In discussions of standards of proof, a familiar perspective often emerges. According to what we call specificationism, standards of proof are legal rules that specify the quantum of evidence required to determine that a litigant’s claim has been proven. In so doing, they allocate the risk of error among litigants (and potential litigants), minimizing the risk of certain types of error. Specificationism is meant as a description of the way the rules actually function. We argue, however, that its claims are (...) either mistaken or at a minimum deeply misleading, especially when it comes to standard of proof rules (SPRs) that contain indeterminate formulas, as is typical. As against specificationism, we argue that SPRs are best understood as rules that confer competence to decide whether a given standard has been met—according to whatever vague or inchoate interpretation (if any) of the rule in question triers of fact implicitly or explicitly employ. We call this the competence-norm approach. (shrink)

Several studies highlight the importance of the order of different instructional methods when designing learning environments. Correct but also erroneous worked examples are frequently used methods to foster students’ learning performance, especially in problem-solving. However, so far no study examined how the order of these example types affects learning. While the expertise reversal effect would suggest presenting correct examples first, the productive failure approach hypothesizes the reversed order to be learning-facilitating. In addition, congruency of subsequent exemplified problems was tested as (...) a moderator of the effect of order on learning. For example, with arithmetic tasks, congruent problems target exactly the same calculation while incongruent problems refer to different calculations. Following cascade theory, a model of cognitive skill acquisition, presenting correct examples first should be more effective when the subsequent exemplified problems are different. To test the hypotheses, 83 university students were assigned to one of the four conditions in a 2 × 2 between-subject design. Learners navigated through a slideshow on the topic of Vedic mathematics consisting of explicit instruction, worked examples differing in terms of the experimental condition, and transfer problems. Although no main or interaction effects were found regarding students’ learning performance, mediational analysis offered support for the expertise reversal effect, as it indicated that there is a significant indirect effect of order via mental load on learning. Presenting correct examples first and erroneous examples second resulted in a lower mental load, which in turn was associated with better learning performance. In contrast, presenting erroneous examples first and correct examples second resulted in a more accurate self-assessment of learning performance. These findings offer first insights into the question of how the presentation order of different example types impacts learning and provide practical recommendations for the design of educational media. Results are discussed in light of the ongoing debate regarding the question if less guided instructional methods should precede or succeed more guided methods. (shrink)

This essay revisits the drafting of the first UNESCO Statement on Race in order to reorient historical understandings of mid-twentieth-century anti-racism and science. Historians of science have primarily interpreted the UNESCO statements as an oppositional project led by anti-racist scientists from the North Atlantic and concerned with dismantling racial typologies, replacing them with population-based conceptions of human variation. Instead of focusing on what anti-racist scientists opposed, this article highlights the futures they imagined and the applied social-science projects that anti-racist science (...) drew from and facilitated. The scientific experts who participated in drafting the first UNESCO Statement on Race played important roles in late colonial, post-colonial and international projects designed to modernize, assimilate and improve so-called backward communities – typically indigenous or Afro-descendent groups in the global South. Such connections between anti-racist science and the developmental imaginaries of the late colonial period indicate that the transition from fixed racial typologies to sociocultural and psychological conceptualizations of human diversity legitimated the flourishing of modernization discourses in the Cold War era. In this transition to an economic-development paradigm, ‘race’ did not vanish so much as fragment into a series of finely tuned and ostensibly anti-racist conceptions that offered a moral incentive for scientific elites to intervene in the ways of life of those deemed primitive. (shrink)

As science studies scholars, one of our basic tasks is to draw the boundaries that will de?ne our units of inquiry and constrain the chronological and geographical limits of our studies. Without these boundaries, the categories of our analysis remain imprecise. Fortunately, we now have an extensive toolkit to help us with this task. With paradigms, research programs, epistemic cultures, or styles of reasoning, historians, philosophers, and sociologists of science now have a large set of resources for locating the ?ssures (...) and discontinuities in science. The papers from the focused discussion of this issue of Spontaneous Generations present us with an opportunity to take a step back and examine the ways that science studies scholars are currently drawing boundaries. In reviewing the articles for this discussion, our aim as editors was to re?ect on what boundaries scholars were paying attention to and what use we can make of these boundaries. (shrink)

Histories of economic development during the Cold War do not typically consider connections to race science and eugenics. By contrast, this article historicizes the debates sparked by the International Labor Organization’s Puno–Tambopata project in Peru and demonstrates how Cold War development practice shared common epistemological terrain with racial and eugenic thought from the Andes. The International Labor Organization project’s goal of resettling indigenous groups from the Peruvian highlands to lower-lying tropical climates sparked heated debates about the biological specificity of Andean (...) highlanders’ physiques and ability to survive in the tropics. Such concerns betrayed the antitypological consensus expressed in the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization Race Statements and defended by one of the main proponents of the resettlement project, the Swiss–American anthropologist Alfred Métraux. The concern with Andean racial types was central to the research agenda of the acclaimed Peruvian physiologist Carlos Monge, who endorsed modernization projects that did not entail moving highlanders outside of their traditional climate. The debates sparked by the Puno–Tambopata project demonstrate how Cold War development discourse grappled with racial and eugenic thought from Latin America and the Global South and thereby produced projects of indigenous “improvement.”. (shrink)

This white paper outlines the plans of the History Philosophy Culture Working Group of the Next Generation Event Horizon Telescope Collaboration.

This book treats practical and political reasoning as an active engagement with the world and other people; it cannot be understood as exclusively cognitive and this is seen as a virtue rather than a deficiency. Informal, emotional, characterological, aesthetic and interactional aspects of thought can be constituents of reasonable arguing. The work examines key capacities connected with argumentation, in a variety of fields from professional and medical ethics to work organization and the practice of art.

The Gait Deviation Index is a multivariate measure of overall gait pathology based on 15 gait features derived from three-dimensional kinematic data. GDI aims at providing a comprehensive, easy to interpret, and clinically meaningful metric of overall gait function. It has been used as an outcome measure to study gait in several conditions: cerebral palsy, post-stroke hemiparetic gait, Duchenne muscular dystrophy, and Parkinson’s disease, among others. Nevertheless, its use in population with Spinal Cord Injury has not been studied yet. The (...) aim of the present study was to investigate the applicability of the GDI to SCI through the assessment of the relationship of the GDI with the Walking Index for Spinal Cord Injury II. 3D gait kinematics of 34 patients with incomplete SCI was obtained. Besides, 3D gait kinematics of a sample of 50 healthy volunteers was also gathered with Codamotion motion capture system. A total of 302 and 446 strides were collected. GDI was calculated for each stride and grouped for each WISCI II level. HV data were analyzed as an additional set. Normal distribution for each group was assessed with Kolmogorov-Smirnov tests. Afterward, ANOVA tests were performed between each pair of WISCI II levels to identify differences among groups. The results showed that the GDI was normally distributed across all WISCI II levels in both iSCI and HV groups. Furthermore, our results showed an increasing relationship between the GDI values and WISCI II levels in subjects with iSCI, but only discriminative in WISCI II levels 13, 19, and 20. The index successfully distinguished HV group from all the individuals with iSCI. Findings of this study indicated that the GDI is not an appropriate multivariate walking metric to represent the deviation of gait pattern in adult population with iSCI from a normal gait profile when it is compared with the levels of walking impairment described by the WISCI II. Future work should aim at defining and validating an overall gait index derived from 3D kinematic gait variables appropriate for SCI, additionally taking into account other walking ability outcome measures. (shrink)

Este artículo se propone examinar la historia de la recepción inicial de las vanguardias históricas en la literatura hispanoamericana a través de la obra de Alfonso Reyes. Sin ignorar el estallido de la Revolución Mexicana y de la Primera Guerra Mundial, el futurismo y el cubismo responden a la praxis cotidiana relacionada con el belicismo. Ambos pueden encontrarse en otros textos de Reyes escritos entre 1914 y 1924 en Madrid, donde él se había autoexiliado. Este ensayo termina comparando (...) el vanguardismo inicial de Reyes con el de Borges y Huidobro. (shrink)

It has been argued that the explanation of self-control requires positing special motivational powers. Some think that we need will-power as an irreducible mental faculty; others that we need to think of the active self as a dedicated and depletable pool of psychic energy or – in today more respectable terminology – mental resources; finally, there is the idea that self-control requires postulating a deep division between reason and passion – a deliberative and an emotional motivational system. This essay argues (...) that no such special motivational powers are necessary. Yet, at the same time, self-control does powerfully illustrate the importance of a feature of the mind. What it illustrates, I argue, is the importance of the mental activity of attention in the control of all action. It is by appeal to this mental activity that we can dispense with special motivational powers. If we think of Humeanism as the view that there is fundamentally only one kind of motivational system and that all action is based in that system, then this essay contributes to a defense of Humeanism. On the other hand, the essay also shows that any model of agency in terms of only beliefs and desires, motivational and representational states, or preferences and credences is incomplete. A different conception of Humeanism as the view that every mental state is either motivational, representational, or a combination of them, is false. (shrink)

El autor aprovecha el fallido debate que tuvo lugar entre John Searle y Jacques Derrida desde finales de los anos setenta, en torno a la teoria de los actos de habla de John L. Austin. Este desencuentro no solo es analizado minuciosamente sino que ofrece sendas visiones retrospectivas de las tradiciones de Searle y Derrida, al tiempo que aprovecha el episodio para retratar algunos momentos de la filosofia contemporanea y reflexionar sobre los grande problemas de la filosofia del lenguaje y (...) de la mente: la palabra como instrumento de comunicacion, la intencionalidad de la conciencia y la diferancia como aspecto constitutivo de todo texto. (shrink)

What is attention? How does attention shape consciousness? In an approach that engages with foundational topics in the philosophy of mind, the theory of action, psychology, and the neurosciences this book provides a unified and comprehensive answer to both questions. Sebastian Watzl shows that attention is a central structural feature of the mind. The first half of the book provides an account of the nature of attention. Attention is prioritizing, it consists in regulating priority structures. Attention is not another element (...) of the mind, but constituted by structures that organize, integrate, and coordinate the parts of our mind. Attention thus integrates the perceptual and intellectual, the cognitive and motivational, and the epistemic and practical. The second half of the book concerns the relationship between attention and consciousness. Watzl argues that attentional structure shapes consciousness into what is central and what is peripheral. The center-periphery structure of consciousness cannot be reduced to the structure of how the world appears to the subject. What it is like for us thus goes beyond the way the world appears to us. On this basis, a new view of consciousness is offered. In each conscious experience we actively take a stance on the world we appear to encounter. It is in this sense that our conscious experience is our subjective perspective. (shrink)

Many of our attitudes are non-culpable: there was nothing that we should have done to avoid holding them. I argue that we can still be blameworthy for non-culpable attitudes: they can impair our relationships in ways that make our full practice of apology and forgiveness intelligible. My argument poses a new challenge to indirect voluntarists, who attempt to reduce all responsibility for attitudes to responsibility for prior actions and omissions. Rationalists, who instead explain attitudinal responsibility by appeal to reasons-responsiveness, can (...) make sense of blameworthiness for non-culpable attitudes. In response, voluntarists could propose a revision of our actual practices. This would lead us into a quite different debate. (shrink)

In this paper we discuss James Buchanan’s contribution in the narrow domain of understanding committee voting under majority rule. We then go on to discuss Charles Plott’s seminal experimental work on the topic that sparked a wave of public choice experimental work. However, given Plott’s claims that Buchanan influenced him significantly, it is puzzling that his work with Morris Fiorina explores a question outside of those which Buchanan and Tullock found interesting. We suggest several ways to resolve this tension. Our (...) chapter concludes by discussing a lacuna in the experimental public choice literature in which Buchanan was particularly interested—logrolling, or vote trading. (shrink)

Quasi-realists argue that meta-ethical expressivism is fully compatible with the central assumptions underlying ordinary moral practice. In a recent paper, Andy Egan has developed a vexing challenge for this project, arguing that expressivism is incompatible with central assumptions about error in moral judgments. In response, Simon Blackburn has argued that Egan's challenge fails, because Egan reads the expressivist as giving an account of moral error, rather than an account of judgments about moral error. In this paper I argue that the (...) challenge can be reinstated, even if we focus only on the expressivist's account of judgments about moral error. (shrink)

In this paper I present an interpretation of Deleuze's concept of the virtual. I argue that this concept is best understood in relation to the problematic of individuation or differentiation, which Deleuze inherits from Duns Scotus. After analysing Scotus' critique of Aristotelian or hylomorphic approaches to the problem of individuation, I turn to Deleuze's account of differentiation and his interpretation of the calculus in chapter 4 of Difference and Repetition. The paper seeks thereby to explicate Deleuze's dialectics or theory of (...) Ideas, his approach to the principle of sufficient reason, and the concept of the virtual itself. (shrink)

Für Aristoteles ist das Kontinuum ein potentiell Unendliches. Dieser Unendlichkeitsbegriff, den er neben dem prozessualen und aktualen einführte, wurde im Laufe der Philosophiegeschichte nicht mehr berücksichtigt. So verwenden ihn u.a. weder Kant noch Weyl in ihren Kontinuumsbetrachtungen, obwohl ihr Kontinuumsverständnis ihn geradezu nahelegt. - In dieser Arbeit werden zum einen die ontologischen Kontinuumslehren des Aristoteles und späterer Philosophen und Mathematiker behandelt, zum anderen erfährt die von Aristoteles im 6. Buch der «Physik» vorgelegte strukturelle Kontinuumsuntersuchung eine eingehende Würdigung.

In this paper I discuss a prevailing view by which logical terms determine forms of sentences and arguments and therefore the logical validity of arguments. This view is common to those who hold that there is a principled distinction between logical and nonlogical terms and those holding relativistic accounts. I adopt the Tarskian tradition by which logical validity is determined by form, but reject the centrality of logical terms. I propose an alternative framework for logic where logical terms no longer (...) play a distinctive role. This account employs a new notion of semantic. (shrink)

ABSTRACT The difference between perception and cognition seems introspectively obvious in many cases. Perceiving and thinking have also been assigned quite different roles, in epistemology, in theories of reference and of mental content, in philosophy of psychology, and elsewhere. Yet what is the nature of the distinction? In what way, or ways, do perception and cognition differ? The paper reviews recent work on these questions. Four main respects in which perception and cognition have been held to differ are discussed. First, (...) their phenomenal character, such as the often-remarked vivacity or immediacy of perception. Second, the way in which they represent the world, e.g. the non-propositional nature of the contents, or non-discursive character of the vehicles, that have been held to characterise perceptual representation. Third, their place in cognitive architecture, i.e., roughly, in the information-flow of the mind, such as their alleged (non-)modularity. Fourth, their mind-world relations, e.g. the way in which perceptions seem to be tightly causally linked with distal or proximal stimuli. Against this background, we distinguish some main options for an account of the perception/cognition distinction, in particular concerning whether there is one, several, or no interesting and principled distinction(s) to be drawn here. (shrink)

The medical profession is observing a rising number of calls to action considering the threat that climate change poses to global human health. Theory-led bioethical analyses of the scope and weight of physicians’ normative duty towards climate protection and its conflict with individual patient care are currently scarce. This article offers an analysis of the normative issues at stake by using Korsgaard’s neo-Kantian moral account of practical identities. We begin by showing the case of physicians’ duty to climate protection, before (...) we succinctly introduce Korsgaard’s account. We subsequently show how the duty to climate protection can follow from physicians’ identity of being a healthcare professional. We structure conflicts between individual patient care and climate protection, and show how a transformation in physicians’ professional ethos is possible and what mechanisms could be used for doing so. An important limit of our analysis is that we mainly address the level of individual physicians and their practical identities, leaving out important measures to respond to climate change at the mesolevels and macrolevels of healthcare institutions and systems, respectively. (shrink)

Spoofing is the act of placing orders to buy or sell a financial contract without the intention to have those orders fulfilled in order to create the impression that there is a large demand for that contract at that price. In this article, I deny the view that spoofing in financial markets should be viewed as morally permissible analogously to the way bluffing is permissible in poker. I argue for the pro tanto moral impermissibility of spoofing and make the case (...) that spoofing is disanalogous from bluffing in at least one important regard—speculative trading serves an important economic role, whereas poker does not. (shrink)

This paper argues for the normative significance of attention. Attention plays an important role when describing an individual’s mind and agency, and in explaining many central facts about that individual. In addition, many in the public want answers and guidance with regard to normative questions about attention. Given that attention is both descriptively central and the public cares about normative guidance with regard to it, attention should be central also in normative philosophy. We need an ethics of attention: a field (...) of study of which normative pressures, if any, govern attention. Like the ethics of belief, the ethics of attention will connect those normative questions to issues regarding the nature of attention, i.e. to what is subject to such normative pressures. Philosophers should develop an ethics of attention that helps to provide normative guidance and that is commensurate in its richness to the descriptive significance of attention. The second half of the paper sketches a framework that may help us to get started at developing the ethics of attention. (shrink)

We present four new change detection methods that create an automated change map from a probability map. In this case, the probability map was derived from a 3D model. The primary application of interest is aerial photographic applications, where the appearance, disappearance or change in position of small objects of a selectable class (e.g., cars) must be detected at a high success rate in spite of variations in magnification, lighting and background across the image. The methods rely on an earlier (...) derivation of a probability map. We describe the theory of the four methods, namely Bernoulli variables, Markov Random Fields, connected change, and relaxation-based segmentation, evaluate and compare their performance experimentally on a set probability maps derived from aerial photographs. (shrink)

Animal models of human diseases are often used in biomedical research in place of human subjects. However, results obtained by animal models may fail to hold true for humans. One way of addressing this problem is to make animal models more similar to humans by placing human tissue into animal models, rendering them chimeric. Since technical and ethical limitations make neurological disorders difficult to study in humans, chimeric models with human neural tissue could help advance our understanding of neuropathophysiology. In (...) this article, we examine whether the introduction of human neural tissue and any consequent cognitive change is relevant to the way we ought to treat chimeras. We argue that changes in cognitive abilities are morally relevant to the extent that they increase the capacities that affect the moral status of any entity, including awareness, autonomy, and sociability. We posit that no being, regardless of species, should be treated in a way that is incommensurate with its moral status. Finally, we propose a framework that can be used to guide ethical assessment of research involving chimeras with advanced cognitive capacities. We advance this framework as a useful tool for bringing relevant considerations to the forefront for those considering the ethical merit of proposed chimeric research. In doing so, we examine concepts relevant to the question of how any entity may be treated, including moral status, dignity, and capacities. (shrink)

The global Covid-19 pandemic has resulted in social and economic disruption unprecedented in the modern era. Many countries have introduced severe measures to contain the virus, including travel restrictions, public event bans, non-essential business closures and remote work policies. While digital technologies help governments and organizations to enforce protection measures, such as contact tracing, their rushed deployment and adoption also raises profound concerns about surveillance, privacy and data protection. This article presents two critical cases on digital surveillance technologies implemented during (...) the Covid-19 pandemic and delineates the privacy implications thereof. We explain the contextual nature of privacy trade-offs during a pandemic and explore how regulatory and technical responses are needed to protect privacy in such circumstances. By providing a multi-disciplinary conversation on the value of privacy and data protection during a global pandemic, this article reflects on the implications digital solutions have for the future and raises the question of whether there is a way to have expedited privacy assessments that could anticipate and help mitigate adverse privacy implications these may have on society. (shrink)

This paper defends and develops the structuring account of conscious attention: attention is the conscious mental process of structuring one’s stream of consciousness so that some parts of it are more central than others. In the first part of the paper, I motivate the structuring account. Drawing on a variety of resources I argue that the phenomenology of attention cannot be fully captured in terms of how the world appears to the subject, as well as against an atomistic conception of (...) attention. In the second part of the paper, I show how the structuring account can be made precise: attention causes and causally sustains phenomenal relations to hold between the parts of the stream of consciousness; most importantly the relation of one part being peripheral to another. I end by pointing out consequences for both the scientific study of attention as well as for several areas of central philosophical interest. (shrink)

Available corpora for Argument Mining differ along several axes, and one of the key differences is the presence (or absence) of discourse markers to signal argumentative content. Exploring effective ways to use discourse markers has received wide attention in various discourse parsing tasks, from which it is well-known that discourse markers are strong indicators of discourse relations. To improve the robustness of Argument Mining systems across different genres, we propose to automatically augment a given text with discourse markers such that (...) all relations are explicitly signaled. Our analysis unveils that popular language models taken out-of-the-box fail on this task; however, when fine-tuned on a new heterogeneous dataset that we construct (including synthetic and real examples), they perform considerably better. We demonstrate the impact of our approach on an Argument Mining downstream task, evaluated on different corpora, showing that language models can be trained to automatically fill in discourse markers across different corpora, improving the performance of a downstream model in some, but not all, cases. Our proposed approach can further be employed as an assistant tool for better discourse understanding. (shrink)

The “Centro de Estudios Cientificos” of San Sebastian was established to palliate the absence of universitary studies in the Basque Country, in base of an idea suggested by J. Rey Pastor. It began itsactivities in 1932 and ended in 1936, because of Spanish Civil War. It was supported by the “Sociedad de Estudios Vascos” and sponsored by the “Diputación Foral de Gipuzkoa” and the San Sebastian Council. In this paper, we describe and comment the different aspects relatives to the CEC (...) such as constitution, statutes, members, sections, courses, teachers, students, ... , and scientific journals supported by the CEC. (shrink)

This article explores the question: is The X-Files dangerous to science fiction (SF) and science? Certainly it is one of the most prominent series that, despite being frequently appended with the SF television label, seems to challenge and sometimes eschew basic conceptualizations of the genre. Furthermore, at the height of its success the series was criticized by scientists such as Richard Dawkins for disseminating and popularizing anti-rational and potentially anti-scientific perspectives. On these grounds, the answer to our question appears to (...) be yes. However, detailed analysis of the series reveals quite a different picture. Firstly, even attempts to distance the series from SF effectively encapsulate reasons for that very labelling. These specifically revolve around the use of the phrase ‘extreme possibilities’. Secondly, far from presenting a simplistic juxtaposition of belief and reason, the series instead involves a dialogic exchange that helps to articulate the role of scientific inquiry in approaching the unknown. (shrink)

What is attention? Attention is often seen as a subject matter for the hard sciences of cognitive and brain processes, and is understood in terms of sub-personal mechanisms and processes. Correspondingly, there still is a stark contrast between the central role attention plays for the empirical investigation of the mind in psychology and the neurosciences, and its relative neglect in philosophy. Yet, over the past years, several philosophers have challenged the standard conception. A number of interesting philosophical questions concerning the (...) nature of attention arise. This article provides an introduction to contemporary debates concerning these questions. In particular, it discusses the question of how the pre-theoretic conception of attention might be reconciled with a scientific conception, arguments that provide support for an anti-reductivist theory of attention, and sketches several recent anti-reductivist theories and their inter-relations. (shrink)

Downward causation exercised by emergent properties of wholes upon their lower-level constituents’ properties has been accused of conceptual and metaphysical incoherence. Only upward causation is usually peacefully accepted. The aim of this paper is to criticize and refuse the traditional hierarchical-vertical way of conceiving both types of causation, although preserving their deepest ontological significance, as well as the widespread acceptance of the traditional atomistic-combinatorial view of the entities and the relations that constitute the so-called ‘emergence base’. Assuming those two perspectives (...) with no reserves, we are condemned to confine our debate to the question of whether reified wholes can have the power to downwardly change or influence their lower-level parts, a question which seems profoundly misleading to me. I therefore propose an alternative relational ontological view, assuming a straightforward horizontal and intra-level way of representing those putative cases of cross-level causation. I finally confront two recent replies to Kim’s well-known objections to DC—Craver and Bechtel and Kistler :595–609, 2009)—, emphasizing their global positive approaches, as well as the reasons why their accounts still seem insufficient to me. I conclude arguing that both Kim’s principle of the causal closure of the physical domain and its allegation of an overdetermination in cases of DC can be surpassed by the new relational ontological perspective presented here. (shrink)

This article explores the concept of non-personal immortality. Non-personal theories of immortality claim that even though there is no personal or individual survival of death, it is still possible to continue to exist in a non-personal state. The most important challenge for non-personal conceptions of immortality is solving the apparent contradiction between on the one hand accepting that individual existence ends with death and on the other hand maintaining that death nevertheless is not equal to total annihilation. I present two (...) theories of non-personal immortality found in Schopenhauer and William James and derive a set of systematic core theses from them. Finally, I discuss whether the notion of non-personal immortality is consistent, and whether a non-personal afterlife could be desirable. (shrink)

Physicians frequently encounter situations in which their professional practice is intermingled with moral affordances stemming from other domains of the physician’s lifeworld, such as family and friends, or from general morality pertaining to all humans. This article offers a typology of moral conflicts ‘at the margins of professionalism’ as well as a new theoretical framework for dealing with them. We start out by arguing that established theories of professional ethics do not offer sufficient guidance in situations where professional ethics overlaps (...) with moral duties of other origins. Therefore, we introduce the moral theory developed by Christine M. Korsgaard, that centres around the concept of practical identity. We show how Korsgaard’s account offers a framework for interpreting different types of moral conflicts ‘at the margins of professionalism’ to provide either orientation for solving the conflict or an explanation for the emotional and moral burden involved in moral dilemmas. (shrink)

What is the philosophical significance of attention? The present article provides an overview of recent debates surrounding the connections between attention and other topics of philosophical interest. In particular, it discusses the interplay between attention and consciousness, attention and agency, and attention and reference. The article outlines the questions and contemporary positions concerning how attention shapes the phenomenal character of experience, whether it is necessary or sufficient for consciousness, and whether it plays a special role in the best philosophical theories (...) of action or conceptual reference. Various interdependencies between the answers to these questions are indicated, as well as how these answers might depend on the metaphysics of attention. Together with its companion piece this article serves as an introduction to the philosophy of attention. (shrink)