This book is a defense of modal realism; the thesis that our world is but one of a plurality of worlds, and that the individuals that inhabit our world are only a few out of all the inhabitants of all the worlds. Lewis argues that the philosophical utility of modal realism is a good reason for believing that it is true.

This volume is devoted to Lewis's work in metaphysics and epistemology. Topics covered include properties, ontology, possibility, truthmaking, probability, the mind-body problem, vision, belief, and knowledge. The purpose of this collection, and the volumes that precede and follow it, is to disseminate more widely the work of an eminent and influential contemporary philosopher. The volume will serve as a useful work of reference for teachers and students of philosophy.

The Coalition of Immokalee Workers (CIW) has successfully combated modern-day slavery by transforming the ways that over a dozen major brands, including Taco Bell, Subway, and Wal-Mart, manage their supply chains. The CIW’s efforts over more than 20 years have effectively stopped enslavement practices, including abuses such as wage theft and peonage indebtedness. We conducted a field ethnography, interviews, and archival analyses to understand this success. We find that the CIW employs a decentered, egalitarian, and ensemble approach to their multiplicities (...) of alliances by collectively “animating” themselves and their partners through ensemble leadership. This combination of alliances, along with worker-driven monitoring, brings life to the CIW motto “We are all leaders.” Translating this motto into daily practice is how the CIW virtually eradicates enslavement practices in corporate supply chains. (shrink)

Mabel Cooper and Gloria Ferris lived in St Lawrence's Hospital one of the large learning disability institutions which were built round the edges of London. In this paper, Mabel and Gloria share their memories of three nurses at St Lawrence's, supported by Jane Abraham and in this process reveal a number of ethical issues that remain relevant today.

_Migration and the Education of Young People 0_–_19_ investigates migration from a number of perspectives to consider the changing dynamics of society within different countries. Examining the data associated with global migration by focusing on case studies from a wide range of countries, it provides detailed and balanced coverage of this politically sensitive topic to explore the educational needs of migrant young people, the impact of large-scale migration to and from countries and the policy challenges that individual countries face when (...) ensuring adequate provision for migrant young people within their education systems. Chapters cover: The reasons why people might move Social and emotional learning in Britain: a tool to guard against cultural pollution? Migration into a global city: the economic and educational success of London Latvian people on the move and the impact on education People’s movement – Greece Return migration in Lithuania: incoming challenges for children’s education The United States, Latin America, immigration and education Tanzanian street children: victims, ordinary lives or extraordinary survivors? This book explores the changing social dynamics through an extensive range of case studies and will be an essential resource for students taking undergraduate and postgraduate courses in education, sociology and international relations. (shrink)

Por un lado, el libro aborda la problemática educativa que enfrentan estudiantes mexicanos indocumentados en las universidades de los Estados Unidos. Por el otro lado, se aborda la atención específica (escolar, académica y administrativa) que la Universidad de Guadalajara (México), ofrece a los estudiantes migrantes retornados de los Estados Unidos.

The intellectual history of the last quarter of this century has been marked by the growing influence of Africana thought--an area of philosophy that focuses on issues raised by the struggle over ideas in African cultures and their hybrid forms in Europe, the Americas, and the Caribbean. Existentia Africana is an engaging and highly readable introduction to the field of Africana philosophy and will help to define this rapidly growing field. Lewis R. Gordon clearly explains Africana existential thought to (...) a general audience, covering a wide range of both classic and contemporary thinkers--from Douglass and DuBois to Fanon, Davis and Zack. (shrink)

AbstractDuring the Covid-19 pandemic, ethicists and researchers proposed human challenge studies as a way to speed development of a vaccine that could prevent disease and end the global public health crisis. The risks to healthy volunteers of being deliberately infected with a deadly and novel pathogen were not low, but the benefits could have been immense. This essay is a history of the three major efforts to set up a challenge model and run challenge studies in 2020 and 2021. The (...) pharmaceutical company Johnson and Johnson, the National Institutes of Health in the United States, and a private-public partnership of industry, university, and government partners in Britain all undertook preparations. The United Kingdom’s consortium began their Human Challenge Programme in March of 2021.Beyond documenting each effort, the essay puts these scientific and ethical debates in dialogue with the social, epidemiological, and institutional conditions of the pandemic as well as the commercial, intellectual, and political systems in which medical research and Covid-19 challenge studies operated. It shows how different institutions understood risk, benefit, and social value depending on their specific contexts. Ultimately the example of Covid-19 challenge studies highlights the constructedness of such assessments and reveals the utility of deconstructing them retrospectively so as to better understand the interplay of medical research and research ethics with larger social systems and historical contexts. (shrink)

Presentación del Dossier: Feminismos y posthumanismo.

Elegant, suggestive, and clarifying, Lewis Thomas's profoundly humane vision explores the world around us and examines the complex interdependence of all things. Extending beyond the usual limitations of biological science and into a vast and wondrous world of hidden relationships, this provocative book explores in personal, poetic essays to topics such as computers, germs, language, music, death, insects, and medicine. Lewis Thomas writes, "Once you have become permanently startled, as I am, by the realization that we are a (...) social species, you tend to keep an eye out for the pieces of evidence that this is, by and large, good for us.". (shrink)

The final published book by Nobel Prize-winning author and philosopher Henri Bergson (1859-1941), La pensée et le mouvant (translated here as The Creative Mind), is a masterly autobiography of his philosophical method. Through essays and lectures written between 1903 and 1923, Bergson retraces how and why he became a philosopher, and crafts a fascinating critique of philosophy itself. Until it leaves its false paths, he demonstrates, philosophy will remain only a wordy dialectic that surmounts false problems. With masterful skill and (...) intensity, Bergson shows that metaphysics and science must be rooted in experience for philosophy to become a genuine search for truth. And in the quest for unanswered questions, the spiritual dimension of human life and the importance of intuition must be emphasized. A source of inspiration for physicists as well as philosophers, Bergson's introduction to metaphysics reveals a philosophy that is always on the move, blending man's spiritual drive with his mastery of the material world. (shrink)

David Lewis (1941-2001) was Class of 1943 University Professor of Philosophy at Princeton University. His contributions spanned philosophical logic, philosophy of language, philosophy of mind, philosophy of science, metaphysics, and epistemology. In On the Plurality of Worlds, he defended his challenging metaphysical position, "modal realism." He was also the author of the books Convention, Counterfactuals, Parts of Classes, and several volumes of collected papers.

A lineage of prominent philosophers who have discussed the second-person relation can be regarded as advancing structural accounts. They posit that the second-person relation effects one transformative change to the structure of practical reasoning. In this paper, I criticise this orthodoxy and offer an alternative, substantive account. That is, I argue that entering into second-personal relations with others does indeed affect one's practical reasoning, but it does this not by altering the structure of one's agential thought, but by changing what (...) reasons can become available. The importance of second-personal thought for action is heterogenous. Second-person relations make possible the emergence of a wide variety of different kinds of practical reasons: creating some, revealing others. Recognising this diminishes the appeal of the traditional, structural accounts of the practical significance of such second-personal relations. Moving away from structural accounts facilitates a more thorough understanding of the intersubjective form of action. (shrink)

We examine the impact of corporate culture on environmental performance using a sample of 7199 firm-year observations over the period of 2002–2018. We find that stronger corporate culture improves environmental performance, measured by the amount of toxic chemical release (TCR). Our result is both statistically and economically significant. We also show that cultural norms of innovation, quality and teamwork as well as a technology-oriented corporate culture have a greater impact on enhancing environmental performance. Further analyses show that managerial competence and (...) strong institutional ownership moderate the relationship between corporate culture and environmental performance. We introduce the decomposition of expected and unexpected components of TCR and document that firms with a strong corporate culture implement strategies to reduce the unexpected component of TCR in addition to the expected component of TCR. Finally, we document that strong corporate culture and environmental performance improve firms’ financial performance. Our results are robust to several sensitivity tests and procedures to mitigate endogeneity and self-selection problems. From a practical point of view, our findings suggest that a firm’s culture can determine its environmental sustainability and ethical practices. (shrink)

The present better understanding of the Logistai Inscription, both mathematical and calendrical, justifies the presentation of a new continuous text and some comment upon it. The inscription is well cut with a stoichedon pattern of 75 or 74 letters per line. The change from 75 to 74 letters occurs somewhere between line 69 and line 75; in the upper half of the stone there were normally six letters to the right of the preserved post-Classical edge, and in the lower half (...) there were never more than five. (shrink)

Drawing on the pragmatic turn in contemporary social theory, we explore how corporate elites accused of corruption in the context of weak institutions engage in their justification works. Empirically, we focus on three high-profile corruption scandals that shook Ghana between 2010 and 2020 and inspired widespread public condemnation. Publicly accessible archival documents, such as court reporting, newspaper stories, press conferences, and the digital footprints of corporate elites implicated in the scandals provide data for our inquiry. Focussing on the juxtaposition of (...) ‘sayings’ and ‘doings’, the findings show justification as performative, and rooted in contextual pragmatism that acknowledges the plurality of logics situated between self-interest and folk-logic. Within this framework, the domestic and civic orders of worth emerge as most prominent, with the justification processes manifesting through _victimising, scapegoating,_ and _crusading_. Building on these insights, we develop a framework that highlights how the use of justifications serves as a critique of the inadequacies within climates of weak institutional frameworks consequently fostering an atmosphere conducive to framing unethical conducts as morally acceptable. (shrink)

In his note "can there be vague objects?" ("analysis", 1978), Gareth evans presents a purported proof that there can be no vague identity statements. Some readers think that evans endorses the proof and its false conclusion. Not so. His point is that those who put vagueness in the world, Rather than in language, Will have no way to fault the proof and no way to escape the false conclusion.

Volume 20, Issue 6, June 2020, Page 75-77.

Pharmacological substances used to improve cognition and brain function range from dietary supplements and caffeine to drugs targeted at altering particular neurochemical concentrations in the brain. This article considers current scientific research into pharmaceutical cognitive enhancement and likely future directions. Then it discusses the trends in the use of PCEs within patients groups for whom they were intended, as well as in those for whom they were not originally intended, including healthy adults and children. Finally, it provides an overview of (...) current and future ethical considerations and concludes that the use of PCE will likely continue both within patient and healthy individuals in the foreseeable future. Information regarding actual use, benefits, and harms in various populations is severely lacking. Therefore, more emphasis should be placed on obtaining the relevant empirical data, for example, by the long-term monitoring of effectiveness and side effects, and by accurate large-scale surveys to assess actual usage. (shrink)

According to a recent paper by Tim Maudlin, Bell’s theorem has nothing to tell us about realism or the descriptive completeness of quantum mechanics. What it shows is that quantum mechanics is non-local, no more and no less. What I intend to do in this paper is to challenge Maudlin’s assertion about the import of Bell’s proof. There is much that I agree with in the paper; in particular, it does us the valuable service of demonstrating that Einstein’s objections to (...) quantum mechanics have nothing to do with its indeterminism. But I do think that Maudlin’s conclusion is overly cut-and-dried. Quantum mechanics is far from a unified edifice, and what Bell’s theorem shows depends on what version of quantum mechanics you look at. In particular, I’ll try to make the case that there’s an interesting, if ultimately uncompelling anti-realist construal of the import of Bell’s theorem. And I also want to suggest that locality isn’t quite as decisively defeated as Maudlin claims. (shrink)

The handbook contains more than 50 chapters by leaders from around the world and a broad range of sectors of academia and clinical practice spanning the ...

Shows that many of our understandings about scientific thought can be corrected once we realise just how unnatural science is. Quoting scientists from Aristotle to Einstein, the book argues that scientific ideas are, with rare exceptions, counter-intuitive and contrary to common sense.

ABSTRACT A thriving project in contemporary epistemology concerns identifying and explicating the epistemic virtues. Although there is little sustained argument for this claim, a number of prominent sources suggest that curiosity is an epistemic virtue. In this paper, I provide an account of the virtue of curiosity. After arguing that virtuous curiosity must be appropriately discerning, timely and exacting, I then situate my account in relation to two broader questions for virtue responsibilists: What sort of motivations are required for epistemic (...) virtue? And do epistemic virtues need to be reliable? I will sketch an account on which curiosity is only virtuous when rooted in a non-instrumental appreciation of epistemic goods, before arguing that curiosity can exhibit intellectual virtue irrespective of whether one is reliable in satisfying it. (shrink)