A common complaint against Kripke’s Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language is that whereas the aim of “the real” Wittgenstein’s private language argument is to establish the impossibility of a necessarily private language, the communitarian account of meaning proposed by Kripke’s Wittgenstein (KW), if successful, would establish the impossibility of a contingently private language. I show that this common complaint is based on a failure of Kripke’s critics (a failure that is justified, in part, by Kripke’s text) to recognize and (...) understand his distinction between a “physically isolated” individual (PII) and an individual “considered in isolation” (ICl) . It is only an ICI for whom rule following and language are rendered impossible by KW. l then show that an lel speaks a necessarily private language. Thus, KW’s private language argument gives us, at best, the same story about the impossibility of private language as pre-Kripke accounts of Wittgenstein’s private language argument. (shrink)

A common complaint against Kripke’s Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language is that whereas the aim of “the real” Wittgenstein’s private language argument is to establish the impossibility of a necessarily private language, the communitarian account of meaning proposed by Kripke’s Wittgenstein , if successful, would establish the impossibility of a contingently private language. I show that this common complaint is based on a failure of Kripke’s critics to recognize and understand his distinction between a “physically isolated” individual and an (...) individual “considered in isolation” . It is only an ICI for whom rule following and language are rendered impossible by KW. l then show that an lel speaks a necessarily private language. Thus, KW’s private language argument gives us, at best, the same story about the impossibility of private language as pre-Kripke accounts of Wittgenstein’s private language argument. (shrink)

A common complaint against Kripke’s Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language is that whereas the aim of “the real” Wittgenstein’s private language argument is to establish the impossibility of a necessarily private language, the communitarian account of meaning proposed by Kripke’s Wittgenstein (KW), if successful, would establish the impossibility of a contingently private language. I show that this common complaint is based on a failure of Kripke’s critics (a failure that is justified, in part, by Kripke’s text) to recognize and (...) understand his distinction between a “physically isolated” individual (PII) and an individual “considered in isolation” (ICl). It is only an ICI for whom rule following and language are rendered impossible by KW. l then show that an lel speaks a necessarily private language. Thus, KW’s private language argument gives us, at best, the same story about the impossibility of private language as pre-Kripke accounts of Wittgenstein’s private language argument. (shrink)

This paper is a critical analysis of Putnam’s “consistency objection,” an objection made against a particular reading of Wittgenstein’s philosophy of mathematics (“up-to-us-ism”). I show that Putnam’s objection presupposes a rather unlikely version of Wittgenstein’s “up-to-us-ism” and is unable to undermine a more likely anti-Platonist version. I also show that a companion argument, (the “something more” argument) is unable to overturn this more sophisticated anti-Platonist version of Wittgenstein’s up-to-us-ism. Along the way I try to clarify Wittgenstein’s anti-Plalonist account of mathematics, (...) so that others do not repeat Putnam’s mistake. (shrink)

This paper is a critical analysis of Putnam’s “consistency objection,” an objection made against a particular reading of Wittgenstein’s philosophy of mathematics (“up-to-us-ism”). I show that Putnam’s objection presupposes a rather unlikely version of Wittgenstein’s “up-to-us-ism” and is unable to undermine a more likely anti-Platonist version. I also show that a companion argument, (the “something more” argument) is unable to overturn this more sophisticated anti-Platonist version of Wittgenstein’s up-to-us-ism. Along the way I try to clarify Wittgenstein’s anti-Plalonist account of mathematics, (...) so that others do not repeat Putnam’s mistake. (shrink)

Results: We analyzed 1,402 surveys and 15 in-depth interviews. Many (32%) CL participants reported greater difficulty refilling medications and a minority (14%) reported greater difficulty accessing HIV care during the pandemic. Most (99%) Opt4Mamas participants reported no difficulty refilling medications or accessing HIV/pregnancy care. Among the CL participants, older women were less likely (aOR = 0.95, 95% CI: 0.92–0.98) and women with more children were more likely (aOR = 1.13, 95% CI: 1.00–1.28) to report difficulty refilling medications. Only 2% of (...) CL participants reported greater difficulty managing FP and most (95%) reported no change in likelihood of using FP or desire to get pregnant. Qualitative analysis revealed three major themes: (1) adverse organizational/economic implications of the pandemic, (2) increased importance of pregnancy prevention during the pandemic, and (3) fear of contracting COVID-19. (shrink)

_Private Language_ is that it almost universally sees KW as offering, in his sceptical solution, an account of meaning attributions (i.e., statements of the form, "X means such-and-so by 's'"; hereafter, MAs) which takes their legitimate attribution to be a function of something other than facts or truth conditions. KW is almost universally read as having rejected any account of meaning attributions which takes them to be stating facts or corresponding to facts. In a word, KW is understood as offering (...) a nonfactualist account of MAs. And given that KW's sceptical challenge to the possibility of meaning rests on his negative assertions that there are no meaning facts, and that KW offers a sceptical solution to the sceptic's claim that meaning is impossible, i.e., a solution that by definition "begins . . . by conceding that the sceptic's negative assertions are unanswerable" (K, p. 66), it seems impossible that there would be any doubts about the accuracy of the "almost universal" reading of KW as a nonfactualist. (shrink)

Depoliticization: The Political Imaginary of Global Capitalism follows in the path blazed by Hannah Arendt and Cornelius Castoriadis, where politics is seen as a mode of freedom; the possibility for individuals to consciously and explicitly create the institutions of their own societies. Starting with such problem as: What is capital? How can we characterize the dominant economic system? What are the conditions for its existence, and how can we create alternatives?, the articles examine the central institutions of modern Western societies, (...) market capitalism, representative liberal democracy, and science. To elucidate the problem of depoliticization, the authors engage a number of thinkers from Karl Marx, Max Weber, Thorstein Veblen to Cornelius Castoriadis, Michel Foucault, Jacques Rancière, and Stanley Kubrick. -/- . (shrink)

The alleged paradox begins with a sceptical inquiry about my right to claim that my past usage of '+' (i.e., my past usage of the plus sign) was used to denote the function plus rather than the function quus. The definition of quus is: x quus y = x + y, if x, y < 57; otherwise, x quus y = 5. (Kripke uses an encircled plus sign to represent the quus sign. I can't reproduce that sign here so I'll (...) just use 'quus'). Basically, the problem is that on all of the problems that I have done so far, the plus and quus functions demand the same answers. So, whether I know it or not, my past responses to computations have been in accord with plus just as much as they have been in accord with quus. Thus, there seems to be no reason at all to prefer the claim that I've been plussing to the claim that I've been quussing, given my hypothetical past history. After all, the two functions are identical over the cases that I am allowed to appeal to so far. Given this setup, Kripke boldly asks: "Who is to say that [quus] is not the function I previously meant by '+'?" The sceptic claims that no one can legitimately claim that quus is not the function I previously meant by '+', given the hypothetical situation he proposes, because no one can find a fact that shows that I meant plus rather than quus. More specifically, the sceptic challenges those of us who disagree with him to produce a fact that shows that I meant plus rather than quus. Also, the sceptic requires that the fact in question "must, in some sense, show how I am justified in giving the answer '125' to '68 + 57'" (rather than '5'). (K, p. 11). (I have always seen the second form of the challenge, as Kripke calls it, viz., the requirement that the fact show how I am justified in answering '125' rather than '5', as simply a way of clarifying the task at hand. After all, challenging someone to produce a fact that I meant plus rather than quus is not the most obvious challenge in the world, for a variety of reasons. Since it's clear that if I such a fact could be produced, it would justify my saying '125' rather than '5', the second form of the challenge does not impose a new task on us.. (shrink)

The goal of this study is to reconsider Nietzsche's early metaphysics. Nietzsche has been understood both as the last metaphysician and as the first western thinker to overcome metaphysics. Most of Nietzsche's readers who have been concerned with this issue, however, have concentrated entirely on his conception of the will-to-power which appears in his later work and have completely ignored his early artists-metaphysics which is only to be found in his first book, The Birth of Tragedy. If the metaphysical foundations (...) of this work are mentioned at all, readers assume that, because of the prominence awarded to the Apollinian and the Dionysian, the two art-drives are the first principles of the Artisten-Metaphysik. Based on this assumption, these same readers conclude that Nietzsche left his early metaphysics behind as he developed his conception of the will-to-power; the Artisten-Metaphysik has no relation to the will-to-power. ;In contrast to this treatment of the Artisten-Metaphysik, I argue that the first principle of Nietzsche's early metaphysics is the primordial-one , the world artist. On the basis of this hypothesis, I demonstrate that if the Ur-Eine is indeed the first principle of the Artisten-Metaphysik, the two art-drives are derivative of this principle. The Apollinian and the Dionysian burst forth from nature without the intervention of the human artist; each of the two art-drives represents a different creative tendency of the primordial artist. ;The significance of my re-evaluation of the Artisten-Metaphysik is far-reaching. Although previous interpretations of The Birth of Tragedy have prevented readers from seeing any connection between the early metaphysics and the will-to-power, my reconstruction of the Artisten-Metaphysik invites the reader to compare Nietzsche's early metaphysics with his later philosophical thought. And while I do not deny the differences between the Artisten-Metaphysik and the will-to-power, my interpretation enables the reader to appreciate the similarities between Nietzsche's early and his later philosophical work. Nietzsche is no longer understood as either the last metaphysician or the first western thinker to overcome metaphysics; rather, I emphasize the importance of Nietzsche's role as a transitional thinker in the western philosophical tradition. Indeed, Nietzsche emerges as one who adopts the will-to-power in an attempt to overcome metaphysics. And while he thinks of himself as an "untimely one" and one of the first thinkers to have overcome metaphysics, from the vantage point of this investigation elements of metaphysical thought may be identified in his philosophy. (shrink)

Oddity One : Kripke claims that Wittgenstein has invented "a new form of scepticism", one which inclines Kripke "to regard it as the most radical and original sceptical problem that philosophy has seen to date, one that only a highly unusual cast of mind could have produced" (K, p. 60). However, Kripke also claims that there are analogies (and sometimes the analogies look very much like identities) between Wittgenstein's sceptical argument and the work of at least three and maybe four (...) other philosophers, viz., Quine, Goodman, Hume and Berkeley. Strange stuff indeed. The originality of Wittgenstein's work is especially difficult to see after Kripke claims that Wittgenstein presents a problem concerning the nexus between past . . . 'meanings' and present practice" (K, p. 62), and says that Hume is said to have questioned "the causal nexus whereby a past event necessitates a future one, and the inductive inferential nexus from the past to the future." (K, p. 62). Whither the originality? And the connection with Goodman's work with 'grue' is even closer than that between Kripke's Wittgenstein and Hume. Given that Kripke had read Goodman before "discovering" the rule-following paradox in Wittgenstein, one ought to be sceptical of Kripke's claim that Wittgenstein has invented a new form of scepticism. It would be much more accurate to say that Kripke has strapped Wittgenstein with a hybrid scepticism drawn from Hume and Goodman. (shrink)

IN the recently published Life by I.eslie Stephen of his brother, Fitz-James, there is an account of a school to which the latter went when he was a boy. The teacher, a certain Mr. Guest, used to converse with his pupils in this wise: "Gurney, what is the difference between justification and sanctification?- Stephen, prove the omnipotence of God " etc. In the midst of our Harvard freethinking and indifference we are prone to imagine that here at your good old (...) orthodox College conversation continues to be somewhat upon this order; and to show you that we at Harvard have not lost all interest in these vital subjects, I have brought with me tonight something like a sermon on justification by faith to read to you, --I mean an essay in justification of faith, a defence of our right to adopt a believing attitude in religious matters, in spite of the fact that our merely logical intellect may not have been coerced. 'The Will to Believe,' accordingly, is the title of my paper. (shrink)

Parts I through III of this paper will examine several, increasingly comprehensive forms of aggregation, ranging from insurance reimbursement “lock-in” programs to PDMPs to completely unified electronic medical records. Each part will advocate for the adoption of these aggregation systems and provide suggestions for effective implementation in the fight against opioid misuse. All PDMPs are not made equal, however, and Part II will, therefore, focus on several elements — mandating prescriber usage, streamlining the user interface, ensuring timely data uploads, creating (...) a national data repository, mitigating privacy concerns, and training doctors on how to respond to perceived doctor-shopping — that can make these systems more effective. In each part, we will also discuss the privacy concerns of aggregating data, ranging from minimal to significant, and highlight the unique role of stigma in motivating these concerns. In Part IV, we will conclude by suggesting remedial steps to offset this loss of privacy and to combat the stigma around SUDs and mental health disorders in general. (shrink)

To generate coherent behaviour, the brain needs to attend selectively to the many objects that are present in the environment, but this poses several questions. How does the brain know which objects 'belong together'? How does the information from different senses get combined? How does this help to plan and carry out actions? The subject of attentional mechanisms has a long history in cognitive psychology, as it is the key to making sense of the visual world. However, new developments in (...) cognitive neuroscience, and greater understanding of how attention and action are integrated, have transformed the field. This book is the first to bring together leading researchers to discuss the convergence of experimental findings in the following areas: Visual selective attention Attention and perceptual integration Spatial representation and attention Visual attention and action Control of attention Attention, Space, and Action provides a unique combination of perspectives that will appeal to students and researchers from psychology, neuropsychology, neurophysiology, and neuroanatomy. (shrink)

The publication of 'Animal Rights and Souls in the 18th Century' will be welcomed by everyone interested in the development of the modern animal liberation movement, as well as by those who simply want to savour the work of enlightenment thinkers pushing back the boundaries of both science and ethics. At last these long out-of-print texts are again available to be read and enjoyed - and what texts they are! Gems like Bougeant's witty reductio of the Christian view of animals (...) are included together with path-breaking works of ethics such as Primatt's A Dissertation on the Duty of Mercy and Sin of Cruelty to Brute Animals . There are works I have never seen before, including the remarkable Cry of Nature by the Scottish revolutionary Jacobin, John Oswald. In this set, everyone will find something novel, delightful and truly enlightening. - Peter Singer The discussion of animal rights and the moral status of animals, so prevalent in the late twentieth century, has its roots in the mid to late eighteenth century. Some of the themes we consider of recent invention - the legal standing of animals, the ethical status of vegetarians, cruelty towards animals, ultimately resulting in cruelty to humans - are of long standing. But in the eighteenth-century literature they are interconnected with theological issues surrounding animal souls, the birth of the life sciences, the great chain of being and other peculiarly eighteenth-century problems. This collection explores the exciting early discussions of moral theories concerning animals, placing them within their historical and social context. It reveals that issues such as vivisection, animal souls and vegetarianism were very much live philosophical subjects 200 years ago. The six volumes reprinted here includes complete works and edited extracts from such key eighteenth-century thinkers as Oswald, Primatt, Smellie, Monboddo and Jenyns. Many of the materials are extremely rare and never previously reprinted. The collection, edited with a new introduction and bio-bibliography by Aaron V. Garrett provides valuable original source material to supplement contemporary discussions of animal rights. --18th-century material on the theme of animal rights and practical ethics --an important supplement to contemporary animal rights discussions --provides a broader account of early discussions of the 'science of human nature' through animals --widens our understanding of 18th-century ethics through an important area of practical ethics --includes many scarce texts, most of which have never been reprinted before. (shrink)

_Raritan: A Quarterly Review_ , IX, 68-98, Summer 1989. Reprinted (with footnotes), _Occasional Paper #8_ , Center on Violence and Human Survival, John Jay College of Criminal Justice, The City University of New York, 1991; Daniel Kolak and R. Martin, eds., _Self & Identity: Contemporary Philosophical Issues_ , Macmillan, 1991.

This collection of essays is the definitive version of a widely discussed debate over the origins of the New Theory of Reference. In new articles, written especially for this volume, Quentin Smith and Scott Soames, the original participants in the debate, elaborate their positions on who was responsible for the ideas that Saul Kripke presented in his Naming and Necessity. They are joined by John Burgess, who weighs in on the side of Soames, while Smith adds a further dimension (...) in discussing the contributions of philosophers such as Follesdal, Geach, Hintikka, and Plantinga. Also included are lengthy excerpts from Follesdal's 1961 Harvard dissertation and a careful examination by Sten Lindstrom of the respective contributions of Kripke and Stig Kanger to the development of modal semantics. The collection will be essential reading for anyone acquainted with these influential ideas. (shrink)

This paper examines the recent ?deliberative turn? in environmental political thought with particular regard to demands concerning the employment of public reason in democratic deliberation. Working from John Rawls? account of the three essential elements of deliberative democracy, the paper assesses the scope for bringing environmental claims within the remit of public reason, and revisits the ?unfairness to novel reasons? objection against public reason, as articulated by Jeremy Waldron and then criticised by Lawrence Solum. I argue for a contextual (...) view of political justification. The unfairness objection is found to hold in an attenuated form, and disbarring non?public reasons from decisiveness in political justification, even on a wide view of public political culture, imposes an arbitrary unfairness on those, such as environmental activists, seeking to challenge widely shared, but possibly misguided, beliefs. (shrink)

This paper examines some possibilities for the laws of nature changing over time. This is done within the context of recent literature on transformational emergence. Transformational emergence is a diachronic account of emergence that does not require the invariance of fundamental objects, properties, and laws. The requirement that no new laws are introduced after the first instance of the universe seems to indicate that all the laws of the universe are present from the outset. By using a dispositional approach to (...) fundamental properties, this restriction can be avoided. An argument appealing to quantitative laws of nature is then used to show that such laws are not, contrary to dispositional essentialism, metaphysically necessary. Further arguments are given to support the possibility of change of laws across time rather than across worlds and why the identity conditions for properties are different in the two cases. The paper is framed by an analysis of John Stuart Mill’s reasons for imposing the invariance requirement on fundamental laws. (shrink)

We address some of the epistemological challenges highlighted by the Critical Data Studies literature by reference to some of the key debates in the philosophy of science concerning computational modeling and simulation. We provide a brief overview of these debates focusing particularly on what Paul Humphreys calls epistemic opacity. We argue that debates in Critical Data Studies and philosophy of science have neglected the problem of error management and error detection. This is an especially important feature of the epistemology of (...) Big Data. In “Error” section we explain the main characteristics of error detection and correction along with the relationship between error and path complexity in software. In this section we provide an overview of conventional statistical methods for error detection and review their limitations when faced with the high degree of conditionality inherent to modern software systems. (shrink)

Theoria, Volume 87, Issue 4, Page 971-985, August 2021.

The scarcity of vital organs has prompted several calls to either modify the dead donor rule or interpret it more broadly. Given its symbolic importance, however, the rule should be changed only cautiously.

Sympathy for animals is regarded by many thinkers as theoretically disreputable. Against this I argue that sympathy appropriately underlies moral concern for animals. I offer an account of sympathy that distinguishes sympathy with from sympathy for fellow creatures, and I argue that both can be placed on an objective basis, if we differentiate enlightened from folk sympathy. Moreover, I suggest that sympathy for animals is not, as some have claimed, incompatible with environmentalism; on the contrary, it can ground environmental concern. (...) Finally, I show that the traditional concept of anthropomorphism has no coherent basis, and I argue that the attempt to prove that animals lack thoughts is both unsuccessful and irrelevant to sympathy for languageless creatures. (shrink)

A Humean Critique of David Hume's Theory of Knowledge provides the first full-length Aristotilian-Thomistic critique of Hume's most mature and familiar work. While giving Hume proper respect and appreciation for his achievement, Jeremy White engages in a thoughtful critique through an approach based in Hume's own method.

Managers in Peru, South Africa, and the United States were classified into four groups along Singhapakdi et al. (J Bus Ethics 15:1131–1140, 1996) Perceived Role of Ethics and Social Responsibility (PRESOR) scale. In Peru and the United States, individuals in the ethics and social responsibility first category reported greater satisfaction with organizational performance than did those in the profits first category. Moral capitalists—individuals who report high emphases on both social responsibility and profits—reported the highest satisfaction with performance in the United (...) States. Managers in the United States are more likely than their counterparts in Peru and South Africa to reject the mutual exclusivity of prioritizing social responsibility and profits simultaneously. Directions for future research are outlined. (shrink)

Does ethical content in organizational mission statements make a difference? Research regarding the effectiveness and results of mission statements is mixed. Krohe concluded that much of the good results do not come from the mission statements themselves but from the strategic re-education that happens in producing one. We attempted to discover whether universities that explicitly state their ethical orientation and vision in their mission statements had students with higher perceived character trait importance and activities that reinforce character than universities that (...) did not. While the faculty and administration may receive benefits from mission statement development through strategic re-education as Krohe suggested, do the statements influence the students at the university who may have had no role in its creation? Using a sample of senior business students at 16 universities we found that students at universities with ethical statements in their mission statements had significantly higher perceived character trait importance and character reinforcement than those at universities whose missions lacked ethical statements. This research suggests that schools that explicitly stated ethical content in their mission statements do influence student ethical orientation. (shrink)