Esta comunicación pretende reflexionar sobre lo que se entiende por �dominación� y como ella se relaciona con la �soberanía�. Para ello se hará un pequeño recorrido histórico para analizar las distintas formas soberanas. Con este análisis se llegará a la época actual reinada por el libre mercado, con lo que se hará necesario reflexionar sobre él y vincularlo, si es preciso, con la dominación, a pesar de la contradicción incial.

Despite the radical importance of embryology in the development of organi- cism, developmental biology remains philosophically underexplored as a theoretical and empirical resource to clarify the nature of organisms. This paper discusses how embryology can help develop the organisational definition of the organism as a differentiated, function- ally integrated, and autonomous system. I distinguish two conceptions of development in the organisational tradition that yield two different conceptions of the organism: the life- history view claims that organisms can be considered as (...) such during their whole ontogeny; the constitutive view distinguishes two periods in the life history, a period of generation and a period of self-maintenance of a constitutive organisation. Arguing in favour of the con- stitutive view, it will be claimed that the organisational criteria for the definition of organ- ism (i.e., differentiation, functional integration, and autonomy) can only be applied to the developmental system when it has entered the period of self-maintenance of a constitutive organisation. under the light of current research in developmental biology, it is possible to make explicit how organisms come to be as organisms. To this end, I explore key onto- genetic events that help us clarify the core aspects of animal organisation and allow us to identify the developmental stage that marks the ontological transition between an organism in potency and an organism in actuality. The structure of this ontogenetic unfolding paral- lels the conceptual structure of the very notion of organism; the generation of the being of a particular organism parallels its definition. (shrink)

This study analyzes shells of marine gastropods of a zoological museum and the Latin epithets expressing perceptual and connotative attributes that they have received in the standard, Linnaean nomenclature. Making use of the Osgood semantic differential, we presented the subjects with digital 3-D reproductions of the shell specimens to be subjectively evaluated according to 17 pairs of attributes. The results show that, overall, the subjective evaluations given by the subjects are consistent, which suggests that an intersubjective characterization of the shells (...) as wholes according to their qualitative and morphological traits is possible and scientifically explicable. This may apply to other biological items as well. The results also show that the epithets given to the shells by taxonomists do not always reflect the perceptual evaluation of the general population, being a product of the well-known ambiguity in taxonomic categorization and naming. (shrink)

This study analyzes shells of marine gastropods of a zoological museum and the Latin epithets expressing perceptual and connotative attributes that they have received in the standard, Linnaean nomenclature. Making use of the Osgood semantic differential, we presented the subjects with digital 3-D reproductions of the shell specimens to be subjectively evaluated according to 17 pairs of attributes. The results show that, overall, the subjective evaluations given by the subjects are consistent, which suggests that an intersubjective characterization of the shells (...) as wholes according to their qualitative and morphological traits is possible and scientifically explicable. This may apply to other biological items as well. The results also show that the epithets given to the shells by taxonomists do not always reflect the perceptual evaluation of the general population, being a product of the well-known ambiguity in taxonomic categorization and naming. (shrink)

Study on views of Rāmadāsa, 1608-1681, on philosophy and aesthetics of Hindustani classical music, expressed in Dāsabodha, Marathi verse work on Hindu religious life.

The importance of socio-economic impacts from the introduction and use of genetically modified crops is reflected in increasing efforts to include them in regulatory frameworks. Aiming to identify and understand the present knowledge on SEI of GM crops, we here report the findings from an extensive study of the published international scientific peer-reviewed literature. After applying specified selection criteria, a total of 410 articles are analysed. The main findings include: limited empirical research on SEI of GM crops in the scientific (...) literature; the main focus of the majority of the published research is on a restricted set of monetary economic parameters; proportionally, there are very few empirical studies on social and non-monetary economic aspects; most of the research reports only short-term findings; the variable local contexts and conditions are generally ignored in research methodology and analysis; conventional agriculture is the commonly used comparator, with minimal consideration of other substantially different agricultural systems; and there is the overall tendency to frame the research upon not validated theoretical assumptions, and to over-extrapolate small-scale and short-term specific results to generalized conclusions. These findings point to a lack of empirical and comprehensive research on SEI of GM crops for possible use in decision-making. Broader questions and improved methodologies, assisted by more rigorous peer-review, will be required to overcome current research shortcomings. (shrink)

Homework have different familiar impact in each familiar environment. In order to uncover the attitudes parents take towards their children’s homework, a national study about family balance, where 471 people have been interviewed, is done. The results show that women are more likely to help children doing homework. The study concludes making evidence some changes.

El presente artículo desarrolla un análisis crítico de papel metodológico que desempeña la libre fantasía en Ideas I. Haciendo visible la estrecha relación entre las modalizaciones de conciencia y la estructura noético-noemática de los actos intencionales, se demostrará la necesaria complementariedad de los métodos de las reducciones eidética y fenomenológica para el proyecto de Husserl de una crítica fenomenológica del conocimiento. Con ello se busca poner de relieve que el rendimiento de la fantasía tuvo un impacto metodológico decisivo para la (...) conversión trascendental de la fenomenología. (shrink)

A cross-cultural survey experiment revealed a dominant tendency to rely on a rule’s letter over its spirit when deciding which behaviors violate the rule. This tendency varied markedly across (k = 15) countries, owing to variation in the impact of moral appraisals on judgments of rule violation. Compared with laypeople, legal experts were more inclined to disregard their moral evaluations of the acts altogether and consequently exhibited stronger textualist tendencies. Finally, we evaluated a plausible mechanism for the emergence of textualism: (...) in a two-player coordination game, incentives to coordinate in the absence of communication reinforced participants’ adherence to rules’ literal meaning. Together, these studies (total n = 5,794) help clarify the origins and allure of textualism, especially in the law. Within heterogeneous communities in which members diverge in their moral appraisals involving a rule’s purpose, the rule’s literal meaning provides a clear focal point—an identifiable point of agreement enabling coordinated interpretation among citizens, lawmakers, and judges. (shrink)

This article aims to explore the relationship between neutralization and “as if” consciousness in Husserl’s phenomenology, in particular, from its convergence in intuitions concerning phantasy. Starting from a critique of a line of interpretation that, in its attempt to approach phenomenologically to an “aesthetic consciousness”, homologates the neutrality modification with the Epoché, the article seeks to expose the methodological function that the modalization of belief fulfills in the project of Ideas I, as well as highlighting the growing importance that phantasy (...) and the “as if” consciousness will acquire in the subsequent development of Husserl’s phenomenology. (shrink)

In this paper I argue against the received view that the anti‐nativist arguments of Book I of Locke's Essay conclusively challenge nativism. I begin by reconstructing the chief argument of Book I and its corollary arguments. I call attention to their dependence on (what I label) “the Awareness Principle”, viz., the view that there are no ideas in the mind of which the mind either isn't currently aware or hasn't been aware in the past. I then argue that the arguments' (...) dependence on this principle is question begging on two counts. Unless this principle is defended, Locke's arguments beg the question against Descartes and Leibniz because their nativism implies the denial of the Awareness Principle. And even when Locke defended the principle, his arguments remain question begging because they presuppose the empiricism they aim to prove. The disclosure of the question‐begging status of these arguments debunks a seemingly powerful way of attacking nativism. (shrink)

While the concept of adaptive preferences is an important tool for criticizing injustice, it is often claimed that using the concept involves showing disrespect for persons judged to have adaptive preferences. In this paper, I propose an account of adaptive preferences that does the relevant political work while still showing persons two centrally important kinds of respect. My account is based in what I call an indirect substantive account of autonomy, which places substantive requirements on the options available to a (...) person, rather than on the option that she ultimately prefers. This allows us to pinpoint cases in which a person's circumstances have rendered her insufficiently autonomous, without saying that any conception of the good must be non-autonomous tout court. (shrink)

In this paper, I argue for the counter-intuitive conclusion that the same adaptive preference can be both prudentially good and prudentially bad for its holder: that is, it can be prudentially objectionable from one temporal perspective, but prudentially unobjectionable from another. Given the possibility of transformative experiences, there is an important sense in which even worrisome adaptive preferences can be prudentially good for us. That is, if transformative experiences lead us to develop adaptive preferences, then their objects can become prudentially (...) better for our actual selves than the objects of their non-adaptive alternatives would now be. I also argue, however, that the same worrisome adaptive preferences might still be prospectively prudentially objectionable: that is, our pre-transformation selves might be prudentially better off undergoing a non-adaptive alternative transformative experience instead. I argue that both claims hold across the range of the most broadly-defended accounts of well-being in the literature. (shrink)

The significance of critical phenomenology for psychiatric praxis has yet to be expounded. In this paper, I argue that the adoption of a critical phenomenological stance can remedy localised instances of hermeneutical injustice, which may arise in the encounter between clinicians and patients with psychosis. In this context, what is communicated is often deemed to lack meaning or to be difficult to understand. While a degree of un-shareability is inherent to subjective life, I argue that issues of unintelligibility can be (...) addressed by shifting from individualistic conceptions of understanding to an interactionist view. This takes into account the contextual, historical and relational background within which meaning is co-constituted. I conclude by providing a corrective for hermeneutical injustice, which entails a specific attentiveness towards the person’s subjectivity, a careful sensitivity to contingent meaning-generating structures, and a degree of hermeneutical flexibility as an attitude of openness towards alternative horizons of possibility. (shrink)

In this article, I first propose four guidelines that follow from understanding the project of assigning victims duties to resist oppression as an ameliorative project. That is, if we understand the project to be motivated by the urgent aim of ending or mitigating the harm that oppression imposes on the oppressed, I argue that we should focus on developing and assigning duties that satisfy what I call the ability, weighting, fairness, and overdemandingness guidelines. Second, I develop the duty to be (...) a non-normative individual, which satisfies all four guidelines. (shrink)

The brain is often taken to be a paradigmatic example of a signaling system with semantic and representational properties, in which neurons are senders and receivers of information carried in action potentials. A closer look at this picture shows that it is not as appealing as it might initially seem in explaining the function of the brain. Working from several sender-receiver models within the teleosemantic framework, I will first argue that two requirements must be met for a system to support (...) genuine semantic information: 1. The receiver must be competent —that is, it must be able to extract rewards from its environment on the basis of the signals that it receives. 2. The receiver must have some flexibility of response relative to the signal received. In the second part of the paper, this initial framework will be applied to neural processes, pointing to the surprising conclusion that signaling at the single-neuron level is only weakly semantic at best. Contrary to received views, neurons will have little or no access to semantic information (though their patterns of activity may carry plenty of quantitative, correlational information) about the world outside the organism. Genuine representation of the world requires an organism - level receiver of semantic information, to which any particular set of neurons makes only a small contribution. (shrink)

Are there representations in the brain? It depends on what you mean by representations, and it depends on what you want them to do for you—both in terms of the causal role they play in the system, and in terms of their explanatory value. But ideally, we would like an account of representation that allows us to assign a representational role and content to the appropriate mechanistic precursors of behavior that in fact play that role and conversely, search for the (...) mechanistic realizers of representational roles that are posited by our models of behavior and cognition. Such an account would be methodologically valuable in neuroscience. Lately, people have started asking similar questions about deep neural networks. What representations do they learn and use, and what is the relation between those representations and the sometimes impressive capacities these networks exhibit? More philosophically puzzling, perhaps, is the question of why the internal activities or dispositions labeled as such in neuroscience and AI research should count as representations at all. I think we can give a unified answer to both sets of questions, in the form of a kind of representational pragmatism. What makes something a representation just is that we can identify and re-identify it as such, and moreover, that we can manipulate it effectively to do whatever it is that we think representations ought to do for us in that particular context. For the first condition, the idea is that so long as we have some probe that allows us to pick out the relevant causally effective candidate, we should consider that to be a candidate representation-relative-to-that-probe. The second condition can be understood as a kind of anti-gerrymandering constraint: one ought to be able to intervene on the candidate, and see effects of that intervention consistent with the functional role the representation is supposed to play. Naturally the details need to be spelled out for different contexts—and I will articulate them for a few illustrative cases—which effectively allows for a kind of pluralism about representation depending on the setting and the kinds of questions being asked. With the extra components filled in, representational pragmatism can make sense of existing practices in neuroscience and AI, as well as their relationship to naturalistic theories of representation in philosophy. (shrink)

I propose that we can explain the contribution of mental time travel to agency through understanding it as a specific instance of our more general capacity for narrative understanding. Narrative understanding involves the experience of a pre-reflective and embodied sense of self, which co-emerges with our emotional involvement with a sequence of events. Narrative understanding of a sequence of events also requires a ‘recombinable system’, that is, the ability to combine parts to make myriad sequences. Mental time travel shares these (...) two characteristics: it involves an embodied sense of self and the ability to create novel scenarios. What is unique about mental time travel is that it is a story explicitly about our selves, and it involves metarepresentation. Agency is enabled by narrative understanding when we are able to put our current situation into a larger narrative context, whereby some possible actions, but not others, make sense. However, new features of agency are enabled when we understand stories that are explicitly about our selves: we gain the ability to plan and act on plans. (shrink)

Although the problem of adaptiveness plays an important motivating role in her work on human capabilities, Martha Nussbaum never gives a clear account of the controversial concept of adaptive preferences on which she relies. In this paper, I aim both to reconstruct the most plausible account of the concept that may be attributed to Nussbaum and to provide a critical appraisal of that account. Although her broader work on the capabilities approach moves progressively towards political liberalism as time passes, I (...) aim to show that her account of adaptive preferences continues to maintain her earlier commitment to perfectionism about the good. I then distinguish between two obligatory kinds of respect for persons, which I call, respectively, primary and secondary recognition respect. This distinction allows us to see that her perfectionist account of adaptive preferences allows her to show persons primary but not secondary recognition respect. Ultimately, I claim that an acceptable account of adaptive prefer.. (shrink)

El presente artículo se propone explorar la relación entre neutralización y conciencia del ‘como si’ en la fenomenología de Husserl, en particular, a partir de su convergencia en las intuiciones de fantasía. Partiendo de una crítica a una línea de interpretación que, en su intento de aproximarse fenomenológicamente a una «conciencia estética», homologa la modificación de neutralidad con la epojé, el artículo busca exponer la función metodológica que cumplen la modalización de la creencia en el proyecto de Ideas I, así (...) como también resaltar la importancia creciente que la fantasía y la conciencia del ‘como si’ irán adquiriendo en el desarrollo posterior de la fenomenología de Husserl. (shrink)

Accounts of adaptive preferences are of two kinds: well-being accounts fully theorized for their own sake and political accounts theorized to facilitate the political project of reducing oppression and marginalization. Given their practical role, the latter are often less fully theorized, and are therefore less robust to theoretical criticism. In this paper, I first draw on well-being accounts to identify the well-theorized elements that political accounts should want to adopt in order to strengthen their project and avoid common criticisms. Second, (...) I appeal to the political project to show the shortcomings of the well-being accounts on which I draw. (shrink)

If you are an anthropologist wanting to use digital methods or programming as part of your research, where do you start? In this commentary, we discuss three ways in which anthropologists can use computational tools to enhance, support, and complement ethnographic methods. By presenting our reflections, we hope to contribute to the stirring conversations about the potential future role of data science vis-a-vis anthropology and ethnography, and to inspire other anthropologists to take up the use of digital methods, programming, and (...) computational tools in their own research. (shrink)

Progressive supranuclear palsy is a movement disorder with prominent tau neuropathology. Brain diseases with abnormal tau deposits are called tauopathies, the most common of which is Alzheimer's disease. Environmental causes of tauopathies include repetitive head trauma associated with some sports. To identify common genetic variation contributing to risk for tauopathies, we carried out a genome-wide association study of 1,114 individuals with PSP and 3,247 controls followed by a second stage in which we genotyped 1,051 cases and 3,560 controls for the (...) stage 1 SNPs that yielded P ≤ 10-3. We found significant previously unidentified signals associated with PSP risk at STX6, EIF2AK3 and MOBP. We confirmed two independent variants in MAPT affecting risk for PSP, one of which influences MAPT brain expression. The genes implicated encode proteins for vesicle-membrane fusion at the Golgi-endosomal interface, for the endoplasmic reticulum unfolded protein response and for a myelin structural component. © 2011 Nature America, Inc. All rights reserved. (shrink)

In this article, I develop a tension in the capabilities approach between committing to political liberalism and ensuring full capability for all persons. In particular, I argue that the capabiliti...

Why should we avoid incoherence? An influential view tells us that incoherent combinations of attitudes are such that it is impossible for all of those attitudes to be simultaneously vindicated by the evidence. But it is not clear whether this view successfully explains what is wrong with certain akratic doxastic states. In this paper I flesh out an alternative response to that question, one according to which the problem with incoherent combinations of attitudes is that it is impossible for all (...) of those attitudes to be simultaneously knowledgeable. This alternative response explains what is wrong with akratic combinations of attitudes using commonly accepted epistemological theses. The paper still shows how this proposal is able to explain the badness of incoherent combinations involving the absence of attitudes, suspended judgment and credence. These explanations deploy the notions of knowledge and being in a position to know, instead of the notion of responding properly to the evidence. Finally, I suggest that this picture can be generalized to the realm of practical rationality as well. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Seventeenth-Century Catholic Polemic and the Rise of Cultural Rationalism: An Example from the EmpireSusan RosaIn Galileo’s Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems Sagre-do, an intelligent, cultivated, and well-traveled young man who is persuaded of the truth of arguments in favor of the Copernican opinion presented by the philosopher Salviati, dismisses the counter-arguments of the Aristotelian Simplicio with sympathetic condescension: “I pity him,” he proclaims,no less than I should (...) some fine gentleman who, having built a magnificent palace at great trouble and expense, employing hundreds and hundreds of artisans, and then beholding it threatened with ruin because of poor foundations, should attempt, in order to avoid the grief of seeing the walls destroyed, adorned as they are with so many lovely murals; or the columns fall, which sustain the superb galleries, or the gilded beams, or the doors spoiled, or the pediments and the marble cornices, brought in at so much cost—should attempt, I say, to prevent the collapse with chains, props, iron buttresses, and shores. 1 [End Page 87]This elegant simile, which suggests that the fine gentleman can only preserve his palace by destroying its beauty, is meant to evoke the dilemma of the scholastic philosopher who is confronted by the evident disintegration of his intellectual home. Like the desperate owner who seeks to shore up his real palace, he must rebuild a philosophical edifice whose apparent beauty and coherence have been achieved at the expense of substance and can only be preserved by recourse to means so ugly and inadequate that they destroy even the illusion of credibility.Such a dilemma, I would argue, was the legacy bequeathed to many defenders of traditional religion in the seventeenth century by more than one hundred years of confessional rivalry. To simplify a complex process, this lengthy period of controversy and apologetic, to say nothing of warfare and mutual persecution, had generated a discourse which objectified and prob-lematized religion, making it something to think about rather than to think with. 2 In other words, the formal statements of conviction issued in the wake of the Reformation by competing denominations within Christendom, like the Catechism of the Council of Trent, the Augsburg Confession, the Genevan Confession, or the Thirty-Nine Articles of the Church of England had encouraged the development of the notion of religion as adherence to a set of propositions. As Peter Harrison has explained, this creation of a propositional religion in turnenabled discussion of the merits of other “religions” conceived to exist similarly as sets of beliefs. The truth or falsity of a religion had become a function of the truth or falsity of the propositions which constituted it. True religion... [had become]... a body of certain knowledge. 3Harrison’s remarks are significant because they suggest that the origins of rationalized discourse about religion and its consequent transformation from a way of thinking to an object of thought are to be found squarely within orthodoxy itself. 4To be specific, the competing content of official doctrinal pronouncements led not only to the comparison of the religions but implicitly to their emergence as subjects of a discourse which proposed reason as the norm, a [End Page 88] development clearly reflected in the wave of pamphlets, broadsides, printed disputations, and formal polemical treatises written in both Latin and the vernacular languages which poured from the presses of Catholic and mainstream Protestant denominations in England and on the continent throughout the seventeenth century. In this literature, Protestants accused Catholics of “superstition” and “idolatry,” while Catholics urged potential converts to compare the religions with a view to discovering their “marks of truth,” argued for the compatibility of Catholic faith and “natural light,” and identified heresy, on the contrary, with unreason, passion, lust, and self-contradiction. On both sides of the confessional fence, polemicists frequently insisted that religious discussion conform to the rules of logic, accusing one another of failing to argue from incontrovertible first principles, and of succumbing to the fatal dangers of petitio principii and circular reasoning. In other words, they claimed that in religious matters poor argumentation is a sure sign of error, and it would not be... (shrink)

It is well known that experts’ opinion and testimony take on a decisive weight in judicial fact-finding, raising issues and perplexities that have long been under scholarly scrutiny. In this paper I argue that expert’s opinions have a much wider impact on legal decision-making. In particular, they may generate a problem that I will call ‘the opacity of law’. A legal text, such as a statute or regulation, becomes opaque if a legal authority is not able to grasp its full (...) linguistic content but is nevertheless in a position to use it, thanks to an expert’ opinion, in legal decision-making. When this occurs, not only do experts contribute to fact-finding but also to determining the content of the law. In the paper I analyse the linguistic and cognitive sources of this phenomenon, its characteristics and troublesome consequences, and the different kinds of opacity that may affect legal decision-making. (shrink)

Political philosophers working on ideal and non-ideal theory sometimes seem to be stuck in a bind: while ideal theory risks being too ideal to be useful in the real world, non-ideal theory risks being so non-ideal that it stops far short of justice. In this paper, I highlight a third – and equally unappealing – possibility: that non-ideal theory, precisely because of its obvious engagement with real-world problems, might fail to recognize the unacceptable ways in which it is itself problematically (...) idealized. I highlight this problem through the case-study of adaptive preferences. Although work in adaptive preferences obviously fits into non-ideal theory, the actual work being done in the literature is idealized in that it takes only the circumstances and needs of adults into account. In the best case, this means that the needs of one of our most vulnerable populations – that is, children – are ignored. In the worst case, where the needs of children and adults conflict, the needs of children will be actively frustrated. In this way, non-ideal theory can fail to approximate justice precisely because it fails to recognize the idealizations that it itself employs. (shrink)

The recruitment of respondents belonging to ethnic minorities poses important challenges in social and health research. This paper reflects on the enablers and barriers to recruitment that we encountered in our research work with persons belonging to ethnic minorities. Additionally, we applied the Matching Model of Recruitment, a theoretical framework concerning minority recruitment, to guide our reflection. We also explored its applicability as a research design tool. In assessing our research experience, we learned that minority recruitment in social and health (...) research is influenced by the social context of all key players involved in the research. Also, there are enablers and barriers within that social context facilitating or delaying the recruitment process. The main enablers to recruit respondents belonging to ethnic minorities include working with community agencies and gatekeepers who share a common vision with researchers and the latter’s ability to gain the trust of potential respondents. The main barriers include demanding too much from these same community agencies and gatekeepers and ignoring factors that could delay the completion of the research. Although we found the Matching Model of Recruitment to be an effective tool in assessing the processes of recruiting respondents belonging to ethnic minorities, further empirical research is needed to explore its usefulness during the research planning phase. (shrink)

In this paper, I offer two counterexamples to the so-called ‘Uniqueness Thesis.’ As one of these examples rely on the thesis that it is possible for a justified belief to be based on an inconsistent body of evidence, I also offer reasons for this further thesis. On the assumption that doxastic justification entails propositional justification, the counterexamples seem to work.

The development of computer science has raised ethical concerns regarding the potential negative impacts of machine learning tools on people and society. Some examples are pornographic deepfakes used as weapons of war against women; pattern recognition designed to uncover sexual orientation; and misuse of data and deep learning by private companies to influence democratic elections. We contend that these three examples are cases of automated evil. In this article, we defend that the concept of forbidden knowledge can help to inform (...) a coherent ethical framework in the context of machine learning research. We conclude that restricting generalised access to extensive data and limiting access to ready-to-use codes would mitigate potential harms caused by machine learning tools. In addition, the notions of intersectionality and interdisciplinarity should be systematically introduced in data and computer science research. (shrink)

In this article I offer an analysis of harms associated with sexual objectification. Objectification can be benign, but harm tends to occur in three circumstances: (i) when objectification is non-consensual, (ii) when a phenomenon that I term ‘context-creeping’ occurs, and (iii) when the objectification is also enacting or reinforcing some kind of oppression. I defend the view that objectification is not always harmful, and I explain the popular intuition to the contrary by demonstrating that these three harm-generating circumstances are especially (...) prevalent. The phenomenon of ‘context-creeping’ objectification is introduced to capture what is intuitively wrong with much objectification in media and advertising. This phenomenon describes when instances of sexual objectification (which may be, in themselves, benign) regularly occur outside sexual contexts, in a way that reinforces particular rape myths and thereby contributes to harms. This means that the ubiquity of discussion of pornography in the objectification literature is misleading, and a shift in focus to other media is warranted. I end with a warning, though: we should be very careful in how we respond to these problems, as attempts to mitigate any harms associated with objectifying media can badly misfire. (shrink)

Talisse proposes a reconstruction of a pragmatist view of democracy based on Peirce's scientific method. I argue that on the one hand, Talisse's “Peircean” account of democracy is not truly Peircean because it ignores his metaphysics; on the other hand, that his account minimizes Peirce's possible contribution by focusing too narrowly on his epistemology. I show how Talisse's account is open to the same kind of objections he makes to Dewey's theory, and how Peirce's remarks on ethics can contribute towards (...) a more compelling pragmatist democratic theory than Talisse allows. (shrink)

To conceptualise moral education as ‘living and learning to bear suffering’ offers a humanistic vision for choices people make in the face of drastic threats to their existence. This essay proposes that bearing and transcending suffering—part of the human narrative—helps human beings to realise their ethical potential. Grounded in Eastern and Western metaphysics and ethics, I assess the human condition brought about by the 2008 earthquake disaster in China—in an attempt to come to terms with fundamental philosophical questions of existence (...) and human values. While raising questions about how human beings are intrinsically interrelated to Nature and the world, this account is linked by a thread of humanism encompassing three important values (caring, responsibility and free spirit). I conclude by suggesting that educating young people for the wisdom of suffering is to cultivate a humanistic morality. Ethical implications for ecology and moral education are considered. (shrink)

It is well known that experts’ opinion and testimony take on a decisive weight in judicial fact-finding, raising issues and perplexities that have long been under scholarly scrutiny. In this paper I argue that expert’s opinions have a much wider impact on legal decision-making. In particular, they may generate a problem that I will call ‘the opacity of law’. A legal text, such as a statute or regulation, becomes opaque if a legal authority is not able to grasp its full (...) linguistic content but is nevertheless in a position to use it, thanks to an expert’ opinion, in legal decision-making. When this occurs, not only do experts contribute to fact-finding but also to determining the content of the law. In the paper I analyse the linguistic and cognitive sources of this phenomenon, its characteristics and troublesome consequences, and the different kinds of opacity that may affect legal decision-making. (shrink)

In this thesis I argue that the tradition of political philosophy which follows in John Rawls's footsteps is obligated to concern itself not only with the realizability, but also with the realization, of justice. Although Rawls himself expresses a commitment only to the former of these, I argue that the roles which he assigns to political philosophy require him to take on the further commitment to realization. This is because these roles are meant to influence not only political philosophers, but (...) the citizens of the wider community as well. The realistically utopian role, which I take to be the central one, requires political philosophy to inspire in that population a hope which I argue that realizability alone cannot provide. Given the deep revisions regarding the political nature of justice as fairness which Rawls made on the basis of realizability concerns, I argue that his theory must in this case be committed to a similar revision. The hope which political philosophy is meant to provide is simply not realizable until the discipline concerns itself centrally with the task of realization. (shrink)

In this article, I argue that opposite-sex couples planning weddings have a duty to make their choices in ways that undermine the harmful norms that lead to most women taking their husband’s last names when they marry, and most weddings being extremely expensive. This duty, however, is not a duty to significantly reduce the prevalence of those norms, since doing so is generally not in the power of individual couples. Rather, it is a duty to provide observing couples around them (...) with new live options for their own weddings. (shrink)