Every choice we make is set against a background of massive ignorance about our past, our future, our circumstances, and ourselves. Philosophers are divided on the moral significance of such ignorance. Some say that it has a direct impact on how we ought to behave - the question of what our moral obligations are; others deny this, claiming that it only affects how we ought to be judged in light of the behaviour in which we choose to engage - the (...) question of what responsibility we bear for our choices. Michael Zimmerman claims that our ignorance has an important bearing on both questions, and offers an account of moral obligation and moral responsibility that is sharply at odds with the prevailing wisdom. His book will be of interest to a wide range of readers in ethics. (shrink)

If a man born blind were to gain his sight in later life would he be able to identify the objects he saw around him? Would he recognise a cube and a globe on the basis of his earlier tactile experiences alone? This was William Molyneux's famous question to John Locke and it was much discussed by English and French empiricists in the eighteenth century as part of the controversy over innatism and abstract ideas. Dr Morgan examines the whole history (...) of this debate: Locke's own (negative) answer to the question, the contributions of Berkeley, Condillac, Diderot and Voltaire and the factual accounts of early cataract operations and modern laboratory studies. He shows how this debate is involved in the development and eventual separation of philosophy and experimental psychology after the eighteenth century and considers why the original question is effectively still unanswered. This is one problem-area with its intricate cluster of connected conceptual and technical difficulties which suggests the need for some reunion or at least collaboration between the two subjects. (shrink)

This paper focuses on the inheritance of human handedness and cerebral lateralization within the more general context of structural biological asymmetries. The morphogenesis of asymmetrical structures, such as the heart in vertebrates, depends upon a complex interaction between information coded in the cytoplasm and in the genes, but the polarity of asymmetry seems to depend on the cytoplasmic rather than the genetic code. Indeed it is extremely difficult to find clear-cut examples in which thedirectionof an asymmetry is under genetic control. (...) As one possible case, there is some evidence that the direction, clockwise or counterclockwise, of rotation of the abdomen in certain mutant strains ofDrosophilais controlled by a particular gene locus, although there appears to be some degree of confusion on this point. By contrast, it is much easier to find examples in which thedegreebut not the direction of asymmetry is under genetic control. For instance, there is a mutant strain of mice in which half of the animals displaysitus inversusof the viscera. The proportion has remained at one half despite many years of inbreeding, suggesting that the mutant allele effectively cancels the normalsitusand allows the asymmetry to be specified in random fashion.Although this account does not deny that the right hemisphere of humans may be the more specialized for certain functions, it does attribute a leading or dominant role to the left hemisphere (at least in most individuals). We suggest that so-called “right-hemisphere” functions are essentially acquired by default, due to the left hemisphere's prior involvement with speech and skilled motor acts; we note, for instance, that these right-hemisphere functions include rather elementary perceptual processes. But perhaps the more critical prediction from our account is that the phenomenon of equipotentiality should be unidirectional: the right (lagging) hemisphere should be more disposed to take over left-hemisphere functions following early lesions than is the left (leading) hemisphere to take over right-hemisphere functions. We note preliminary evidence that this may be so. (shrink)

Though the reputation of eugenics has been tarnished by history, eugenics per se is not necessarily a bad thing. Many advocate a liberal new eugenics—where individuals are free to choose whether or not to employ genetic technologies for reproductive purposes. Though genetic interventions aimed at the prevention of severe genetic disorders may be morally and socially acceptable, reproductive liberty in the context of enhancement may conflict with equality. Enhancement could also have adverse effects on utility. The enhancement debate requires a (...) shift in focus. What the equality and/or utility costs of enhancement will be is an empirical question. Rather than philosophical speculation, more social science research is needed to address it. Philosophers, meanwhile, should address head-on the question of how to strike a balance between liberty, equality, and utility in cases of conflict (in the context of genetics). (shrink)

Recently, Kroedel and Schulz have argued that the exclusion problem—which states that certain forms of non-reductive physicalism about the mental are committed to systematic and objectionable causal overdetermination—can be solved by appealing to grounding. Specifically, they defend a principle that links the causal relations of grounded mental events to those of grounding physical events, arguing that this renders mental–physical causal overdetermination unproblematic. Here, we contest Kroedel and Schulz’s result. We argue that their causal-grounding principle is undermotivated, if not outright false. (...) In particular, we contend that the principle has plausible counterexamples, resulting from the fact that some mental states are not fully grounded by goings on ‘in our heads’ but also require external factors to be included in their full grounds. We draw the sceptical conclusion that it remains unclear whether non-reductive physicalists can plausibly respond to the exclusion argument by appealing to considerations of grounding. (shrink)

Beginning at the end of the nineteenth century, systematic scientific abstracting played a crucial role in reconfiguring the sciences on an international scale. For mathematicians, the 1931 launch of the Zentralblatt für Mathematik and 1940 launch of Mathematical Reviews marked and intensified a fundamental transformation, not just to the geographic scale of professional mathematics but to the very nature of mathematicians’ research and theories. It was not an accident that mathematical abstracting in this period coincided with an embrace across mathematical (...) research fields of a distinctive form of symbolic and conceptual abstraction. This essay examines the historical, institutional, embodied, and conceptual bases of mathematical abstracting and abstraction in the mid-twentieth century, placing them in historical context within the first half of the twentieth century and then examining their consequences and legacies for the second half of the twentieth century and beyond. Focused on scale, media, and the relationship between mathematical knowledge and its forms of articulation, my analysis connects the changing social structure of modern mathematical research communities to their changing domains of investigation and resources for representation and collective understanding. (shrink)

If there are facts about what grounds what, are there any grounding relations between them? This paper suggests so, arguing that transitivity and amalgamation principles in the logic of grounding yield facts of grounding that are grounded by others. I develop and defend this view and note that combining it with extant accounts of iterated grounding commits us to seemingly problematic instances of ground-theoretic overdetermination. Taking the superinternality thesis as a case study, I discuss how defenders of this thesis should (...) respond. It emerges that our discussion puts pressure on superinternalists to make an interesting qualification to their view: to only regard as a fundamental metaphysical law a version of the superinternality thesis that is restricted to minimal and immediate grounding. (shrink)

The paper examines the problematic understanding of “risk” in entrepreneurial literature that locates courage in either the loss orgain of having or in the difficulty and hardship of the doing. We argue in this paper that what is lost in this vernacular view of courage is a deeper notion of the subjective dimension of work and the social need of society. Grounded within the Catholic social and moral tradition, we find a richer notion of courage, which in part corrects and (...) rounds out the insufficient description of the vernacular understanding of courage in entrepreneurship. What we also find in this account of the virtues and subjective dimension of work is greater explanatory power of what happens to the entrepreneur in the work that he or she does. The end result of this analysis is a more spiritual, ethical and social understanding of entrepreneurship. (shrink)

In this book, Michael Perry addresses several fundamental questions about the proper role of religion in the politics of a liberal democracy, which is a central, recurring issue in the politics of the United States. The controversy about religion in politics comprises both constitutional and moral questions.

Pseudonymous mathematician Nicolas Bourbaki and his lesser-known counterpart E.S. Pondiczery, devised respectively in France and in Princeton in the mid-1930s, together index a pivotal moment in the history of modern mathematics, marked by international infrastructures and institutions that depended on mathematicians’ willingness to play along with mediated personifications. By pushing these norms and practices of personification to their farcical limits, Bourbaki’s and Pondiczery’s impersonators underscored the consensual social foundations of legitimate participation in a scientific community and the symmetric fictional character (...) of both fraud and integrity in scientific authorship. To understand authorial identity and legitimacy, individual authors’ conduct and practices matter less than the collective interpersonal relations of authorial assertion and authentication that take place within disciplinary institutions. (shrink)

David hume is sometimes viewed as a skeptic who argues that none of our beliefs about the world are justified. this paper challenges that view by developing and explicating an account of justified belief that is compatible with hume's theories about belief formation, inference, and principles governing the association of ideas. it is noted that the resultant account bears some resemblance to contemporary causal/reliability views of justification.

We conducted focus groups with 47 potential jurors who were presented with diferent scenarios in a hypothetical malpractice case involving failure to order a PSA test. Better documentation that a patient made an informed decision to decline a PSA test appeared to provide more medical-legal protection for physicians, especially with the use of a decision aid.

Harsh blame can be socially destructive. This article examines how harsh blame can be “civilized.” A core construct here is the historicist narrative, which is a story-like account of how a person came to be the sort of person she is. We argue that historicist narratives regarding immoral actors can temper blame and that this happens via a novel mechanism. To illuminate that mechanism, we offer a novel theoretical perspective on lay beliefs about free will. We distinguish 2 senses of (...) free will: (a) Freedom of action, which portrays the will as a dynamic choice-making mechanism and concerns whether the actor can exert volitional control via that mechanism at the time of action, and (b) Control of self-formation, which portrays the will as an enduring disposition (e.g., persistent desire to humiliate) and refers to whether the actor is truly the source of that disposition. Six experiments show that historicist narratives have no effect on perceived freedom of action, but rather temper blame by reducing perceived self-formative control. We also provide evidence against several additional theoretically derived alternative mediators (e.g., intentionality, perceived suffering). Further underlining the need to distinguish free will concepts, we show that biological narratives—unlike historicist narratives—temper blame via reductions in perceived freedom of action. Finally, to illuminate the meaning of “civilized” blame,” we show that historicist narratives specifically reduce the urge to inflict spiteful punishments on offenders, but leave intact the urge to nonviolently guide the offender toward moral improvement. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2017 APA, all rights reserved). (shrink)

This comprehensive anthology of classic and contemporary readings by leading philosophers complements the second edition of Michael Loux's _Metaphysics: A Contemporary Introduction_.

Examining how, and to what effect, the phrase “truly international” became central to the rhetoric and organization of the American-hosted 1950 International Congress of Mathematicians, this essay traces the negotiation of a “truly international” discipline from mathematicians’ first international congresses around the turn of the century across two world wars and their divisive interlude. Two failed attempts to host international congresses of mathematicians in the United States, for 1924 and 1940, defined the stakes for those who became the principal organizers (...) for 1950. Combining American organizational records with contexts and sources that extend across and beyond traditional mathematical centers in Europe and North America, the essay shows how a small cohort of American mathematicians marshaled an emphatic but ambiguous “international” rhetoric to guide policies and command cooperation and support while responding to persistent challenges. Their adaptations and compromises left a lasting mark on the terms and achievements of international inclusion, cooperation, and hegemony in mathematics. (shrink)

Astronomer Charles Piazzi Smyth’s 1864–65 expedition to measure the Great Pyramid of Giza was planned around a system of linear measures designed to guarantee the validity of his measurements and settle ongoing uncertainties as to the Pyramid’s true size. When the intended system failed to come together, Piazzi Smyth was forced to improvise a replacement that presented a fundamental challenge to the metrological enterprise upon which his system had been based. The astronomer’s new system centered around a small lump of (...) basalt, now held at Cambridge’s Whipple Museum of the History of Science, which nucleated a wide array of material and scientific considerations. Through a bipartite analysis of the physical and narrative dimensions of Piazzi Smyth’s basalt Standard, I develop the implications of its use and construction for understanding the material constitution of scientific instruments. In particular, I illustrate how instruments are locally constituted through co-accountable systems and how their material features become integrally implicated in both their uses and meanings. (shrink)

Sociology originated in the mid-nineteenth century from a new confidence in the power of science to explain the world on a mathematical foundation. Both mathematics and sociology transformed over the ensuing century, inverting the hierarchical relationship from sociology as a mathematics-based science of complex human configurations to mathematics as a complex science based on social institutions. That is, where sociology began as the hard case for mathematics, it became possible to see mathematics as the hard case for sociology. In this (...) light, we examine a number of motivations and provocations for the sociology of mathematics, from language and social cognition to Marxist and materialist skepticism of ideology, and sample the evidence and arguments brought to bear on the sociology of mathematics at a range of scales. (shrink)

The definition of precision medicine has continued to evolve, partly in response to criticism of the original concept. However, whatever the definition or current state of the brand, it fundamentally relies on a putatively tight linkage between genotype and complex human traits. If such a linkage is truly robust, then it should be possible to predict the occurrence of complex traits, both good and bad. If such prediction is possible, it should also be feasible to intervene to prevent or preempt (...) disease-related traits. There are of course many potential barriers to this sort of genomic medicine two-step. For example, a number of statistical considerations make generating biomarker (including gene... (shrink)

Studies of economic decision-making have revealed the existence of consistent contributors, who always make contributions to the collective good. It is difficult to understand such behavior in terms of mutualistic motives. Furthermore, consistent contributors can elicit apparently altruistic behavior from others. Therefore, although mutualistic motives are likely an important contributor to moral action, there is more to morality than mutualism.

Newton began his optical studies believing in the modification theory, which was still universally accepted at that time, and in the perception of colour as a physiological process—a process in which the eye responds differently to the different velocities of identical globules. His discovery that white light is heterogeneous led him to switch to considering colour in purely physical terms.A century later, Goethe started out by accepting Newton's physical theory. He soon abandoned it, however, finding modification to be more in (...) keeping with his own insights. One beneficial consequence of this was that he developed an awareness of the importance of the physiological aspect of colour perception, and was therefore able to demonstrate that Newton's theory of light and colours is too simplistic; that there is more to colour than variable refrangibility. (shrink)

Causal theories of action are attempts to develop an account of actions in terms of events which have the right kind of causal ancestry. The causal ancestry must be traced back to some kind of intentional state in the agent, such intentional state must have the right kind of content, and it must cause the bodily movement in the ‘right’ way. Causal accounts differ on the nature of the intentional state, the nature of the content it must have, and the (...) specification of the ‘right’ kind of causal connection to bodily movements or other effects. Causal accounts also differ on the identification of the action itself. Some acounts say that the action is the bodily movement, provided that it was caused in the right way and had the right kind of effects. Others identify the action with the triggering intentional state, provided that it has the right kind of effects. Yet others identify the action with the composite event of the intentional state's causing the appropriate effects. Finally there are those which fail to identify the action with any of these events or combinations of them. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:141 HUME AND CAUSAL INFERENCE Hume held that any time we reach by inference a belief about the existence or qualities of some object or event that we have not actually perceived, the inference is grounded in beliefs about causal relations holding between the object of belief and some other object or objects that have actually been experienced. I will examine here Hume's account of such causal inferences. There (...) are many places in the Treatise of Human Nature at which Hume seems to claim that causal inferences take place when and only when the percipient has had an extensive previous experience of objects of the respective types as regularly conjoined in relations of contiguity and temporal priority. It seems to me that reliance on these passages alone gives a distorted view of Hume's theory of causal inference. Contrary to appearances, Hume did not hold that extensive previous experiences of objects of the same types as properly conjoined is either necessary or sufficient for causal inference. Hume's view is more subtle and complicated, and there are important considerations of coherence and holism present in it. Getting Hume's view on this matter clear is important because it shows how he can escape some of the objections that have been laid against his theory, and it makes possible a reading of Hume as a causal realist. Hume's theory of inference provides the resources for drawing a distinction between accidental and genuine causal regularities and it is compatible with the view that causal relations (and not mere de facto regularities) hold among events in the world independently of their being perceived. The examination begins by looking at a different, but related, issue. Why does Hume think 142 that of the three types of association, only cause and effect association is capable of producing belief? Hume puts the question in the form of a possible objection to his account. For it may be said, that if all the parts of that hypothesis be true, viz. that these three species of relation are deriv'd from the same principles; that their effects in inforcing and inlivening our ideas are the same; and that belief is nothing but a more forcible and vivid conception of an idea; it shou'd follow, that that action of the mind may not only be deriv'd from the relation of cause and effect, but also from those of contiguity and resemblance. But as we find by experience, that belief arises only from causation, and that we can draw no inference from one object to another, except they be connected by this relation, we may conclude, that there is some error in that reasoning, which leads us into such difficulties. (T 107) It is important to note that Hume is talking here only about beliefs about the existence or situations of objects that have not been intuited or experienced. Beliefs about relations of ideas (e.g., that 2 + 2 = 4) are intuitions (or perhaps memories 2 of intuitions). Beliefs in the existence of things as experienced or in the previous existence of things as previously experienced automatically have the 3 vivacity of impressions or memory ideas. What Hume takes himself to need to explain is why cause and effect association allows for a transfer of this vivacity to an idea of an object or situation that has not itself been intuited or experienced and why 4 resemblance and contiguity association do not. If I see a green ball next to a red sweater, then I will normally subsequently believe that the green ball existed next to the red sweater at that time (at 143 least until my memories begin to lose vivacity). This is purely a matter of sense experience and memory. Now if I subsequently see a different red sweater (or the same sweater in a different location), I may be led to think of a green ball existing next to it purely through contiguity and resemblance association. But presumably I would not believe that a green ball existed next to the currently perceived red sweater unless I currently perceived a green ball or my belief was based on some 5 form of causal inference... (shrink)

The Recurrence of the End Times: Voegelin, Hegel, and the Stop-History Movements explores the deep connection between modern political ideologies and the secular eschatological hopes and dreams of a post-Christian society.