This article reviews the recent literature on idealization, specifically idealization in the course of scientific modeling. We argue that idealization is not a unified concept and that there are three different types of idealization: Galilean, minimalist, and multiple models, each with its own justification. We explore the extent to which idealization is a permanent feature of scientific representation and discuss its implications for debates about scientific realism.

This article reviews the recent literature on idealization, specifically idealization in the course of scientific modeling. We argue that idealization is not a unified concept and that there are three different types of idealization: Galilean, minimalist, and multiple models, each with its own justification. We explore the extent to which idealization is a permanent feature of scientific representation and discuss its implications for debates about scientific realism.

The Ontology Summit 2012 explored the current and potential uses of ontology, its methods and paradigms, in big systems and big data: How ontology can be used to design, develop, and operate such systems. The systems addressed were not just software systems, although software systems are typically core and necessary components, but more complex systems that include multiple kinds and levels of human and community interaction with physical-software systems, systems of systems, and the socio-technical environments for those systems which can (...) include cultural, legal, and economic components. The focus themes used for this exploration were Big Systems Engineering, Big Data Challenge, Large Scale Domain Applications, and cross-cutting aspects Ontology Quality, and Federation and Integration of Systems. The Ontology Summit 2012 consisted of over three months of intensive virtual collaborative elaboration of these issues in presentations, panels, and group email. The culmination of these activities was a face-to-face Symposium at the US National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), Gaithersburg, MD, USA, 12–13 April 2012. The primary product of this Ontology Summit is the communiqué reported here. But there are other products, some continuing as collaborative, more specifically focused analysis and modeling efforts aligned with various open standards activities. Behind all of these particular products, of course, is the real overriding purpose of the Ontology Summit 2012, which was: the joint collaboration of three distinct communities, the ontology, systems engineering and big systems stakeholder communities, who came together to address common problems, create common understanding and propose common solutions. (shrink)

This book defends a form of ethical intuitionism, according to which (i) there are objective moral truths; (ii) we know some of these truths through a kind of immediate, intellectual awareness, or "intuition"; and (iii) our knowledge of moral truths gives us reasons for action independent of our desires. The author rebuts all the major objections to this theory and shows that the alternative theories about the nature of ethics all face grave difficulties.

Tyquin, Michael We all associate war with death-and remembrance. But amidst the slaughter of World War One, and, for Australians, the Gallipoli campaign, it is easy to forget the anguish of those who did not fight. These were the parents, siblings, lovers and friends of soldiers who went to war and who never came home. This is the story of a father who went to extreme lengths to find the last resting pace of his young son who was killed (...) on Gallipoli in 1915. (shrink)

In light of the atrocities of National Socialism, the challenge of working through the past has become a crucial issue. The end of Communism has reinforced the urgency of this challenge. Coming to terms with an ethically problematic past takes place at several levels (jurisdictional/legal, political, mental). A central challenge is to keep memory alive and thereby to gain appropriate insights. However, the demand for constructive forms of remembrance should not be overloaded with expectations that are impossible to meet. The (...) acceptance of guilt or responsibility requires an atmosphere of mercy and forgiveness, and is threatened by impatience. In this context, historical research can be seen as a form of ‘pathological inquiry’ into time and the past, providing mental and moral orientation for the present generation of humans; reflection about the past may be an important aspect of tackling the challenge of the present. Such historical research must always critically assess its own interest and beware of a drift towards becoming ideological grounded in a certain kind of moralism. The one who sees the light of the Promise of Easter above the graves of the past can conclude, following Cordelia Edvardson: ‘The past is at our mercy’. (shrink)

A common complaint of biologists is that their subject receives poor treatment from philosophers—it gets but a fraction of the attention accorded to physics and chemistry, and what little it does receive, is usually of the type where ‘All swans are white’ is taken to be a paradigmatic example of the state of biological thinking. It cannot be denied that this complaint is, to a great extent, justified; however, there are some notable breaches in the wall of ignorance and silence, (...) amongst which must be numbered The Ascent of Life by T.A. Goudge. In this book, starting from what is obviously a very wide knowledge of biology, Goudge attempts a careful and thorough analysis of one of the major achievements of biological thought, evolutionary theory. The conclusions that Goudge draws are many; nevertheless, one can discern running through them a common theme, namely that whilst evolutionary theory is indeed a legitimate branch of science, to assume that it is a science of the same nature as physics and chemistry would be a grave error. Goudge argues that, despite certain similarities to other branches of science, the essential aims, methods and results of evolutionary theory are peculiar unto itself. (shrink)

Shaftesbury believed that the height of virtue was impartial love for all of humanity. But Shaftesbury also harboured grave doubts about our ability to develop such an expansive love. In The Moralists, Shaftesbury addressed this problem. I show that while it may appear on the surface that The Moralists solves the difficulty, it in fact remains unresolved. Shaftesbury may not have been able to reconcile his view of the content of virtue with his view of our motivational psychology.

The goal of military medicine is to conserve the fighting force necessary to prosecute just wars. Just wars are defensive or humanitarian. A defensive war protects one's people or nation. A humanitarian war rescues a foreign, persecuted people or nation from grave human rights abuse. To provide medical care during armed conflict, military medical ethics supplements civilian medical ethics with two principles: military-medical necessity and broad beneficence. Military-medical necessity designates the medical means required to pursue national self-defense or humanitarian intervention. (...) While clinical-medical necessity directs care to satisfy urgent medical needs, military-medical necessity utilizes medical care to satisfy the just aims of war. Military medicine may therefore attend the lightly wounded before the critically wounded or use medical care to win hearts and minds. The underlying principle is broad, not narrow, beneficence. The latter addresses private interests, while broad beneficence responds to the collective welfare of the political community. (shrink)

Remembering forgetting : Maladies de la Mémoire in nineteenth-century France -- Dying of the past : medical studies of nostalgia in nineteenth-century France -- Hysterical remembering -- Trauma, representation, and historical consciousness -- Trauma : a dystopia of the spirit -- Falling into history : Freud's case of 'Frau Emmy von N.' -- Why Freud haunts us -- Why Warburg now? -- Classic postmodernism : Keith Jenkins -- Ebb tide : Frank Ankersmit -- The art of losing oneself : Anne (...) Carson and decreation -- Inquiry as hope : Richard Rorty -- Photographic ambivalence -- Why photography matters to the theory of history -- Ordinary film : Péter Forgács's The Maelstrom -- Graves of the insane, decorated -- On a certain blindness in teaching -- Beyond critical thinking -- Good and risky : on the promise of a liberal education. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Sighs and Tears:Biological Signals and John Donne's "Whining Poetry"Michael A. WinkelmanPhebe: Good shepherd, tell this youth what 'tis to love. Silvius: It is to be all made of sighs and tears...—Shakespeare, As You Like It (5.2.83–84)ISighs and tears permeate John Donne's poetry, as well they should. Crying in particular functions as a costly signal in biological terms: a blatant, physiologically-demanding, involuntary indicator of hurt feelings. "Tears dim mine (...) eyes," laments Donne's Sappho ("Sappho to Philaenis," l. 56); they are "Fruits of much grief" in "A Valediction of Weeping" (l. 7).1 The theory of costly signaling, related to the handicap principle, was developed fairly recently by Israeli zoologists Amotz and Avishag Zahavi. As the Zahavis explain: "in order to be effective, signals have to be reliable; in order to be reliable, signals have to be costly."2 Initially their idea was resisted, but it has since become widely accepted and it has proven very helpful in making sense of both animal and human behavior. Wasteful conspicuous consumption among upper-class Americans, as noted a century ago by sociologist Thorstein Veblen, exemplifies this handicap principle in action. Like gazelles jumping in place or stotting rather than running away when wolves appear, it indicates fitness by flaunting excess resources.Shedding tears when feeling sad is an evolved human adaptation that broadcasts unhappiness. The wailing of infants demands attention, and crying does something similar for grown-ups: among other things, it tests the commitment of hearers to appease the distressed. For instance, in Chaucer's tragic medieval romance Troilus and Criseyde, Pandarus advises [End Page 329] Troilus to provoke a suitable reaction from Criseyde by embellishing his billet-doux: "Towchyng thi lettre... Biblotte it with thi teris ek a lite" (touching thy letter... Be-blot it with thy tears a little).3 Early modern authors also knew their importance. In the words of Robert Herrick, "tears are tongues," while Claudius suspects that "There's matter in these sighs, these profound heaves" (Hamlet, 4.1.1).4As a case in point, Donne was overwhelmed by the death of his dear wife Anne in 1617. As his contemporaneous biographer Izaak Walton reported: "his very soul was elemented of nothing but sadness; now, grief took so full a possession of his heart, as to leave no place for joy."5 Donne even hoped to be literally entombed with her soon: "as the grave is become her house, so I would hasten to make it mine also; that we two might there make our beds together in the dark" (Walton, p. 51). His miserable mood was revealed in his initial sermon after her demise:His first motion from his house was to preach, where his beloved wife lay buried (in St. Clement's Church, near Temple-Bar, London) and his text was a part of the Prophet Jeremiah's Lamentation: "Lo, I am the man that have seen affliction."And indeed, his very words and looks testified him to be truly such a man; and they, with the addition of his sighs and tears expressed in his Sermon, did so work upon the affections of his hearers as melted and molded them into a companionable sadness; and so they left the Congregation.(Walton, p. 52)Listeners responded in kind to his honest confessions, a textbook illustration of the empathy generated by crying. (A related issue—how and why literature affects audiences so strongly—is currently generating some very interesting work from New Humanists investigating the question from an evolutionary perspective.)These qualities make sighs and tears fundamental to love poetry. In other words, writers deploy them because they reflect universal states of mind, rather than originating as some arbitrary, socially-constructed literary device. The copious opening sonnet of Petrarch's magnificent Rime sparse codifies the theme:6You who can hear in scattered rhymes the soundof all that sighing which once fed my heartin my first youthful error, when in partI was a person of a different kind—my changing manner as I weep and reason, [End Page 330] between vain aspirations and vain grief,leads everyone who has known... (shrink)

Philosophical theology is aimed primarily at theoretical understanding of the nature and attributes of God and of God's relationship to the world and its inhabitants. During the twentieth century, much of the philosophical community had grave doubts about our ability to attain any such understanding. In recent years the analytic tradition in particular has moved beyond the biases that placed obstacles in the way of the pursuing questions located on the interface of philosophy and religion. The result has been a (...) rebirth of serious, widely-discussed work in philosophical theology. The Oxford Handbook of Philosophical Theology attempts both to familiarize readers with the directions in which this scholarship has gone and to pursue the discussion into hitherto under-examined areas. Written by some of the leading scholars in the field, the essays in the Handbook are grouped in five sections. In the first, articles focus on the authority of scripture and tradition, on the nature and mechanisms of divine revelation, on the relation between religion and science, and on theology and mystery. The next section focuses on philosophical problems connected with the central divine attributes: aseity, omnipotence, omniscience, and the like. In Section Three, essays explore theories of divine action and divine providence, questions about petitionary prayer, problems about divine authority and God's relationship to morality and moral standards, and various formulations of and responses to the problem of evil. The fourth section examines philosophical problems that arise in connection with such central Christian doctrines as the trinity, the incarnation, the atonement, original sin, resurrection, and the Eucharist. Finally, Section Five introduces readers to work that is being done in Jewish, Islamic, and Chinese philosophical theology. (shrink)

This volume addresses whether, how, and where laws (variously defined) teach values and shape moral character in late modern liberal societies. Each author recognizes the essential value of state law in fostering peace, security, health, education, charity, trade, democracy, constitutionalism, justice, and human rights, among many other moral goods. Each author also recognizes, however, the grave betrayals of law in supporting fascism, slavery, apartheid, genocide, persecution, violence, racism, and other forms of immorality and injustice. They thus call for state laws (...) that set a basic civil morality of duty for society and for robust freedoms that protect private individuals and private groups to cultivate a higher morality of aspiration"--Back cover. (shrink)

Introduction / Alessandra Tanesini and Michael P. Lynch -- Reassessing different conceptions of argumentation / Catarina Dutilh Novaes -- Martial metaphors and argumentative virtues and vices / Ian James Kidd -- Arrogance and deep disagreement / Andrew Aberdein -- Closed-mindedness and arrogance / Heather Battaly -- Intellectual trust and the marketplace of ideas / Allan Hazlett -- Is searching the Internet making us intellectually arrogant? / J. Adam Carter and Emma C. Gordon -- Intellectual humility and the curse of (...) knowledge / Michael Hannon -- Bullshit and dogmatism : a discourse analytical perspective / Chris Heffer -- Polarization and the problem of spreading arrogance / Michael P. Lynch -- Arrogance, polarization and arguing to win / Alessandra Tanesini -- Partisanship, humility, and epistemic polarization / Thomas Nadelhoffer, Rose Graves, Gus Skorburg, Mark Leary, and Walter Sinnott-Armstrong -- Science denial, polarization, and arrogance / Lee McIntyre -- The polarization toolkit / Quassim Cassam -- Epistemic rights in a polarized world : the right to know and the abortion / Debate Lani Watson. (shrink)

Discussion of the worldwide corporate development of biotechnologies is sometimes diverted through the introduction of images of heroic medical intervention, exemplified by the statement, I would do anything to save my daughter. Such heroic images seem to justify virtually any deployment of resources and nearly any health or environmental risk. But it is instructive for future public discussions to examine the use of such images, and to note that those advocating a prominent role for biotechnologies in an expanding global economy (...) welcome such diversionary patterns. Our responsibility to do our own thinking is beset by conditions that may lead us astray. In a time burdened by profound worry—crushing inequalities among the world's peoples, an ecological crisis, and threat of nuclear war—it is tempting to avert our eyes when we are faced with grave new dangers. Moreover, in our increasingly visual culture, images have come to function as a facsimile of and substitute for real thinking. If we are to have significant discussions about the potential of biotechnology, we must not only be wary of promises of economic growth but must also be mindful of sources of diversion and the appeals of image-thinking. We should strive to become more critical of our own ways of thinking, thus opening the discussion to a fuller consideration of what needs to be saved. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Buddhist-Christian Studies 23 (2003) 147-148 [Access article in PDF] Buddhists and Christians: Praying for Peace in the World Archbishop Michael L. Fitzgerald Pontifical Council for Interreligious Dialogue Dear Buddhist Friends:As the new president of the Pontifical Council for Interreligious Dialogue, the office of His Holiness the Pope for relations with people of different religious traditions, I wish to greet you and send this congratulatory message on the occasion (...) of the feast of Vesakh. This gesture of friendship, initiated in 1995 by my predecessor Cardinal Francis Arinze, has almost become a tradition. I wish to continue this good tradition and express my hearty congratulations to each and every one of you.In this message, I would like to invite you, my dear Buddhist friends, to join in prayer for the cause of peace in the world. Observing the current international situation, we cannot but be aware of the acuteness of the question of peace in our world. Since the beginning of this new millennium, marked by the dramatic events of September 11, 2001, we witness every day fresh scenes of bloodshed, violence, confrontation, and crisis in almost all parts of the world. In the midst of this grave situation, we cannot lead our lives without committing ourselves to advancing the cause of peace in the world.We Christians and Buddhists are convinced that the origin of all conflict is ultimately located in human hearts characterized by selfish desire, specifically by desire for power, domination, and wealth, often at the expense of others. It is also our common conviction that peace must inhabit people's hearts before it can become a social reality. For us, therefore, the most fundamental and efficient way to advance peace is to do our best to see that the deep-rooted selfishness of human hearts is overcome, so that people may be transformed into true artisans of peace.Pope John Paul II has proclaimed the year from October 2002 to October 2003 the Year of the Rosary of the Virgin Mary. He has earnestly encouraged the frequent recitation of the Rosary in order to pray for peace in the world. His wish to revive the practice of the Rosary is closely connected with the present historical circumstances, which need more than ever-constant supplication for the great gift of peace.My Buddhist friends, is it not a wonderful coincidence that you also have a lengthy tradition of using the Mala for prayer? The Rosary for Catholics and the [End Page 147] Mala for Buddhists are simple yet profound and meaningful prayer, despite essential differences in their form and content, based on our distinct doctrines and practices. For Catholics, the Rosary represents a most effective means of fostering contemplation of Jesus Christ. For Buddhists, the Mala is used to overcome the 108 Sinful Desires in order to reach the state of Nirvana. By virtue of their meditative character, these two prayers have in common a calming effect on those who pray them; they lead them to experience and to work for peace, and they produce fruits of love. For Catholics, the repetition and meditation of the holy names of the Persons of the Blessed Trinity and the Virgin Mary in the recitation of the Rosary makes us more willing to assimilate their love and compassion for others, especially for the poor and afflicted. In your Buddhist tradition, praying the Mala helps one to become a peacemaker.Dear Buddhist friends, these are the thoughts I wish to share with you this year. I am convinced that by persevering in prayer we will contribute to advancing peace in the world both now and in the future. May this peace be with you and your families on the feast of Vesakh and at all times.Archbishop Michael L. Fitzgerald, President © by Michael L. Fitzgerald. Reprinted by permission.... (shrink)

The first thing to stress is that although the orientation of the grave implies a point of view somewhere to its left, the attenuation of illusion in the rendering of the grave makes that implication anything but conspicuous. Consequently, a beholder who approaches the Burial by centering himself before it , and in so doing exposes himself to the full force of its solicitations toward merger , will very likely not even notice that the grave is skewed relative to the (...) picture plane . Furthermore, the fact that the point of view posited by the orientation of the grave lies opposite the most active and, at first glance, the most confusion portion of the composition also serves to forestall an awareness that such a point of view may be held to exist.Here it is useful to compare the finished painting with the preliminary drawing. In the latter the grave is at the far left; a single procession, to be joined by the pallbearers, makes its way across the sheet; and two figures, the crucifix-bearer and the hatless man at the center , appear to gaze out of the drawing as if at a spectator centered before it. In the finished painting, on the other hand, various processional units are shown converging precisely there; and yet not only does no outward gaze place the beholder directly before the grave, it appears that a deliberate effort has been made to keep the center of the composition blank, as if to install at the ostensible heart of the painting a formal/ontological equivalent to the unemphatic emptiness lying open below it. Thus both the gravedigger and the dog turn their heads away from the vicinity of the grave; the mourner to the right of the gravedigger weeps facelessly into a handkerchief; and a barely modulated expanse of black pigment looms like a great blind spot between the gravedigger and the two veterans of ’93. It is as though the Burial’s curiously indeterminate affective atmosphere comes to a head in this portion of the canvas, which as we have seen bears the principal burden of facilitating the merger of painting and beholder.47 And of course the avoidance of overt address to the beholder that such a strategy implies also helps to reduce the risk of conflict between the generally centering character of the composition as a whole and the slant orientation of the grave. 47. Clark, Image of the People, p.81. (shrink)

This paper aims at explicating a theory of hope that is also suitable for gravely ill people and based on virtue ethics, research in the psychology of “well-being,” and the philosophy of palliative care. The working hypotheses of the theory are that hope is conditioned neither by past events nor by present needs, but is not necessarily oriented toward the future, especially the distant future; that hope is related to personal agency and to freedom; and that hope is deliberative, hence (...) evaluative, motivatory, and rationally critical. Following Higgins’ distinction between “prevention-focus” and “promotion-focus” strategies of coping, and Rawls’ notion of the “Aristotelian principle,” it is argued that hope is the valuation of and personal identification with “promotion-focus” goals with an attitude of nonattachment to any one goal. (shrink)

The "Tangong Shang" chapter of the Liji provides a brief account of Confucius performing certain burial rites for his deceased parents. After finishing one portion of the rites, something awful occurs—heavy rains fall, causing the grave to collapse. Confucius' demonstration of reverence through the performance of these burial rites is thwarted; but whose fault is it that the grave collapsed? Could Confucius have prevented this failure? In this essay it is argued that contrary to most contemporary interpretations, unpreventable failures in (...) ritual were causes of concern for the authors of early Confucian texts because they believed that meaningful aspects of life were vulnerable to these failures, and because they found themselves occasionally unable to recognize a clear distinction between preventable and unpreventable failures in ritual. This essay provides a persuasive reading of an early Confucian text that preserves rather than resolves the ambiguity between preventable and unpreventable failures in ritual. It argues for an openness to a tragic reading of early Confucian ritual theory. Contemporary interpreters, for the most part, have neglected such a reading; yet in the worldview of the Liji unpreventable failures in ritual were a real, yet uncertain, possibility. (shrink)

Philosophical theology is aimed primarily at theoretical understanding of the nature and attributes of God and of God's relationship to the world and its inhabitants. During the twentieth century, much of the philosophical community had grave doubts about our ability to attain any such understanding. In recent years the analytic tradition in particular has moved beyond the biases that placed obstacles in the way of the pursuing questions located on the interface of philosophy and religion. The result has been a (...) rebirth of serious, widely-discussed work in philosophical theology. The Oxford Handbook of Philosophical Theology attempts both to familiarize readers with the directions in which this scholarship has gone and to pursue the discussion into hitherto under-examined areas. Written by some of the leading scholars in the field, the essays in the Handbook are grouped in five sections. In the first, articles focus on the authority of scripture and tradition, on the nature and mechanisms of divine revelation, on the relation between religion and science, and on theology and mystery. The next section focuses on philosophical problems connected with the central divine attributes: aseity, omnipotence, omniscience, and the like. In Section Three, essays explore theories of divine action and divine providence, questions about petitionary prayer, problems about divine authority and God's relationship to morality and moral standards, and various formulations of and responses to the problem of evil. The fourth section examines philosophical problems that arise in connection with such central Christian doctrines as the trinity, the incarnation, the atonement, original sin, resurrection, and the Eucharist. Finally, Section Five introduces readers to work that is being done in Jewish, Islamic, and Chinese philosophical theology. (shrink)

The Oxford Handbook of Philosophical Theology attempts both to familiarize readers with the directions in which the scholarship of this discipline has gone and to pursue the discussion into hitherto under-examined areas. Philosophical theology is aimed primarily at theoretical understanding of the nature and attributes of God and of God's relationship to the world and its inhabitants. During the twentieth century, much of the philosophical community (both in the Anglo-American analytic tradition and in Continental circles) had grave doubts about our (...) ability to attain any such understanding. In recent years the analytic tradition in particular has moved beyond the biases that placed obstacles in the way of the pursuing questions located at the interface of philosophy and religion. Written by some of the leading scholars in the field, the articles in the book are grouped into five sections. In the first section, articles focus on the authority of scripture and tradition, on the nature and mechanisms of divine revelation, on the relation between religion and science, and on theology and mystery. The next section focuses on philosophical problems connected with the central divine attributes: aseity, omnipotence, omniscience, and the like. In the third section, articles explore theories of divine action and divine providence, questions about petitionary prayer, problems about divine authority and God's relationship to morality and moral standards, and various formulations of and responses to the problem of evil. The fourth section examines philosophical problems that arise in connection with such central Christian doctrines as the trinity, the incarnation, the atonement, original sin, resurrection, and the Eucharist. Finally, the fifth section introduces readers to current work in Jewish, Islamic, and Chinese philosophical theology. (shrink)

According to the received account of guilt in the philosophical literature, one cannot feel guilt unless one takes oneself to have done something morally wrong. But ordinary people feel guilt in many cases in which they do not take themselves to have done anything morally wrong. In this paper, I focus on one kind of guilt without perceived wrongdoing, guilt about being merely causally responsible for a bad state-of-affairs. I go on to present a novel account of guilt that explains (...) guilt about mere causal responsibility, according to which guilt represents part of the self as bound up with what is bad. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Names Alive Are Like the Names in GravesBlack Life and Black Social Death in Terrance Hayes's American Sonnets for My Past and Future AssassinLee Spinks"After blackness was invented / people began seeing ghosts."1One of the most powerful and provoking responses to the political rise of Donald Trump appeared with the 2018 publication of Terrance Hayes's American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin. Hayes began writing these poems (...) straight after Trump's remarkable triumph in the 2016 presidential election, and they race to keep pace with the rapidly metastasizing effects of the Trump phenomenon, from his relentless radicalization of the modes and mores of political speech ("Newshounds ponder the tweets of a bullhorn"), his continuous assault on American democratic institutions, and his singular success in marshalling a newly cohesive political constituency seduced by the reactionary allure of resurgent white nationalism or what Hayes caustically calls "a mandate for whiteness, virility, sovereignty / stupidity" (AS: 38).2 As the phrase "mandate for whiteness" suggests, integral to the story of Trump's ascendancy in American Sonnets is another story, a story about race and social authority in the time of Black Lives Matter when blackness remains "the color of this country's current threat / advisory" (AS: 10). At home and abroad the appalling incandescence of Hayes's contemporary American political moment is reflected by the names of its black victims, names like Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, Tamir Rice, and, perhaps most explosively of all, George Floyd, whose May 2020 police killing on a Minneapolis street reprised such a familiar configuration of racial power that Hayes had already glimpsed its spectral outline two years earlier: "A [End Page 60] brother has to know how to time travel & doctor / himself when a knee or shoe stalls against his neck" (AS: 77).3Without compromising the intensity of Hayes's focus on this contemporary social emergency, I want in what follows to expand our sense of the historical and metaphysical scene of his writing by reading it as an imaginative response to a larger and more fundamental question: What does it mean to live a black life in an antiblack world? I'm moved to do so by the double register of his writing vividly exemplified by the penultimate sonnet in the sequence which memorializes "All the black people I'm tired of losing / All the dead from parts of Florida, Ferguson / Brooklyn, Charleston, Cleveland, Chicago / Baltimore, where the names alive are / Like the names in graves" (AS: 81). What's remarkable, to my mind at least, about the phrase "the names alive are / like the names in graves" is its fusion of a directly contemporary perception of the precariousness of black existence within a culture of white supremacy (the perception that every black life could share the social fate of Tamir Rice at any particular moment) with an encompassing metaphysical vision of blackness as the embodiment of social death and the continuing afterlife of slavery. Paying close attention to several of Hayes's poems, I will trace this double register to explore a number of ideas central to his thinking in American Sonnets including the foundational role of antiblackness in organizing American reality for both black and white identities, the dialectical relationship between antiblackness and the libidinal economy of white supremacy, and the hope of imagining new possibilities of life capable of contesting the antiblack conditions of contemporary social existence.4 In doing so I will place particular emphasis on Hayes's development of a distinctively dialectical and dialogical style of poetic address that reimagines lyric subjectivity as a drama of racial becoming focused on the relationship between black social death and the culture of white supremacy.5Black Social Death and the Libidinal Economy of WhitenessBefore continuing let me briefly develop three ideas above which help shape my reading of American Sonnets: the social life of social death, the continuing afterlife of slavery, and what Hayes calls in my epigraph "the [End Page 61] invention of blackness." The first draws on the Afropessimist radicalization of Orlando Patterson's famous redescription of slavery as social death that sees the slave as a "social nonperson" whose relation to... (shrink)

What is the relation between small-scale collaborative plans and the execution of those plans within interactive contexts? I argue here that joint attention has a key role in explaining how shared plans and shared intentions are executed in interactive contexts. Within singular action, attention plays the functional role of enabling intentional action to be guided by a prior intention. Within interactive joint action, it is joint attention, I argue, that plays a similar functional role of enabling the agents to act (...) in a collaborative way such that their actions are rationally guided by a prior shared intention. This understanding of joint attention – as having a key functional role of enabling the rational guidance of joint intentional action by a prior shared intention – allows for an alternative understanding of the kind of minimal cooperation that infants can engage in. On this understanding, infants’ capacity to engage in joint actions is already an incipient capacity to engage in rational and intentional joint actions, albeit a capacity that is necessarily scaffolded by an adult rational co-partner. (shrink)

This a clear and concise introduction to Danish philosopher Soren Kierkegaard.ichael Watts uses Kierkegaard's own writings to introduce his theoriesbout living a truthfu; and spiritual life, while explaining the enormousnfluence of the philosopher's personal life on his work and beliefs. As theounder of 20th century existentialism, and the first philosopher to definehe idea of angst, Kierkegaard's profound influence on modern life is clearlyefined in accessible terms in this guide for students and general readers.

How does the complex nature of ecological systems affect ecologists' ability to study them? This Element argues that ecological systems are complex in a rather special way: they are causally heterogeneous. The author presents an updated philosophical account with an optimistic outlook of the methods and status of ecological research.

Common knowledge is ubiquitous in our lives and yet there remains considerable uncertainty about how to model or understand it. Standard analyses of common knowledge end up being challenged by either regress or circularity which then give rise to well-known paradoxes of practical reasoning, such as the Two Generals’ Paradox. This paper argues that the nature and utility of common knowledge can be illuminated by appeal to Wittgenstein’s Hinge Epistemology. It is argued that those things that we standardly think of (...) as being common knowledge in our lives are the same as those that Wittgenstein identified as hinge certainties. This identification of common knowledge with hinge certainties allows us to resolve the regress problem for common knowledge and explain how the Two Generals’ Paradox arises. (shrink)

It is a commonplace in economics that we should disregard sunk costs. The sunk cost effect might be widespread, goes the conventional wisdom, but we would be better off if we could rid ourselves of it. In this paper, I argue against the orthodoxy by showing that the sunk cost effect is often beneficial. Drawing on discussions of related topics in dynamic choice theory, I show that, in a range of cases, being disposed to honor sunk costs allows an agent (...) to mimic a resolute chooser, someone who adopts the best plan at the outset of a decision problem and sticks with it, even when resoluteness is unfeasible. I discuss several kinds of cases in which honoring sunk costs coincides with resolute choice. (shrink)

The fact that Gilbert Ryle and J.L. Austin seem to disagree about the ordinary use of words such as ‘voluntary’, ‘involuntary’, ‘voluntarily’, and ‘involuntarily’ has been taken to cast doubt on the methods of ordinary language philosophy. As Benson Mates puts the worry, ‘if agreement about usage cannot be reached within so restricted a sample as the class of Oxford Professors of Philosophy, what are the prospects when the sample is enlarged?’ (Mates, Inquiry 1:161–171, 1958, p. 165). In this chapter, (...) we evaluate Mates’s criticism alongside Ryle’s and Austin’s specific claims about the ordinary use of these words, assessing these claims against actual examples of ordinary use drawn from the British National Corpus (BNC). Our evaluation consists in applying a combination of methods: first aggregating judgments about a large set of samples drawn from the corpus, and then using a clustering algorithm to uncover connections between different types of use. In applying these methods, we show where and to what extent Ryle’s and Austin’s accounts of the use of the target terms are accurate as well as where they miss important aspects of ordinary use, and we demonstrate the usefulness of this new combination of methods. At the heart of our approach is a commitment to the idea that systematically looking at actual uses of expressions is an essential component of any approach to ordinary language philosophy. (shrink)

Our aim in this paper is to present the distinct ways in which Wolff, Baumgarten, and Kant understand the relationship between necessitation, constraint, and reluctant action in an effort to illustrate the subtle ways in which their conceptions of obligation differ from each another. Whereas Wolff conceives of natural or moral obligation as incompatible with constraint, Baumgarten holds that constraint and reluctant action are, in some instances, compatible with natural obligation. Kant departs from Baumgarten by conceiving of obligation as necessarily (...) involving constraint: as Kant’s reply to Schiller’s famous objection reveals, obligation must take on the character of constraint to reluctant action on account of the fact that human beings possess inclinations that always threaten to impel them in directions that oppose morality. (shrink)

What is the relation between joint attention and common knowledge? On the one hand, the relation seems tight: the easiest and most reliable way of knowing something in common with another is for you and that other to be attentively aware of what you are together experiencing. On the other hand, they couldn’t seem further apart: joint attention is a mere perceptual phenomena that infants are capable of engaging in from nine months of age, whereas common knowledge is a cognitive (...) phenomenon involving (so it seems) complex, overlapping metarepresentational states that require the kind of sophisticated mindreading skills that developmental psychology has shown to be beyond the capabilities of young children. In 'The Shared World: Perceptual Common Knowledge, Demonstrative Communication, and Shared Social Space', Axel Seemann attempts, inter alia, to makensense of this conundrum. (shrink)

An Essay on Human Action seeks to provide a comprehensive, detailed, enlightening, and (in its detail) original account of human action. This account presupposes a theory of events as abstract, proposition-like entities, a theory which is given in the first chapter of the book. The core-issues of action-theory are then treated: what acting in general is (a version of the traditional volitional theory is proposed and defended); how actions are to be individuated; how long actions last; what acting intentionally is; (...) what doing one thing by doing another is; what basic action is; and what omitting to do something is. Attention is also given to the concepts of causation, intention, volition, deciding, choosing, and trying. Finally, a libertarian account of free action is tentatively proposed and defended. (shrink)

The traditional philosophy of science approach to prediction leaves little room for appreciating the value and potential of imprecise predictions. At best, they are considered a stepping stone to more precise predictions, while at worst they are viewed as detracting from the scientific quality of a discipline. The aim of this paper is to show that imprecise predictions are undervalued in philosophy of science. I review the conceptions of imprecise predictions and the main criticisms levelled against them: (i) that they (...) cannot aid in model selection and improvement, and (ii) that they cannot support effective interventions in practical decision making. I will argue against both criticisms, showing that imprecise predictions have a circumscribed but important and legitimate place in the study of complex, heterogeneous systems. The argument is illustrated and supported by an example from conservation biology, where imprecise models were instrumental in saving the kōkako from extinction. (shrink)

Using William Shakespeare’s Hamlet and the play-within-the play, The Murder of Gonzago, as a case study, this essay argues that theatrical utterances constitute a special case of language usage not previously elucidated: the utterance of a statement with propositional content in theatre functions as an event. In short, the propositional content of a particular p (e.g. p1, p2, p3 …), whether or not it is true, is only understood—and understood to be true—if p1 is uttered in a particular time, place, (...) and situation (i.e. during a theatrical event); otherwise, the propositional content in those theatrical utterances can either be false or contingently true. (shrink)

A particular feature of this book is substantial "Stretch and Challenge" material throughout which allows students to develop further.

Concepts and Cases in Nursing Ethics is an introduction to contemporary ethical issues in health care, designed especially for Canadian audiences. The book is organized around six key concepts: beneficence, autonomy, truth-telling, confidentiality, justice, and integrity. Each of these concepts is explained and discussed with reference to professional and legal norms. The discussion is then supplemented by case studies that exemplify the relevant concepts and show how each applies in health care and nursing practice. This new fourth edition includes an (...) added chapter on end-of-life issues, and it is revised throughout to reflect the latest developments on topics such as global health ethics, cultural competence, social media, and palliative sedation. (shrink)

Als Philosoph, Literat, Prediger und Pädagoge gehört Herder zu den bedeutendsten Vertretern der Weimarer Klassik. Diese aktuelle und kenntnisreiche Biografie bringt Leben und Werk Herders einem breiteren Publikum nahe.

Opponents of medically assisted dying have long appealed to ‘slippery slope’ arguments. One such slippery slope concerns palliative care: that the introduction of medically assisted dying will lead to a diminution in the quality or availability or palliative care for patients near the end of their lives. Empirical evidence from jurisdictions where assisted dying has been practiced for decades, such as Oregon and the Netherlands, indicate that such worries are largely unfounded. The failure of the palliation slope argument is nevertheless (...) instructive with respect to how slippery slope arguments can be appraised without having to await post-facto evidence regarding the effects of a proposed change in public policy. Close attention in particular to the norms operative in a given institution and how changes to policy will interact with those norms enable slippery slopes to be credibly appraised. (shrink)