ABSTRACTAlthough formative of modern value theory, the moral beauty view—which states that moral virtue is beautiful and moral vice is ugly—is now mostly neglected by philosophers. The two contemporary defences of the view mostly capitalize on its intuitive attractiveness, but to little avail: such considerations hardly convince sceptics of what is nowadays a rather unpopular view. Historically, the view was supported by thought experiments; and although these greatly increase its plausibility, they also raise empirical questions, which they leave unanswered. Here, (...) I offer a novel defence of the moral beauty view, capitalizing on empirical evidence and arguing via an inference to the best explanation. (shrink)

This paper is a sequel to an earlier result of the authors that in making inferences from certain probabilistic knowledge bases the maximum entropy inference process, ME, is the only inference process respecting “common sense.” This result was criticized on the grounds that the probabilistic knowledge bases considered are unnatural and that ignorance of dependence should not be identified with statistical independence. We argue against these criticisms and also against the more general criticism that ME is representation dependent. In a (...) final section, however, we provide a criticism of our own of ME, and of inference processes in general, namely that they fail to satisfy compactness. (shrink)

I offer a set of sufficient conditions for beauty, drawing on Parsons and Carlson’s account of ‘functional beauty’. First, I argue that their account is flawed, whilst falling short of...

We have all heard people say ‘Beauty is only skin-deep’, or ‘Beauty is in the eye of the beholder’: our culture promulgates a conception of beauty as subjective, superficial, and independent of other values like moral goodness or knowledge and understanding. Yet our taste in beauty affects many aspects of our lives, sometimes playing a decisive – and often detrimental – role in areas as wide-ranging as our identity and self-esteem, our morally salient decisions, and our relationship to the environment. (...) This presents us with a choice: we can either ignore the facts – leaving our conception of beauty unchanged and allowing our taste to influence much in our lives while either not acknowledging such influence, or perhaps seeking to reprimand it; or we can take the power of beauty seriously and seek to harmonise our taste with our values. I argue for the latter option and propose a way of bringing beauty and taste in line with what matters to us using the notion of functional beauty. Adopting this strategy, I suggest, can have a powerful – and positive – impact on our self-esteem and wellbeing, our relationship to others, as well as our attitudes towards the environment. (shrink)

Es, quiza, la coleccion mas abierta que existe en cuestiones de etica, aunque se ha ocupado tambien de antropologia, estetica, ontologia, teoria del conocimiento e historia de la filosofia. El primer titulo que se publico en la coleccion fue la gran Historia de la filosofia y de la ciencia en tres volumenes de Ludovico Geymonat. A este le han seguido obras de A. J. Ayer, A. MacIntyre, Ernst Tugendhat, Antoni Domenech, Anna Estany, Agnes Heller, F. Fernandez Buey, Carlos Paris, (...) Emilio Lledo, Manuel Sacristan, John Rawls o Ludwig Wittgenstein. Victoria Camps ha dirigido, ademas, una gran Historia de la etica, en tres volumenes, en la que han colaborado los mejores especialistas espanoles. Para el autor solo el analisis de la evolucion biologica permite comprender el concepto de cultura como desarrollo y desembocadura de la vida. Es un proceso que culmina en la realidad humana y que la presente obra examina en sus grandes lineas. (shrink)

This paper corrects three widely held misunderstandings about Maxent when used in common sense reasoning: That it is language dependent; That it produces objective facts; That it subsumes, and so is at least as untenable as, the paradox-ridden Principle of Insufficient Reason.

We give an account of some relationships between the principles of Constant and Atom Exchangeability and various generalizations of the Principle of Instantial Relevance within the framework of Inductive Logic. In particular we demonstrate some surprising and somewhat counterintuitive dependencies of these relationships on ostensibly unimportant parameters, such as the number of predicates in the overlying language.

Iconic signs are overrepresented in the vocabularies of young deaf children, but it is unclear why. It is possible that iconic signs are easier for children to learn, but it is also possible that adults use iconic signs in child-directed signing in ways that make them more learnable, either by using them more often than less iconic signs or by lengthening them. We analyzed videos of naturalistic play sessions between parents and deaf children aged 9–60 months. To determine whether iconic (...) signs are overrepresented during child-directed signing, we compared the iconicity of actual parent productions to the iconicity of simulated vocabularies designed to estimate chance levels of iconicity. For almost all dyads, parent sign types and tokens were not more iconic than the simulated vocabularies, suggesting that parents do not select more iconic signs during child-directed signing. To determine whether iconic signs are more likely to be lengthened, we ran a linear regression predicting sign duration, and found an interaction between age and iconicity: while parents of younger children produced non-iconic and iconic signs with similar durations, parents of older children produced non-iconic signs with shorter durations than iconic signs. Thus, parents sign more quickly with older children than younger children, and iconic signs appear to resist that reduction in sign length. It is possible that iconic signs are perceptually available longer, and their availability is a candidate hypothesis as to why iconic signs are overrepresented in children’s vocabularies. (shrink)

Philosophical aesthetics has recently been expanding its purview—with exciting work on everyday aesthetics, somaesthetics, gustatory aesthetics, and the aesthetics of imperceptibilia like mathematics and human character—reclaiming territory that was lost during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, when the discipline begun concentrating almost exclusively on the philosophy of art and restricted the aesthetic realm to the distally perceptible. Yet there remains considerable reluctance towards acknowledging the aesthetic character of many of these objects. This raises an important question—partly made salient again by (...) the ongoing expansion of the aesthetic domain, and partly by the fact that many still seem resistant to this aesthetic diversification—which aestheticians seem to avoid: what, if anything, constrains the scope of beauty or the aesthetic? I argue that form, construed as comprising a degree, however minimal, of experienceable complexity, is necessary and sufficient for an object's candidature for the possession of aesthetic properties. Such a condition serves to discriminate between attempts to expand the scope of the aesthetic that are legitimate and those that are not. If correct, my view suggests that the aesthetic realm, though not limitless, is very broad indeed—but this, I think, is as it should be. (shrink)

Pure Inductive Logic is the study of rational probability treated as a branch of mathematical logic. This monograph, the first devoted to this approach, brings together the key results from the past seventy years, plus the main contributions of the authors and their collaborators over the last decade, to present a comprehensive account of the discipline within a single unified context.

Linda Zagzebski recently put forward a new theory, moral exemplarism, that is meant to provide an alternative to theories like consequentialism and deontology, and which proposes to define key moral terms by direct reference to exemplars. The theory’s basic structure is straightforward. A virtuous person is defined as a person like that, where that points to individuals like Leopold Socha, Confucius, Jesus Christ, and so on. A key component of this theory is the function played by the emotions, specifically the (...) emotion of admiration, which helps us identify moral exemplars, inspires our emulation of them, and grounds moral motivation. In other words, admiration tracks persons like that. The aim of this article is to show that unless moral exemplarism recognises and incorporates an aesthetic dimension to morality, as did, for instance, eighteenth-century sentimentalists by recognising the categories of moral beauty and ugliness, the theory suffers important theoretical difficulties, whilst failing to yield some of the theoretical merits that it boasts. To this end, I will cast doubt on the prominent role accorded to the emotion of admiration for morality, arguing that it has to either be qualified as a specific kind of admiration––namely that which takes the beautiful as its object––or be replaced altogether with the affective response to the beautiful, a mark of which is pleasure or delight in the contemplation of an object. In short, an aesthetics of character is necessary in order to properly theorise the affective and motivational components of morality under an exemplarist framework. (shrink)

Ugliness is a neglected topic in contemporary analytic aesthetics. This is regrettable given that this topic is not just genuinely fascinating, but could also illuminate other areas in the field, seeing as ugliness, albeit unexplored, does feature rather prominently in several debates in aesthetics. This paper articulates a ‘deformity-related’ conception of ugliness. Ultimately, I argue that deformity, understood in a certain way, and displeasure, jointly suffice for ugliness. First, I motivate my proposal, by locating a ‘deformity-related’ conception of ugliness in (...) aesthetic tradition, offering examples in support, and rejecting related alternative suggestions. Second, I argue that the proposal boasts considerable merits. Not only does it capture much of what we ordinarily think of as ugly, but it also comprises an objective criterion for ugliness, offers unity and comprehensiveness, and is informative and explanatorily potent. Third, I discuss a number of objections, thereby demonstrating that the proposal withstands reflective scrutiny. (shrink)

We give a complete characterization of Priest's Finite Inconsistent Arithmetics observing that his original putative characterization included arithmetics which cannot in fact be realized.

Reasoning under uncertainty, that is, making judgements with only partial knowledge, is a major theme in artificial intelligence. Professor Paris provides here an introduction to the mathematical foundations of the subject. It is suited for readers with some knowledge of undergraduate mathematics but is otherwise self-contained, collecting together the key results on the subject, and formalising within a unified framework the main contemporary approaches and assumptions. The author has concentrated on giving clear mathematical formulations, analyses, justifications and consequences of (...) the main theories about uncertain reasoning, so the book can serve as a textbook for beginners or as a starting point for further basic research into the subject. It will be welcomed by graduate students and research workers in logic, philosophy, and computer science as a textbook for beginners, a starting point for further basic research into the subject, and not least, an account of how mathematics and artificial intelligence can complement and enrich each other. (shrink)

In What Is Literature? Sartre claims, "One does not write for slaves."1 This takes place in the context of an argument Sartre makes in claiming literature is an appeal to the freedom of others.2 Furthermore, the acts of reading and writing are collaborative occasions that invent and re-invent the world by disclosing it and creating it.3 It is important to be precise about what Sartre believes must be presupposed in order for literature to function. The force of committed literature is (...) not propaganda that attempts to control the reader; it only comes about from the a priori existence of free subjects. Thus, Sartre notes, "The book does not serve my freedom; it requires it. Indeed, one cannot address oneself to... (shrink)

¿De qué forma es posible el pensamiento auténtico, como un acto libre y creador, en el mundo actual? Tal pregunta, arranque de este libro, es elaborada por Carlos París desde una doble perspectiva: desde la “agresión” que supone la actual “sociedad de masas programadas” -cuya capacidad de absorción engloba y manipula la misma “protesta”- y desde las exigencias de la racionalidad científica actual. Nacido en Bilbao en 1925, y catedrático desde 1951 en las Universidades de Santiago, Valencia y Autónoma de (...) Madrid, el profesor París ha sido testigo de excepción -además de activo protagonista- de la evolución experimentada por la filosofía española en el curso de los últimos veinte años. La introducción en nuestro país de la “filosofía científica”, que tanto habría de contribuir a la higienización del ambiente filosófico tras de su prolongado enrarecimiento por la escolástica de la postguerra, tuvo en él a uno de sus promotores más caracterizados. Ha sabido conjugar el interés por los problemas de la ciencia y la técnica modernas con un interés parejo por los problemas del hombre y la sociedad, como lo acreditan sus libros y publicaciones en revistas. Los trabajos incluidos en esta obra dan una idea de su investigación en una amplia gama de dominios, que discurren desde la antropología filosófica hasta la metodología científica. (shrink)

In the quest for identity and healing, what belongs to the humanities and what to clinical psychology? Ginette Paris uses cogent and passionate argument as well as stories from patients to teach us to accept that the human psyche seeks to destroy relationships and lives as well as to sustain them. This is very hard to accept which is why, so often, the body has the painful and dispiriting job of showing us what our psyche refuses to see. In (...) jargon-free language, the author describes her own story of taking a turn downwards and inwards in the search for a metaphorical personal 'death'. If this kind of mortality is not attended to, then more literal bodily ailments and actual death itself can result. Paris engages with one of the main dilemmas of contemporary psychology and psychotherapy: how to integrate findings and insights from neuroscience and medicine into an approach to healing founded upon activation of the imagination. At present, she demonstrates, what is happening is damaging to both science and imagination. (shrink)

The question of how to theorize the relationship between consciousness and the social transformation of racism remains vexed. Most critical theories agree that some form of critical consciousness is necessary for the transformation of social life, but disagree about whether this change is sufficient. Furthermore, they disagree about whether the content of this change is at the level of cognitive beliefs, active ignorance, or ideology. In this article, I describe most accounts of social transformation of racism as relying upon what (...) I call awareness consciousness. I argue that the model of awareness consciousness in critical theory risks giving too much explanatory power to the role of self-knowledge in developing accounts of successful social transformation. In contrast, I defend an account of critical consciousness that emphasizes the primacy of social structures in constraining and enabling our practices. When social structures can no longer support our horizons of expectation there is the possibility for the development of what I call crisis consciousness and utopian consciousness. The materialist account I deploy locates the social transformation of racism in the experience of dysfunctional institutions and the consequent insight of how to collectively develop functional institutions that can enable new forms of social practice. (shrink)

Considerable progress in personality and social psychology has been largely ignored by philosophers, many of whom still remain sceptical concerning whether the conception of character presupposed by virtue theory is descriptively adequate. Here, I employ the five-factor model of personality, currently the consensus view in personality psychology, to respond to a strong reading of the situationist challenge, whereby most people lack dispositions that are both cross-situationally consistent and temporally stable. I show that situationists rely on a false dichotomy between character (...) traits and situations, and that evidence supports the empirical adequacy of the sorts of character traits presupposed by virtue ethics. Additionally, I suggest that the personality traits of the five-factor model are relevant to virtue theory, in so far as they are malleable, morally salient, and seem to structurally parallel Aristotelian virtues and vices. Thus, contra situationism, the five-factor model supports the descriptive adequacy of a virtue-theoretical framework. (shrink)

This article will continue Jose Medina's work on “resistant imaginations” by developing the concepts of “internal resistant imagination” and “external resistant imagination” through readings of Assata Shakur's and Mamphela Ramphele's autobiographies. By introducing the problem of location and its relation to race it will show that one's geographical location affects their location in relation to hegemonic imaginations. This in turn requires different strategies of resistance. Using Medina's work this article will argue that Shakur and Ramphele explore these two different avenues (...) for undoing harmful truths within racist and sexist hegemonic imaginaries. (shrink)

El presente escrito se enmarca en un proyecto de investigación que propone abordar el complejo mundo del trabajo petrolero que se desarrolla en la Cuenca del Golfo San Jorge, en la Patagonia argentina, desde una perspectiva de género. La hipótesis de sentido que guía la investigación indica al universo hidrocarburífero de la región como un entretejido social sumamente heterogéneo. Dicha heterogeneidad se plasma también (quizás paradigmáticamente) en la participación femenina en el sector. A partir de entrevistas en profundidad, reconstruimos las (...) trayectorias laborales de mujeres vinculadas a la industria de los hidrocarburos en Comodoro Rivadavia.En una industria percibida como predominantemente masculina, no es fácil delimitar quiénes pueden entenderse como trabajadoras del petróleo, cuando el calificativo de “petroleros” suele reservarse a los varones. Para ello, en este texto compartimos los desafíos metodológicos de abordar el complejo petrolero en búsqueda de sus trabajadoras. Así, presentamos dilemas, reflexiones y hallazgos de un trabajo de campo atravesado por la reflexividad. Identificar a esas mujeres, caracterizar sus trabajos, prácticas y desplazamientos conllevó reconocer nuestras propias posiciones en el espacio social.Se indican tres perfiles típicos hallados entre nuestras entrevistadas para interrogar sobre su representatividad y provisoriedad, en tanto el análisis en profundidad nos orienta a la identificación de rasgos comunes entre aquellas que en un principio parecen muy diferentes. (shrink)

El texto se propone como un estudio del reconocimiento recíproco a través de una revisión de la propuesta elaborada por Axel Honneth en su filosofía, y con el objetivo de señalar sus principales contribuciones tanto para la configuración de la identidad humana como para la práctica de la metodología de la transformación pacífica de los conflictos. Tanto es así que se enfatiza, especialmente y siguiendo a Honneth, cómo el hecho de reconocerse recíprocamente ayudará a las personas a sentirse más confiadas, (...) respetadas y estimadas, siendo éstos tres valores fundamentales para la regulación positiva de los conflictos y para la construcción de culturas para la paz. Además, el reconocimiento recíproco se pondrá en relación en estas páginas con otros medios pacíficos de la transformación de los conflictos. (shrink)

John Ayrton Paris, writer and physician, became a member of the Linnean Society in 1810, and served as president of the Royal College of Physicians from 1844 until his death. Intended for children and originally composed for the author's family, this three-volume work about science was first published in 1827. Dedicated to the writer Maria Edgeworth and with illustrations by George Cruikshank, it aims 'to blend amusement with instruction', since youth, as Paris writes, 'is naturally addicted to amusement'. (...) Topics covered in Volume 1 include momentum, geometry, elasticity and rotatory motion; the science behind these is demonstrated using a yo-yo, a jack-in-the-box and a slingshot, among various other toys and games. A fascinating and popular text in the history of science education, the engaging narrative seeks to prove 'how profitably, and agreeably, the machinery of fiction may be worked for the dissemination of truth'. (shrink)

George Turnbull is one of the figures of the Scottish Enlightenment who has been largely overlooked. In this thesis I give the first detailed analysis of his major writings by focusing on a set of principles that guided and unified his work. I show that he constructed a unified system of philosophy and a proper Science of Man, which in turn draws attention to his relevance as an important figure of the early stages of the Scottish Enlightenment. I present an (...) interpretation of Turnbull’s work that takes into account the deep interconnectedness of his texts and considers his anatomy of the human mind as the foundation on which he develops his theories of education, painting, religion, law, and politics. The unity of his work and the set of principles that guide it allow us to gain a deeper understanding of Turnbull’s thought and its place within its eighteenth-century context, highlighting his unique contribution to the development of the Science of Man. (shrink)

It took nearly two thousand years for society to recognize the Hippocratic insistence that “the doctor knows best”1 was an inadequate approach to medical decisionmaking. Today, patient-centered medicine has come to understand that the individual patient has a significant role in the decisionmaking process.2.

There is a tendency in contemporary (analytic) aesthetics to consider- ably restrict the scope of things that can be beautiful or ugly. This peculiarly modern tendency is holding back progress in aesthetics and robbing it of its potential contribution to other domains of inquiry. One view that has suffered neglect as a result of this tendency is the moral beauty view, whereby the moral virtues are beautiful and the moral vices are ugly. This neglect stems from an assumption to the (...) effect that virtues and vices simply cannot be beautiful or ugly. The aim of this paper is twofold. First, it develops an account of form, under which, it argues, possession of form suffices for an object’s candidature for beauty and ugliness. Second, it argues that, under the foregoing proposal, the moral beauty view turns out to be a coherent position, and so should be taken seriously in both aesthetics and ethics. (shrink)

We investigate the relative probabilistic support afforded by the combination of two analogies based on possibly different, structural similarity (as opposed to e.g. shared predicates) within the context of Pure Inductive Logic and under the assumption of Language Invariance. We show that whilst repeated analogies grounded on the same structural similarity only strengthen the probabilistic support this need not be the case when combining analogies based on different structural similarities. That is, two analogies may provide less support than each would (...) individually. (shrink)

We examine the closure conditions of the probabilistic consequence relation of Hawthorne and Makinson, specifically the outstanding question of completeness in terms of Horn rules, of their proposed (finite) set of rules O. We show that on the contrary no such finite set of Horn rules exists, though we are able to specify an infinite set which is complete.

The opinion of Mr. Justice Francis of the English High Court which denied the parents of Charlie Gard, who had been born with an extremely rare mutation of a genetic disease, the right to take their child to the United States for a proposed experimental treatment occasioned world wide attention including that of the Pope, President Trump, and the US Congress. The case raise anew a debate as old as the foundation of Western medicine on who should decide and on (...) what standard when there is a conflict between a family and the treating physicians over a possible treatment. This paper will explore the different approaches of the British and American courts on the issue and the various proposals from that of John Rawls in his A Theory of Justice to a processed-based approach for resolving such disputes. As carefully crafted as the opinion of Mr Justice Nicholas Francis in the Gard case proved to be, it left commentators unsatisfied. A widespread criticism, captured in an article by Michael Dougherty in The National Review was for the state to ‘get out of the way of the parents trying to act in the best interests of the child’.1 Although he conceded the parents could be adding to the suffering of the child by taking Charlie to America for an experimental therapy and agreed that such a choice ‘may be the wrong decision,’ in Dougherty’s view, it should still be ‘their decision’. Dougherty’s stand was the popular response to the question of ‘Who should decide?’ It fails, however, to propose any rationale for the decision. It provided no norms, no standards and no guidelines for the parents. Their motive could equally well be indifference to the suffering of the child as concern for his well-being. Furthermore, even good, loving parents may make …. (shrink)