Public health care interventions—regarding vaccination, obesity, and HIV, for example—standardly take the form of information dissemination across a community. But information networks can vary importantly between different ethnic communities, as can levels of trust in information from different sources. We use data from the Greater Pittsburgh Random Household Health Survey to construct models of information networks for White and Black communities--models which reflect the degree of information contact between individuals, with degrees of trust in information from various sources correlated with (...) positions in that social network. With simple assumptions regarding belief change and social reinforcement, we use those modeled networks to build dynamic agent-based models of how information can be expected to flow and how beliefs can be expected to change across each community. With contrasting information from governmental and religious sources, the results show importantly different dynamic patterns of belief polarization within the two communities. (shrink)

Alain Badiou’s relationship to the work of Baruch Spinoza is a complex one. Though Badiou admires Spinoza’s courageous pursuit of the more geometrico, he is ardently critical of Spinoza on a number of fundamental ontological issues. Because of this, Spinoza often has had to bear the brunt of Badiou’s theoretical attacks. But how successful is Badiou’s attack on Spinoza? In this paper, I aim to show that this attack fails by examining the critique of Spinoza that Badiou provides in his (...) “Spinoza’s Closed Ontology,” which can be found in his Theoretical Writings. Badiou’s essential claim is that the ontology of Spinoza’s Ethics employs structures or procedures that are heterogeneous to that ontology. I rely on Gilles Deleuze’s reading of Spinoza, as found in his Expressionism in Philosophy, to pinpoint precisely where Badiou’s reading of Spinoza goes wrong. I show not only that Badiou’s critique of Spinoza fails to recognize a central structural feature of Spinoza’s ontology, namely the two powers of God—the power to exist and act, and the power to think and know—but also that this misrecognition is the condition for the possibility of Badiou’s mistaken critique. The paper then discusses how it is that these issues relate, more broadly, to the relationship between Deleuze and Badiou. (shrink)

Alain Badiou’s relationship to the work of Baruch Spinoza is a complex one. Though Badiou admires Spinoza’s courageous pursuit of the more geometrico, he is ardently critical of Spinoza on a number of fundamental ontological issues. Because of this, Spinoza often has had to bear the brunt of Badiou’s theoretical attacks. But how successful is Badiou’s attack on Spinoza? In this paper, I aim to show that this attack fails by examining the critique of Spinoza that Badiou provides in his (...) “Spinoza’s Closed Ontology,” which can be found in his Theoretical Writings. Badiou’s essential claim is that the ontology of Spinoza’s Ethics employs structures or procedures that are heterogeneous to that ontology. I rely on Gilles Deleuze’s reading of Spinoza, as found in his Expressionism in Philosophy, to pinpoint precisely where Badiou’s reading of Spinoza goes wrong. I show not only that Badiou’s critique of Spinoza fails to recognize a central structural feature of Spinoza’s ontology, namely the two powers of God—the power to exist and act, and the power to think and know—but also that this misrecognition is the condition for the possibility of Badiou’s mistaken critique. The paper then discusses how it is that these issues relate, more broadly, to the relationship between Deleuze and Badiou. (shrink)

El artículo estudia la teoría de la guerra justa, en san Agustín, considerándolo como el fundador de esta teoría, ya que fue el primero en articular los criterios perennes dentro del marco de "ethos" cristiano del amor e igualdad como seres humanos creados a imagen y semejanza del Creador. Trata también del influjo de Agustín en el desarrollo de esta teoría de la guerra justa.

An anthology of writings from Plato and Aristotle, including an introductory essay on the history of ancient Greek philosophy and Greek Glossary.

This book returns the reader to an agenda for addressing equity in schools, emphasizing the need to reexamine past reform efforts and the work ahead for educational leaders in reshaping schools and schooling.

The_ Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy_ is the most ambitious international philosophy project in many years. Edited by Edward Craig and assisted by thirty specialist subject editors, the REP consists of ten volumes of the world's most eminent philosophers writing for the needs of students and teachers of philosophy internationally. The REP is a project on an unparalleled scale: Over 2000 entries ranging from 500 to 15,000 words in length - thematic, biographical and national 10 volumes consisting of over 5 (...) million words of text plus considerable bibliographic material A Chief Editor and thirty specialist Subject Editors from across the world Over 1200 authors from all over the world. The importance of the REP is not to be found just in the sheer size of the project but also in its breadth of subject matter. It covers: The core of most Anglo-American philosophy - the metaphysical, epistemological and logical questions The usual menu of ethics, political philosophy and the history of philosophy The philosophy of other cultures - from Chinese, Arabic and Jewish philosophy to the philosophy of Africa and Latin America The most impressive range of authors have been gathered together on this unique project: William Alston, Roderick Chisolm, Fred Dretske, Joel Feinberg, Sandra Harding, Larry Laudan, Martha Nussbaum, Richard Popkin, Richard Rorty, Alan Ryan, Gyatri Chakravorty Spivak, Stephen Stich, Patrick Suppes and Bernard Williams, to name just a few. Also available online: www.rep.routledge.com. (shrink)

Craig's interpolation lemma (if φ → ψ is valid, then φ → θ and θ → ψ are valid, for θ a formula constructed using only primitive symbols which occur both in φ and ψ) fails for many propositional and first order modal logics. The interpolation property is often regarded as a sign of well-matched syntax and semantics. Hybrid logicians claim that modal logic is missing important syntactic machinery, namely tools for referring to worlds, and that adding such machinery (...) solves many technical problems. The paper presents strong evidence for this claim by defining interpolation algorithms for both propositional and first order hybrid logic. These algorithms produce interpolants for the hybrid logic of every elementary class of frames satisfying the property that a frame is in the class if and only if all its point-generated subframes are in the class. In addition, on the class of all frames, the basic algorithm is conservative: on purely modal input it computes interpolants in which the hybrid syntactic machinery does not occur. (shrink)

Some religious believers may see synthetic biology as usurping God's creative role. The Catholic Church has yet to issue a formal teaching on the field (though it has issued some informal statements in response to Craig Venter's development of a ‘synthetic’ cell). In this paper I examine the likely reaction of the Catholic Magisterium to synthetic biology in its entirety. I begin by examining the Church's teaching role, from its own viewpoint, to set the necessary backround and context for (...) the discussion that follows. I then describe the Church's attitude to science, and particularly to biotechnology. From this I derive a likely Catholic theology of synthetic biology.The Church's teachings on scientific and biotech research show that it is likely to have a generally positive disposition to synbio, if it and its products can be acceptably safe. Proper evaluation of, and protection against, risk will be a significant factor in determining the morality of the research. If the risks can be minimized through regulation or other means, then the Church is likely to be supportive. The Church will also critique the social and legal environment in which the research is done, evaluating issues such as the patenting of scientific discoveries and of life. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:From the Perspective of the Self: Montaigne’s Self-PortraitPatrick HenryFrom the Perspective of the Self: Montaigne’s Self-Portrait, by Craig B. Brush; 321 pp. New York: Fordham University Press, 1994, $32.50.In a note to Chapter One, the author explains that his is the third book to center on the self-portrait of Montaigne but, unlike one—Miroirs d’encre by Michel Beaujour—his deals only with Montaigne and, unlike both—the other is Montaigne’s (...) Essays as the Book of the Self by Richard Regosin—his is not geared toward literary theory and offers no theoretical approach to self-portraiture or autobiography. What we have, then, is a close textual analysis of the essayist’s self-portrait which is shown to coexist with the ubiquitous voice of the moraliste, whose subject is mankind in general, and a third voice, particularly pronounced in the 1588 and 1595 editions of the Essays, that of the “essayer,” “whose topic is his own book, its aim, its method of inquiry, and its production” (p. 120). Throughout his study, even as he scrutinizes the self-portrait, Brush demonstrates that these three voices are interrelated, interdependent, and virtually inseparable. [End Page 173]Brush’s exhaustive enterprise: to depict “how Montaigne came to the project [of self-portraiture], how he conceived it, how he practiced it, what he had to say about it, what he learned from the strange practice, how it became a way of life for him” (p. 8) takes him into areas that have been well-debated by Montaigne scholars. Thus we find lengthy discussions of the sense of the word “essay,” authorial modesty, the role of the reader, titles, beginnings, digressions, additions, endings, skepticism, nominalism, Catholicism, dialogue, ethics, evolution, the use of personal pronouns, the structure of individual chapters and of the book as a whole, the link between La Boétie’s death and the self-portraiture project, and the interplay between self and other.On each topic, however, Brush inevitably offers a fresh insight, a quirky intuition, or a new departure that makes the discussion worthwhile. He paints the history of both domestic and official portraiture at the moment when Montaigne began writing; he explains why a self-portrait is not an autobiography; he opposes the treatise and the essay; he differentiates clearly between self-study, self-knowledge, and self-portraiture; he depicts what is missing from the portrait that the essayist deemed relatively complete, and he weighs carefully the opposed proclivities of the essayist toward self-improvement and self-acceptance. In addition, he points out how the impossibility of finding a “pure self” forced Montaigne “to paint himself in context” (p. 107) and argues forcefully that the essayist’s “love of life was a profoundly religious experience” (p. 210). In a particularly rich commentary on “Of practice” (pp. 82–83), Brush stresses the importance of writing for the author of the Essays. In this case, the writing of the essay may in fact have been more significant for him than the event that the writing narrates, thus underscoring the essayist’s claim that this book has made him as much as he has made it. Finally, Brush’s tenth chapter, “Study Without a Book,” eloquently elucidates the originality that Montaigne brought to his reading of the ancient adage “Know Thyself.”It was inevitable that Brush would cover much familiar material but by keeping his encyclopedic knowledge of the history of Montaigne criticism in the end notes and by rigorously analyzing the Essays, he has written an eminently readable, jargon-free study that will serve both the beginning student and the seasoned Montaigne scholar. Having no theory to impose, he is free to chart the amazingly rich variety and diversity of the Essays, aspects of the human condition that the essayist always underscored. His book, clearly the product of years of ruminating on the Essays, contains hundreds of quotations from Montaigne’s Travel Journal and from seventy-seven of the one-hundred-seven chapters penned by the essayist. By giving us, in the main, nothing but his own personal reflections on the Essays, he has also curiously and interestingly provided us with his... (shrink)

Preface Introduction Christopher J. Berry: Adam Smith: Outline of Life, Times, and Legacy Part One: Adam Smith: Heritage and Contemporaries 1: Nicholas Phillipson: Adam Smith: A Biographer's Reflections 2: Leonidas Montes: Newtonianism and Adam Smith 3: Dennis C. Rasmussen: Adam Smith and Rousseau: Enlightenment and counter-Enlightenment 4: Christopher J. Berry: Adam Smith and Early Modern Thought Part Two: Adam Smith on Language, Art and Culture 5: Catherine Labio: Adam Smith's Aesthetics 6: James Chandler: Adam Smith as Critic 7: Michael C. (...) Amrozowicz: Adam Smith: History and Poetics 8: C. Jan Swearingen: Adam Smith on Language and Rhetoric: The Ethics of Style, Character, and Propriety Part Three: Adam Smith and Moral Philosophy 9: Christel Fricke: Adam Smith: The Sympathetic Process and the Origin and Function of Conscience 10: Duncan Kelly: Adam Smith and the Limits of Sympathy 11: Ryan Patrick Hanley: Adam Smith and Virtue 12: Eugene Heath: Adam Smith and Self-Interest Part Four: Adam Smith and Economics 13: Tony Aspromourgos: Adam Smith on Labour and Capital 14: Nerio Naldi: Adam Smith on Value and Prices 15: Hugh Rockoff: Adam Smith on Money, Banking, and the Price Level 16: Maria Pia Paganelli: Commercial Relations: from Adam Smith to Field Experiments Part Five: Adam Smith on History and Politics 17: Spiros Tegos: Adam Smith: Theorist of Corruption 18: David M. Levy & Sandra J. Peart: Adam Smith and the State: Language and Reform 19: Fabrizio Simon: Adam Smith and the Law 20: Edwin van de Haar: Adam Smith on Empire and International Relations Part Six: Adam Smith on Social Relations 21: Richard Boyd: Adam Smith, Civility, and Civil Society 22: Gavin Kennedy: Adam Smith on Religion 23: Samuel Fleischacker: Adam Smith and Equality 24: Maureen Harkin: Adam Smith and Women Part Seven; Adam Smith: Legacy and Influence 25: Spencer J. Pack: Adam Smith and Marx 26: Craig Smith: Adam Smith and the New Right 27: Tom Campbell: Adam Smith: Methods, Morals and Markets 28: Amartya Sen: The Contemporary Relevance of Adam Smith. (shrink)

Tens of thousands of students have learned to be more discerning at constructing and evaluating arguments with the help of Patrick J. Hurley. Hurley’s lucid, friendly, yet thorough presentation has made A CONCISE INTRODUCTION TO LOGIC the most widely used logic text in North America. In addition, the book’s accompanying technological resources, such as CengageNOW and Learning Logic, include interactive exercises as well as video and audio clips to reinforce what you read in the book and hear in class. (...) In short, you’ll have all the assistance you need to become a more logical thinker and communicator. Important Notice: Media content referenced within the product description or the product text may not be available in the ebook version. (shrink)

How can we talk meaningfully about the past if it does not exist to be talked about? What gives time its direction? Is time travel possible? This defence of presentism - the view that only the present exists - makes an original contribution to a fast growing and exciting debate.

How can we talk meaningfully about the past if it does not exist to be talked about? What gives time its direction? Is time travel possible? This defence of presentism - the view that only the present exists - makes an original contribution to a fast growing and exciting debate.

Orthodox epistemological disjunctivism involves the idea that paradigm cases of visual perceptual knowledge are based on visual perceptual states which are propositional, and hence representational. Given this, the orthodox version of epistemological disjunctivism takes on controversial representational commitments in the philosophy of perception. Must epistemological disjunctivism involve these commitments? I don’t think so. Here I argue that we can take epistemological disjunctivism in a new direction and develop a version of the view free of these representational commitments. The basic idea (...) is that instead of conceiving of knowledge grounding perceptions as states in which one sees that such-and-such is the case, we should instead conceive of them as states or episodes in which one sees a thing, we should conceive of them as thing-seeings. I’ll suggest that we can cast such seeings in a knowledge grounding role without conceiving of them as representational. But this is because we can put thing-seeings to epistemological work, in the framework of epistemological disjunctivism, whilst remaining neutral on whether or not they are propositional, or representational at all. The point, then, is not to replace epistemological disjunctivism’s controversial representational commitments with controversial non-representational commitments. The point is, rather, that epistemological disjunctivism can be developed with fewer commitments in the philosophy of perception than is usually appreciated. (shrink)

In the semantic literature, there is a class of examples involving anaphora in intensional contexts, i.e. under the scope of modal operators or propositional attitude predicates, which display anaphoric relations that appear at first glance to violate otherwise well-supported generalizations about operator scope and anaphoric potential. In Section 1,I will illustrate this phenomenon, which, for reasons that should become clear below, I call modal subordination; I will develop a general schema for its identification, and show how it poses problems for (...) most theories of scope and anaphoric relations. In Section 2, I will review the main approaches which have been considered in attempting to account for modal subordination and argue that only an approach involving accommodation can account for the full range of examples. The notion of accommodation is due to Lewis, who defines it as follows: If at time t something is said that requires presupposition P to be acceptable, and if P is not presupposed just before t, then - ceteris paribus and within certain limits - presupposition P comes into existence at t.(Lewis 1979: 340) The interesting question, of course, is what the limits on accommodation might be. I believe that the proper account of modal subordination has something to say about this. I will argue this briefly in section 3, where I draw some conclusions and also sketch some ... (shrink)

The Russian philosopher and cultural theorist Mikhail Bakhtin has traditionally been seen as the leading figure in the group of intellectuals known as the Bakhtin Circle. The writings of other members of the Circle are considered much less important than his work, while Bakhtin's achievement has been exaggerated in proportion to the downgrading of the thinkers with whom he associated in the 1920s. This volume, which includes new translations and studies of the work of the most important members of the (...) Circle, sets out to correct the distortions in the established representations of its activity. The original contributions to literary and linguistic theory made by Valentin Voloshinov and Pavel Medvedev (but frequently credited to Bakhtin) are assessed, and the distinctiveness of their approaches is highlighted. (shrink)

At least since Aristotle’s famous 'sea-battle' passages in On Interpretation 9, some substantial minority of philosophers has been attracted to the doctrine of the open future--the doctrine that future contingent statements are not true. But, prima facie, such views seem inconsistent with the following intuition: if something has happened, then (looking back) it was the case that it would happen. How can it be that, looking forwards, it isn’t true that there will be a sea battle, while also being true (...) that, looking backwards, it was the case that there would be a sea battle? This tension forms, in large part, what might be called the problem of future contingents. A dominant trend in temporal logic and semantic theorizing about future contingents seeks to validate both intuitions. Theorists in this tradition--including some interpretations of Aristotle, but paradigmatically, Thomason (1970), as well as more recent developments in Belnap, et. al (2001) and MacFarlane (2003, 2014)--have argued that the apparent tension between the intuitions is in fact merely apparent. In short, such theorists seek to maintain both of the following two theses: (i) the open future: Future contingents are not true, and (ii) retro-closure: From the fact that something is true, it follows that it was the case that it would be true. It is well-known that reflection on the problem of future contingents has in many ways been inspired by importantly parallel issues regarding divine foreknowledge and indeterminism. In this paper, we take up this perspective, and ask what accepting both the open future and retro-closure predicts about omniscience. When we theorize about a perfect knower, we are theorizing about what an ideal agent ought to believe. Our contention is that there isn’t an acceptable view of ideally rational belief given the assumptions of the open future and retro-closure, and thus this casts doubt on the conjunction of those assumptions. (shrink)

This book is a combined anthology and guide intended for use as a textbook in courses on philosophy of religion. It aims to bring to the student the very best of cutting-edge work on important topics in the field. (publisher, edited).

The counterfactual mental state of negligent criminal activity invites skepticism from those who see mental states as essential to responsibility. Here, I offer a revision of the mental state of criminal negligence, one where the mental state at issue is actual and not merely counterfactual. This revision dissolves the worry raised by the skeptic and helps to explain negligence’s comparatively reduced culpability.

This 2-in-1 anthology and guide brings together the most influential readings on key topics in philosophy of religion from the Christian tradition and sets them in context.

Politics pervades every aspect of our lives as human beings. As Aristotle said, we are "political animals.

Drunk drivers and other culpably incapacitated wrongdoers are often taken to pose a problem for reasons-responsiveness accounts of moral responsibility. These accounts predicate moral responsibility upon an agent having the capacities to perceive and act upon moral reasons, and the culpably incapacitated wrongdoers lack exactly those capacities at the time of their wrongdoing. Many reasons-responsiveness advocates thus expand their account of responsibility to include a tracing condition: The culpably incapacitated wrongdoer is blameworthy despite his incapacitation precisely because he is responsible (...) for becoming incapacitated. As some skeptics have suggested, it is not clear that we need tracing. Here, however, I make a stronger case against tracing: I show that tracing gets things wrong. I consider a new sort of case, the case of the Odysseus agent, whose incapacitation is non-culpable (sometimes merely permissible and sometimes praiseworthy). Tracing would have us hold responsible and therefore blame unlucky Odysseus agents, Odysseus agents who commit a wrongdoing in the throes of their non-culpably induced incapacitation. But we should not hold these unlucky Odysseus agents responsible for their incapacitated wrongdoing. Because tracing gets these cases wrong, we should reject tracing. (shrink)

A framework for pragmatic analysis is proposed which treats discourse as a game, with context as a scoreboard organized around the questions under discussion by the interlocutors. The framework is intended to be coordinated with a dynamic compositional semantics. Accordingly, the context of utterance is modeled as a tuple of different types of information, and the questions therein — modeled, as is usual in formal semantics, as alternative sets of propositions — constrain the felicitous flow of discourse. A requirement of (...) Relevance is satisfied by an utterance (whether an assertion, a question or a suggestion) iff it addresses the question under discussion. Finally, it is argued that the prosodic focus of an utterance canonically serves to reflect the question under discussion (at least in English), placing additional constraints on felicity in context. (shrink)

What is addiction? Why do some people become addicted while others do not? Is the addict rational? In this book, Craig Hanson attempts to answer these questions and more. Using insights from the beginnings of philosophy to contemporary behavioral economics, Hanson attempts to assess the variety of ways in which we can and cannot, understand addiction. Special consideration is given to a challenging (and controversial) proposal dubbed “hyperbolic discounting.” Hanson proposes some modifications to the hyperbolic discounting view that permit (...) it to explain not only addiction, but also a variety of psychological maladies, such as self-deception. (shrink)

For many philosophers, bad-history wrongdoers are primarily interesting because of what their cases might tell us about the interaction of moral responsibility and history. However, philosophers focusing on blameworthiness have overlooked important questions about blame itself. These bad-history cases are complicated because blame and sympathy are both fitting. When we are careful to consider the rich natures of those two reactions, we see that they conflict in several important ways. We should see bad-history cases as cases about whether and how (...) we should blame, rather than as cases giving us ready insight into the nature of moral responsibility. (shrink)

As we navigate through life, we model time as flowing, the present as special, and the past as “dead.” This model of time—manifest time—develops in childhood and later thoroughly infiltrates our language, thought, and behavior. It is part of what makes a human life recognizably human. Yet if physics is correct, this model of the world is deeply mistaken. This book is about this conflict between manifest and physical time. The first half dives into the physics and philosophy to establish (...) the conflict’s existence; but it also argues that the claim that physics “spatializes” time is overstated. Rather, even relativity theory makes time special in deep and significant ways. The second half turns to psychology, biology, and more, seeking to understand why creatures like us develop manifest time. The novel picture that results is that manifest time is a natural reaction to the many cognitive and evolutionary challenges that we face. For subjects embedded in our circumstances, it makes sense to develop—even if fundamentally wrong. (shrink)

This paper offers a new approach to an old debate about superaddition in Locke. Did Locke claim that some objects have powers that are unrelated to their natures or real essences? The question has split commentators. Some (Wilson, Stuart, Langton) claim the answer is yes and others (Ayers, Downing, Ott) claim the answer is no. This paper argues that both of these positions may be mistaken. I show that Locke embraced a robust epistemic humility. This epistemic humility includes ignorance of (...) the real essences of bodies, of the causal processes underlying the production of natural phenomena, and of God’s method of creation. I show how this epistemic humility offers strong support for an agnostic response to the question of superaddition. Locke did not intend to claim that bodies either do or do not have properties unrelated to their real essences. Instead, his primary goal in discussing the topic was to emphasize the strict limits to human knowledge. (shrink)

In common treatments of deontic logic, the obligatory is what is true in all deontically ideal possible worlds. In this article, I offer a new semantics for Standard Deontic Logic with Leibnizian intensions rather than possible worlds. Even though the new semantics furnishes models that resemble Venn diagrams, the semantics captures the strong soundness and completeness of Standard Deontic Logic. Since, unlike possible worlds, many Leibnizian intensions are not maximally consistent entities, we can amend the semantics to invalidate the inference (...) rule which ensures that all tautologies are obligatory. I sketch this amended semantics to show how it invalidates the rule in a new way. (shrink)

This is an essential book for every serious student of Plato, for anyone teaching the Republic, and for every library.

In this paper I argue that Theodor W. Adorno 's philosophy of freedom needs an ontological picture of the world. Adorno does not make his view of natural order explicit, but I suggest it could be neither the chaotic nor the strictly determined ontological images common to idealism and positivism, and that it would have to make intelligible the possibility both of human freedom and of critical social science. I consider two possible candidates, Nancy Cartwright 's ‘patchwork of laws’, and (...) Roy Bhaskar 's critical realism. Arguing that Cartwright 's position conflicts with the spirit of Adorno 's philosophy, I suggest that Bhaskar 's realism is compatible with and to a significant extent implicit in Adorno 's position. Whilst Adorno is clearly not a critical realist, Bhaskar 's position does provide the best overall account of the ontological commitments of Adorno 's critical theory. It becomes possible in turn to locate Bhaskar 's arguments in a broader critical tradition and give fuller expression to the concerns that structure his work, in particular by locating the epistemic fallacy in the narrative account of the natural history of subjective reason and its tendency towards ‘identity thinking ’. The discussion goes on to consider the interdependence of reason, nature and freedom in the idea of emancipatory critique, confirming the deeper affinities between critical realism and critical theory. (shrink)

The Polymath Project is an online collaborative enterprise that was initiated in 2009, when Timothy Gowers asked whether and how groups could work together to solve mathematical problems that “do not naturally split up into a vast number of subtasks.” Gowers proposed to answer this question himself by actually trying to set up such a collaboration, based on interactions taking place in the comment-threads of a series of posts on a WordPress blog. Hence, the first project officially started in early (...) 2009, to be proclaimed successful only 6 weeks later (Gowers and Nielsen 2009). From its inception until April 2018, 15 more Polymath problems (and a handful of smaller or related ones) have been launched. These projects have attracted attention from different scholarly communities, including the philosophy of mathematical practices, from the perspective of which the Polymath Project can be seen as a vast repository of mathematics in action. This chapter continues previous work by its authors on the topic in question and topics related. More specifically, for the purposes of this volume, it is our aim to both summarize and expand upon these earlier contributions. The starting point is the above observation that in the past decade, the issue of “massively collaborative mathematics” (to be qualified below) has drawn quite some attention. However, does it also warrant intensive philosophical attention in particular? For, as exciting as these developments might be from mathematical and other points of view, the enhanced possibilities that have come with it do not per se give rise to any philosophical import. In Van Bendegem (2011), one of us has indeed tentatively argued for the philosophical relevance of these new dynamics of proof construction flowing from the wide availability and efficiency of Internet technology. We shall below briefly rehearse and update the argument given there. (shrink)

This modern, advanced textbook reviews modal logic, a field which caught the attention of computer scientists in the late 1970's.

Locke famously claimed that morality was capable of demonstration. But he also refused to provide a system of demonstrative morality. This paper addresses the mismatch between Locke’s stated views and his actual philosophical practice. While Locke’s claims about demonstrative morality have received a lot of attention it is rare to see them discussed in the context of his general theory of demonstration and his specific discussions of particular demonstrations. This paper explores Locke’s general remarks about demonstration as well as his (...) claims about demonstration in natural philosophy, mathematics, and morality. Careful attention to these detailed discussions motivates a reevaluation of Locke’s views on demonstrative knowledge of morality. Specifically, while Locke did believe that some demonstrative moral knowledge might be in-principle available to us he also believed that facts about the difficulty of demonstration meant that this knowledge would in-practice be largely unattainable. (shrink)

Duress is a defense in both law and morality. The bank teller who provides an armed robber with the bank vault combination, the innocent suspect who fabricates a story after hours of interrogation, the Good Samaritan who breaks into a private cabin in the woods to save a stranded hiker, and the father who drives at high speed to rush his injured child to the hospital—in deciding how to respond to agents like these, we should take into account that they (...) have acted under duress. In this paper, I offer a new duress defense, which I call “distinctive duress.” The distinctive-duress defense is neither ordinary justification nor ordinary excuse. Rather, it is a defense available to agents who act wrongly because they are appropriately insensitive to certain reasons. In the distinctive-duress cases, an agent’s normative sensitivities are rightly directed elsewhere, leading them awry. (shrink)

Cowan, Ruth Schwartz (1983) More Work for Mother: The Ironies of Household Technology from the Open Hearth to the Microwave. New York: Basic. ...

Given his view that the modern world is ‘radically evil’, Adorno is an unlikely contributor to business ethics. Despite this, we argue that his work has a number of provocative implications for the field that warrant wider attention. Adorno regards our social world as damaged, unfree, and false and we draw on this critique to outline why the achievement of good work is so rare in contemporary society, focusing in particular on the ethical demands of roles and the ideological nature (...) of management’s self-understanding. Nevertheless, we show that Adorno’s comments on activities such as art and philosophy mean that it is possible to draw on his work in a way that contributes constructively to the conversation about good and meaningful work within business ethics. (shrink)

The text includes fragments of his work that have never before been translated.

Harry C. Boyte. Craig Calhoun. Geoff Eley. Nancy Fraser. Nicholas Garnham. JürgenHabermas. Peter Hohendahl. Lloyd Kramer. Benjamin Lee. Thomas McCarthy. Moishe Postone. Mary P.Ryan. Michael Schudson. Michael Warner. David Zaret.