Mary Ann Baily's points are important, but they are largely accounted for by the analysis we provided. -/- .

La communication par ordinateur est de plus en plus utilisée comme soutien pour les cours universitaires conventionnels. Cet article offre un panorama d'une série d'études fines d'innovation à petite échelle dans diverses disciplines sur deux campus universitaires britanniques. La plupart impliquait des interactions textuelles asynchrones concernant tous les étudiants et tous les tuteurs d'un cours. Des observations, des questionnaires et des entretiens ont servi à établir des configurations de décollage et d'usage des nouveaux médias pour la discussion. Les résultats sont (...) discutés selon les cinq « règles de virtualité » .Computer-based communication is increasingly being used in support of conventional university courses. This paper offers an overview of a series of detailed studies of small scale innovations across a range of disciplines at two campus-based UK universities. Most involved asynchronous, text-based interactions involving all students on a given course and the tutor or tutors involved. Observations, questionnaires and interviews were used to establish patterns of uptake and use of the new discussion media. Findings are discussed in terms of five "rules of virtuality". (shrink)

Biobanks are increasingly being linked together into global networks in order to maximise their capacity to identify causes of and treatments for disease. While there is great optimism about the potential of these biobank networks to contribute to personalised and data-driven medicine, there are also ethical concerns about, among other things, risks to personal privacy and exploitation of vulnerable populations. Concepts drawn from theories of globalisation can assist with the characterisation of the ethical implications of biobank networking across borders, which (...) can, in turn, inform more ethically sophisticated responses. Using the China Kadoorie Biobank as a case study, we show how distinguishing between the subnational, transnational, supranational and extranational spheres of operation and influence can help researchers, institutions and regulators to understand and manage the ethical issues raised by the globalisation of biobanking. (shrink)

Universal access to health care has historically faced strident opposition from political conservatives in the United States, although it has long been accepted by most conservatives in the rest of the industrialized world. Now, in a global economy where American business is crippled by the rising cost of market-based health care, the time may be ripe for change. The key to fostering a new mindset among American conservatives is to show why universal access fulfills many of the basic values that (...) all conservatives hold. (shrink)

BackgroundBiobanks provide an important foundation for genomic and personalised medicine. In order to enhance their scientific power and scope, they are increasingly becoming part of national or international networks. Public trust is essential in fostering public engagement, encouraging donation to, and facilitating public funding for biobanks. Globalisation and networking of biobanking may challenge this trust.MethodsWe report the results of an Australian study examining public attitudes to the networking and globalisation of biobanks. The study used quantitative and qualitative methods in conjunction (...) with bioethical analysis in order to determine factors that may contribute to, and threaten, trust.ResultsOur results indicate a generally high level of trust in biobanks and in medical research more broadly. Key factors that can reduce perceived trustworthiness of biobanks are commercialisation and involvement in global networking.ConclusionsWe conclude that robust ethical oversight and governance standards can both promote trust in global biobanking and ensure that this trust is warranted. (shrink)

_A Communion of Subjects_ is the first comparative and interdisciplinary study of the conceptualization of animals in world religions. Scholars from a wide range of disciplines, including Thomas Berry (cultural history), Wendy Doniger (study of myth), Elizabeth Lawrence (veterinary medicine, ritual studies), Marc Bekoff (cognitive ethology), Marc Hauser (behavioral science), Steven Wise (animals and law), Peter Singer (animals and ethics), and Jane Goodall (primatology) consider how major religious traditions have incorporated animals into their belief systems, myths, rituals, and art. Their (...) findings offer profound insights into humans' relationships with animals and a deeper understanding of the social and ecological web in which we all live. Contributors examine Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism, Daoism, Confucianism, African religions, traditions from ancient Egypt and early China, and Native American, indigenous Tibetan, and Australian Aboriginal traditions, among others. They explore issues such as animal consciousness, suffering, sacrifice, and stewardship in innovative methodological ways. They also address contemporary challenges relating to law, biotechnology, social justice, and the environment. By grappling with the nature and ideological features of various religious views, the contributors cast religious teachings and practices in a new light. They reveal how we either intentionally or inadvertently marginalize "others," whether they are human or otherwise, reflecting on the ways in which we assign value to living beings. Though it is an ancient concern, the topic of "Religion and Animals" has yet to be systematically studied by modern scholars. This groundbreaking collection takes the first steps toward a meaningful analysis. (shrink)

_A Communion of Subjects_ is the first comparative and interdisciplinary study of the conceptualization of animals in world religions. Scholars from a wide range of disciplines, including Thomas Berry, Wendy Doniger, Elizabeth Lawrence, Marc Bekoff, Marc Hauser, Steven Wise, Peter Singer, and Jane Goodall consider how major religious traditions have incorporated animals into their belief systems, myths, rituals, and art. Their findings offer profound insights into humans' relationships with animals and a deeper understanding of the social and ecological web in (...) which we all live. Contributors examine Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism, Daoism, Confucianism, African religions, traditions from ancient Egypt and early China, and Native American, indigenous Tibetan, and Australian Aboriginal traditions, among others. They explore issues such as animal consciousness, suffering, sacrifice, and stewardship in innovative methodological ways. They also address contemporary challenges relating to law, biotechnology, social justice, and the environment. By grappling with the nature and ideological features of various religious views, the contributors cast religious teachings and practices in a new light. They reveal how we either intentionally or inadvertently marginalize "others," whether they are human or otherwise, reflecting on the ways in which we assign value to living beings. Though it is an ancient concern, the topic of "Religion and Animals" has yet to be systematically studied by modern scholars. This groundbreaking collection takes the first steps toward a meaningful analysis. (shrink)

“I hate war,” de Fontenelle confessed, “for it spoils conversation.” And does it spoil philosophy too, which is always a kind of conversation? Or can philosophers write about war, as now we surely must, in a way that keeps the conversation going without belligerence? Only so, perhaps, can philosophy shed light on this dark field; but how to do it is itself obscured by the passions that wars evoke. Ted Honderich advocates advocacy, “an advocacy of arguments and judgements. A (...) decent philosopher dealing with moral and political questions … is in a line of life higher than that of a trial lawyer, but not out of sight of that line of life. If there is what can be called moral truth, it is not ordinary truth. Desire sits onto it” . Honderich's book may be viewed in this light as a sustained speech for the prosecution in the impeachment of Tony Blair and George W. Bush for waging terrorist war and supporting the terrorist wars of others. It is, then, a polemical work, but, unlike a lawyer's, founded on Honderich's own convictions, which are themselves rooted in philosophical belief. (shrink)

Should a principle of charity be applied to the interpretation of the colour concepts exercised in visual experience? We think not. We shall argue, for one thing, that the grounds for applying a principle of charity are lacking in the case of colour concepts. More importantly, we shall argue that attempts at giving the experience of colour a charitable interpretation either fail to respect obvious features of that experience or fail to interpret it charitably, after all. Charity to visual experience (...) is therefore no motive for resisting the natural, Galilean response to a scientific understanding of light and vision. The best interpretation of colour experience ends up convicting it of widespread and systematic error. (shrink)

With his theory of descriptions Russell wanted to solve two problems concerning denotation and reference, which are formulated here as Problem I and Problem II. After presenting each problem, we describe the main points of Russell’s solution. We deal with Russell’s concepts of existence and then elaborate his presuppositions concerning the relation of denoting and referring. Next we discuss the presuppositions or principles which underlie Russell’s understanding of the _objects_ of reference. These principles are such that if the objects of (...) reference are material objects, they are objects of classical mechanics, or very close to such an interpretation. Finally we show how these principles have to be relaxed if the objects of reference are objects of quantum mechanics or special or general relativity. (shrink)

In _Complexity and Postmodernism_, Paul Cilliers explores the idea of complexity in the light of contemporary perspectives from philosophy and science. Cilliers offers us a unique approach to understanding complexity and computational theory by integrating postmodern theory into his discussion. _Complexity and Postmodernism_ is an exciting and an original book that should be read by anyone interested in gaining a fresh understanding of complexity, postmodernism and connectionism.

What is truth. Paul Horwich advocates the controversial theory of minimalism, that is that the nature of truth is entirely captured in the trivial fact that each proposition specifies its own condition for being true, and that truth is therefore an entirely mundane and unpuzzling concept. The first edition of Truth, published in 1980, established itself as the best account of minimalism and as an excellent introduction to the debate for students. For this new edition, Horwich has refined and (...) developed his treatment of the subject in the light of subsequent discussions, while preserving the distinctive format that made the earlier edition so successful. (shrink)

By applying research in artificial intelligence to problems in the philosophy of science, Paul Thagard develops an exciting new approach to the study of scientific reasoning. This approach uses computational ideas to shed light on how scientific theories are discovered, evaluated, and used in explanations. Thagard describes a detailed computational model of problem solving and discovery that provides a conceptually rich yet rigorous alternative to accounts of scientific knowledge based on formal logic, and he uses it to illuminate (...) such topics as the nature of concepts, hypothesis formation, analogy, and theory justification. (shrink)

Complexity and Postmodernism explores the notion of complexity in the light of contemporary perspectives from philosophy and science. The book integrates insights from complexity and computational theory with the philosophical position of thinkers including Derrida and Lyotard. Paul Cilliers takes a critical stance towards the use of the analytical method as a tool to cope with complexity, and he rejects Searle's superficial contribution to the debate.

The application of extended mind theory to the Internet and Web yields the possibility of Internet-extended knowledge—a form of extended knowledge that arises as a result of an individual's interactions with the online environment. The present paper seeks to advance our understanding of Internet-extended knowledge by describing the functionality of a real-world application, called the HoloArt app. In part, the goal of the paper is illustrative: it is intended to show how recent advances in mixed reality, cloud-computing, and machine intelligence (...) might be combined so as to yield a putative case of Internet-extended knowledge. Beyond this, however, the paper is intended to support the philosophical effort to understand the notions of extended knowledge and the extended mind. In particular, the HoloArt app raises questions about the universality of some of the criteria that have been used to evaluate putative cases of cognitive extension. The upshot is a better appreciation of the way in which claims about extended knowledge and the extended mind might be affected by a consideration of technologically-advanced resources. (shrink)

Scientific debates about the nature of light have nothing to do with the philosophical problem of evil if you focus on the subject matter of those debates, but quite a bit to do with it if you focus on the structure of the reasoning in those debates. Some theories of light have been shown to be improbable, at least other evidence held equal, by comparing them to incompatible theories, both with respect to how well they fit certain data (...) and (at least implicitly) with respect to how probable they are intrinsically. Similarly, (a popular form of) theism can be shown to be improbable, at least other evidence held equal, by comparing it to the incompatible theory that physical reality is the source of mental reality. This theory of “source physicalism” fits a variety of data about good and evil much better than theism does. Further, primarily because of its modesty, source physicalism is many times more probable intrinsically than theism. It follows that, other evidence held equal, theism is very probably false. (shrink)

In some previous work, I tried to give a concept-based account of the nature of our entitlement to certain very basic inferences (see the papers in Part III of Boghossian 2008b). In this previous work, I took it for granted, along with many other philosophers, that we understood well enough what it is for a person to infer. In this paper, I turn to thinking about the nature of inference itself. This topic is of great interest in its own right (...) and surprisingly understudied by philosophers. A correct understanding of inference promises to shed light on a number of important topics. In particular, it threatens to undermine the sort of concept-based story about entitlement to which I had previously been attracted. (shrink)

This paper develops a trivalent semantics for the truth conditions and the probability of the natural language indicative conditional. Our framework rests on trivalent truth conditions first proposed by Cooper (1968) and Belnap (1973) and it yields two logics of conditional reasoning: (i) a logic C of certainty-preserving inference; and (ii) a logic U for uncertain reasoning that preserves the probability of the premises. We show systematic correspondences between trivalent and probabilistic representations of inferences in either framework, and we use (...) the distinction between the two systems to cast light on the validity of inferences such as Modus Ponens, Or-To-If, and Conditional Excluded Middle. Specifically, the conditional behaves monotonically in C, but non-monotonically in U; Modus Ponens is valid in C, but valid in U only for non-nested conditionals. The result is a unified account of the semantics and epistemology of indicative conditionals that can be fruitfully applied to analyzing the validity of conditional inferences. (shrink)

In just a few years, children achieve a stable state of linguistic competence, making them effectively adults with respect to: understanding novel sentences, discerning relations of paraphrase and entailment, acceptability judgments, etc. One familiar account of the language acquisition process treats it as an induction problem of the sort that arises in any domain where the knowledge achieved is logically underdetermined by experience. This view highlights the 'cues' that are available in the input to children, as well as children's skills (...) in extracting relevant information and forming generalizations on the basis of the data they receive. Nativists, on the other hand, content that language-learners project beyond their experience in ways that the input does not even suggest. Instead of viewing language acqusition as a special case of theory induction, nativists posit a Universal Grammar, with innately specified linguistic principles of grammar formation. The 'nature versus nurture' debate continues, as various "poverty of stimulus" arguments are challenged or supported by developments in linguistic theory and by findings from psycholinguistic investigations of child language. In light of some recent challenges to nativism, we rehearse old poverty-of stimulus arguments, and supplement them by drawing on more recent work in linguistic theory and studies of child language. (shrink)

That we owe duties to others is a commonplace, the subject of countless philosophical treatises and monographs. Morality is interpersonal and other-directed, many claim. But what of what we owe ourselves? In Duty to Self, Paul Schofield flips the paradigm of interpersonal morality by arguing that there are moral duties we owe ourselves, and that in light of this, philosophers need to significantly rethink many of their views about practical reason, moral psychology, politics, and moral emotions. -/- Among (...) these views is the idea that divisions within a person's life enable her to relate to herself second-personally--that is, as though she were relating to a distinct other person--in the way required by morality. Further, there exist political duties owed to the self, which the state may coerce persons to perform. This amounts to a novel argument for paternalistic law, which appeals to considerations of right, justice, and freedom in order to justify coercing a person for their own sake--a liberal justification for an idea typically thought to be deeply at odds with liberalism. -/- Schofield untangles how this view would impact various issues in applied ethics and political philosophy, for example, financial prudence and risk, the pursuit of the good life, and medical ethics. Duty to Self is essential for anyone working in moral and political philosophy or political theory. (shrink)

For two and a half months in 1928, the Japanese philosopher Shûzô Kuki had weekly talks with a young French student of philosophy—Jean-Paul Sartre. In 1928, Kuki had just come to Paris after having studied with Heidegger and Husserl. Freshly ac­quainted with the new phenomenology, Kuki in­troduced Sartre to this emerging movement in philosophy. In a well-researched introductory essay, Stephen Light details the eight years Kuki spent in Europe in the 1920s, a period during which Kuki came to (...) know Henri Bergson, Heinrich Rickert, and Emile Brehier, as well as Husserl and Heidegger. Light includes translations of two of Kuki’s essays on time and often of his short essays on matters Japanese, culminating in the insightful “General Characteristics of French Philosophy.” None of the Kuki essays were previously available in English. The final section of the book is a facsimile of the never before published notebook Kuki used during his discussions with Sartre. (shrink)

Dobzhansky argued that biology only makes sense if life on earth has a shared history. But his dictum is often reinterpreted to mean that biology only makes sense in the light of adaptation. Some philosophers of science have argued in this spirit that all work in ‘proximal’ biosciences such as anatomy, physiology and molecular biology must be framed, at least implicitly, by the selection histories of the organisms under study. Others have denied this and have proposed non-evolutionary ways in (...) which biologists can frame these investigations. This paper argues that an evolutionary perspective is indeed necessary, but that it must be a forward-looking perspective informed by a general understanding of the evolutionary process, not a backward-looking perspective informed by the specific evolutionary history of the species being studied. Interestingly, it turns out that there are aspects of proximal biology that even a creationist cannot study except in the light of a theory of their effect on future evolution. (shrink)

In a recent article, Barrett & Halvorson define a notion of equivalence for first-order theories, which they call “Morita equivalence.” To argue that Morita equivalence is a reasonable measure of “theoretical equivalence,” they make use of the claim that Morita extensions “say no more” than the theories they are extending. The goal of this article is to challenge this central claim by raising objections to their argument for it and by showing why there is good reason to think that the (...) claim itself is false. In light of these criticisms, this article develops a natural way for the advocate of Morita equivalence to respond. I prove that this response makes her criterion a special case of bi-interpretability, an already well-established barometer of theoretical equivalence. I conclude by providing reasons why the advocate of Morita equivalence should opt for a notion of theoretical equivalence that is defined in terms of interpretability rather than Morita extensions. (shrink)

Should we act only for the sake of what we might bring about (causal decision theory); or is it enough for a decent motive that our action is highly correlated with something desirable (evidential decision theory)? The conflict between these points of view is embodied in Newcomb's problem. It is argued here that intuitive evidence from familiar decision contexts does not enable us to settle the issue, since the two theories dictate the same results in normal circumstances. Nevertheless, there are (...) several reasons to reject the causal approach: (1) its relative complexity; (2) its commitment to the existence of situations in which every possible act would be irrational; (3) its incorporation of an arbitrary time bias; and (4) its implicit distinction between what ought to be done and what ought to be hoped for. (shrink)

Mandevillian intelligence is a specific form of collective intelligence in which individual cognitive vices are seen to play a positive functional role in yielding collective forms of cognitive success. The present paper introduces the concept of mandevillian intelligence and reviews a number of strands of empirical research that help to shed light on the phenomenon. The paper also attempts to highlight the value of the concept of mandevillian intelligence from a philosophical, scientific and engineering perspective. Inasmuch as we accept (...) the notion of mandevillian intelligence, then it seems that the cognitive and epistemic value of a specific social or technological intervention will vary according to whether our attention is focused at the individual or collective level of analysis. This has a number of important implications for how we think about the design and evaluation of collective cognitive systems. For example, the notion of mandevillian intelligence forces us to take seriously the idea that the exploitation of individual cognitive shortcomings could, in some situations, provide a productive route to collective forms of cognitive and epistemic success. (shrink)

Mystical experiences of the natural world bring a sense of unity, knowledge, self-transcendence, eternity, light, and love. This is the first detailed study of these intriguing phenomena. Paul Marshall surveys and evaluates a wide range of explanations put forward by religious thinkers, philosophers, and scientists, and offers his own perspective on the nature of these experiences.

Despite the rapidly growing literature on realism, there’s little discussion of the ideology critique of John Rawls offered by one of its leading lights, Raymond Geuss. There is little understanding of what (most of) this critique consists in and few discussions of how Rawls’ approach to political theorising may be defended against it. To remedy this situation, this article reconstructs the realist ideology critique of Rawls advanced by Raymond Geuss, which has three prongs: (1) Rawls’ political theory offers insufficient tools (...) to uncover and address distortions of our political values, beliefs, and intuitions; (2) it unacceptably reinforces these distortions by unduly legitimating them; and (3) it diverts attention from important features of real politics. With this done, I finish by considering how Rawlsians can respond, chiefly by employing a kind of reflective equilibrium, or reflective endorsement, broad enough to encompass different forms of genealogy and ideology critique. (shrink)

Can Levinas’ thought of the other be extended beyond the relation to the other human being? This article seeks to demonstrate that Levinas’ philosophy can indeed be read in such a sense and that this serves to open up a new way of understanding human thinking. Key to understanding such an extension of Levinas’ philosophy will be his account of the face and, more particularly, his claim that the relation to the face is ‘heard in language’. Through explicating what is (...) at stake in this claim, we will work to show how Levinas’ philosophy leads us away from what might be called a tradition of understanding human thought through the medium of light and takes us toward a conception of thinking that is conditioned by sound. In the final section of the article, we consider what such a shift might suggest for the ways we understand thinking in both educational and everyday contexts. (shrink)

ABSTRACT This paper is a case study in public health ethics. It considers whether there is a basis in ethics for political action by health professionals and their associations in response to inhumane treatment. The issue arises from Australia's treatment of asylum seekers and the charge that this treatment has been both immoral and inhumane. This judgement raises several questions of broader significance in bioethics and of significance to the emerging field of public health ethics. These questions relate to the (...) role of health professionals in response to inhumane treatment of people in their charge; to the discipline of public health in light of a growing recognition of its ethical basis; and the role of public health and bioethical associations in response to ethical issues arising in a political context. It is argued that, in serious cases of humanitarian and human rights abuses affecting health and well‐being, there is a case for political action by health professionals, academic and professional institutions, and associations of public health and ethics. (shrink)

The idea of the inner is central to our conception of a person and is at the heart of all interaction. But how should we understand this concept, and what do we mean when we wonder what is going on inside our heads? This accessible and non-technical guide to Wittgenstein provides insight into his work in this area and on the problem of the inner. Using Wittgenstein's recently published writings on the philosophy of psychology, together with unpublished material, Paul (...) Johnston presents a thorough account of a subject that was central to Wittgenstein's later work. He shows that Wittgenstein's arguments involve a radical re-thinking of our understanding of the inner and present a challenge to contemporary views which has yet to be fully appreciated or understood. Wittgenstein demonstrates how a Wittgensteinian approach can dissolve age-old problems about the nature of consciousness and the relationship between the mind, the body, and the soul. The resulting picture of the inner, with its stress on the crucial role of language, sheds light on the direction of Wittgenstein's work and presents a stimulating and controversial alternative to more fashionable positions on the subject. (shrink)

Most philosophers assume that ‘ought’ implies ‘can’, and most of them hold that this principle is true not only universally but also analytically or conceptually. Some skeptics deny this principle, although they often admit some related one. In this article, we show how new empirical evidence bolsters the skeptics’ arguments. We then defend the skeptical view against some objections to the empirical evidence and to its effect on the traditional principle. In light of the new evidence, we conclude that (...) philosophers should stop unconditionally assuming that ‘ought’ implies ‘can’. (shrink)

In workplace situations of all kinds novices are transformed by experience of practice into highly proficient practitioners. How are we to understand this change which appears to be as much a qualitative one as it is a quantitative one? This paper argues that the available resources for understanding the informal learning that occurs during the course of successful workplace practice are somewhat limited. Theories about know‐how are criticised for shedding little light on this topic. The notion of tacit knowledge (...) is also rejected as unhelpful. The development of judgement is proposed as a more promising way to understand the phenomenon. A consideration of four main dimensions of contextuality is used as a lead into an account of eleven key features of workplace practical judgement. (shrink)

Bringing elementary logic out of the academic darkness into the light of day, Paul Tomassi makes logic fully accessible for anyone attempting to come to grips with the complexities of this challenging subject. Including student-friendly exercises, illustrations, summaries and a glossary of terms, _Logic_ introduces and explains: * The Theory of Validity * The Language of Propositional Logic * Proof-Theory for Propositional Logic * Formal Semantics for Propositional Logic including the Truth-Tree Method * The Language of Quantificational Logic (...) including the Theory of Descriptions. _Logic _is an ideal textbook for any logic student: perfect for revision, staying on top of coursework or for anyone wanting to learn about the subject. Related downloadable software for Macs and PCs is available for this title at www.logic.routledge.com. (shrink)

The dispute between realists about color and anti-realists is actually a dispute about the nature of color properties. The disputants do not disagree over what material objects are like. Rather, they disagree over whether any of the uncontroversial facts about material objects--their powers to cause visual experiences, their dispositions to reflect incident light, their atomic makeup, and so on--amount to their having colors. The disagreement is thus about which properties colors are and, in particular, whether colors are any of (...) the properties in a particular set that is acknowledged on both sides to exhaust the properties of material objects. In a previous paper we discussed at length one attempt to identify colors with particular properties of material objects--namely, with their dispositions to cause visual experiences. Here we shall discuss a different and perhaps more influential version of realism, which says that the colors of material objects are microphysical properties of their surfaces. We shall call this theory physicalism about color (physicalism, for short). In order to evaluate this theory, however, we shall first have to clarify some methodological issues. Our hope is that we can bring some further clarity to the question of color realism, whether or not we succeed in our critique of the physicalists' answer. (shrink)

Complexity science has proliferated across academic domains in recent years. A question arises as to whether any useful sense of ‘generalized complexity ’ can be abstracted from the various versions of complexity to be found in the literature, and whether it could prove fruitful in a scientific sense. Most attempts at defining complexity center around two kinds of notions: Structural, and temporal or dynamic. Neither of these is able to provide a foundation for the intuitive or generalized notion when taken (...) separately; structure is often a derivative notion, dependent on prior notions of complexity, and dynamic notions such as entropy are often indefinable. The philosophical notion of process may throw light on the tensions and contradictions within complexity. Robustness, for instance, a key quality of complexity, is quite naturally understood within a process-theoretical framework. Understanding complexity as process also helps one align complexity science with holistically oriented predecessors such as General System Theory, while allowing for the reductionist perspective of complexity. These results, however, have the further implication that it may be futile to search for general laws of complexity, or to hope that investigations of complex objects in one domain may throw light on complexity in unrelated domains. (shrink)

The paper seeks to identify criteria that digital communication would have to satisfy in order to serve the functions for which theater is necessary in human cultures.

The Dalai Lama is fond of quoting a statement in which the Buddha is said to have asserted that no one should accept his word out of respect for the Buddha himself, but only after testing it, analysing it ‘ as a goldsmith analyses gold, through cutting, melting, scraping and rubbing it’. The Dalai Lama is often referred to as the temporal and spiritual leader of Tibet, but in truth as a spiritual figure His Holiness, while respected, indeed revered by (...) almost all Tibetans, usually speaks from within the perspective of one particular tradition of Tibetan Buddhism, that of the dGe lugs . Founded in the late fourteenth century by Tsong kha pa, the dGe lugs has always stressed the importance of reasoning, analytic rationality, on the spiritual path. This dGe lugs perspective is by no means shared by all Buddhists, at least not in the form it there takes. Nevertheless it does represent an important direction in Buddhist thinking on reasoning and the spiritual path which can be traced back in Indian Buddhism a very long way indeed, and it is in the light of dGe lugs thought that I want to contemplate two points which seem to be crucial in Raimundo Panikkar's approach to interreligious dialogue and understanding: first, that Reality, Being, transcends the intelligible, the range of consciousness, and second, that understanding this is the only basis for tolerance, not seeking in one way or another to overcome the other. (shrink)

In workplace situations of all kinds novices are transformed by experience of practice into highly proficient practitioners. How are we to understand this change which appears to be as much a qualitative one as it is a quantitative one? This paper argues that the available resources for understanding the informal learning that occurs during the course of successful workplace practice are somewhat limited. Theories about know-how are criticised for shedding little light on this topic. The notion of tacit knowledge (...) is also rejected as unhelpful. The development of judgement is proposed as a more promising way to understand the phenomenon. A consideration of four main dimensions of contextuality is used as a lead into an account of eleven key features of workplace practical judgement. (shrink)

Ross Cameron has argued that the modal realism of David Lewis furnishes the theist with the resources to explain divine necessity. Cameron is successful in identifying two theistic strategies, but neither is attractive in light of a commitment to modal realism. The first theistic strategy is to treat God as an abstract entity in the same way that the modal realist treats pure sets. This is undermotivated in light of the nominalistic spirit of modal realism. The second strategy (...) is to regard God as enjoying trans-world identity because the divine nature can possess no accidental intrinsic properties. This approach raises a problem of how one is to understand the notion of actuality. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to describe a methodology for revising logical principles in the light of empirical psychological findings. Historical philosophy of science and wide reflective equilibrium in ethics are considered as providing possible models for arguing from the descriptive to the normative. Neither is adequate for the psychology/logic case, and a new model is constructed, employing criteria for evaluating inferential systems. Once we have such criteria, the notion of reflective equilibrium becomes redundant.

Collaboration is ubiquitous in the natural and social sciences. How collaboration contributes to the development of scientific knowledge can be assessed by considering four different kinds of collaboration in the light of Alvin Goldman's five standards for appraising epistemic practices. A sixth standard is proposed to help understand the importance of theoretical collaborations in cognitive science and other fields. I illustrate the application of these six standards by describing two recent scientific developments in which collaboration has been important, the (...) bacterial theory of ulcers and the multiconstraint theory of analogy, and by arguing that philosophy should become more collaborative. (shrink)

The case outlined below is the basis for the In That Case section of the “Ethics and Epistemology of Big Data” symposium. Jordan receives reports from two separate personal genomic tests that provide intriguing data about ancestry and worrying but ambiguous data about the potential risk of developing Alzheimer’s disease. What began as a personal curiosity about genetic inheritance turns into an alarming situation of medical uncertainty. Questions about Jordan’s family tree are overshadowed by even more questions about Alzheimer’s disease (...) and healthy ageing. As a parent, Jordan is unsure whether to share these results and what it would mean for their children to learn about their genetic inheritance and potential future health. Furthermore, Jordan is unsure how to make sense of these reports in light of current knowledge of the risk factors for Alzheimer’s disease and in the absence of effective treatments or robust preventative guidelines. (shrink)

It Is My Pleasure To Introduce this discussion of Naoko Saito's American Philosophy in Translation. We have contributions from three experts in American philosophy, all of whom have been in conversation with the author for many years: Jim Garrison, Vincent Colapietro, and Steven Fesmire. Prior to their contributions, I would like to set the scene with some brief remarks to introduce the book and to explain something of its background.Over the past two decades, I have worked closely with Saito on (...) a number of projects, and I have been familiar with her ideas for this book since its inception. In some respects, the book is the product of studies in American philosophy that go back to her time as an undergraduate in Tokyo in the 1980s, ideas that were advanced considerably when she did an MA at Harvard, taking classes with Stanley Cavell and Hilary Putnam, and subsequently when she completed her PhD at Teachers College, with René Arcilla as her advisor and Cavell as a member of her committee. It was against this background that, in 2006, Saito published her first singly authored book, The Gleam of Light: Moral Perfectionism and Education in Dewey and Emerson. As that title indicates, she was already exploring the relation between Dewey and pragmatism, on the one hand, and American transcendentalism, on the other. Her sense back then of some separation between these traditions of thought, and of the nature of the tensions between them, has been refined and, for the most part, strengthened in the years since that earlier publication. No doubt she has been influenced in this by Cavell, who, in one essay, for example, asks: “What's the use of calling Emerson a pragmatist?” In any case, her account of this relationship is extended and altered significantly in American Philosophy in Translation.Through the course of her research, Saito has been conscious of the fact that she is studying American philosophy from a distance—a distance that is geographical, cultural, and linguistic—and she retains a thoughtful humility in relation to this. But she also sees here a possible opening to the perception and release of untapped aspects of these traditions of thought, in ways that might fertilize and extend the ground in which the inheritance of American philosophy has flourished. This is very much the line that she pursues in this book. In the light of this, and as the book's title indicates, there is a particular focus on language and translation. It is important that the latter term is understood not merely as an attractive metaphor for change and transformation: crucial to her developing argument is the experience of translating between languages and the reality of the experience in the lives of so many today, within the academy and without. In the course of this experience, one is sometimes confronted, quite self-consciously, with a word or phrase that resists translation. But sometimes—more often in the life of the accomplished or habituated speaker of the foreign language in question—the experience persists as an undercurrent, subtly opening a world that is other in some respects from the one that comes to light in the mother tongue.By contrast, to the many (especially Anglophone) monolingually minded, the need for translation can appear as an unwanted barrier, something of a nuisance, a problem to be solved. This is by no means a response confined, however, to the uneducated (or the Anglophone or the monolingual). There is also a sophisticated variant of this narrowness of outlook where faith is placed in an artificial or technical language with the power, the fantasy runs, to overcome the vagaries of natural language. Hilary Putnam recalls how Rudolf Carnap, whose stature as a thinker and as a human being he does not doubt, felt strongly that “for all x, planned x is better than unplanned x” and was drawn to the idea of a common world language: Thus the idea of a socialist world in which everyone spoke Esperanto (except scientists, who, for their technical work, would employ notations from symbolic logic) was one which would have delighted him. And I recently had a conversation with a student who remarked quite casually that it would not be a bad idea if there were only one language and one literature: “We would get used to it, and it might help to prevent war.” (Putnam 185)Putnam does not deign to respond to the latter assertion. What is foregrounded in his discussion is that monolingualism is likely to hide the plurality of goods that is realized in different cultures. The importance of that plurality is surely something that the luminaries of American philosophy bring to light. Indeed, Putnam's key point of reference in making these remarks is William James.The undercurrent of translation in the experience of the more accomplished speaker of a foreign language can act then as a sensitization to cultural difference, to different possibilities of thought and being. But in fact, this shifting of thought can apply within any language itself, not just inter- but intra-lingually, opening an insight that is close to the heart of American philosophy. If one can hear the cry of the rooster, then one may be wakened also by Thoreau's turn of expression in the idea of the “father tongue”: through a maturing experience of the language we are brought up with, we come to “a reserved and select expression, too significant to be heard by the ear, which we must be born again in order to speak” (Thoreau 69). This renewed investment in language, this continual return to our words, is what opens them to new thought and gives them interest. It is first an inheritance from the culture we are brought up in, but it dies in our speech and thinking if we do not turn it to something new. To build, we must begin by borrowing an axe, but we can return it sharper than when we borrowed it.If translation is operative in our language as a whole, as Saito's argument shows, this points to the many little rebirths within ourselves and in our interactions with one another. In fact, the point becomes political in that democracy depends upon this renewal of our words. This renewal resists not only the allure of ideology but also the now familiar etiolated rhetoric of “political realism.” Moreover, it points beyond the reliance, within the politics of recognition, on the defining of groups and categories toward a politics of acknowledgment.In this vein, Saito's outsider perspective is in tune with what Richard Bernstein has called the “global resurgence of American pragmatism.” The borderline or outsider perspective can have a powerful effect on thought, in relation to which Saito invites the reader to recall that America's past was itself an outsider-past: it was outside Europe, a relation with which it was bound to struggle, but it was also ready, as Emerson and Thoreau demonstrate, to draw from greater cultural distances, where it found congenial aspects in East Asian thought.Saito stresses the anti-foundationalist character of American philosophy as of critical importance for both philosophy and politics, and again her discussion of language is crucial to this. Dewey's emphasis on communication, with his relatively flat style of prose, is contrasted with the stylistic experiment and invention that she finds in Emerson, Thoreau, and Cavell. She sees the style of these writers, in some contrast to that of Dewey, as having a salutary, destabilizing effect. She wants to destabilize Dewey. It is entirely consonant with her position, furthermore, that she raises doubts about the bland acceptance of a politics of inclusion. Not only can this become a surreptitious form of discipline and control: it can engender the conformism that Emerson worked so hard to prevent.The book finishes on a more aesthetic note, taking up lines of thought in Dewey's aesthetics but turning this toward the more extravagant elision, in Thoreau, of the functional and the beautiful. The thematization of the aesthetic in this way is, she tries to show, crucial to our (political) world. (shrink)

Standard accounts of nineteenth-century German philosophy often begin with Kant and assess philosophers after him in light of their responses to Kantian idealism. In _Continental Idealism_, Paul Redding argues that the story of German idealism begins with Leibniz. Redding begins by examining Leibniz's dispute with Newton over the nature of space, time and God, and stresses the way in which Leibniz incorporated Platonic and Aristotelian elements in his distinctive brand of idealism. Redding shows how Kant's interpretation of Leibniz's (...) views of space and time consequently shaped his own 'transcendental' version of idealism. Far from ending here, however, Redding argues that post-Kantian idealists such as Fichte, Schelling and Hegel on the one hand and metaphysical sceptics such as Schopenhauer and Nietzsche on the other continued to wrestle with a form of idealism ultimately derived from Leibniz. _Continental Idealism_ offers not only a new picture of one of the most important philosophical movements in the history of philosophy, but also a valuable and clear introduction to the origins of Continental and European philosophy. (shrink)

The historian Raphael Falk has described the gene as a ‘concept in tension’ (Falk 2000) – an idea pulled this way and that by the differing demands of different kinds of biological work. Several authors have suggested that in the light of contemporary molecular biology ‘gene’ is no more than a handy term which acquires a specific meaning only in a specific scientific context in which it occurs. Hence the best way to answer the question ‘what is a gene’, (...) and the only way to provide a truly philosophical answer to that question is to outline the diversity of conceptions of the gene and the reasons for this diversity. In this essay we draw on the extensive literature in the history of biology to explain how the concept has changed over time in response to the changing demands of the biosciences . Finally, we outline some of the conceptions of the gene current today. The seeds of change are implicit in many of those current conceptions and the future of the gene concept looks set to be at as turbulent as the past. (shrink)