International relations are made up of thick layers of meaning and big streams of data. How can we capture the nuances and scales of increasingly digitalised world politics, taking advantage of the possibilities that come with ‘big data’ and ‘digital methods’ in our discipline of International Relations? What is needed, we argue, is a methodological twin-move of making big data thick and thick data big. Taking diplomacy, one of IR's core practices as our case, we illustrate how anthropological and computational (...) approaches can be merged in IR research. We report from our experiences with the project DIPLOFACE: Diplomatic Face-Work between Confidential Negotiations and Public Display, investigating how digital communication technologies influence both the study and conduct of age-old and traditionally analogue practices of inter-state diplomacy. (shrink)

In Working Virtue: Virtue Ethics and Contemporary Moral Problems, leading figures in the fields of virtue ethics and ethics come together to present the first ...

I explore how gender can shape the pragmatics of speech. In some circumstances, when a woman deploys standard discursive conventions in order to produce a speech act with a specific performative force, her utterance can turn out, in virtue of its uptake, to have a quite different force—a less empowering force—than it would have if performed by a man. When members of a disadvantaged group face a systematic inability to produce a specific kind of speech act that they are entitled (...) to perform—and in particular when their attempts result in their actually producing a different kind of speech act that further compromises their social position and agency—then they are victims of what I call discursive injustice. I examine three examples of discursive injustice. I contrast my account with Langton and Hornsby's account of illocutionary silencing. I argue that lack of complete control over the performative force of our speech acts is universal, and not a special marker of social disadvantage. However, women and other relatively disempowered speakers are sometimes subject to a distinctive distortion of the path from speaking to uptake, which undercuts their social agency in ways that track and enhance existing social disadvantages. (shrink)

This chapter explores two kinds of testimonial trust, what we call ‘evidential trust’ and ‘non-evidential trust’ with the aim of asking how testimonial trust could provide epistemic reasons for belief. We argue that neither evidential nor non-evidential trust can play a distinctive role in providing evidential reasons for belief, but we tentatively propose that non-evidential trust can in some circumstances provide a novel kind of epistemic reason for belief, a reason of epistemic facilitation. The chapter begins with an extensive discussion (...) of standard accounts of both kinds of trust and criticises especially the standard accounts of non-evidential trust. A new account of non-evidential trust is offered that avoids a number of difficulties that plague the standard accounts by rejecting what we call ‘attitude-liability assumptions’. (shrink)

Kant scholars have paid relatively little attention to his raciology. They assume that his racism, as personal prejudice, can be disentangled from his core philosophy. They also assume that racism contradicts his moral theory. In this book, philosopher Huaping Lu-Adler challenges both assumptions. She shows how Kant's raciology--divided into racialism and racism--is integral to his philosophical system. She also rejects the individualistic approach to Kant and racism. Instead, she uses the notion of racism as ideological formation to demonstrate how (...) Kant, from his social location both as a prominent scholar and as a lifelong educator, participated in the formation of modern racist ideology. As a scholar, Kant developed a ground-breaking scientific theory of race from the standpoint of a philosophical investigator of nature or Naturforscher. As an educator, he transmitted denigrating depictions of the racialized others and imbued those descriptions with normative relevance. In both roles, he left behind, as one of his legacies, a worldview that excluded non-whites from such goods as recognitional respect and candidacy for cultural and moral achievements. Scholars who research and teach Kant's philosophy therefore have an unshakable burden to take part in the ongoing antiracist struggles, through their teaching practices as well as their scholarship. And they must do so with a pragmatic attention to nonideal social realities and a deliberate orientation toward substantial racial justice, equality, and inclusion. Lu-Adler pushes the discourse about Kant and racism well beyond the old debates about whether he was racist or whether his racism contaminates his philosophy. By foregrounding the lasting legacies of Kant's raciology, her work calls for a profound reorientation of Kant scholarship. (shrink)

A ternary relation [Formula: see text] between subsets of the big model of a complete first-order theory T is called an independence relation if it satisfies a certain set of axioms. The primary example is forking in a simple theory, but o-minimal theories are also known to have an interesting independence relation. Our approach in this paper is to treat independence relations as mathematical objects worth studying. The main application is a better understanding of thorn-forking, which turns out to be (...) closely related to modular pairs in the lattice of algebraically closed sets. (shrink)

According to an oft-repeated narrative, while Kant maintained racist views through the 1780s, he changed his mind in the 1790s. Pauline Kleingeld introduced this narrative based on passages from Kant’s Metaphysics of Morals and “Toward Perpetual Peace”. On her reading, Kant categorically condemned chattel slavery in those texts, which meant that he became more racially egalitarian. But the passages involving slavery, once contextualized, either do not concern modern, race-based chattel slavery or at best suggest that Kant mentioned it as a (...) cautionary tale for labor practices in Europe. Overall, Kant never explicitly considered chattel slavery as a moral problem to be addressed on its own. Rather, he treated it primarily in terms of its function in human history. If he ended up expressing some qualms about its practices, it was likely because they threatened to deepen intra-European conflicts and undermine the prospect of perpetual peace. The humanity of the enslaved “Negroes” was never part of the reasoning. This was not a casual oversight on Kant’s part. It reflects the complexity of his philosophical system: everything he did or did not say about chattel slavery begins to make sense once we connect his philosophy of history and his depiction of “Negroes” as natural slaves. (shrink)

Kant develops a concept of savagery, partly characterized by laziness, to envision a program for human progress. He also racializes savagery, treating native Americans, in particular, as literal savages. He ascribes to this “race” a peculiar physiological laziness, a supposedly hereditary trait of blunted life power. Accordingly, while he grants them the same “germs” for perfections as he does the civilized Europeans, he allows them no prospect of actually fulfilling any such perfection. For the road to perfection must be paved (...) through industry, a condition that Kant denies to the “savages” by racializing their alleged laziness. This case will shed new light on the debated relation between Kant’s moral universalism and his racism. (shrink)

This book is both a history of philosophy of logic told from the Kantian viewpoint and a reconstruction of Kant’s theory of logic from a historical perspective. Kant’s theory represents a turning point in a history of philosophical debates over the following questions. (1) Is logic a science, instrument, standard of assessment, or mixture of these? (2) If logic is a science, what is the subject matter that differentiates it from other sciences, particularly metaphysics? (3) If logic is a necessary (...) instrument to all philosophical inquiries, how is it so entitled? (4) If logic is both a science and an instrument, how are these two roles related? Kant’s official answer to these questions centers on three distinctions: general versus particular logic; pure versus applied logic; pure general logic versus transcendental logic. The true meaning and significance of each distinction becomes clear, I argue, only if we consider two factors. First, Kant was mindful of various historical views on how logic relates to other branches of philosophy (viz. metaphysics and physics) and to the workings of common human understanding. Second, he first coined ‘transcendental logic’ while struggling to secure metaphysics as a proper “science,” and this conceptual innovation would in turn have profound implications for his mature theory of logic. Against this backdrop, I reassess the place of Kant’s theory in the history of philosophy of logic and highlight certain issues that are still debated today, such as normativity of logic and the challenges posed by logical pluralism. In Chapter 1, “Kant and a Philosophical History of Logic – Methodological Reflections,” I discuss certain exegetical challenges posed by Kant’s logic corpus and argue for a “history of philosophical problems” method by which to reconstruct a Kantian theory of logic. In Chapter 2, “The Nature and Place of Logic – A History of Controversies,” I construct a partial history of philosophy of logic that revolves around the (supposedly) scientific status of logic on the one hand and its value or utility on the other. In Chapter 3, “The Making of a Scientific Logic from Bacon to Wolff,” I examine how four representative early modern philosophers – Francis Bacon, John Locke, G.W. Leibniz, and Christian Wolff – approached the four questions mentioned above. In Chapter 4, “Kant on the Way to His Own Philosophy of Logic,” I consider how Kant, in the decade between around mid-1760s and mid-1770s, navigated between existing accounts of logic until he finally found his own voice. I highlight the breakthroughs that would mark his critical departures from previous views and pave the way for the final articulation of his own view. In Chapter 5, “Logic and the Demands of Kantian ‘Science’,” I zero in on Kant’s official theory of logic in his monumental publication, Critique of Pure Reason. I foreground both what makes the theory original and what leaves it vulnerable to criticisms from post-Kantian thinkers. (shrink)

A testimony is somebody else’s reported experience of what has happened. It is an indispensable source of knowledge. It only gives us historical cognition, however, which stands in a complex relation to rational or philosophical cognition: while the latter presupposes historical cognition as its matter, one needs the architectonic “eye of a philosopher” to select, interpret, and organize historical cognition. Kant develops this rationalist theory of testimony. He also practices it in his own work, especially while theorizing about race as (...) a subject of natural philosophy. In three dedicated essays on this subject, he treats race from the standpoint of a philosophical investigator of nature (Naturforscher), who (as Kant puts it in the first Critique) learns from nature “like an appointed judge who compels witnesses to answer the questions he puts to them.” This view underwrites Kant’s use of travel reports (a type of testimony) in developing and defending his theory of race. (shrink)

The purpose of this study was to explore situations experienced by 12 health-care providers working in two nursing homes. Individual interviews, using a narrative approach, were conducted. A phenomenological–hermeneutical method, developed for researching life experiences, was applied in the analysis. The findings showed that good care situations are experienced when the time culture is flexible, the carers act in a sovereign time rhythm, not mentioning clock time or time as a stress factor. The results are discussed in terms of anthropological (...) and sociological theory: time as event and action and flexible time cultures. Care settings for persons with dementia represent many challenges, such as a heavy workload and time strain. Time ethics is a construction, understanding time used in caring for persons suffering from dementia, which involves a mature, responsible and flexible nursing approach to these patients. (shrink)

Taking as a starting point the assertion of an ambiguity in the Lutheran tradition's assessment of reason, the essay argues that the Kantian unreserved confidence in reason is criticised in Bonhoeffer. Based upon a Christological understanding of reason, Bonhoeffer endorses a view of reason which is specifically Christian and yet maintains a universality. With a focus on Bonhoeffer's Ethik as the hermeneutical key to his theology, Bonhoeffer's notion is also discussed in light of contemporary Christian ethics. In this part it (...) is particularly the role of reason within a public discourse which is treated in the essay. Here it is argued that Bonhoeffer may be appropriated in attempting to outline a Christological ontology of reason holding essential implications for the sources and conditions of public discourse. (shrink)

In the 1780s through the end of 1790s, Kant made various references to slavery (in its different forms) and the transatlantic slave trade in the context of his political philosophy or philosophy of right; he thereby had opportunities to speak in favor of abolitionism, which was gaining momentum in parts of Europe, or at least to articulate a normative critique of the race-based chattel slavery or Atlantic slavery and the associated slave trade qua (legalized) INSTITUTIONS; but he did neither. Why? (...) In raising and seeking an answer to this question, I am not interested in what Kant’s normative silence about the institutions of Atlantic slavery and slave trade may tell us about him as a person (for example, whether he was blinded by his own racist prejudices or whether he was affected by some kind of cognitive dissonance). Rather, I will focus on what it may tell us about certain limitations of his political philosophy, limitations that might have made it THEORETICALLY DIFFICULT for him to figure out exactly what to DO about those institutions as entrenched political realities. (shrink)

Purpose: We sought to examine the ethical, legal, and social implications (ELSI) literature research and scholarship types, topics, and contributing community fields of training as a first step to charting the broader ELSI community’s future priorities and goals. Methods: We categorized 642 articles and book chapters meeting inclusion criteria for content in both human genetics or genomics and ethics or ELSI during a 5-year period (2003–2008) according to research and scholarship types, topics, and the area of advanced training of the (...) first-listed author. Research and scholarship type categories were developed and characterized through in-depth review of 95 randomly sampled publications from the larger group. Results: There is a single dominant approach to ELSI, which focuses on ethical and other social issues “downstream” of advances in genomics, the contributors to which predominately have advanced training in medicine or science fields other than social science. A comparatively low percentage of publications primarily offer policy recommendations, and these are much more likely to be written by those with advanced training in law than is the case for the literature as a whole. Social science studies predominately employ qualitative methods and vary significantly with respect to the extent and types of recommendations offered. Two further types of ELSI research and scholarship offer alternative models for so-called “normative” work in this field. Conclusion: Considering topics, training, and types of ELSI research and scholarship from the most recent past allows for a baseline perspective that is sorely needed in charting this field’s future course. (shrink)

How does the critical Kant view ontology? There is no shared scholarly answer to this question. Norbert Hinske sees in the Critique of Pure Reason a “farewell to ontology,” albeit one that took Kant long to bid (Hinske 2009). Karl Ameriks has found evidence in Kant’s metaphysics lectures from the critical period that he “was unwilling to break away fully from traditional ontology” (Ameriks 1992: 272). Gualtiero Lorini argues that a decisive break with the tradition of ontology is essential to (...) Kant’s critical reform of metaphysics, as is reflected in his shift from “ontology” to “transcendental philosophy,” two notions that Lorini takes to be related by mere “analogy” (Lorini 2015). I agree with Lorini that a thorough reform of ontology is a pivotal part of Kant’s critical plan for metaphysics and that ontology somehow “survives within the critical philosophy” (Lorini 2015: 76). To make this case, however, I deem it important to identify “ontology” and “transcendental philosophy” in the sense of extensional equivalence. While we can detect this identification in Kant’s writings, only from his metaphysics lectures can we get a full sense of its historical and philosophical significance. In this chapter I focus on how it represents a definitive turn from as well as notable continuity with traditional treatments of ontology, particularly the Wolffian one. (shrink)

Leibniz, and many following him, saw the Principle of Sufficient Reason (PSR) as pivotal to a scientific (demonstrated) metaphysics. Against this backdrop, Kant is expected to pay close attention to PSR in his reflections on the possibility of metaphysics, which is his chief concern in the Critique of Pure Reason. It is far from clear, however, what has become of PSR in the Critique. On one reading, Kant has simply turned it into the causal principle of the Second Analogy. On (...) a different reading, PSR is but the supreme principle of reason, which roughly states that, if the conditioned is given, so is the unconditioned. On my reading, PSR appears in the guises of both the causal principle and the supreme principle. This twofold specification, I argue, is key to understanding (i) Kant’s allegations that past metaphysicians failed to prove PSR, (ii) his own Critical account of the possibility of metaphysics in both of its parts (ontology and metaphysics proper), and (iii) his nuanced answer to the contentious question about the relation between physical inquiry and metaphysical reasoning about nature (both being quests for reasons). (shrink)

Human Rights Education (HRE) has traditionally been articulated in terms of cultivating better citizens or world citizens. The main preoccupation in this strand of HRE has been that of bridging a gap between universal notions of a human rights subject and the actual locality and particular narratives in which students are enmeshed. This preoccupation has focused on ‘learning about the other’ in order to improve relations between plural ‘others’ and ‘us’ and reflects educational aims of national identity politics in citizenship (...) education. The article explores the learning of human rights through narratives in relations, drawing on Hannah Arendt and Sharon Todd. For this re-thinking of relations in learning human rights, the article argues that HRE needs to address both competing historical narratives on the drafting of the Universal Declaration on Human Rights (UDHR) as well as unique life narratives of learners. (shrink)

Controversial and provocative, To Be Real is a blueprint for the creation of a new political force.

Miranda Fricker claims that a “gap” in collective hermeneutical resources with respect to the social experiences of marginalized groups prevents members of those groups from understanding their own experiences (Fricker 2007). I argue that because Fricker misdescribes dominant hermeneutical resources as collective, she fails to locate the ethically bad epistemic practices that maintain gaps in dominant hermeneutical resources even while alternative interpretations are in fact offered by non-dominant discourses. Fricker's analysis of hermeneutical injustice does not account for the possibility that (...) marginalized groups can be silenced relative to dominant discourses without being prevented from understanding or expressing their own social experiences. I suggest that a gap in dominant hermeneutical resources is ambiguous between two kinds of unknowing: hermeneutical injustice suffered by members of marginalized groups, and epistemically and ethically blameworthy ignorance perpetrated by members of dominant groups. (shrink)

At A71/B96–7 Kant explains that singular judgements are ‘special’ because they stand to the general ones as Einheit to Unendlichkeit. The reference to Einheit brings to mind the category of unity and hence raises a spectre of circularity in Kant’s explanation. I aim to remove this spectre by interpreting the Einheit-Unendlichkeit contrast in light of the logical distinctions among universal, particular and singular judgments shared by Kant and his logician predecessors. This interpretation has a further implication for resolving a controversy (...) over the correlation between the logical moments of quantity (universal, particular, singular) and the categorial ones (unity, plurality, totality). (shrink)

Kant describes logic as “the science that exhaustively presents and strictly proves nothing but the formal rules of all thinking”. (Bviii-ix) But what is the source of our cognition of such rules (“logical cognition” for short)? He makes no concerted effort to address this question. It will nonetheless become clear that the question is a philosophically significant one for him, to which he can see three possible answers: those representations are innate, derived from experience, or originally acquired a priori. Although (...) he gives no explicit argument for the third answer, he seems committed to it—especially given his views on the source of pure concepts of the understanding and on the nature of logic. It takes careful preparatory work to gather all the essential materials for motivating and reconstructing Kant’s “original acquisition” account of logical cognition. I shall proceed in two sections. In section 1, I analyze Kant’s argument that pure concepts of the understanding (or intellectual concepts)—as one kind of pure cognition—must be acquired originally and a priori. My analysis partly concerns his varied attitudes toward Crusius’s and Leibniz’s versions of the nativist account of such concepts. I give special attention to how Kant characterizes the nativist account and his own “original acquisition” account in terms of “preformation” and “epigenesis”. My goal is, firstly, to tease out the sense in which Kant grants that there must be an innate ground (or preformation) for the derivation of pure concepts and, secondly, to introduce—and pave the way for answering—the question about the source of logical cognition. In section 2, in light of Kant’s reference to Locke and Leibniz as the greatest reformers of philosophy (including logic) in their times (Log, AA 9: 32), I examine the Lockean and Leibnizian approaches to logic, respectively. Both approaches are “physiological” by Kant’s standard and are directly opposed to his own strictly critical method. I explain how this methodological move shapes Kant’s view that representations of logical rules must be originally acquired a priori. This acquisition involves a kind of radical epigenesis of pure reason: unlike the acquisition of pure concepts, it presupposes no further innate ground (or preformation). This view will have important consequences for issues such as the ground of the normativity of logical rules and the boundaries of their rightful use. (shrink)

Evolution was not discovered single-handedly, Rebecca Stott argues, contrary to what has become standard lore, but is an idea that emerged over many centuries, advanced by daring individuals across the globe who had the imagination to speculate on nature's extraordinary ways, and who had the courage to articulate such speculations at a time when to do so was often considered heresy.

It is a truism that humans are social animals. Thus, it is no surprise that we understand the world, each other, and ourselves in terms of social kinds such as money and marriage, war and women, capitalists and cartels, races, recessions, and refugees. Social kinds condition our expectations, inform our preferences, and guide our behavior. Despite the prevalence and importance of social kinds, philosophy has historically devoted relatively little attention to them. With few exceptions, philosophers have given pride of place (...) to the kinds studied by the natural sciences, especially physics. However, philosophical interest in social kinds is growing in recent years. I critically examine answers to a cluster of related questions concerning the metaphysics of social kinds. Are social kinds natural kinds? Do social kinds have essences? Are social kinds mind dependent? Are social kinds real? (shrink)

In this groundbreaking new study, Lowell Nissen explores the use of teleological language in the study of subjects such as behaviorism, negative feedback, and natural selection. He argues that all existing analyses fail to explain how teleological language can be used legitimately, and provides his own analysis in terms of intentionality.

Phase 1 healthy volunteer clinical trials—which financially compensate subjects in tests of drug toxicity levels and side effects—appear to place pressure on each joint of the moral framework justifying research. In this article, we review concerns about phase 1 trials as they have been framed in the bioethics literature, including undue inducement and coercion, unjust exploitation, and worries about compromised data validity. We then revisit these concerns in light of the lived experiences of serial participants who are income-dependent on phase (...) 1 trials. We show how participant experiences shift attention from discrete exchanges, behaviors, and events in the research enterprise to the ongoing and dynamic patterns of serial participation in which individual decision-making is embedded in collective social and economic conditions and shaped by institutional policies. We argue in particular for the ethical significance of structurally diminished voluntariness, routine powerlessness in setting the terms of exchange, and incentive structures that may promote pharmaceutical interests but encourage phase 1 healthy volunteers to skirt important rules. (shrink)

The origin of languages was a hotly debated topic in the eighteenth century. This paper reconstructs a distinctively Kantian account according to which the origination, progression, and diversification of languages is at bottom reason’s self-development under certain a priori constraints and external environments. The reconstruction builds on three sets of materials. The first is Herder’s famous prize essay on the origin of languages. The second includes Kant’s explicit remarks about language – especially his notion of “transcendental grammar,” his argument that (...) language cannot be innate, his contrast of “Oriental” symbolic (intuitive) and “Occidental” discursive languages, and his treatment of the latter as a sine qua non of humanity’s cultural and moral progress. The third includes the concepts that we need to make sense of those remarks, such as Kant’s epigenetic theory of biological formation and his account of categories as originally acquired. (shrink)

I defend the thesis that Kantian analytic judgments are about objects (as opposed to concepts) against two challenges raised by recent scholars. First, can it accommodate cases like “A two-sided polygon is two-sided”, where no object really falls under the subject-concept as Kant sees it? Second, is it compatible with Kant’s view that analytic judgments make no claims about objects in the world and that we can know them to be true without going beyond the given concepts? I address these (...) challenges in two steps. First, given Kant’s distinction between an object in general = x from an object of sensible intuition, I argue that analytic judgments are about objects in the former sense, no matter whether the purported objects can be given in our intuition. Second, using Kant’s method of representing certain logical relations of concepts with such figures as circles, I construct a model to show that analytic truths are truths about objects in general = x and yet can be determined solely by the intensional relation between the given concepts plus certain Kantian-logical laws. Analytic truths are thus shown as formal in the Kantian sense that they do not presuppose the purported objects as givable in our intuition. This account of the formality of analytic truths captures Kant’s diagnosis of the Leibnizian illusion that we can make material claims about the world by analytically true judgments. (shrink)

Prominent mathematician William Thurston was praised by other mathematicians for his intellectual generosity. But what does it mean to say Thurston was intellectually generous? And is being intellectually generous beneficial? To answer these questions I turn to virtue epistemology and, in particular, Roberts and Wood's (2007) analysis of intellectual generosity. By appealing to Thurston's own writings and interviewing mathematicians who knew and worked with him, I argue that Roberts and Wood's analysis nicely captures the sense in which he was intellectually (...) generous. I then argue that intellectual generosity is beneficial because it counteracts negative effects of the reward structure of mathematics that can stymie mathematical progress. (shrink)

The COVID-19 pandemic has led a number of countries to introduce restrictive ‘lockdown’ policies on their citizens in order to control infection spread. Immunity passports have been proposed as a way of easing the harms of such policies, and could be used in conjunction with other strategies for infection control. These passports would permit those who test positive for COVID-19 antibodies to return to some of their normal behaviours, such as travelling more freely and returning to work. The introduction of (...) immunity passports raises a number of practical and ethical challenges. In this paper, we seek to review the challenges relating to various practical considerations, fairness issues, the risk to social cooperation and the impact on people’s civil liberties. We make tentative recommendations for the ethical introduction of immunity passports. (shrink)

A ternary relation [Formula: see text] between subsets of the big model of a complete first-order theory T is called an independence relation if it satisfies a certain set of axioms. The primary example is forking in a simple theory, but o-minimal theories are also known to have an interesting independence relation. Our approach in this paper is to treat independence relations as mathematical objects worth studying. The main application is a better understanding of thorn-forking, which turns out to be (...) closely related to modular pairs in the lattice of algebraically closed sets. (shrink)

I defend a novel view of how social kinds (e.g., money, women, permanent residents) depend on our mental states. In particular, I argue that social kinds depend on our mental states in the following sense: it is essential to them that they exist (partially) because certain mental states exist. This analysis is meant to capture the very general way in which all social kinds depend on our mental states. However, my view is that particular social kinds also depend on our (...) mental states in more specific ways—some of them causal, others metaphysical. I defend a minimal but metaphysically important notion of essence—one that takes as primary that the essential properties of a kind constitute its identity—and argue that this minimal notion of essence is all that is needed to vindicate my claim that social kinds are essentially mind-dependent. (shrink)

It is a received view that Kant’s formal logic (or what he calls “pure general logic”) is thoroughly intensional. On this view, even the notion of logical extension must be understood solely in terms of the concepts that are subordinate to a given concept. I grant that the subordination relation among concepts is an important theme in Kant’s logical doctrine of concepts. But I argue that it is both possible and important to ascribe to Kant an objectual notion of logical (...) extension according to which the extension of a concept is the multitude of objects falling under it. I begin by defending this ascription in response to three reasons that are commonly invoked against it. First, I explain that this ascription is compatible with Kant’s philosophical reflections on the nature and boundary of a formal logic. Second, I show that the objectual notion of extension I ascribe to Kant can be traced back to many of the early modern works of logic with which he was more or less familiar. Third, I argue that such a notion of extension makes perfect sense of a pivotal principle in Kant’s logic, namely the principle that the quantity of a concept’s extension is inversely proportional to that of its intension. In the process, I tease out two important features of the Kantian objectual notion of logical extension in terms of which it markedly differs from the modern one. First, on the modern notion the extension of a concept is the sum of the objects actually falling under it; on the Kantian notion, by contrast, the extension of a concept consists of the multitude of possible objects—not in the metaphysical sense of possibility, though—to which a concept applies in virtue of being a general representation. While the quantity of the former extension is finite, that of the latter is infinite—as is reflected in Kant’s use of a plane-geometrical figure (e.g., circle, square), which is continuum as opposed to discretum, to represent the extension in question. Second, on the modern notion of extension, a concept that signifies exactly one object has a one-member extension; on the Kantian notion, however, such a concept has no extension at all—for a concept is taken to have extension only if it signifies a multitude of things. This feature of logical extension is manifested in Kant’s claim that a singular concept (or a concept in its singular use) can, for lack of extension, be figuratively represented only by a point—as opposed to an extended figure like circle, which is reserved for a general concept (or a concept in its general use). Precisely on account of these two features, the Kantian objectual extension proves vital to Kant’s theory of logical quantification (in universal, particular and singular judgments, respectively) and to his view regarding the formal truth of analytic judgments. (shrink)

John Venn has the “uneasy suspicion” that the stagnation in mathematical logic between J. H. Lambert and George Boole was due to Kant’s “disastrous effect on logical method,” namely the “strictest preservation [of logic] from mathematical encroachment.” Kant’s actual position is more nuanced, however. In this chapter, I tease out the nuances by examining his use of Leonhard Euler’s circles and comparing it with Euler’s own use. I do so in light of the developments in logical calculus from G. W. (...) Leibniz to Lambert and Gottfried Ploucquet. While Kant is evidently open to using mathematical tools in logic, his main concern is to clarify what mathematical tools can be used to achieve. For without such clarification, all efforts at introducing mathematical tools into logic would be blind if not complete waste of time. In the end, Kant would stress, the means provided by formal logic at best help us to express and order what we already know in some sense. No matter how much mathematical notations may enhance the precision of this function of formal logic, it does not change the fact that no truths can, strictly speaking, be revealed or established by means of those notations. (shrink)

Human beings with diminished decision-making capacities are usually thought to require greater protections from the potential harms of research than fully autonomous persons. Animal subjects of research receive lesser protections than any human beings regardless of decision-making capacity. Paradoxically, however, it is precisely animals’ lack of some characteristic human capacities that is commonly invoked to justify using them for human purposes. In other words, for humans lesser capacities correspond to greater protections but for animals the opposite is true. Without explicit (...) justification, it is not clear why or whether this should be the case. Ethics regulations guiding human subject research include principles such as respect for persons—and related duties—that are required as a matter of justice while regulations guiding animal subject research attend only to highly circumscribed considerations of welfare. Further, the regulations guiding research on animals discount any consideration of animal welfare relative to comparable human welfare. This paper explores two of the most promising justifications for these differences␣between the two sets of regulations. The first potential justification points to lesser moral status for animals on the basis of their lesser capacities. The second potential justification relies on a claim about the permissibility of moral partiality as␣found in common morality. While neither potential justification is sufficient to justify the regulatory difference as it stands, there is possible common ground between supporters of some regulatory difference and those rejecting the current difference. (shrink)

The view that social kinds (e.g., money, migrant, marriage) are mind-dependent is a prominent one in the social ontology literature. However, in addition to the claim that social kinds are mind-dependent, it is often asserted that social kinds are not real because they are mind-dependent. Call this view social kind anti-realism. To defend their view, social kind anti-realists must accomplish two tasks. First, they must identify a dependence relation that obtains between social kinds and our mental states. Call this the (...) Dependence Task. Second, they must show that social kinds are not real because they are mind-dependent. Call this the Anti-Realist Task. In this paper, I consider several different ways of defining the relation that is supposed to obtain between social kinds and our mental states. With respect to each relation, I argue that either it fails to accomplish the Dependence Task, or it fails to accomplish the Anti-Realist Task. As such, anyone who wishes to defend social kind anti-realism must provide an alternative explanation of how social kinds depend on our mental states in a way that impugns their reality. In the absence of such an explanation, there is no reason to endorse social kind anti-realism. (shrink)

In 1837, Dirichlet proved that there are infinitely many primes in any arithmetic progression in which the terms do not all share a common factor. Modern presentations of the proof are explicitly higher-order, in that they involve quantifying over and summing over Dirichlet characters, which are certain types of functions. The notion of a character is only implicit in Dirichlet’s original proof, and the subsequent history shows a very gradual transition to the modern mode of presentation. In this essay, we (...) describe an approach to the philosophy of mathematics in which it is an important task to understand the roles of our ontological posits and assess the extent to which they enable us to achieve our mathematical goals. We use the history of Dirichlet’s theorem to understand some of the reasons that functions are treated as ordinary objects in contemporary mathematics, as well as some of the reasons one might want to resist such treatment. We also use these considerations to illuminate the formal treatment of functions and objects in Frege’s logical foundation, and we argue that his philosophical and logical decisions were influenced by many of the same factors. (shrink)

Background:The nursing community in the Nordic countries has become multicultural because of migration from European, Asian and African countries. In Norway, minority health care providers are recruited in to nursing homes which have become multicultural workplaces. They overcome challenges such as language and strangeness but as a group they are vulnerable and exposed to many challenges.Purpose:The aim is to explore minority healthcare providers, trained nurses and nurses’ assistants, and their experiences of challenges when working in a multicultural team in a (...) Norwegian context.Research method:The study has a qualitative design, using narrative interviews, and a phenomenological–hermeneutic analysis method to explore the experiences of challenges in dementia care.Ethical considerations:The study was approved by The Norwegian Regional Ethics Committee, and the Norwegian Social Science Data Services.Participation and research context:Five informants from different African, Asian and European countries participated in the study. The study was conducted in a Norwegian nursing home, in a dementia care unit.Findings:The results show that minority health care providers experience and find meaning in being a member of a team, they overcome challenges, characterized by the interdependency in the team, appreciating new cultural experiences and striving to belong. They must overcome challenges such as language problems and the feeling of strangeness.Discussion:The findings are discussed considering Løgstrup’s ethic of proximity, the ethical demand of trust, and interdependency. The ethical demand is an answer to a common, transparent, unspoken agreement to be met, seen, and understood.Conclusion:The study shows that cooperation in a multi-professional and multi-ethnic team is important, and secures the quality of care to persons with dementia. Further research is necessary to examine the relation between a multi-ethnic staff and the patients experiencing dementia. Further research is necessary to examine ethnicity, the relation between a multi-ethnic staff, the patients experiencing dementia and next of kin. (shrink)