This essay explores care ethics and possibilities for caring otherwise through the lens of prefigurative praxis. It draws on the conceptualizations and critiques of care, care practices, and care futurism of writers, theorists, activists, and organizers from Black, Indigenous, and people of colour (BIPOC), disabled, and/or LGBTQIA+ communities, particularly those whose work is underpinned by disability justice and prison industrial complex abolition. It understands disability justice and abolition as integral to our ability to collectively respond to care crises in ways (...) that think beyond austerity, carcerality, and institutional forms of care. (shrink)

Fluid socio-cultural ecologies that reflect historical events and their actors have led to particular religious groups being promoted or persecuted. This article explores how religiously minoritized youth are identified considering local and global contexts. I apply a phenomenological variant of ecological systems theory (PVEST) to understanding regularities and variations in development through a person-centered, relational, holistic lens that considers the intersection of multiple identities. Relatedly, I outline broad conceptual tools that center on how orientations to in-group vs out-group religious and (...) intersecting identities and related experiences align with a range of research methods to reflect such complexity. I suggest ways to study religious and spiritual influences of religiously minoritized youth that are specific to the faith tradition and particular youth’s circumstances in a holistic manner when these issues are a focal area of study, and when they emerge as relevant to other inquiries. Finally, I consider how understanding religiously minoritized youth, their peers, and mentors can be applied to educational, health care, and community settings to inform equitable practice and policy. (shrink)

An invitation to readers from every walk of life to rediscover the impractical splendors of a life of learning In an overloaded, superficial, technological world, in which almost everything and everybody is judged by its usefulness, where can we turn for escape, lasting pleasure, contemplation, or connection to others? While many forms of leisure meet these needs, Zena Hitz writes, few experiences are so fulfilling as the inner life, whether that of a bookworm, an amateur astronomer, a birdwatcher, or (...) someone who takes a deep interest in one of countless other subjects. Drawing on inspiring examples, from Socrates and Augustine to Malcolm X and Elena Ferrante, and from films to Hitz's own experiences as someone who walked away from elite university life in search of greater fulfillment, Lost in Thought is a passionate and timely reminder that a rich life is a life rich in thought. Today, when even the humanities are often defended only for their economic or political usefulness, Hitz says our intellectual lives are valuable not despite but because of their practical uselessness. And while anyone can have an intellectual life, she encourages academics in particular to get back in touch with the desire to learn for its own sake, and calls on universities to return to the person-to-person transmission of the habits of mind and heart that bring out the best in us. Reminding us of who we once were and who we might become, Lost in Thought is a moving account of why renewing our inner lives is fundamental to preserving our humanity. (shrink)

A legal obligation to conduct weapons reviews is a means by which the international community can ensure that States assess whether the use of new types of weapons in armed conflict would raise humanitarian concerns. The use of artificial intelligence in weapon systems greatly complicates the process of conducting reviews, particularly where a weapon system is capable of continuing to ‘learn’ on its own after being deployed on the battlefield. This paper surveys current understandings of the weapons review challenges presented (...) by in situ learning and outlines some concepts which may inform appropriate changes to existing weapons review processes. The main arguments made are that: a distinction should be drawn between learning capabilities that are limited to optimising existing behaviour and capabilities that extend to acquiring new behaviours; and the extent of a weapon system’s learning capabilities should be used as the basis for defining a schedule of weapons reviews. (shrink)

It is widely agreed that Aristotle holds that the best moral education involves habituation in the proper pleasures of virtuous action. But it is rarely acknowledged that Aristotle repeatedly emphasizes the social and political sources of good habits, and strongly suggests that the correct law‐ordained education in proper pleasures is very rare or non‐existent. A careful look at the Nicomachean Ethics along with parallel discussions in the Eudemian Ethics and Politics suggests that Aristotle divided public moral education or law‐ordained habituation (...) into two types. One type is a defective form practiced by the Spartans, producing civic courage and similar defective virtue‐ like states motivated by external incentives. By contrast Aristotle endorses the law‐ordained musical education described in Politics 8. The chapter argues that Aristotle considers the well‐habituated state of proper pleasures in virtue to be best cultivated by this kind of musical education; and that this explains both his emphasis on good laws and on their scarcity. (shrink)

In Nicomachean Ethics 10.7, Aristotle says that the contemplative wise person living the happiest and most self-sufficient life will need other people less than a person living a life of practical virtue. This seems to be in tension with Aristotle's emphasis elsewhere on the political nature of human beings. I analyze in detail Aristotle's most elaborate defense of the need for friends in the happy life in Nicomachean Ethics 9.9 to see whether and how he resolves the need for friends (...) with the self-sufficiency of the happy life. The virtue-friendship described in the chapter does turn out to be more compatible with the self-contained unity of a happy life than other sorts of friendship, because collaboration in virtuous activities integrates the friend into one's activities. This is true even for contemplative friendship, where, as Aristotle suggests in the ornate final argument of 9.9, the friends collaboratively contemplate human nature and take pleasure in the goodness of human life. The unity achieved in this kind of friendship is an imitation of God's self-contemplative and self-contained unity. Nonetheless, I conclude, there is no evidence that Aristotle did not think that friendship was conditioned on human failings and so that friends would be less necessary for those leading the most excellent contemplative lives. (shrink)

RÉSUMÉ: Il semble injuste, à la réflexion, de blâmer les agents pour les mauvaises conséquences non voulues de leurs actions. Le présent article montre au contraire que la pratique de blâmer les agents d’une façon différente en raison de circonstances pourtant fortuites est bel et bien juste après tout. Si les agents agissent de manière impeccable, ils prennent une «assurance morale» contre la malchance et se mettent ainsi à l’abri de tout blâme relatif aux conséquences non voulues de leurs actions. (...) Mais s’ils agissent mal, ils renoncent à cette assurance morale et s’exposent ainsi à être blâmés pour ces mauvaises conséquences non voulues. Le fait que les agents qui agissent mal renoncent intentionnellement à leur assurance justifie que nous les blâmions pour les mauvaises conséquences non voulues de leurs actions. (shrink)

Appointment as a director of a company board often represents the pinnacle of a management career. Worldwide, it has been noted that very few women are appointed to the boards of directors of companies. Blame for the low numbers of women of company boards can be partly attributed to the widely publicized "glass ceiling". However, the very low representation of women on company boards requires further examination. This article reviews the current state of women's representation on boards of directors and (...) summarizes the reasons as to why women are needed on company boards. Given that more women on boards are desirable, the article then describes how more women could be appointed to boards, and the actions that organizations and women could take to help increase the representation of women. Finally, the characteristics of those women that have succeeded in becoming members of company boards are described from an international perspective. Unfortunately, answers to the vexing question of whether these women have gained board directorships in their own right as extremely competent managers, or whether they are mere token female appointments in a traditional male dominated culture, remains elusive. (shrink)

The essay concerns the negative end of the political argument of the Republic, that injustice—the rule of unreason—is both widespread and undesirable, and that whatever shadows of virtue or order might be found in its midst are corrupt and unstable. This claim is explained in detail in Republic 8 and 9. These passages explain recognizable faults in recognizable regimes in terms of the failure of the rule of reason and the corresponding success of the rule of non-rational forms of motivation. (...) I will first look at degenerate regimes as they appear in a less systematic way in the Ship of State passage in Republic 6 and in the discussion with Thrasymachus in book 1. I then give a general overview of the system of degenerate regimes in book 8 to examine what exactly goes wrong with them and why, and explain how the process of degeneration ought be understood as the progressive decay of the rule of reason. Finally, I argue that a close look at this decay reveals something surprising: that degenerate regimes and characters feature weak versions of virtue, shadow-virtues that are based on appearances and held in place by force. Thus in the end the whole process of degeneration ought be understood as an extended conflict between reason and appetite. (shrink)

This paper is in part an introduction to Plato's late political philosophy. In the central sections, I look at Plato's Laws and Statesman and ask the question of how law can produce authentic virtue. If law is merely coercive or habituating, but virtue requires rational understanding, there will be a gap between what law can do and what it is supposed to do. I examine the solution to this difficulty proposed in the Laws, the persuasive preludes attached to the laws, (...) and suggest that they produce an inferior, passive mode of rational order that falls short of full virtue. (shrink)

What is happiness? Does life have a meaning? If so, is that meaning available in an ordinary life? The philosopher Zena Hitz confronted these questions head-on when she spent several years living in a Christian religious community. Religious life -- the communal life chosen by monks, nuns, friars, and hermits -- has been a part of global Christianity since earliest times, but many of us struggle to understand what could drive a person to renounce wealth, sex, children, and ambition (...) to live a life of prayer and sacrifice. Hitz's lively and accessible book explores questions about faith, sacrifice, asceticism and happiness through philosophy, stories, and examples from religious life. Drawing on personal experience as well as film, literature, history, biography, and theology, it demystifies an important element of contemporary culture, and provides a picture of human flourishing and happiness which challenges and enriches modern-day life. (shrink)

We present an extension of the lambda calculus with the letrec construct. In contrast to current theories, which impose restrictions on where the rewriting can take place, our theory is very liberal, e.g., it allows rewriting under lambda abstractions and on cycles. As shown previously, the reduction theory is non-confluent. Thus, we searched for and found a new property that resembles confluence and that is equivalent to uniqueness of infinite normal forms: skew confluence. This notion is based on the intuition (...) that some terms are better than others and that terms reduce to better terms. It states that if a term reduces to two other terms, the second of those terms can always be reduced to a term that is better than the first. Using skew confluence we define the infinite normal form of a term and show that the infinite normal form defines a congruence on the set of terms. We relate the lambda calculus plus letrec to the plain lambda calculus and to one of the infinitary lambda calculi. We also present a variant of our calculus, which follows the tradition of the explicit substitution calculi. (shrink)

Expressions designating collectives, such as “the committee” or “the ships in the port”, may be interpreted de re or de dicto, depending on context, according as they pick out collectives defined by their members or collectives defined by some criterion for membership. We call these E-collectives and I-collectives respectively, and in this paper we explore in depth the relationship between these two categories. In particular, we identify important respects in which they differ, regarding the nature of the dependence of the (...) collective on its members, the nature of the parthood relation in which the members stand to the whole, and, from an application perspective, the different methods used for identifying the two forms of collective from large spatio-temporal data-sets. (shrink)

Extant research on political corporate social responsibility (PCSR) has not yet addressed how the populist turn impacts PCSR theory and practice. This conceptual article analyzes how populism influences PCSR across a range of political environments. We draw on signaling and screening theories to develop a conceptual model that advances PCSR literature by proposing an information-centric approach. We highlight the necessity of high-quality information as an enabling condition for effective PCSR-related decision-making, and our model explains how the depreciation of information transparency (...) under populism impacts PCSR strategy. We thus contribute to PCSR literature with a new information-based theorization by showing how PCSR depends on the political environment and by enhancing our understanding of the role of the state in the development of PCSR strategies. (shrink)

Philosophers of mind have long been interested in the relation between two ideas: that causality plays an essential role in our understanding of the mental; and that we can gain an understanding of belief and desire by considering the ascription of attitudes to people on the basis of what they say and do. Many have thought that those ideas are incompatible. William Child argues that there is in fact no tension between them, and that we should accept both. He shows (...) how we can have a causal understanding of the mental without having to see attitudes and experiences as internal, causally interacting entities and he defends this view against influential objections. The book offers detailed discussions of many of Donald Davidson's contributions to the philosophy of mind, and also considers the work of Dennett, Anscombe, McDowell, and Rorty, among others. Issues discussed include: the nature of intentional phenomena; causal explanation; the character of visual experience; psychological explanation; and the causal relevance of mental properties. (shrink)

Life and works -- The Tractatus, language and logic -- The Tractatus, reality and the limits of language -- From the Tractatus to philosophical investigations -- Intentionality and rule-following -- Mind and psychology -- Knowledge and certainty -- Religion and anthropology -- Legacy and influence.

The extracellular domains of several integral membrane proteins are released from the cell surface by a group of enzymes known as “sheddases” through a process called “ectodomain shedding”. Because many transmembrane growth and differentiation factors, including members of the epidermal growth factor (EGF) family that play a crucial role in development, require ectodomain shedding for proper action in vivo, proteolysis is now viewed as a regulatory mechanism in the developing embryos. Two recent reports by Zhao et al. provide evidence for (...) the role of cell surface proteolysis by an ADAM (a disintegrin and metalloprotease) in the development of murine lung.(1,2) Inhibition of tumor necrosis factor‐α converting enzyme (TACE, ADAM17) by the hydroxamic acid‐based metalloprotease inhibitor (TAPI), (1) or a targeted mutation in Zn2+‐binding domain of TACE, (2) disrupts two essential epithelial functions in lung development: branching morphogenesis and cytodifferentiation. Evidence for the role of ADAMs as sheddases in development and growth factor signaling is discussed. BioEssays 24:8–12, 2002. © 2002 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. (shrink)

Profit is a concept that both causes and manifests deep conflict and division. It is not merely that people disagree over whether it is good or bad. The very meaning of the concept and its role in competing theories necessitates the deepest possible disagreement; people cannot agree on what profit is. Still, simply learning the starkly different sentiments expressed about profit gives us some feel for the depth of the conflict. Friends of capitalism have praised profit as central to the (...) achievement of prosperity and to civilized modern life. Calvin Coolidge, that silent sentinel of American business, said, “Profit and civilization go hand in hand.” F. A. Hayek tells us that in the evolution of the structure of human activities, profitability works as a signal that guides selection towards what makes man more fruitful; only what is more profitable will, as a rule, nourish more people, for it sacrifices less than it adds. (shrink)

At present, Third World countries owe over one trillion dollars to the developed Western nations; much of the debt is held by the leading international commercial banks. The debt of six Latin American countries alone — Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Mexico, Peru, and Venezuela — is over $330 billion, of which $240 billion is owed to commercial banks. Let us immediately narrow our focus to loans made by the major international commercial banks to Third World governments. We shall not be concerned (...) with government-to-government loans, or private-party-to-private-party loans, or with debt owed to the World Bank or the International Monetary Fund. The bank-to-government loans — the so-called “sovereign loans” — are the most economically troublesome and morally interesting. The largest lenders, at least with respect to the Latin American countries, are the American banks Citibank, Chase Manhattan, Bank of America, Manufacturers Hanover, and Chemical Bank. About fifteen Third World countries have serious debt problems, including the largest: Brazil, Mexico, and Argentina. (shrink)

Objective: Symptom improvement is often examined as an indicator of a good outcome of accessing mental health services. However, there is little evidence of whether symptom improvement is associated with other indicators of a good outcome, such as a mutual agreement to end treatment. The aim of this study was to examine whether young people accessing mental health services who meaningfully improved were more likely to mutually agree to end treatment.Methods: Multilevel multinomial regression analysis controlling for age, gender, ethnicity, and (...) referral source was conducted on N = 8,995 episodes of care [Female = 5,469, 61%; meanAge = 13.66 years] using anonymised administrative data from young people's mental health services.Results: Compared to young people with no change in mental health difficulties, those showing positive meaningful changes in mental health difficulties were less likely to have case closure due to non-mutual agreement. Similarly, they were less likely to transfer or end treatment for other reasons than by case closure due to mutual agreement.Conclusion: The findings suggest that young people accessing mental health services whose symptoms meaningfully improve are more likely to mutually agree to end treatment, adding to the evidence that symptom improvement may be appropriate to examine as an indicator of a good outcome of accessing mental health services. (shrink)

What is the relation between meaning and use? This chapter first defends a non-reductionist understanding of Wittgenstein’s suggestion that ‘the meaning of a word is its use in the language’; facts about meaning cannot be reduced to, or explained in terms of, facts about use, characterized non-semantically. Nonetheless, it is contended, facts about meaning do supervene on non-semantic facts about use. That supervenience thesis is suggested by comments of Wittgenstein’s and is consistent with his view of meaning and rule-following. Semantic (...) supervenience is then defended against two criticisms: first, John McDowell’s suggestion that the supervenience thesis falsifies the epistemology of meaning and fails to accommodate common-sense truths about meaning; second, a series of counter-examples proposed by Stephen Kearns and Ofra Magidor, who argue that worlds may differ semantically without differing non-semantically. It is argued that neither criticism is convincing: we should accept the thesis that semantic facts supervene on non-semantic facts. (shrink)

It is natural to say that when we acquire a new concept or concepts, or grasp a new theory, or master a new practice, we come to see things in a new way: we perceive phenomena that we were not previously aware of; we come to see patterns or connections that we did not previously see. That natural idea has been applied in many areas, including the philosophy of science, the philosophy of religion, and the philosophy of language. And, in (...) reflecting on the character of philosophy itself, Wittgenstein himself associates the introduction of a new concept in philosophy with the discovery of a new way of looking at things (PI §401), and says that the point of presenting us with an imagined example may be to change our way of looking at things (PI §144). The paper considers four interrelated questions about this association between seeing-as and change, novelty, or innovation. 1. Is there an important difference between the case where the change in someone’s way of seeing things involves the invention or discovery of a completely new concept, a completely new theory etc., and the case where it involves the person’s coming to understand an existing concept or theory? 2. Is there a special connection between seeing-as and conceptual or theoretical change or creativity: a connection that does not obtain between seeing-as and using or applying a familiar theory or system of concepts? 3. In cases where seeing-as is associated with novelty or creativity, is there any sense in which the fact that someone sees things in a new way can help to explain their conceptual or theoretical creativity? 4. To the extent that there is some association between seeing-as and novelty or creativity, why if at all does it matter that one experiences things in a certain way? Would someone who was aspect-blind be any worse off with respect to creativity or innovation than the rest of us? And if so, why? (shrink)

William Child; IV*—On the Dualism of Scheme and Content, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Volume 94, Issue 1, 1 June 1994, Pages 53–72, https://doi.org/.

William Child; IV*—On the Dualism of Scheme and Content, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Volume 94, Issue 1, 1 June 1994, Pages 53–72, https://doi.org/.

A central theme in Wittgenstein’s post-Tractatus remarks on the limits of language is that we ‘cannot use language to get outside language’. One illustration of that idea is his comment that, once we have described the procedure of teaching and learning a rule, we have ‘said everything that can be said about acting correctly according to the rule’; ‘we can go no further’. That, it is argued, is an expression of anti-reductionism about meaning and rules. A framework is presented for (...) assessing the debate between reductionist and anti-reductionist readings of Wittgenstein’s views about meaning and use. It is argued that that debate cannot be settled merely by reference to Wittgenstein’s general opposition to reductionism. An important argument for anti-reductionism about rules and meaning, from Remarks on the Foundations of Mathematics, is discussed. Putative evidence of reductionism about meaning in the Brown Book is considered; an alternative reading is proposed. The nature of Wittgenstein’s anti-reductionism is examined. It is argued, first, that Wittgenstein accepts that semantic and normative facts supervene on non-semantic, non-normative facts and, second, that at many points his treatment of meaning and rules goes beyond the kind of pleonastic claim that is often taken to define non-reductionist, quietist, positions in philosophy. (shrink)

How should we understand our capacity to remember our past intentional states? And what can we leam from Wittgenstein's treatment of this topic? Three questions are considered. First, what is the relation between our past attitudes and our present beliefs about them? Realism about past attitudes is defended. Second, how should we understand Wittgenstein's view that self‐ascriptions of past attitudes are a kind of “response” and that the “language‐game” of reporting past attitudes is “the primary thing”? The epistemology and metaphysics (...) of past‐tense self‐ascription are examined in the light of those comments, and our acquisition of the concept of past attitudes is discussed. Third, does Wittgenstein give us reason to think that the identity of a past attitude may be constituted, not by anything that was true of the subject at the time, but by her retrospective tendency to self‐ascribe it? It is argued that, contrary to some interpretations, he does not. (shrink)

How should we understand our capacity to remember our past intentional states? And what can we learn from Wittgenstein's treatment of this topic? Three questions are considered. First, what is the relation between our past attitudes and our present beliefs about them? Realism about past attitudes is defended. Second, how should we understand Wittgenstein's view that self-ascriptions of past attitudes are a kind of "response" and that the "language-game" of reporting past attitudes is "the primary thing"? The epistemology and metaphysics (...) of past-tense self-ascription are examined in the light of those comments, and our acquisition of the concept of past attitudes is discussed. Third, does Wittgenstein give us reason to think that the identity of a past attitude may be constituted,not by anything that was true of the subject at the time, but by her retrospective tendency to self-ascribe it? It is argued that, contrary to some interpretations, he does not. (shrink)

Part 1 of this paper sketches Wittgenstein’s opposition to scientism in general. Part 2 explores his opposition to scientism in philosophy focusing, in particular, on philosophy of mind; how must philosophy of mind proceed if it is to avoid the kind of scientism that Wittgenstein complains about? Part 3 examines a central anti-scientistic strand in Wittgenstein’s Last Writings on the Philosophy of Psychology volume II: his treatment of the ‘uncertainty’ of the relation between ‘outer’ behaviour and ‘inner’ experiences and mental (...) states. (shrink)

Wittgenstein’s philosophy involves a general anti-platonism about properties or standards of similarity. On his view, what it is for one thing to have the same property as another is not dictated by reality itself; it depends on our classificatory practices and the standards of similarity they embody. Wittgenstein’s anti-platonism plays an important role in the private language sections and in his discussion of the conceptual problem of other minds. In sharp contrast to Wittgenstein’s views stands the contemporary doctrine of natural (...) properties, which holds that there is an objective hierarchy of naturalness amongst properties, a hierarchy that is completely independent of our concepts or practices. Some authors have appealed to the natural properties view to offer an explicitly anti-Wittgensteinian account of sensation concepts. The paper discusses these competing views of properties and sensation concepts. It is argued that, if our account of concepts of conscious states starts from a commitment to natural properties, we are bound to recognize that our actual classificatory practices also play a crucial role in determining which properties our concepts pick out. On the other hand, if we start from the anti-platonist position, we are bound to recognize that we also need a notion of sameness of property that extends beyond our limited capacity to recognize similarity or sameness of property. The correct view, it is concluded, must occupy a middle position between an extreme anti-realism about properties and an extreme version of the natural properties view. It is suggested that Wittgenstein’s own view does just that. (shrink)