First published in 1987, Althusser, The Detour of Theory was widely received as the fullest account of its subject to date. Drawing on a wide range of hitherto untranslated material, it examined the political and intellectual contexts of Althusser's `return to Marx' in the mid-1960s and proclamaed of a `crisis of Marxism'. It concluded with a balance-sheet of Althusser's contribution to historical materialism. In this second edition, Gregory Elliott has added a substantial postscript in which he surveys the (...) posthumous edition of the French philosopher's work. (shrink)

Only one traditional objection to Pascal's wager is telling: Pascal assumes a particular theology, but without justification. We produce two new objections that go deeper. We show that even if Pascal's theology is assumed to be probable, Pascal's argument does not go through. In addition, we describe a wager that Pascal never considered, which leads away from Pascal's conclusion. We then consider the impact of these considerations on other prudential arguments concerning what one should believe, and on the more general (...) question of when and why belief formation ought to be based solely on the evidence. (shrink)

Volume 20, Issue 5, June 2020, Page 77-79.

In Considerations on Western Marxism, released in 1976, Perry Anderson stated and vindicated an affiliation to the Trotskyist tradition long apparent from the pages of New Left Review under his editorship. Central to this tradition, in its orthodox forms, was a historico-political perspective which regarded the Soviet Union as ‘degenerate’ or ‘deformed’ ‘workers’ states’ – post-capitalist social formations whose complex character dictated rejection of Stalinism and anti-Sovietism alike. In Anderson's case, this orientation received a Deutscherite inflection: abroad, no less than (...) at home, Soviet power was a contradictory phenomenon, by turns reactionary and progressive. The potential regeneration of the Russian Revolution and its sequels, whether via ‘proletarian revolution’ from below, or bureaucratic reformation from above, remained an article of faith among Marxists of this observance to the end. Accordingly, the debacle of Gorbachevite perestroika proved a profoundly disorientating experience for many who lent little or no credence to the mendacious claims of ‘actually existing socialism'. Amid capitalist euphoria at Communist collapse, what was to be said – and done? Anderson's displaced answer was forthcoming in 1992 in ‘The Ends of History’. (shrink)

The media attention and subsequent scientific backlash engendered by the claim, announced by spokespeople for the Encyclopedia of DNA Elements project, that 80% of the human genome has a “biochemical function” highlights the need for a clearer understanding of function concepts in biology. This article provides an overview of two major function concepts that have been developed in the philosophy of science – the “causal role” concept and the “selected effects” concept – and their relevance to ENCODE. Unlike some previous (...) critiques, the ENCODE project is not considered problematic because it employed a causal role definition of function, but because of how this concept was misused. In addition, several unique challenges that arise when dealing with transposable elements, but which were ignored by ENCODE, are highlighted. These include issues surrounding TE-level versus organism-level selection, the origins versus the persistence of elements, and accidental versus functional organism-level benefits. Finally, some key questions are presented that should be addressed in any studies aiming to ascribe functions to major portions of large eukaryotic genomes, the majority of which is made up of transposable elements. (shrink)

End-of-life decision making is fraught with ethical challenges. Withholding or withdrawing life support therapy is widely considered ethical in patients with high treatment burden, poor premorbid status, or significant projected disability even when such treatment is not “futile.” Whether such withdrawal of therapy in the aftermath of attempted suicide is ethical is not well established in the literature. We provide a clinical vignette and propose criteria under which such withdrawal would be ethical. We suggest that it is appropriate to withdraw (...) life support, regardless of the cause of the critical illness or disability, when the following criteria are met: (1) Surrogates request withdrawal of care and the adequacy of surrogates is confirmed, (2) an external reasonability standard is met, (3) passage of time, perhaps 72 hours, to allow certainty regarding the patient's wishes, and (4) psychiatric morbidity should be considered as grounds for withdrawal only in truly treatment-refractory cases. Fundamentally, we believe the question to ask is, “If this were not an attempted suicide, would a request to withdraw care be reasonable?” We believe that under these circumstances, such withdrawal of life support, even in an individual who has attempted suicide, does not constitute physician assistance with suicide and is distinct from physician aid-in-dying in several important respects. (shrink)

End-of-life decision making is fraught with ethical challenges. Withholding or withdrawing life support therapy is widely considered ethical in patients with high treatment burden, poor premorbid status, or significant projected disability even when such treatment is not ?futile.? Whether such withdrawal of therapy in the aftermath of attempted suicide is ethical is not well established in the literature. We provide a clinical vignette and propose criteria under which such withdrawal would be ethical. We suggest that it is appropriate to withdraw (...) life support, regardless of the cause of the critical illness or disability, when the following criteria are met: (1) Surrogates request withdrawal of care and the adequacy of surrogates is confirmed, (2) an external reasonability standard is met, (3) passage of time, perhaps 72 hours, to allow certainty regarding the patient's wishes, and (4) psychiatric morbidity should be considered as grounds for withdrawal only in truly treatment-refractory cases. Fundamentally, we believe the question to ask is, ?If this were not an attempted suicide, would a request to withdraw care be reasonable?? We believe that under these circumstances, such withdrawal of life support, even in an individual who has attempted suicide, does not constitute physician assistance with suicide and is distinct from physician aid-in-dying in several important respects. (shrink)

A promising recent development in molecular biology involves viewing the genome as a miniecosystem, where genetic elements are compared to organisms and the surrounding cellular and genomic structures are regarded as the local environment. Here we critically evaluate the prospects of Ecological Neutral Theory, a popular model in ecology, as it applies at the genomic level. This assessment requires an overview of the controversy surrounding neutral models in community ecology. In particular, we discuss the limitations of using ENT both as (...) an explanation of community dynamics and as a null hypothesis. We then analyze a case study in which ENT has been applied to genomic data. Our central finding is that genetic elements do not conform to the requirements of ENT once its assumptions and limitations are made explicit. We further compare this genome-level application of ENT to two other, more familiar approaches in genomics that rely on neutral mechanisms: Kimura’s Molecular Neutral Theory and Lynch’s Mutational Hazard Model. Interestingly, this comparison reveals that there are two distinct concepts of neutrality associated with these models which we dub ‘fitness-neutrality’ and ‘competitive neutrality’. This distinction helps to clarify the various roles for neutral models in genomics, for example, in explaining the evolution of genome size. (shrink)

We are grateful for the careful reading and insightful responses of the several peer commentaries to our proposed approach to requests to withhold or withdraw life support therapies among patients...

We are grateful for the careful reading and insightful responses of the several peer commentaries to our proposed approach to requests to withhold or withdraw life support therapies among patients...

This book situates Althusser and his texts within the wider histories and cultures to which they belong, drawing in contributors from a wide range of cultures and countries.

This essay is not about contemporary French philosophy, strictly speaking, but something which concerns it—an important episode in its modern history. Its intention is to deal, in very schematic terms, with the nature and evolution of French Marxism from the mid-1950s to the end of the 70s, focusing on two of its best-known and most influential representatives, Jean-Paul Sartre and Louis Althusser, and relating the internal history of their ambitious reconstructions of Marxism to the wider, non-theoretical history of which they (...) were a part— and for whose comprehension they sought to supply the conceptual instruments. Maurice Merleau-Ponty's balance-sheet of a century of Marxism, Adventures of the Dialectic, published in 1955, provides my starting point and explains my title. (shrink)

This book embraces two centuries of the history of non-violence, reconstructing the great historical crises that this movement has faced. In this book the historical reconstruction is intertwined with the philosophical and psychological analysis of the moral dilemmas that great historical crises inevitably imply.

"This first full reconstruction of Perry Anderson's distinguished career provides an overview of the evolution of the British New Left since 1956 and reveals a great deal about the vicissitudes of Marxist theory and political practice in ...

Analogical reasoning relies on subprocesses of long-term memory and problem-solving. Stress, with its accompanying hormones dehydroepiandrosterone and cortisol, has been shown to impair memo...

Considerable variation exists not only in the kinds of transposable elements (TEs) occurring within the genomes of different species, but also in their abundance and distribution. Noting a similarity to the assortment of organisms among ecosystems, some researchers have called for an ecological approach to the study of transposon dynamics. However, there are several ways to adopt such an approach, and it is sometimes unclear what an ecological perspective will add to the existing co-evolutionary framework for explaining transposon-host interactions. This (...) review aims to clarify the conceptual foundations of transposon ecology in order to evaluate its explanatory prospects. We begin by identifying three unanswered questions regarding the abundance and distribution of TEs that potentially call for an ecological explanation. We then offer an operational distinction between evolutionary and ecological approaches to these questions. By determining the amount of variance in transposon abundance and distribution that is explained by ecological and evolutionary factors, respectively, it is possible empirically to assess the prospects for each of these explanatory frameworks. To illustrate how this methodology applies to a concrete example, we analyzed whole-genome data for one set of distantly related mammals and another more closely related group of arthropods. Our expectation was that ecological factors are most informative for explaining differences among individual TE lineages, rather than TE families, and for explaining their distribution among closely related as opposed to distantly related host genomes. We found that, in these data sets, ecological factors do in fact explain most of the variation in TE abundance and distribution among TE lineages across less distantly related host organisms. Evolutionary factors were not significant at these levels. However, the explanatory roles of evolution and ecology become inverted at the level of TE families or among more distantly related genomes. Not only does this example demonstrate the utility of our distinction between ecological and evolutionary perspectives, it further suggests an appropriate explanatory domain for the burgeoning discipline of transposon ecology. The fact that ecological processes appear to be impacting TE lineages over relatively short time scales further raises the possibility that transposons might serve as useful model systems for testing more general hypotheses in ecology. (shrink)

Knowing the factors that executives deem critical to governance change can improve our understanding of how such changes come about and can help us evaluate those changes. Interviews with business and finance executives at 11 colleges reveal the importance to governance change of chief executive and board member leadership and interactions, as well as executive communication style. Costs are clear constraints to action, particularly since benefits are not quantified and are difficult to describe. Efforts to discuss governance with internal stakeholders (...) require persistence to overcome narrow, individualized concerns. Communication about governance to external stakeholders is rare and represents a missed opportunity for stakeholder feedback and the development of trust. Executives appear willing to adopt governance forms without considering the idiosyncrasies of their institutional field, limiting the working definition of governance and its potential. For corporations and not‐for‐profit enterprises these findings hold implications for the context in which leadership is exercised and the shape of governance structures. They also pose a fundamental ethical dilemma for leaders to address. (shrink)

Reducing health disparities and improving health outcomes are fundamental principles in global health. Environmental justice remains underrecognized and undervalued as a key driver of health dispar...

Sustained controversy over a philosophical issue is often times symptomatic of differing commitments at a more fundamental philosophical level. I will argue that two current debates over the foundations of the theory of natural selection are cases in point. Alexander Rosenberg, at times together with Mary Williams, challenges what is becoming received orthodoxy about the foundations of this theory. He argues that the currently popular propensity interpretation of fitness does not legitimize explanations in terms of natural selection, and that furthermore, (...) the biological fields which typically study the ways in which selection pressures originate in the organism/environment complex are not in fact part of the theory of natural selection at all. His foils in the first case are Robert Brandon, John Beatty and Susan Mills;2 on the second issue he is engaged in debate with Elliott Sober.3 We will see that, although the controversies are ostensibly about the interpretation of fitness, the issues, at bottom, involve the nature of scientific explanation. (shrink)

Book Reviws in this ArticleThe Human Body and the Law, 2nd edition by D.W. Meyers, Edinburgh University Press, 1990Classic Cases in Medical Ethics by Gregory E. Pence. New York: McGraw‐Hill Publishing Co. 1990Changing Values in Medical and Health Care Decision Making, edited by Uffejuul Jensen and Gavin Mooney. Chichester: John Wiley & Sons, 1990IVF and Justice by Teresa Iglesias, London: The Linacre Centre For Health Care Ethics, 1990The Practical, Moral and Personal Sense of Nursing: A Phenomenon‐ological Philosophy of Practice (...) by Anne H. Bishop and John R. Scudder, Jr. New York: State University of New York Press, 1990A Companion to Ethics, edited by Peter Singer. Oxford and Cambridge, Mass: Basil Blackwell, 1991.Ethics and Law in Health Care and Research edited by Peter Byrne, Chichester, UK: 1990The Human Embryo edited by G.R. Dunstan, Exeter: Exeter University Press, 1990Everyday Ethics: Resolving Dilemmas in Nursing Home Life by Rosalie A. Kane and Arthur L. Caplan. N.Y.: Springer Publishing Company, 1990Psychiatric Ethics, 2nd edition, edited by S. Bloch and P. Chodoff. Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1991Health Care and Gender by Charlotte Muller. New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1990. (shrink)

The theory of lower previsions is designed around the principles of coherence and sure-loss avoidance, thus steers clear of all the updating anomalies highlighted in Gong and Meng's "Judicious Judgment Meets Unsettling Updating: Dilation, Sure Loss, and Simpson's Paradox" except dilation. In fact, the traditional problem with the theory of imprecise probability is that coherent inference is too complicated rather than unsettling. Progress has been made simplifying coherent inference by demoting sets of probabilities from fundamental building blocks to secondary representations (...) that are derived or discarded as needed. (shrink)

In this paper, we defend the view that Spinoza is committed to allowing for the existence of a plurality of possible worlds, that his necessitarianism is merely moderate, not strict enough to exclude the possibility of other worlds. To show that evidence for attributing strict necessitarianism to Spinoza is lacking, we shall concentrate on Don Garrett's article, “Spinoza's Necessitarianism,” in the conviction that his case for attributing strict necessitarianism to Spinoza is the strongest one available.

Many philosophers are attracted to a complaints-based theory of the procreation asymmetry, according to which creating a person with a bad life is wrong (all else equal) because that person can complain about your act, whereas declining to create a person who would have a good life is not wrong (all else equal) because that person never exists and so cannot complain about your act. In this paper, I present two problems for such theories: the problem of impairable-life acceptance and (...) an especially acute version of the problem of improvable-life avoidance. I explain how these problems afflict two recent complaints-based theories of the procreation asymmetry, from Joe Horton and Abelard Podgorski. (shrink)

According to Critical-Level Views in population axiology, an extra life improves a population only if that life’s welfare exceeds some fixed ‘critical level.’ An extra life at the critical level leaves the new population equally good as the original. According to Critical-Range Views, an extra life improves a population only if that life’s welfare exceeds some fixed ‘critical range.’ An extra life within the critical range leaves the new population incommensurable with the original. -/- In this paper, I sharpen some (...) old objections to these views and offer some new ones. Critical-Level Views cannot avoid certain Repugnant and Sadistic Conclusions. Critical-Range Views imply that lives featuring no good or bad components whatsoever can nevertheless swallow up and neutralise goodness or badness. Both classes of view entail that certain small changes in welfare correspond to worryingly large differences in contributive value. -/- I then offer a view that retains much of the appeal of Critical-Level and Critical-Range Views while avoiding the above pitfalls. On the Imprecise Exchange Rates View, the quantity of some good required to outweigh a given unit of some bad is imprecise. This imprecision is the source of incommensurability between lives and populations. (shrink)

Lexical views in population axiology can avoid the Repugnant Conclusion without violating Transitivity or Separability. However, they imply a dilemma: either some good life is better than any number of slightly worse lives, or else the ‘at least as good as’ relation on populations is radically incomplete. In this paper, I argue that Archimedean views face an analogous dilemma. I thus conclude that the lexical dilemma gives us little reason to prefer Archimedean views. Even if we give up on lexicality, (...) problems of the same kind remain. (shrink)

Arrhenius’s impossibility theorems purport to demonstrate that no population axiology can satisfy each of a small number of intuitively compelling adequacy conditions. However, it has recently been pointed out that each theorem depends on a dubious assumption: Finite Fine-Grainedness. This assumption states that there exists a finite sequence of slight welfare differences between any two welfare levels. Denying Finite Fine-Grainedness makes room for a lexical population axiology which satisfies all of the compelling adequacy conditions in each theorem. Therefore, Arrhenius’s theorems (...) fail to prove that there is no satisfactory population axiology. In this paper, I argue that Arrhenius’s theorems can be repurposed. Since all of our population-affecting actions have a non-zero probability of bringing about more than one distinct population, it is population prospect axiologies that are of practical relevance, and amended versions of Arrhenius’s theorems demonstrate that there is no satisfactory population prospect axiology. These impossibility theorems do not depend on Finite Fine-Grainedness, so lexical views do not escape them. (shrink)

Critical-set views avoid the Repugnant Conclusion by subtracting some constant from the welfare score of each life in a population. These views are thus sensitive to facts about biographical identity: identity between lives. In this paper, I argue that questions of biographical identity give us reason to reject critical-set views and embrace the total view. I end with a practical implication. If we shift our credences towards the total view, we should also shift our efforts towards ensuring that humanity survives (...) for the long term. (shrink)