-mail: jill[email protected]. (shrink)

This is a collection of thirteen new philosophical essays exploring the inequities in our contemporary food system. The book addresses topics including food and property, food insecurity, food deserts, food sovereignty, the gendered aspects of food injustice, food and race, and locavorism.

This book analyzes contemporary visual art produced in the context of conflict and trauma from a range of countries, including Colombia, Northern Ireland, South Africa, and Australia. It focuses on what makes visual language unique, arguing that the "affective" quality of art contributes to a new understanding of the experience of trauma and loss. By extending the concept of empathy, it also demonstrates how we might, through art, make connections with people in different parts of the world whose experiences differ (...) from our own. The book makes a distinct contribution to trauma studies, which has tended to concentrate on literary forms of expression. It also offers a sophisticated theoretical analysis of the operations of art, drawing on philosophers such as Gilles Deleuze, but setting this within a postcolonial framework. _Empathic Vision_ will appeal to anyone interested in the role of culture in post-September 11 global politics. (shrink)

Dominant food systems, based on industrial methods and corporate control, are in a state of flux. To enable the transition towards more sustainable and just food systems, food movements are claiming new roles in governance. These movements, and the initiatives they spearhead, are associated with a range of labels (e.g., food sovereignty, food justice, and community food security) and use a variety of strategies to enact change. In this paper, we use the concept of relational fields to conduct a post-hoc (...) analysis of nine cases, examining how social movement organizations and other actors actively create new deliberative governance spaces. We argue that successes are related to the “power to convene,” a process-oriented approach that increases movements’ capacity to mobilize; leverage different types of power; and integrate, coordinate, and build a systems-oriented vision. The power to convene and create deliberative spaces is demonstrated in a variety of contexts and often results in outcomes that further movement aims, including policy change and repositioning food movement actors vis-à-vis others in the field. Our findings suggest that success is not only measured as policy outcomes, but as an advantageous repositioning of social movement actors that enables them to be part of governance processes beyond simple policy advocacy. (shrink)

We investigate whether the disclosure of a firm’s decision to organize as a benefit corporation (BC) rather than a traditional C corporation (CC) influences investors. We survey 136 investors and 57 MBA students and find that they expect BCs to attain higher future corporate social responsibility (CSR) than CCs even when both have equal CSR ratings. Approximately one third of our sample prefers to invest in BCs when CCs have greater financial returns, indicating a willingness by some investors to sacrifice (...) personal financial gain for social good. Our results suggest that investors weight the information contained in BC disclosures as reliable and value-relevant in their investment decisions. We extend the CSR disclosure literature by indicating how investors weight this new type of CSR information, which may affect how BCs fare as publicly traded companies. (shrink)

Huw Price argues that there are two conceptions of the puzzle of the time‐asymmetry of thermodynamics. He thinks this puzzle has remained unsolved for so long partly due to a misunderstanding about which of these conceptions is the right one and what form a solution ought to take. I argue that it is Price's understanding of the problem which is mistaken. Further, it is on the basis of this and other misunderstandings that he disparages a type of account which does, (...) in fact, hold promise of a solution. (shrink)

All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood. (Article 1, Universal Declaration of Human Rights 1948) This resounding statement encapsulates a number of problematic themes for lawyers with respect to personality disorder, and acutely so for the extremes of personality disorder embraced by designations such as psychopathy or dangerous and severe personality disorder (DSPD). These designations are in themselves (...) contentious; they do not have commonly agreed definitions either across disciplines or across jurisdictions. Morse (2008), for example, argues in a fascinating account that .. (shrink)

In the twenty interviews collected in this volume, seventeen of which appear in English for the first time, Levinas sets forth the central features of his ethical philosophy and discusses biographical matters not available elsewhere.

I discuss the nature of the puzzle about the time‐asymmetry of radiation and argue that its most common formulation is flawed. As a result, many proposed solutions fail to solve the real problem. I discuss a recent proposal of Mathias Frisch as an example of the tendency to address the wrong problem. I go on to suggest that the asymmetry of radiation, like the asymmetry of thermodynamics, results from the initial state of the universe.

In this introductory textbook to Kant's Critique of Pure Reason, Jill Vance Buroker explains the role of this first Critique in Kant's Critical project and offers a line-by-line reading of the major arguments in the text. She situates Kant's views in relation both to his predecessors and to contemporary debates, explaining his Critical philosophy as a response to the failure of rationalism and the challenge of skepticism. Paying special attention to Kant's notoriously difficult vocabulary, she explains the strengths and (...) weaknesses of his arguments, while leaving the final assessment up to the reader. Intended to be read alongside the Critique, this guide is accessible to readers with little background in the history of philosophy, but should also be a valuable resource for more advanced students. (shrink)

Artificial intelligence-driven technology increasingly shapes work practices and, accordingly, employees’ opportunities for meaningful work (MW). In our paper, we identify five dimensions of MW: pursuing a purpose, social relationships, exercising skills and self-development, autonomy, self-esteem and recognition. Because MW is an important good, lacking opportunities for MW is a serious disadvantage. Therefore, we need to know to what extent employers have a duty to provide this good to their employees. We hold that employers have a duty of beneficence to design (...) for opportunities for MW when implementing AI-technology in the workplace. We argue that this duty of beneficence is supported by the three major ethical theories, namely, Kantian ethics, consequentialism, and virtue ethics. We defend this duty against two objections, including the view that it is incompatible with the shareholder theory of the firm. We then employ the five dimensions of MW as our analytical lens to investigate how AI-based technological innovation in logistic warehouses has an impact, both positively and negatively, on MW, and illustrate that design for MW is feasible. We further support this practical feasibility with the help of insights from organizational psychology. We end by discussing how AI-based technology has an impact both on meaningful work (often seen as an aspirational goal) and decent work (generally seen as a matter of justice). Accordingly, ethical reflection on meaningful and decent work should become more integrated to do justice to how AI-technology inevitably shapes both simultaneously. (shrink)

This paper critically assesses John Danaher’s ‘ethical behaviourism’, a theory on how the moral status of robots should be determined. The basic idea of this theory is that a robot’s moral status is determined decisively on the basis of its observable behaviour. If it behaves sufficiently similar to some entity that has moral status, such as a human or an animal, then we should ascribe the same moral status to the robot as we do to this human or animal. The (...) paper argues against ethical behaviourism by making four main points. First, it is argued that the strongest version of ethical behaviourism understands the theory as relying on inferences to the best explanation when inferring moral status. Second, as a consequence, ethical behaviourism cannot stick with merely looking at the robot’s behaviour, while remaining neutral with regard to the difficult question of which property grounds moral status. Third, not only behavioural evidence ought to play a role in inferring a robot’s moral status, but knowledge of the design process of the robot and of its designer’s intention ought to be taken into account as well. Fourth, knowledge of a robot’s ontology and how that relates to human biology often is epistemically relevant for inferring moral status as well. The paper closes with some concluding observations. (shrink)