While I cannot conclude that Langer is successful so far in this formidable undertaking, I find myself not only resonating to much that she sets out but also applauding the attempt to develop a philosophy of mind in a new key. Surely, to decide what we mean by mind without reference to the mind-in-art is myopic philosophizing. No systematic metaphysician can but be grateful for the attempt to show that in the nature of feeling as found in art there is (...) a kind of organization that will enable us to get beyond the persistent frustrations created by a dualistic view of mind and body, and will possibly give us a clue even to the dynamics of physical beings. (shrink)

> ‘The fact about himself that the bullshitter hides, on the other hand, is that the truth-values of his statements are of no central interest to him; what we are not to understand is that his intention is neither to report the truth nor conceal it. It is just this lack of connection to a concern with truth—this indifference to how things really are—that is the essence of bullshit.’1 > —Harry Frankfurt In his paper, Nudging, informed consent, and bullshit, William (...) Simkulet accuses doctors of being bullshitters when they knowingly influence patient decision making through means other than argument and reasoning, that is, through ‘nudges.’ In these instances, he contends that they care little about patient understanding or communicating the truth about the options and, instead, care only about presenting alternatives in ways that cause patients to do what the physicians think they should do.2 However, doctors can intend to enhance patient understanding at the same time that they try to influence patients’ choices. Consider a physician who wants her patient to get a vaccine. …. (shrink)

Vittorio Possenti’s Terza Navigatione is a much welcome and needed ado about nothing. More precisely, it is much ado about the nihilism that presently smothers Western philosophy and culture. Mired in nihilism, contemporary philosophy and culture attempt to comprehend themselves, and get lost in a nihilistic smog. Instead of recognizing the essentially nihilistic nature of the intellectual confusion that confronts them, contemporary philosophy and culture tend to see this nihilism in accidental forms, such as consumerism, moral relativism, technocracy. As Possenti (...) rightly understands, the West’s current intellectual malaise is much deeper, and more difficult to eradicate, than these accidental instantiations might suggest. Possenti’s central question is: How can philosophy and Western culture transcend nihilism when it surrounds us, like the air we breathe? (shrink)

Civil society organizations (CSOs) have significantly impacted on the politics of health research and the field of bioethics. In the global HIV epidemic, CSOs have served a pivotal stakeholder role. The dire need for development of new prevention technologies has raised critical challenges for the ethical engagement of community stakeholders in HIV research. This study explored the perspectives of CSO representatives involved in HIV prevention trials (HPTs) on the impact of premature trial closures on stakeholder engagement. Fourteen respondents from South (...) African and international CSOs representing activist and advocacy groups, community mobilisation initiatives, and human and legal rights groups were purposively sampled based on involvement in HPTs. Interviews were conducted from February-May 2010. Descriptive analysis was undertaken across interviews and key themes were developed inductively. CSO representatives largely described positive outcomes of recent microbicide and HIV vaccine trial terminations, particularly in South Africa, which they attributed to improvements in stakeholder engagement. Ongoing challenges to community engagement included the need for principled justifications for selective stakeholder engagement at strategic time-points, as well as the need for legitimate alternatives to CABs as mechanisms for engagement. Key issues for CSOs in relation to research were also raised. (shrink)

Civil society organizations (CSOs) have significantly impacted on the politics of health research and the field of bioethics. In the globalHIVepidemic,CSOs have served a pivotal stakeholder role. The dire need for development of new prevention technologies has raised critical challenges for the ethical engagement of community stakeholders inHIVresearch. This study explored the perspectives ofCSOrepresentatives involved inHIVprevention trials (HPTs) on the impact of premature trial closures on stakeholder engagement. Fourteen respondents fromSouthAfrican and internationalCSOs representing activist and advocacy groups, community mobilisation initiatives, (...) and human and legal rights groups were purposively sampled based on involvement inHPTs. Interviews were conducted fromFebruary‐May 2010. Descriptive analysis was undertaken across interviews and key themes were developed inductively.CSOrepresentatives largely described positive outcomes of recent microbicide andHIVvaccine trial terminations, particularly inSouthAfrica, which they attributed to improvements in stakeholder engagement. Ongoing challenges to community engagement included the need for principled justifications for selective stakeholder engagement at strategic time‐points, as well as the need for legitimate alternatives toCABs as mechanisms for engagement. Key issues forCSOs in relation to research were also raised. (shrink)

America, this is your chance. We must get it right this time or risk losing our democracy forever. —Michelle AlexanderEven some conservatives fear a power grab might trigger the disintegration of t...

Can AI developers be held epistemically responsible for the processing of their AI systems when these systems are epistemically opaque? And can explainable AI (XAI) provide public justificatory reasons for opaque AI systems’ outputs? Koskinen (2024) gives negative answers to both questions. Here, I respond to her and argue for affirmative answers. More generally, I suggest that when considering people’s uncertainty about the factors causally determining an opaque AI’s output, it might be worth keeping in mind that a degree of (...) uncertainty about conclusions is inevitable even in entirely human-based empirical science because in induction there’s always a risk of getting it wrong. Keeping this in mind may help appreciate that requiring full transparency from AI systems before epistemically trusting their outputs might be unusually (and potentially overly) demanding. (shrink)

In this series of articles the early life and work of the young Julian Schwinger are explored. In the present article, we discuss Schwinger's winding up his work at the MIT Radiation Laboratory, being offered a tenured professorship at Harvard University, getting married, and settling down into a highly productive teaching and research career.

My conversion into a knower has been a long and winding road. From childhood reverie to the years of formal schooling, education has never ceased to lure me into its magical power. How do we really get to know/see/learn whatever happens on our educational journey? In this paper, I will re‐trace my quest for knowledge that reaches beyond the boundaries of traditional epistemology. My wonderings will take me to explore, via Jung, the possibilities of imaginative education through Gnosis and Sophia. (...) The paper intends to weave together several Jungian discourses with their versions by other thinkers who have contributed to the fields of depth psychology, esotericism, and educational philosophy. (shrink)

Monetary intelligence theory asserts that individuals apply their money attitude to frame critical concerns in the context and strategically select certain options to achieve financial goals and ultimate happiness. This study explores the dark side of monetary Intelligence and behavioral economics—dishonesty. Dishonesty, a risky prospect, involves cost–benefit analysis of self-interest. We frame good or bad barrels in the environmental context as a proxy of high or low probability of getting caught for dishonesty, respectively. We theorize: The magnitude and intensity (...) of the relationship between love of money and dishonest prospect may reveal how individuals frame dishonesty in the context of two levels of subjective norm—perceived corporate ethical values at the micro-level and Corruption Perceptions Index at the macro-level, collected from multiple sources. Based on 6382 managers in 31 geopolitical entities across six continents, our cross-level three-way interaction effect illustrates: As expected, managers in good barrels, mixed barrels, and bad barrels display low, medium, and high magnitude of dishonesty, respectively. With high CEV, the intensity is the same across cultures. With low CEV, the intensity of dishonesty is the highest in high CPI entities —the Enron Effect, but the lowest in low CPI entities. CPI has a strong impact on the magnitude of dishonesty, whereas CEV has a strong impact on the intensity of dishonesty. We demonstrate dishonesty in light of monetary values and two frames of social norm, revealing critical implications to the field of behavioral economics and business ethics. (shrink)

Corruption involves greed, money, and risky decision-making. We explore the love of money, pay satisfaction, probability of risk, and dishonesty across cultures. Avaricious monetary aspiration breeds unethicality. Prospect theory frames decisions in the gains-losses domain and high-low probability. Pay dissatisfaction (in the losses domain) incites dishonesty in the name of justice at the individual level. The Corruption Perceptions Index, CPI, signals a high-low probability of getting caught for dishonesty at the country level. We theorize that decision-makers adopt avaricious love-of-money (...) aspiration as a lens and frame dishonesty in the gains-losses domain (pay satisfaction-dissatisfaction, Level 1) and high-low probability (CPI, Level 2) to maximize expected utility and ultimate serenity. We challenge the myth: Pay satisfaction mitigates dishonesty across nations consistently. Based on 6500 managers in 32 countries, our cross-level three-dimensional visualization offers the following discoveries. Under high aspiration conditions, pay dissatisfaction excites the highest- (third-highest) avaricious justice-seeking dishonesty in high (medium) CPI nations, supporting the certainty effect. However, pay satisfaction provokes the second-highest avaricious opportunity-seizing dishonesty in low CPI entities, sustaining the possibility effect—maximizing expected utility. Under low aspiration conditions, high pay satisfaction consistently leads to low dishonesty, demonstrating risk aversion—achieving ultimate serenity. We expand prospect theory from a micro and individual-level theory to a cross-level theory of monetary wisdom across 32 nations. We enhance the S-shaped Curve to three 3-D corruption surfaces across three levels of the global economic pyramid, providing novel insights into behavioral economics, business ethics, the environment, and responsibility. (shrink)

The scientific study of consciousness emerged as an organized field of research only a few decades ago. As empirical results have begun to enhance our understanding of consciousness, it is important to find out whether other factors, such as funding for consciousness research and status of consciousness scientists, provide a suitable environment for the field to grow and develop sustainably. We conducted an online survey on people’s views regarding various aspects of the scientific study of consciousness as a field of (...) research. 249 participants completed the survey, among which 80% were in academia, and around 40% were experts in consciousness research. Topics covered include the progress made by the field, funding for consciousness research, job opportunities for consciousness researchers, and the scientific rigor of the work done by researchers in the field. The majority of respondents (78%) indicated that scientific research on consciousness has been making progress. However, most participants perceived obtaining funding and getting a job in the field of consciousness research as more difficult than in other subfields of neuroscience. Overall, work done in consciousness research was perceived to be less rigorous than other neuroscience subfields, but this perceived lack of rigor was not related to the perceived difficulty in finding jobs and obtaining funding. Lastly, we found that, overall, the global workspace theory was perceived to be the most promising (around 28%), while most non-expert researchers (around 22% of non-experts) found the integrated information theory (IIT) most promising. We believe the survey results provide an interesting picture of current opinions from scientists and researchers about the progresses made and the challenges faced by consciousness research as an independent field. They will inspire collective reflection on the future directions regarding funding and job opportunities for the field. (shrink)

While moral perfectionists rank conscious beings according to their cognitive abilities, Paola Cavalieri launches a more inclusive defense of all forms of subjectivity. In concert with Peter Singer, J. M. Coetzee, Harlan B. Miller, and other leading animal studies scholars, she expands our understanding of the nonhuman in such a way that the derogatory category of "the animal" becomes meaningless. In so doing, she presents a nonhierachical approach to ethics that better respects the value of the conscious self. Cavalieri (...) opens with a dialogue between two imagined philosophers, laying out her challenge to moral perfectionism and tracing its influence on our attitudes toward the "unworthy." She then follows with a roundtable "multilogue" which takes on the role of reason in ethics and the boundaries of moral status. Coetzee, Nobel Prize winner for Literature and author of _The Lives of Animals_, emphasizes the animality of human beings; Miller, a prominent analytic philosopher at Virginia Polytechnic Institute, dismantles the rationalizations of human bias; Cary Wolfe, professor of English at Rice University, advocates an active exposure to other worlds and beings; and Matthew Calarco, author of _Zoographies: The Question of the Animal from Heidegger to Derrida_, extends ethical consideration to entities that traditionally have little or no moral status, such as plants and ecosystems. As Peter Singer writes in his foreword, the implications of this conversation extend far beyond the issue of the moral status of animals. They "get to the heart of some important differences about how we should do philosophy, and how philosophy can relate to our everyday life." From the divergences between analytical and continental approaches to the relevance of posthumanist thinking in contemporary ethics, the psychology of speciesism, and the practical consequences of an antiperfectionist stance, _The Death of the Animal_ confronts issues that will concern anyone interested in a serious study of morality. (shrink)

Working in constructive set theory we formulate notions of constructive topological space and set-generated locale so as to get a good constructive general version of the classical Galois adjunction between topological spaces and locales. Our notion of constructive topological space allows for the space to have a class of points that need not be a set. Also our notion of locale allows the locale to have a class of elements that need not be a set. Class sized mathematical structures need (...) to be allowed for in constructive set theory because the powerset axiom and the full separation scheme are necessarily missing from constructive set theory. We also consider the notion of a formal topology, usually treated in Intuitionistic type theory, and show that the category of set-generated locales is equivalent to the category of formal topologies. We exploit ideas of Palmgren and Curi to obtain versions of their results about when the class of formal points of a set-presentable formal topology form a set. (shrink)

While Philosophy for/with Children (P4wC) provides a better alternative to the usual ‘banking’ model of education, questions have been raised regarding its applicability in non-western contexts. Despite its adherence to the ideals of democratic dialogue, not all members of a Community of Inquiry (COI) will be disposed to participate in the inquiry, not because they are incapable of doing so, but because they are positioned inferiorly within the group thereby affecting their efforts to speak out on topics that are meaningful (...) to them. In this article, I claim that it is essential to integrate positionality in P4wC research/practice. Aside from its role in helping a practitioner/researcher choose the appropriate method and materials that match the unique contexts of children, it also increases one’s awareness of the subtle forms of epistemic injustice that could leak in the COI, as well as the other subtle ways in which children are marginalized. In this regard, a P4wC researcher/practitioner must have a higher degree of sensitivity towards her positionality as this inevitably gets entangled with the positionality of children. I present some ‘areas’ in which the importance of positionality in the COI manifests, namely, restructuring classroom power relations, navigating a multi-ethnic classroom, facilitating meaning-making, and modeling reflective thinking. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Journal of the History of Philosophy 39.1 (2001) 101-134 [Access article in PDF] Getting Maimon's Goad:Discursivity, Skepticism, and Fichte's Idealism Peter Thielke The image of J. G. Fichte has of late displayed a rather substantial, and even remarkable, transformation. Where before Fichte was viewed—and most often dismissed—as advancing an unpalatable type of metaphysical idealism, in recent years several new perspectives on Fichte have emerged, each claiming to (...) improve on the old, standard picture. 1 The transformation of Fichte's image has been accompanied—or, more precisely, has been made possible—by a renewed interest in the relatively forgotten figures in the interregnum between Kant and Hegel. Fichte's thought is now understood in the context not only of Kant's transcendental idealism, but of, among others, Reinhold's Elementarphilosophie, Aenesidemus-Schulze's skepticism, Jacobi's intuitionism, and Beck's Standpunktslehre. By casting Fichte in this light, a more nuanced understanding of his project has been developed, one that does not simply follow the [End Page 101] traditional view of the Wissenschaftslehre as a full-blown metaphysical idealism in which the world of objects is understood as the product of an Absolute I.But while this 'contextual' approach has led to a renewed appreciation of the Wissenschaftslehre, I will suggest that the new focus on Fichte's historical milieu is incomplete. A lacuna in the current understanding of Fichte can be traced to a neglect of Salomon Maimon, an idiosyncratic and rather obscure critic of Kant. In this paper, I will argue that taking Maimon's skepticism into account when interpreting Fichte's idealism requires a rethinking of Fichte's project. In particular, in order to respond to Maimon's skepticism—an avowed project of the Wissenschaftslehre—Fichte's position must advance an idealist metaphysics, one in which the content of cognition is taken to be constituted by an act of the absolute I. This claim, of course, might seem rash, since it threatens to saddle Fichte with a gratuitous form of absolute idealism. It thus seems to run counter to recent attempts to make Fichte into a figure appealing to modern eyes. Such a concern, however, is I think misplaced. Instead, I will argue that Fichte's idealism, although perhaps ultimately unsuccessful, nevertheless should be of great interest precisely because it stands as an important attempt to provide an answer to a question—the nature of 'givenness'—that remains central to epistemology. 2The paper is divided into five parts. The first presents the historical evidence for Maimon's influence on Fichte. Part 2 offers a discussion of what I call 'Maimon's challenge' to the Kantian notion of 'discursive' cognition, as well as the ways in which this served as a goad to the development of the Wissenschaftslehre. In Part 3 I turn to a close reading of §1 of the Grundlage of 1794, where I try to show how a recognition of Maimon's challenge can help make sense of the foundations of the Wissenschaftslehre's project, and in particular the 'category of reality,' an otherwise highly obscure step in Fichte's argument. Part 4 offers a short discussion of the ways in which a Maimonian-minded account of §1 contributes to the understanding of the Grundlage as a whole. Finally, I conclude in Part 5 with some brief remarks about the broader philosophical implications of Fichte's response to Maimon's challenge: Fichte, I will argue, offers the first (but not the last) attempt at answering a type of Maimonian skepticism that remains viable even today. [End Page 102] 1. The Skeptical Goad Salomon Maimon, perhaps more than any other figure in German philosophy, embodied the Enlightenment notion of a Selbstdenker. He was born in Lithuania in 1753, to a rural Jewish family. 3 After marrying at eleven and becoming a father at fourteen, in his early twenties he fled from his family, after which he wandered the German countryside, until he was finally was able to establish himself in Berlin in 1779. Here he was taken in by Moses... (shrink)

This paper tracks the commitments of mechanistic explanations focusing on the relation between activities at different levels. It is pointed out that the mechanistic approach is inherently committed to identifying causal connections at higher levels with causal connections at lower levels. For the mechanistic approach to succeed a mechanism as a whole must do the very same thing what its parts organised in a particular way do. The mechanistic approach must also utilise bridge principles connecting different causal terms of different (...) theoretical vocabularies in order to make the identities of causal connections transparent. These general commitments get confronted with two claims made by certain proponents of the mechanistic approach: William Bechtel often argues that within the mechanistic framework it is possible to balance between reducing higher levels and maintaining their autonomy at the same time, whereas, in a recent paper, Craver and Bechtel argue that the mechanistic approach is able to make downward causation intelligible. The paper concludes that the mechanistic approach imbued with identity statements is no better candidate for anchoring higher levels to lower ones while maintaining their autonomy at the same time than standard reductive accounts are, and that what mechanistic explanations are able to do at best is showing that downward causation does not exist. (shrink)

This paper argues for a re-evaluation of the relationship between Berkeley and his predecessor, the neo-Aristotelian thinker John Sergeant. In the literature to date, the relationship between these two thinkers has received attention for two reasons. First, because some commentators have attempted to establish a causal connection between them – specifically, by focusing on the fact that both thinkers develop a theory of ‘notions’. Second, because both Berkeley and Sergeant develop ‘anti-representationalist’ arguments against Locke’s epistemology. The first issue has received (...) much greater attention, particularly from commentators seeking an explanation for Berkeley’s use of the term ‘notion’. Only one scholar, G. A. Johnston (in 1923), has considered Berkeley and Sergeant’s anti-representationalism in any depth. In this paper, I argue that the weight given to the causal connection between Berkeley and Sergeant’s ‘notions’ is misplaced since the evidence in favour of this connection is weaker than is usually acknowledged. Instead, I build on Johnston’s analysis of the conceptual connection between Berkeley and Sergeant’s anti-representationalism. I first corroborate Johnston’s claim that there are striking similarities between their criticisms of Locke before going beyond that analysis by identifying two important similarities between their anti-representationalist arguments. (shrink)

It has been maintained that we are quite able to express (1*)–(4*) without the introduction of a dyadic deontic operator, provided only that we supply our standard deontic logic with a stronger conditional than material implication. The lesson learned from Chisholm's paradox has been the eminently convincing, indeed obvious, one: that what we ought to do is not determined by what is the case in some perfect world, but by what is the case in the best world we can ‘get (...) to’ from this world. What we ought to do depends upon how we are circumstanced. (shrink)

My charge in this chapter is to set out the positive case supporting massively modular models of the human mind.1 Unfortunately, there is no generally accepted understanding of what a massively modular model of the mind is. So at least some of our discussion will have to be terminological. I shall begin by laying out the range of things that can be meant by ‘modularity’. I shall then adopt a pair of strategies. One will be to distinguish some things that (...) ‘modularity’ definitely can’t mean, if the thesis of massive modularity is to be even remotely plausible. The other will be to look at some of the arguments that have been offered in support of massive modularity, discussing what notion of ‘module’ they might warrant. It will turn out that there is, indeed, a strong case in support of massively modular models of the mind on one reasonably natural understanding of ‘module’. But what really matters in the end, of course, is the substantive question of what sorts of structure are adequate to account for the organization and operations of the human mind, not whether or not the components appealed to in that account get described as ‘modules’. So the more interesting question before us is what the arguments that have been offered in support of massive modularity can succeed in showing us about those structures, whatever they get called. (shrink)

Dynamical Grammar explores the consequences for language acquisition, language evolution, and linguistic theory of taking the underlying architecture of the language faculty to be that of a complex adaptive dynamical system. It contains the first results of a new and complex model of language acquisition which the authors have developed to measure how far language input is reflected in language output and thereby get a better idea of just how far the human language faculty is hard-wired.

Despite current moves in the UK to limit class sizes for young children in school, there is still a disturbing lack of research evidence on the effect of class size differences on pupils' educational progress and experience. Past research has concentrated on the effects on outcomes such as pupils' school attainments in basic areas. Much less is known about classroom processes that might mediate any such effects, though such knowledge is more useful for practice and policy. Drawing on a current (...) programme of research at the Institute of Education, University of London, this paper identifies five processes likely to be connected to class size : within class grouping practices, the nature and quality of teaching, pupil attention in class, pupil adjustment to school and effects on teachers' morale, stress and enthusiasm. Relevent research is reviewed, and in line with this research the paper concentrates on the primary school years. (shrink)

Suppose you are stranded on an island and you want to get over to the nearby mainland. Your only option is to swim. But is the other shore close enough? If you embark and it isn’t, you drown. So you prefer to know before taking off. Happily, you are well equipped. You have not only a yardstick, but also a theodolite for measuring angles, and a good knowledge of trigonometry. You then determine the distance to the other shore by means (...) of triangulation. You fix two points, A and B, on your own shore, and identify a third point, C, in sight on the opposite shore. You then measure the distance between A and B with your yardstick, and the two angles ABC and CAB with your theodolite. With this information you can calculate the distances AC and BC to the other shore. (shrink)

By exploring central issues in the philosophy of literature, illustrated by a wide range of novels, poems, and plays, _Philosophy of Literature_ gets to the heart of why literature matters to us and sheds new light on the nature and interpretation of literary works. Provides a comprehensive study, along with original insights, into the philosophy of literature Develops a unique point of view - from one of the field's leading exponents Offers examples of key issues using excerpts from well-known novels, (...) poems, and plays from different historical periods. (shrink)

This book addresses the ethical and political questions flowing from the vastly increased possibilities to manipulate the genetic properties of organisms, including human beings. Due to the great complexity of the scientific fields involved, these questions are framed and answered mostly by scientific experts. But the new technological possibilities and social practices connected with genetic manipulation intrude into domains that for a long time have been the provenance of religious and secular worldviews and touch upon deep-seated convictions and emotions. Moreover (...) they are strongly influenced by economic and political interests. As a consequence, questions of scientific truth and technical control are getting more and more mixed up with questions regarding values and interests. Against this background, this book starts from the premise that neither clinging to the idea of value-neutral, disinterested science, nor the complete abandonment of this idea in favour of postmodern relativism will be of much help here. Instead the different contributions to this book explore the idea of a ‘lingua democratica’ for the life sciences and sketch the contours of this notion by focusing on a broad range of conceptual and practical issues in the field of genomics. (shrink)

When i was in graduate school, I inadvertently walked in on a fellow student taking his comprehensive exams. He was extremely frustrated because two of the questions asked about conceptual issues in personality and personality disorders. This student was not expecting such questions and considered them to be unfair. I knew other students in that same program who would have considered it a gift to get such “interesting” questions. Those clinical and counseling psychologists with theoretical–philosophical interests are often attracted to (...) the topics of personality and personality disorders. It has, therefore, puzzled me why these same topics are largely ignored by those philosophers who study the conceptual issues of .. (shrink)

Every immediate memory is unique; it is therefore unlikely to consist of an attractor or even a combination of attractors. In the present state of knowledge about the chemistry of synaptic transmission, there is no reason to look beyond neurons that directly receive sensory afferents for the afterdischarges that correspond to active memories.

A recurring theme dominates recent philosophical debates about the nature of conscious perception: naïve realism’s opponents claim that the view is directly contradicted by empirical science. I argue that, despite their current popularity, empirical arguments against naïve realism are fundamentally flawed. The non-empirical premises needed to get from empirical scientific findings to substantive philosophical conclusions are ones the naïve realist is known to reject. Even granting the contentious premises, the empirical findings do not undermine the theory, given its overall philosophical (...) commitments. Thus, contemporary empirical research fails to supply any new argumentative force against naïve realism. I conclude that, as philosophers of mind, we would be better served spending a bit less time trying to wield empirical science as a cudgel against our opponents, and a bit more time working through the implications of each other’s views – something we can accomplish perfectly well from the comfort of our armchairs. (shrink)

To be beneficent, that is, to promote according to one's means the happiness of others in need, without hoping for something in return, is every man's duty. Immanuel Kant, The Metaphysics of Morals Almost everyone agrees that we have a moral duty to pull out a drowning child from a shallow pond even if this means getting our clothes muddy. But what are the limits of the duty of beneficence? In “Famine, Affluence and Morality”, which first appeared in 1972, (...) Peter Singer attempted to specify those limits in terms of the following principle: “if it is in our power to prevent something bad from happening, without thereby sacrificing anything of comparable moral importance, we ought, morally, to do it.” Singer went on to use this principle to argue that we ought to be doing all we can to prevent Third World hunger. At the same time, he challenged the well-established Western moral viewpoint that makes it an act of charity rather than a duty for a relatively affluent individual to give money to help feed the world's poor. Singer left open the question of whether the traditional distinction between duty and charity should be redrawn or abolished altogether, although he insisted that giving to others who are starving, even at the cost of giving up luxuries such as new clothes or a new car, is not an act of charity, but a duty. (shrink)

The principle of semantic compositionality, as Jerry Fodor and Ernie Lepore have emphasized, imposes constraints on theories of meaning that it is hard to meet with psychological or epistemic accounts. Here, I argue that this general tendency is exemplified in Michael Dummett's account of meaning. On that account, the so-called manifestability requirement has the effect that the speaker who understands a sentence s must be able to tell whether or not s satisfies central semantic conditions. This requirement is not met (...) by truth-conditional accounts of meaning. On Dummett's view, it is met by a proof conditional account: understanding amounts to knowledge of what counts as a proof of a sentence. A speaker is supposed always to be capable of deciding whether or not a given object is a proof of a given sentence she understands. This requirement comes into conflict with compositionality. If meaning is compositionally determined, then all you need for understanding a sentence is what you get from combining your understanding of the parts according to the mode of composition. But that knowledge is not always sufficient for recognizing any proof at all of a given sentence. Dummett's proof-theoretic argument to the contrary is mistaken. (shrink)

This paper argues that without the appropriate educational and organizational context, Socratic pedagogy can undermine a teacher’s leadership and negatively impact classroom dynamics by exposing a teacher’s lack of knowledge. In arguing for this position, the paper articulates the nature of the Socratic method, clarifies the notion of “power” and “leadership,” and then discusses traditional power roles in the classroom. These traditional power roles are strongly contrasted against the notion of power in the Socratic method, where the Socratic teacher derives (...) their power by asking questions. Finally, provided the educational and organizational context are structured in a way that puts the teacher in the role of the Socratic questioner, instructors need not worry that their leadership is in jeopardy or that classroom dynamics will suffer. (shrink)

“Real knowledge,” as I use the term, is the most highly prized form of true belief sought by an epistemic agent. This paper argues that defeasible infinitism provides a good way to characterize real knowledge and it shows how real knowledge can arise from fallible justification. Then, I argue that there are two ways of interpreting Ernest Sosa's account of real knowledge as belief that is aptly formed and capable of being fully defended. On the one hand, if beliefs are (...) aptly formed only if they have a specific causal etiology, namely that they are efficiently caused fully or partially by virtuous characteristics of the epistemic agent, then Sosa's account falls prey to what I call the problem of the Hazard of Empirical Disconfirmation. The HED problem applies to all forms of causal accounts of real knowledge and is simply that as we gain more empirical knowledge about the causal origins of our true beliefs that are the most highly prized we will discover that they do not always satisfy the required efficient causal constraints. Bluntly put, having sufficiently good reasons for our beliefs might not require that the beliefs have the requisite efficient causal etiology. On the other hand, there is a way of interpreting Sosa's views that does not include an efficient causal prerequisite. That interpretation makes Sosa's account of real knowledge almost identical to defeasible infinitism but expressed in an alternate vocabulary. Such a view is not subject to the HED problem and it can solve the deep problem in epistemology, namely how to get epistemically certain knowledge from fallible justification. (shrink)

Peter Cave gets to grips with maths, God and the meaning of life.

Is science getting at the truth? The sceptics – those who spread doubt about science – often employ a simple argument: scientists were sure in the past, and then they ended up being wrong. Such sceptics draw on dramatic quotes from eminent scientists such as Lord Kelvin, who reportedly stated at the turn of the 20th century “There is nothing new to be discovered in physics now,” shortly before physics was dramatically transformed. They ask: given the history of science, (...) wouldn’t it be naïve to think that current scientific theories reveal ‘the truth’, and will never be discarded in favour of other theories? Through a combination of historical investigation and philosophical-sociological analysis, Identifying Future-Proof Science defends science against such potentially dangerous scepticism. It is argued that we can confidently identify many scientific claims that are future-proof: they will last forever, so long as science continues. How do we identify future-proof claims? This appears to be a new question for science scholars, and not an unimportant one. It is argued that the best way to identify future-proof science is to avoid any attempt to analyse the relevant first-order scientific evidence, instead focusing purely on second-order evidence. Specifically, a scientific claim is future-proof when the relevant scientific community is large, international, and diverse, and at least 95% of that community would describe the claim as a ‘scientific fact’. In the entire history of science, no claim meeting these criteria has ever been overturned, despite enormous opportunity. (shrink)

Middle- and upper-middle-class students continue to outpace those from less privileged backgrounds. Most attempts to redress this inequality focus on the issue of access to financial resources, but as _Producing Success_ makes clear, the problem goes beyond mere economics. In this eye-opening study, Peter Demerath examines a typical suburban American high school to explain how some students get ahead. Demerath undertook four years of research at a Midwestern high school to examine the mercilessly competitive culture that drives students to (...) advance. _Producing Success_ reveals the many ways the community’s ideology of achievement plays out: students hone their work ethics and employ various strategies to succeed, from negotiating with teachers to cheating; parents relentlessly push their children while manipulating school policies to help them get ahead; and administrators aid high performers in myriad ways, even naming over forty students “valedictorians.” Yet, as Demerath shows, this unswerving commitment to individual advancement takes its toll, leading to student stress and fatigue, incivility and vandalism, and the alienation of the less successful. Insightful and candid, _Producing Success_ is an often troubling account of the educationally and morally questionable results of the American culture of success. (shrink)

It is argued that causal understanding originates in experiences of acting on objects. Such experiences have consistent features that can be used as clues to causal identification and judgment. These are singular clues, meaning that they can be detected in single instances. A catalog of 14 singular clues is proposed. The clues function as heuristics for generating causal judgments under uncertainty and are a pervasive source of bias in causal judgment. More sophisticated clues such as mechanism clues and repeated interventions (...) are derived from the 14. Research on the use of empirical information and conditional probabilities to identify causes has used scenarios in which several of the clues are present, and the use of empirical association information for causal judgment depends on the presence of singular clues. It is the singular clues and their origin that are basic to causal understanding, not multiple instance clues such as empirical association, contingency, and conditional probabilities. (shrink)

A belief is valuable when it “gets it right”. This “getting it right” is often understood solely as a matter of truth. But there is a second sense of “getting it right” worth exploring. According to this second sense, a belief “gets it right” when its concepts accurately match the way the world is objectively organized – that is, when its concepts are joint-carving, or have fidelity. In this paper, I explore the relationship between fidelity and epistemic value. (...) While many philosophers (especially metaphysicians) acknowledge fidelity's value, they overlook just how much it might disrupt our understanding of epistemic value. To tease out this disruption, I draw on the Jamesian balance between seeking the truth and avoiding the false. A similar balance must be struck both within the pursuit of fidelity itself (“seeking the joints” and “avoiding the gruesome”) as well as between the pursuit of fidelity and the pursuit of truth. I then give an argument against the claim that truth is the higher epistemic good. (shrink)

While Philosophy for/with Children provides a better alternative to the usual ‘banking’ model of education, questions have been raised regarding its applicability in non-western contexts. Despite its adherence to the ideals of democratic dialogue, not all members of a Community of Inquiry will be disposed to participate in the inquiry, not because they are incapable of doing so, but because they are positioned inferiorly within the group thereby affecting their efforts to speak out on topics that are meaningful to them. (...) In this article, I claim that it is essential to integrate positionality in P4wC research/practice. Aside from its role in helping a practitioner/researcher choose the appropriate method and materials that match the unique contexts of children, it also increases one’s awareness of the subtle forms of epistemic injustice that could leak in the COI, as well as the other subtle ways in which children are marginalized. In this regard, a P4wC researcher/practitioner must have a higher degree of sensitivity towards her positionality as this inevitably gets entangled with the positionality of children. I present some ‘areas’ in which the importance of positionality in the COI manifests, namely, restructuring classroom power relations, navigating a multi-ethnic classroom, facilitating meaning-making, and modeling reflective thinking. (shrink)

We clarify Bohr’s interpretation of quantum mechanics by demonstrating the central role played by his thesis that quantum theory is a rational generalization of classical mechanics. This thesis is essential for an adequate understanding of his insistence on the indispensability of classical concepts, his account of how the quantum formalism gets its meaning, and his belief that hidden variable interpretations are impossible.

Marx and Gramsci remain two of the most constant presences and inspirations for those on the left. Yet there is a persistent sense that we have still to get them right. Perhaps this indicates that sources like this are now fully classics, to be returned, and returned to. In the case of Marx and Gramsci, a series of major works published in the Brill Historical Materialism series breaks new ground as well as returning to older controversies, both resolved and unresolved. (...) Apart from remaining arguments concerning the status of materials unpublished in their own lifetimes, the major tension that emerges here is that between the task of immanent, contextual philology and the challenge of reading ‘Marx for today’ or ‘Gramsci for today’. The tension between text and context, and the question of what travels, conceptually persists. (shrink)

This paper argues that without the appropriate educational and organizational context, Socratic pedagogy can undermine a teacher’s leadership and negatively impact classroom dynamics by exposing a teacher’s lack of knowledge. In arguing for this position, the paper articulates the nature of the Socratic method, clarifies the notion of “power” and “leadership,” and then discusses traditional power roles in the classroom. These traditional power roles are strongly contrasted against the notion of power in the Socratic method, where the Socratic teacher derives (...) their power by asking questions. Finally, provided the educational and organizational context are structured in a way that puts the teacher in the role of the Socratic questioner, instructors need not worry that their leadership is in jeopardy or that classroom dynamics will suffer. (shrink)

In this paper, we move toward offering psychological benchmarks to measure success in building increasingly humanlike robots. By psychological benchmarks we mean categories of interaction that capture conceptually fundamental aspects of human life, specified abstractly enough to resist their identity as a mere psychological instrument, but capable of being translated into testable empirical propositions. Nine possible benchmarks are considered: autonomy, imitation, intrinsic moral value, moral accountability, privacy, reciprocity, conventionality, creativity, and authenticity of relation. Finally, we discuss how getting the (...) right group of benchmarks in human–robot interaction will, in future years, help inform on the foundational question of what constitutes essential features of being human. (shrink)

Various criticisms have been brought against a Platonistic construal of the musical work: that is, against the view that the musical work is a universal or kind or type, of which the performances are instances or tokens. Some of these criticisms are: (1) that musical works possess perceptual properties and universals do not; (2) that musical works are created and universals cannot be; (3) that universals cannot be destroyed and musical works can; (4) that parts of tokens of the same (...) type can be interchanged and still yield tokens of that type, whereas we cannot interchange parts of performances of the same work and still get performances of the work. Of these claims, (1) and (2) seem to be true, but are not incompatible with a Platonistic construal of the musical work, whereas (3) and (4) just seem to be false and, therefore, of no concern to the musical Platonist. (shrink)

Various criticisms have been brought against a Platonistic construal of the musical work: that is, against the view that the musical work is a universal or kind or type, of which the performances are instances or tokens. Some of these criticisms are: (1) that musical works possess perceptual properties and universals do not; (2) that musical works are created and universals cannot be; (3) that universals cannot be destroyed and musical works can; (4) that parts of tokens of the same (...) type can be interchanged and still yield tokens of that type, whereas we cannot interchange parts of performances of the same work and still get performances of the work. Of these claims, (1) and (2) seem to be true, but are not incompatible with a Platonistic construal of the musical work, whereas (3) and (4) just seem to be false and, therefore, of no concern to the musical Platonist. (shrink)

The dissection of work based on biological sex orientation amid non-remunerated and remunerated work reduces females frugally and socially to become extra susceptible towards remaining poor and poorer in the society. This division is engineered by family, individual, communal and financial predicaments, especially those emanating from the cultural background, partisan and racial struggle circumstances or disasters like the COVID-19 pandemic. In Africa, particularly in Zimbabwe, women are marginalised and excluded by social discrimination and poverty, hence the call for action by (...) the 1995 Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action. Action is required specifically from the areas, such as education and environment, among others, to empower women to improve their situations or to develop communities and the country as a whole. Actions aimed at reducing impoverishment in society are perilous; hence, the Zimbabwean government decided to give preference to women in economic empowerment strategies and to advance acts that support monetary constitutional rights. While both men and women are susceptible to poverty, gender discrimination makes women to be more vulnerable to poverty and have meagre incomes to survive impoverishment. Women are always the last to feed, they are also usually the last to sleep and the first to wake up, they are the disadvantaged to get healthcare facilities and they are stuck in laborious, voluntary household chores from time to time. Unfortunately, some are left with no option and engage in prostitution as a means to survive. Using purposive sampling and cultural feminist lens, this study problematises the feminisation of poverty in Zimbabwe, using Mutasa community, particularly villages 4 and 30, as a case study to see how women alleviate poverty through mukando/marounds. The main argument presented in this study is that poverty must not have a feminine face; hence, the labels that synonymise scarcity with femininity must be eradicated. Contribution: This study contributes to the ongoing academic studies on the feminisation of poverty, using Mutasa district in Zimbabwe as a case study. It concludes by restating that the feminisation of poverty is a product of a flawed cultural system that denies women opportunities for realising their full potential. (shrink)

Like war and politics, philosophy is too important to be left to professionals. Oh Wait_Now I Get It illustrates this basic truth by tackling a broad spectrum of issues, which include: history, religion, government, sex, family, and death. In fact, the entire contemporary cultural scene from the perspective of a thoughtful amateur philosopher is brought forth within this book. Recalling Neitzsche's dictum that all philosophy is also confession, Professor Peter Heinegg begins with some autobiographical pieces on his background, which (...) include seven years in Jesuit seminaries and doctoral studies at Harvard. He then offers approximately three-dozen brief, pointed, and witty essays that focus on present-day issues, but draw upon a lifetime of reading, teaching, and writing about the great literary and philosophical classics. (shrink)