Throughout, this book questions our accepted definitions and biases, showing the self-reflective nature of scientific activity within society.

In this book, Dr. Robert J. Levine reviews federal regulations, ethical analysis, and case studies in an attempt to answer these questions.

I offer a new interpretation of Heidegger’s analysis of anxiety in Being and Time as an account of the relationship between individual agents and the public normative practices of their communities. According to a prominent recent interpretation, Heidegger’s discussions of anxiety, death and the “call of conscience” together explain how we can respond to the norms of our practices as reasons and subject them to critical reflection. I argue that this is only part of the story. Anxiety is an occasion (...) for Dasein to take responsibility for its ongoing activity of interpreting the possibilities for living and acting made available by the normative practices of its community, which is presupposed and overlooked from the perspective of everyday Dasein. Public normativity underdetermines Dasein’s conception of what it would mean to take up any of the possibilities available in its world as a way of living its own life. (shrink)

The paper proposes a solution to the problem with Odysseus’ kingship in the Odyssey by maintaining that Odysseus is not officially considered dead. Consequently, Telemachus cannot inherit the position of king and Penelope must leave Odysseus’ household before remarrying. After discussing the modern concept of legal death and previous interpretations of the Ithacan situation, the paper focusses on Athena's speech at 1.275–92. A close reading demonstrates that erecting a cenotaph to Odysseus would be tantamount to a modern declaration of death (...) in absentia, since it will render Penelope a widow and Telemachus the head of the household. This legal convention chimes with the Homeric depiction of Hades. (shrink)

Large-scale transnational land acquisition of agricultural land in the global south by rich corporations or countries raises challenging normative questions. In this article, the author critically examines and advocates a human rights approach to these questions. Mutually reinforcing, policies, governance and practice promote equitable and secure land tenure that in turn, strengthens other human rights, such as to employment, livelihood and food. Human rights therefore provide standards for evaluating processes and outcomes of transnational land acquisitions and, thus, for determining whether (...) they are ethically unacceptable land grabs. A variety of recent policy initiatives on the issue have evoked human rights, most centrally through the consultation and negotiation of the Voluntary Guidelines on the Responsible Governance of Tenure of Land, Fisheries and Forests concluded in 2012. However, a case of transnational land appropriation illustrates weak host and investor state enforcement of human rights, leaving the parties to in interaction with local groups in charge of protecting human rights. Generally, we have so far seen limited direct application of human rights by states in their governance of transnational land acquisition. Normative responses to transnational land acquisition—codes of conduct, principles of responsible agricultural investment or voluntary guidelines—do not in themselves secure necessary action and change. Applying human rights approaches one must therefore also analyze the material conditions, power relations and political processes that determine whether and how women and men can secure the human rights accountability of the corporations and governments that promote large-scale, transnational land acquisition in the global south. (shrink)

Darwin in Argentina -- Conflicting Systems -- Francisco Javier Muniz (1795-1871) -- Hermann Burmeister (1807-1891) -- Francisco P. Moreno (1852-1919) -- Domingo F. Sarmiento (1811-1888) -- Eduardo Holmberg (1852-1937) -- Florentino Ameghino (1854-1911) -- Jose Ingenieros (1877-1925) -- Carlos Octavio Bunge (1875-1918).

Darwin the writer -- Learning to see : Darwin's prophetic apprenticeship on the Beagle voyage -- The prose of On the origin of species -- Surprise and paradox : Darwin's artful legacy -- Darwinian mind and Wildean paradox -- Hardy's Woodlanders and the Darwinian grotesque -- Coda : the comic Darwin.

If Savulescu and Kahane’s Principle of Procreative Beneficence were implemented regarding cognitive enhancement, the result would be highly impoverishing for future children. For, apart from being inadequate to rationality itself, advocates’ accounts of cognitive enhancement sever reason from the input to judgments and decision-making that other faculties provide. When handling desire, supporters of cognitive enhancement frame conflicts between reason and the nonrational in terms of self-governance or akratic failure, depending on which one triumphs. Further, so-called negative emotions are treated as (...) simply deleterious and hostile to the rational. Alliances of the nonrational with reason toward shared ends are hence unthinkable. Having critiqued advocates’ views directly, I amplify my assessment through engagement with Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics. Per Savulescu and Kahane, to know how to direct enhancement endeavors, “we need to form reasonable opinions on difficult questions about the nature of well-being and the good life.” Thus far, however, enhancement supporters have been largely silent on this crucial matter. Because the debate over enhancement is ultimately over what values our views of flourishing embody, it should be recast so that this crux is squarely at the fore. What is more, for our own and our children’s sakes, as we embark on this reframing, we would do well to bear in mind Aristotle’s insights about the nonrational in relation to reason and his unwavering focus on the human “that for the sake of which” (hou heneka) all that we do is, perforce, undertaken. (shrink)

Addresses the concept of truth in Chinese Daoist philosophy and ritual. Through wide-ranging research into Daoist ritual, both in history and as it survives in the present day, shows that the concept of true reality that informs this tradition posits being as a paradox anchored in the inexistent Way"--Provided by publisher.

How we assess current calls for vigorous, or “radical”, enhancement through befitting procreative choices depends in part on the plausibility of supporters’ rejecting all substantive ties between their views and earlier eugenics. When denying such connections, today’s advocates of vigorous enhancement routinely emphasize that enhancement decisions would stem from individuals and families, not the state. In a multipronged critique, I show the untenability of transhumanists’ denials.

A selection of speeches and essays from the author's second decade as president of Yale University.

I consider the question of what moral obligations prospective parents owe to their future children. It is taken as an almost axiomatic premise of a wide range of philosophical arguments that prospective parents have a moral obligation to take such steps as ensuring their own financial stability or waiting until they are emotionally mature before conceiving. This is because it is assumed that parents have a moral obligation to lay the groundwork for their children's lives to go well. While at (...) first glance such a premise seems benign, I will argue that when it is applied to arguments in assisted reproductive technology, as it is in Julian Savulescu's procreative beneficence argument or as it is in Daniel Groll's recent argument for open gamete donation, we see problems with this premise. Problems in Groll's argument also become apparent when it is scrutinized in connection with this premise. (shrink)

In many spheres, the law takes the legal concept of causation to correspond to the folk concept (the correspondence assumption). Courts, including the US Supreme Court, tend to insist on the "common understanding" and that which is "natural to say" (Burrage v. United States) when it comes to expressions relating to causation, and frequently refuse to clarify the expression to juries. As recent work in psychology and experimental philosophy has uncovered, lay attributions of causation are susceptible to a great number (...) of unexpected factors, some of which seem rather peripheral to causation. One of those is the norm effect (Knobe & Fraser, 2008): Agents who, in acting as they do, break a salient norm, are more likely to be considered as having caused a certain consequence than when they do not violate a norm. According to some (e.g., Alicke, 1992) this constitutes a bias. According to others (e.g., Sytsma, 2020), the folk concept of causation is sensitive to normative factors, and there’s nothing wrong with that. In this paper, we explore the question whether the norm effect should be considered a bias from the legal perspective on the one hand, and from the psychological perspective on the other. To do this, we test whether norms which are nonpertinent to the consequences or outright silly also impact causation judgements. The data from two preregistered experiments (total N=593) clearly show they do. This, we argue, makes the bias interpretation plausible from the psychological perspective, and both plausible and problematic from the legal perspective. It also shows that the law should abstain from unreflectively assuming conceptual correspondence between legal and ordinary language concepts. (shrink)

Marx's Rebellion Against Lenin is a representative of the contemporary revitalization of the thought of Marx. It fulfils this task in three ways. First, it overthrows the dialectical materialism of Engels and of Stalinist Bolshevism by exploring 18th century historical thought and illustrating how these Enlightenment historians and political theorists first explored method of historical explanation that were later adopted by Marx. It is shown that contrary to the theory of Stalinist Bolshevism, Hegel was a vital influence on Marx. Second, (...) Levine's book represents Marx as an exponent of Classical Humanism. Marx did not define communism as a form of materialism, as economic egalitarianism, but rather related communism to the Classical ethics of Aristotle, to the Aristotelian ideas of polis citizenship and the ethics of distributive justice. Third, it is argued that the 17th and 18th Century Enlightenment was not simply a liberal center extolling property, individual rights and capitalism. Instead it is shown that the 17th and 18th century Enlightenment was divided between an Enlightenment Center and an Enlightenment Left, with the Enlightenment Left challenging the domination of capitalism and private property. Marx's Rebellion Against Lenin traces the flow of the theories of the Enlightenment Left into Marx and in doing so liberates Marxist thought from its imprisonment in 19th century materialism and relocates it within the traditions of Classical Humanism. (shrink)

A number of imposing problems now have our best minds in thrall. These include questions regarding the unity or plurality of the races of Man, whether his creation ought to be dated thousands of years or thousands of centuries past, whether species are fixed, or rather undergo a slow, progressive transformation into new species, how supposedly eternal matter relates to the nothingness outside of it, and whether the idea of God is useless. These are just a few of the issues (...) now subject to learned debate. You need, however, have no fear that my address tonight has any pretensions toward resolving any one of these earnest questions. But in the neighborhood of such mysteries lies another question, more or less closely related, to which I may, perhaps, venture to direct your attention; for its complexities, which I have made the object of concerted and conscientious study, are accessible to experiment. This is the question of what we call "spontaneous generations." Mightn't matter, perhaps, organize itself? Or posed differently, mightn't creatures enter the world without parents, without forebears? This is the question I seek to resolve. (shrink)

In this chapter, the author shows that the affinity between the two thinkers is far greater than interpreters like Farrell allow. He focuses on evaluating the argument that Richard Rorty is not able to get past the dichotomies ‐ although he will have cause to comment on the first one as well. In the context of a continued anti‐representationalism, Rorty comes to admit that there is a “truth in realism” and that our relations to the world are not just causal (...) but also normative. The author argues that with these admissions Rorty comes to articulate a view that can, with some plausibility, be said to have gotten beyond the dichotomies of scheme and content, subject and object, and realism and antirealism. D. Davidson agrees with Rorty that truth is not definable by simpler and more transparent concepts. Davidson has a pronged attack on the concept of representation. (shrink)

Talking About Trees ranges widely, from personal narratives to theoretical discussions on the need for the precautionary principle in science.

We propose the FoodSmart City framework as a transdisciplinary avenue to promote sustainable seafood consumption. We argue that a change in human seafood consumption towards eating at lower trophic levels may be helped by discovering forgotten cultural practices and tapping into locally-sourced marine resources. We set out a framework of knowledge exchange and production between academia, businesses, and civil society to promote and assist healthy and ecologically sustainable living using digital tools and intangible cultural heritage while engaging with innovative chefs (...) and educationalists. The framework targets Dublin City, Ireland, but may potentially be replicated in other contexts. (shrink)