The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate that Francis Hutcheson’s moral sense theory offers a satisfactory account of moral perception. I introduce Hutcheson’s work in §1 and indicate why the existence of a sixth sense is not implausible. I provide a summary of Robert Cowan and Robert Audi’s respective theories of evaluative perception in §2, identifying three problematic objections: the Directness Objection to Cowan’s ethical perception and the aesthetic and perceptual model objections to Audi’s moral perception. §3 examines Hutcheson’s (...) moral sense theory, focusing on his discussion of benevolence, the desire for the happiness of others. I deal with the unresolved issues in Hutcheson’s account by recourse to Charles Darwin’s evolutionary perspective on the moral sense in §4, arguing for the moral sense as the second-order faculty for judging benevolence. I return, in §5, to the objections, showing that moral sense theory solves all three problems and therefore offers a satisfactory account of moral perception. (shrink)

Francis Hutcheson is generally accepted as producing the first systematic study of aesthetics, in the first treatise of An Inquiry into the Original of Our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue, initially published in 1725. His theory reflected the eighteenth century concern with beauty rather than art, and has drawn accusations of vagueness since the first critical response, by Charles Louis DeVillete in 1750. The most serious critique concerns the idea of beauty itself: whether it was simple or complex, and (...) the idea of a primary or secondary quality. It is the latter question I shall answer, attempting to clarify the problematic passage that appears at the end of the first section of Hutcheson’s first treatise. (shrink)

The present edition provides a detailed and accessible discussion ofhis theories and adds an account of the immediate responses to the book on publication.

The purpose of this essay is to argue that Blade Runner: The Final Cut (Ridley Scott, 2007) has cognitive value which is inseparable from its value as a work of cinema. I introduce the cinematic philosophy debate in §1. §2 sets out my position: that the Final Cut affirms the proposition there is no necessary relation between humanity and human beings. I outline the combination of cinematic depiction with distinctive features of the narrative’s peripeteia in §3. In §4, I explain (...) the cognitive value of the peripeteia. (shrink)

Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species is unquestionably one of the chief landmarks in biology. The Origin (as it is widely known) was literally only an abstract of the manuscript Darwin had originally intended to complete and publish as the formal presentation of his views on evolution. Compared with the Origin, his original long manuscript work on Natural Selection, which is presented here and made available for the first time in printed form, has more abundant examples and illustrations (...) of Darwin's argument, plus an extensive citation of sources. (shrink)

At the very beginning of L’Homme-Machine, La Mettrie claims that Leibnizians with their monads have “rather spiritualized matter than materialized the soul”; a few years later Pierre-Louis Moreau de Maupertuis, President of the Berlin Academy of Sciences and natural philosopher with a strong interest in the modes of transmission of ‘genetic’ information, conceived of living minima which he termed molecules, “endowed with desire, memory and intelligence,” in his Système de la nature ou Essai sur les corps organisés. This text first (...) appeared in Latin in 1751 under the title Dissertatio inauguralis metaphysica de universali naturae systemate, with the pseudonym Dr Baumann; it was translated by Maupertuis in 1754 as Essai sur la formation des corps organisés and was later included in his 1756 Œuvres under the title Système de la nature. Now, it is clear that Maupertuis was a kind of Leibnizian; and that his molecule possessed higher-level, ‘mental’ properties. In that sense he falls under the first category described by La Mettrie. But he was also involved in a debate on this issue with Diderot, who put forth a sustained critique of Maupertuis’ theory of the molecule in the additions to his 1753 Pensées sur l’interprétation de la nature. Where Maupertuis attributes higher-level properties to his living minima, Diderot argues that these properties are ‘organizational’, i.e., they can only be properties of the whole. At issue here is the degree of commitment to a form of materialism. (shrink)

The label `semiotic grammar' captures a fundamental property of the grammars of human languages: not only is language a semiotic system in the familiar Saussurean sense, but its organizing system, its grammar, is also a semiotic system. This proposition, explicated in detail by William McGregor in this book, constitutes a new theory of grammar. Semiotic Grammar is `functional' rather than `formal' in its intellectual origins, approaches, and methods. It demonstrates, however, that neither a purely functional nor a purely formal (...) account of language is adequate, given the centrality of the sign as the fundamental unit of grammatical analysis. The author distinguishes four types of grammatical signs: experiential, logical, interpersonal, and textural. The signifiers of these signs are syntagmatic relationships of the following types, respectively: constituency, dependency, conjugational and linking. McGregor illustrates and exemplifies the theory with data from a variety of languages including English, Acehnese, Polish, Finnish, Japanese, Chinese, and Mohawk; and from his pioneering research on Gooniyandi and Nyulnyul, two languages of the Kimberleys region of Western Australia. (shrink)

In his Philosophical Inquiry concerning Human Liberty (1717), the English deist Anthony Collins proposed a complete determinist account of the human mind and action, partly inspired by his mentor Locke, but also by elements from Bayle, Leibniz and other Continental sources. It is a determinism which does not neglect the question of the specific status of the mind but rather seeks to provide a causal account of mental activity and volition in particular; it is a ‘volitional determinism’. Some decades later, (...) Diderot articulates a very similar determinism, which seeks to recognize the existence of “causes proper to man” (as he says in the Réfutation d’Helvétius). The difference with Collins is that now biological factors are being taken into account. Obviously both the ‘volitional’ and the ‘biological’ forms of determinism are noteworthy inasmuch as they change our picture of the nature of determinism itself, but my interest here is to compare these two determinist arguments, both of which are broadly Spinozist in nature – and as such belong to what Jonathan Israel called in his recent book “the radical Enlightenment,” i.e. a kind of underground Enlightenment constituted by Spinozism – and to see how Collins’ specifically psychological vision and Diderot’s specifically biological vision correspond to their two separate national contexts: determinism in France in the mid-1750s was a much more medico-biological affair than English determinism, which appears to be on a ‘path’ leading to Mill and associationist psychology. (shrink)

Kierkegaard’s ideal supports a radical form of “deep diversity,” to use Charles Taylor’s expression. It is radical because it embraces not only irreducible conceptions of the good but also incompatible ones. This is due to its paradoxical nature, which arises from its affirmation of both monism and pluralism, the One and the Many, together. It does so in at least three ways. First, in terms of the structure of the self, Kierkegaard describes his ideal as both unified (the “positive (...) third”) and plural (a “negative unity”). Second, he affirms a process which brings together unity, as implied by the linear notion of “stages”, with plurality, in the form of “spheres of existence” (aesthetic, ethical, and religious). And third, the culmination of the process implies that we should embrace both a unified dialectic (“Religiousness A”) alongside the plural remnants of the ethical/aesthetic, that is, both the infinity of the former and the finitudes of the latter. Unsurprisingly, while Kierkegaard describes those who are able to exemplify his ideal in practice as “always joyful,” he also considers the ideal to be “extremely hard, the hardest task of all.” This is why those such as Hubert L. Dreyfus are wrong to claim that it provides an experience of bliss; on the contrary, those who realize it “are always in danger.” As I shall show, one form this danger takes is that it threatens to dirty the hands of those who manage to uphold Kierkegaard’s ideal. Moreover, it does so in ways that, I claim, tend to be missed by Kierkegaard himself. Nevertheless, the danger is also essential to the creativity of his approach, and I conclude by pointing out how this creativity makes it capable of tackling one of the profoundest challenges in contemporary ethics: that arising from what just war theorists call a “supreme emergency.” . (shrink)

This book provides a novel interpretation of the ideas about language in Ludwig Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations. Travis places the "private language argument" in the context of wider themes in the Investigations, and thereby develops a picture of what it is for words to bear the meaning they do. He elaborates two versions of a private language argument, and shows the consequences of these for current trends in the philosophical theory of meaning.

This book is an examination of the inattention of business schools to moral education, addressing lessons learned from the most recent business corruption scandals and financial crises, and also questioning what we're teaching now and what should be considering in educating future business leaders to cope with the challenges of leading with integrity in the global environment"--Provided by publisher.

I argue that Kant thought his Transcendental Deduction of the Pure Concepts could reach skeptical empiricists like Hume by providing an overlooked explanation of the mind's a priori relation to the objects of experience. And he thought empiricists may be motivated to listen to this explanation because of an instability and dissatisfaction inherent to empiricism.

Ce livre étudie, à travers une série d'épisodes allant de la philosophie des Lumières à notre époque, le problème du matérialisme dans l'histoire de la philosophie et l’histoire des sciences. Comment comprendre les spécificités de l’histoire du matérialisme, des Lumières à nos jours, au sein de la grande histoire de la philosophie et de l’histoire des sciences ? Quelle est l’actualité de l’opposition classique entre le corps et l’esprit ? Qu’est-ce que le rire ou le rêve peuvent nous apprendre du (...) matérialisme ? En traversant l’histoire de ce concept jusqu’à l’émergence d’un « nouveau matérialisme » contemporain, l’ouvrage vise à revitaliser le matérialisme et sa lecture. -/- . (shrink)

El libro que estableció la teoría de la separación de poderes -afirmando la independencia del poder judicial con respecto al ejecutivo y el legislativo, para asegurar la libertad del pueblo- es una de las obras clave del pensamiento político, jurídico, sociológico e histórico de todos los tiempos.Aquella teoría enunciada por Charles-Louis de Secondat, barón de La Brède y de Montesquieu -"No hay libertad si el poder judicial no está separado del legislativo y executivo"- es tan sólo uno de los (...) momentos cumbres de este libro{ probablemente, el más importante de todo el siglo XVIII y un verdadero clásico desde que se publicó en Ginebra en 1748.Montesquieu tardó cerca de viente años en escribir "Del espíritu de las leyes"{ obra ingente que "empecé y dejé" en numerosas ocasiones, entregando "mil veces á los vientos las hojas que había escrito" y que, finalmente, concluyó, con más de 1.000 páginas -hojas perennes- que le ofrecen una lectura imprescindible.Lex Nova pone ahora a su disposición, por primera vez, este cuidado facsímil que reproduce, en tres tomos, la edición que publicó el anónimo licenciado M.V.M. en Madrid, París y Londres -respectivamente- en 1821, traduciendo aquella obra "libremente al español".Un verdadero lujo a su alcance. (shrink)

Discusses heaven, the Creation, forgiveness, vanity, the theology of romantic love, responsibility, and the life of Jesus.

Culture, defined as shared behavior or information within a community acquired through some form of social learning from conspecifics, is now suggested to act as a second inheritance system. Cultural processes are important in a wide variety of vertebrate species. Birdsong provides a classic example of cultural processes: cultural transmission, where changes in a shared song are learned from surrounding conspecifics, and cultural evolution, where the patterns of songs change through time. This form of cultural transmission of information has features (...) that are different in speed and form from genetic transmission. More recently, culture, vocal traditions and an extreme form of song evolution has been documented in cetaceans. Humpback whale song ‘revolutions’, where the single population-wide shared song type is rapidly replaced by a new, novel song type introduced from a neighbouring population, represents an extraordinary example of ocean basin-wide cultural transmission rivalled in its geographic extent only by humans. In this review, we examine the cultural evolutions and revolutions present in some birdsong and whale song, respectively. By taking a comparative approach to these cultural processes, we review the existing evidence to understand the similarities and differences for their patterns of expression and the underlying drivers, including anthropogenic influences, which may shape them. Finally, we encourage future studies to explore the role of innovation vs. production errors in song evolution, the fitness information present in song, and how human-induced changes in population sizes, trajectories and migratory connections facilitating cultural transmission may be driving song revolutions. (shrink)

Abstract:Therapeutic misconception (TM)—when clinical research participants fail to adequately grasp the difference between participating in a clinical trial and receiving ordinary clinical care—has long been recognized as a significant problem in consent to clinical trials. We suggest that TM does not primarily reflect inadequate disclosure or participants’ incompetence. Instead, TM arises from divergent primary cognitive frames. The researchers’ frame places the clinical trial in the context of scientific designs for assessing intervention efficacy. In contrast, most participants have a cognitive frame (...) that is personal and focused primarily on their medical problems. To illustrate this, we draw on interview material from both clinical researchers and participants in clinical trials. We suggest that reducing TM requires encouraging subjects to adjust their frame, not just add information to their existing frame. What is necessary is ascientific reframingof participation in a clinical trial. (shrink)

In spite of strengthened financial regulation, ethical concern continues about the promotion and distribution of financial services in Britain, including savings and investment products. Greater ethical attention needs to be paid to products, price, promotion and distribution. The authors are all faculty members of the School of Management and Finance, University of Nottingham, University Park, Nottingham NG7 2RD, UK. Correspondence should be addressed to Dr Ennew. Alison McGregor gratefully acknowledges funding provided by the Association of British Insurers.

The profile and possibilities of in vitro meat are rapidly expanding, creating new ethical conundrums about how to approach this nascent biotechnology. The outcomes of these ethical debates will shape the future viability of this technology and its acceptability for potential consumers. In this paper we focus on how in vitro meat is being ethically constructed in academic literatures and contrast this with discourses evident in the mainstream print media. The academic literature is analysed to identify a typology of ethical (...) discourses, ordered from the most common to least expressed. We then apply this typology to investigate the frames present in Australian print media reportage on the topic. In the academic literature, discourses relating to in vitro meat’s promised environmental, animal welfare and food security benefits are most prominent. In contrast, ontological struggles over its ‘nature’ have emerged as the dominant feature in the Australian print media. Although these spaces of engagement evidence decidedly different discursive trends, ethical discourses critical of in vitro meat’s wider socio-cultural ramifications are currently under-represented in both. This paper therefore calls for critical scholars to move beyond the narrow, presumptive framings of in vitro meat as a technological remedy for our consumptive ills, to more seriously engage with the ethical consequences of this new form of food. (shrink)

Two variables are usually recognised as determinants of human causal learning: the contingency between a candidate cause and effect, and the temporal and/or spatial contiguity between them. A common finding is that reductions in temporal contiguity produce concomitant decrements in causal judgement. This finding had previously (Shanks & Dickinson, 1987) been interpreted as evidence that causal induction is based on associative learning processes. Buehner and May (2002, 2003, 2004) have challenged this notion by demonstrating that the impact of temporal delay (...) depends on expectations about the timeframe between cause and effect. A corollary of this knowledge-mediation account is that in certain situations longer delays could facilitate, while shorter delays should impair, causal learning. Here we present two experiments involving a physical apparatus that demonstrate a detrimental effect of contiguity under certain conditions. In contrast to all previous studies, delays universally promoted causal learning. This evidence is clearly at variance with the notion of a bottom-up contiguity bias in causal induction. A new, more general timeframe bias is discussed. (shrink)

Previous studies have found Forsyth’s Ethical Position Questionnaire (EPQ) to vary between countries, but none has made a systematic evaluation of its psychometric properties across consumers from many countries. Using confirmatory factor analysis and multi-group LISREL analysis, this paper explores the factor structure of the EPQ and the measurement equivalence in five societies: Austria, Britain, Brunei, Hong Kong and USA. The results suggest that the modified scale, measuring idealism and relativism, was applicable in all five societies. Equivalence was found across (...) Britain, Brunei and USA, but the original scale cannot be used validly. (shrink)

The purpose of this symposium is to explore the ways in which literature, broadly construed to include poetry and narrative in a variety of modes of representation, can change the world by providing interventions in justice. Our approach foregrounds the relationship between the activity demanded by some individual literary works and some categories of literary work on the one hand and the way in which those works can make a tangible difference to social reality on the other. We consider three (...) types of active literary engagement: doing philosophy, ideological critique, and necessary rather than contingent performance. Kate Kirkpatrick opens with Kamel Daoud’s The Meursault Investigation (2013), reading the narrator as not only a critic of colonial and postcolonial discourse but also a literary exemplar of the search for justice when it is difficult to know to what level of explanation to attribute its absence. Rafe McGregor demonstrates how the final season of Prime Video’s The Man in the High Castle (2015–19) makes a radical break from the previous three, exposing the misanthropy at the core of right-wing populism and calling for a fundamentally democratic response from the left. Finally, Karen Simecek argues that poetry in performance has a potentially reparative function for the ethically lonely – the vulnerable, the oppressed, and the persecuted – in society. (shrink)

Hume seems to contend that you can’t get an ought from an is. Searle professed to prove otherwise, deriving a conclusion about obligations from a premise about promises. Since (as Schurz and I have shown) you can’t derive a substantive ought from an is by logic alone, Searle is best construed as claiming that there are analytic bridge principles linking premises about promises to conclusions about obligations. But we can no more derive a moral obligation to pay up from the (...) fact that a promise has been made than we can derive a duty to fight a duel from the fact that a challenge has been issued – just conclusions about what we ought to do according to the rules of the relevant games. Hume suggests bridge principles that would take us from the rules of the games to conclusions about duties, but these principles are false. My argument features an obstreperous earl, an anarchist philosopher and a dueling Prime Minister. (shrink)

One of the greatest merits of Dr. Sherover's excellent book is that it enables us to see Heidegger's thought- in one direction, at least- as an organic outgrowth from his reading of Kant. It thus helps to remove on common misapprehension that Heidegger's thought is odd, idiosyncratic, and not rooted- as in fact it is- in the mainstream of philosophy. Dr. Sherover is able to remove this misunderstanding in great part through the admirable clarity of his exposition; he has succeeded (...) in conveying Heidegger's most abstruse points into plain and understandable English, and so has overcome the formidable barrier of terminology that has blocked so many Heideggerian interpreters. This book is in fact the clearest exposition that I have read of Heidegger's thought at one states of its development. But beyond this valuable job of clarification, by bringing the light of Heidegger to bear upon Kant, this book is also a significant contribution to Kantian scholarship. And that means, of course, a contribution to philosophy itself. (shrink)

The concept of informed consent for medical treatment has been well established as a necessary element in ensuring compliance with patients' right to self determination and respect of individual au...

We respond to Morgan and Feeley’s critique on our article “Mass Media in Organ Donation: Managing Conflicting Messages and Interests.” We noted that Morgan and Feeley agree with the position that the primary aims of media campaigns are: “to educate the general public about organ donation process” and “help individuals make informed decisions” about organ donation. For those reasons, the educational messages in media campaigns should not be restricted to “information from pilot work or focus groups” but should include evidence-based (...) facts resulting from a comprehensive literature research. We consider the controversial aspects about organ donation to be relevant, if not necessary, educational materials that must be disclosed in media campaigns to comply with the legal and moral requirements of informed consent. With that perspective in mind, we address the validity of Morgan and Feeley’s claim that media campaigns have no need for informing the public about the controversial nature of death determination in organ donation. Scientific evidence has proven that the criteria for death determination are inconsistent with the Uniform Determination of Death Act and therefore potentially harmful to donors. The decision by campaign designers to use the statutory definition of death without disclosing the current controversies surrounding that definition does not contribute to improved informed decision making. We argue that if Morgan and Feeley accept the important role of media campaigns to enhance informed decision making, then critical controversies should be disclosed. In support of that premise, we will outline: (1) the wide-spread scientific challenges to brain death as a concept of death; (2) the influence of the donor registry and team-huddling on the medical care of potential donors; (3) the use of authorization rather than informed consent for donor registration; (4) the contemporary religious controversy; and (5) the effects of training desk clerks as organ requestors at the Department of Motor Vehicles offices. We conclude that organ donation is a medical procedure subject to all the ethical obligations that the medical profession must uphold including that of transparency and truthfulness. (shrink)

The Ikhwan al-Safa (Brethren of Purity), the anonymous adepts of a tenth-century esoteric fraternity based in Basra and Baghdad, hold an eminent position in the history of science and philosophy in Islam due to the wide reception and assimilation of their monumental encyclopaedia, the Rasa'il Ikhwan al-Safa (Epistles of the Brethren of Purity). This compendium contains fifty-two epistles offering synoptic accounts of the classical sciences and philosophies of the age; divided into four classificatory parts, it treats themes in mathematics, logic, (...) natural philosophy, psychology, metaphysics, and theology, in addition to didactic fables. The Rasa'il constitutes a paradigmatic legacy in the canonization of philosophy and the sciences in mediaeval Islamic civilization, as well as having shown a permeating influence in Western culture. The present volume is the first of this definitive series consisting of the very first critical edition of the Rasa' il in its original Arabic, with a complete, fully annotated English translation. This epistle, The Case of the Animals versus Man Before the King of the Jinn (Epistle 22), prepared by Professors Lenn E. Goodman and Richard McGregor, is arguably the best known, on account of its prominent ecological fable which casts the exploited and oppressed animals pursuing a case against mankind. Perhaps yet more relevant in modern times, the Ikhwan demonstrate the arrogance of man's claim to superiority, in contrast to the animals' pious understanding of their respective roles within nature. The fable complements and expands upon the short exposition on zoology featured at the beginning of the epistle. (shrink)

Charles Sanders Peirce has been characterized as the greatest American philosophic genius. He is the creator of pragmatism and one of the founders of modern logic. James, Royce, Schroder, and Dewey have acknowledged their great indebtedness to him. A laboratory scientist, he made notable contributions to geodesy, astronomy, psychology, induction, probability, and scientific method. He introduced into modern philosophy the doctrine of scholastic realism, developed the concepts of chance, continuity, and objective law, and showed the philosophical significance of the (...) theory of signs and mathematical logic. The present series is the first published edition of his systematic works. (shrink)

This is a new English translation of a classic work of medieval Islamic learning. In this rich allegorical fable the animals pursue a case against humanity. They rebuke and criticise human weakness, deny man's superiority, and make powerful demands for greater justice and respect for animals.

Familiarity with Charles Darwin's treatise on evolution is essential to every well-educated individual. One of the most important books ever published--and a continuing source of controversy, a century and a half later--this classic of science is reproduced in a facsimile of the critically acclaimed first edition.

David Benatar argues that coming into existence is always a harm, and that – for all of us unfortunate enough to have come into existence – it would be better had we never come to be. We contend that if one accepts Benatar’s arguments for the asymmetry between the presence and absence of pleasure and pain, and the poor quality of life, one must also accept that suicide is preferable to continued existence, and that his view therefore implies both anti-natalism (...) and pro-mortalism . This conclusion has been argued for before by Elizabeth Harman – she takes it that because Benatar claims that our lives are ‘awful’, it follows that ‘we would be better off to kill ourselves’ (Harman 2009: 784). Though we agree with Harman’s conclusion, we think that her argument is too quick, and that Benatar’s arguments for non-pro-mortalism deserve more serious consideration than she gives them. We make our case using a tripartite structure. We start by examining the prima facie case for the claim that pro-mortalism follows from Benatar’s position, presenting his response to the contrary, and furthering the dialectic by showing that Benatar’s position is not just that coming into existence is a harm, but that existence itself is a harm. We then look to Benatar’s treatment of the Epicurean line, which is important for him as it undermines his anti-death argument for non-pro-mortalism. We demonstrate that he fails to address the concern that the Epicurean line raises, and that he cannot therefore use the harm of death as an argument for non-pro-mortalism. Finally, we turn to Benatar’s pro-life argument for non-pro-mortalism, built upon his notion of interests, and argue that while the interest in continued existence may indeed have moral relevance, it is almost always irrational. Given that neither Benatar’s anti-death nor pro-life arguments for non-pro-mortalism work, we conclude that pro-mortalism follows from his anti-natalism, As such, if it is better never to have been, then it is better no longer to be. -/- . (shrink)

An indispensable and comprehensive resource for students and scholars of philosophy of religion.

To Protect and Serve is Norm Stamper’s second book, following Breaking Rank: A Top Cop’s Exposé of the Dark Side of American Policing (2005), and is a welcome contribution to the debate between those who advocate violence against the police and those who insist that no reform is necessary. Radley Balko’s The Rise of the Warrior Cop: The Militarization of America’s Police Forces (2013) inadvertently provided the context of the civil unrest in Ferguson ignited by the shooting of Michael Brown (...) in 2014 and the controversy surrounding the “Ferguson effect” provides the context for Stamper’s treatise on the problems faced – and caused – by contemporary U.S. law enforcement. Stamper is one of the few senior police officers singled out for praise by Balko, for the most part on the basis of his activism against police prejudice and militarisation subsequent to his retirement as Seattle’s police chief in 2000. (shrink)

The War on Cops is a collection of previously-published essays by Heather Mac Donald, a public intellectual in the United States who belongs to the ‘small faction’ of secular conservatives (Mark Oppenheimer, “A Place on the Right for a Few Godless Conservatives”, New York Times, February 18, 2011). The essays are journalistic rather than academic, having appeared in the City Journal, National Review, New York Daily News, InsideSources, Wall Street Journal, and Weekly Standard, but the volume is nonetheless significant to (...) contemporary philosophers due to both its form and content. First, Mac Donald presents a logical argument for her position and makes explicit use of philosophical devices such as thought experiments. Second, this argument concerns the controversy surrounding the killing of African American males by police officers in the last three years and she provides the first sustained criticism of the rationale for the Black Lives Matter movement. (shrink)

The compound eyes of insects exhibit stunning variation in size, structure, and function, which has allowed these animals to use their vision to adapt to a huge range of different environments and lifestyles, and evolve complex behaviors. Much of our knowledge of eye development has been learned from Drosophila, while visual adaptations and behaviors are often more striking and better understood from studies of other insects. However, recent studies in Drosophila and other insects, including bees, beetles, and butterflies, have begun (...) to address this gap by revealing the genetic and developmental bases of differences in eye morphology and key new aspects of compound eye structure and function. Furthermore, technical advances have facilitated the generation of high‐resolution connectomic data from different insect species that enhances our understanding of visual information processing, and the impact of changes in these processes on the evolution of vision and behavior. Here, we review these recent breakthroughs and propose that future integrated research from the development to function of visual systems within and among insect species represents a great opportunity to understand the remarkable diversification of insect eyes and vision. (shrink)

I consider a naturalistic approach to death, seeking a naturalistic or “functional” version of immortality. Making use of John Dewey and some other classical American philosophers, I first articulate the naturalism of this project. I then discuss what such naturalism means for understanding the self and its survival. Finally, I consider the existential question about to what extent such a view of immortality is satisfying.

Does the “free market” foster more freedom for individuals generally and less coercion? Libertarians and other market advocates argue that the unfettered market maximizes freedom and hence has less coercion than any feasible alternative. Welfare liberals, Socialist, and Marxists, in different ways, argue against the claim that the unrestricted market maximizes freedom generally. Both supporters and critics agree that coercion undermines freedom and that that is what is ultimately prima facie wrong with it. Further, they agree that the extent to (...) which an economic system includes coercion provides a serious strike against it. The problem is that there is little consensus on the necessary conditions for coercion. In this paper I will be concerned with the nature of coercive relationships in the market. Market interactions have a particular character and occur within a specific institutional framework. Other accounts of coercion have failed to capture the unique character of coercion in the market because they have failed to take into account certain nontrivial facts about the market which are essential to the analysis of coercive market relations. (shrink)