In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Cartesian Skepticism from Bare PossibilityRobert WachbritIn making his case for skepticism, Peter Unger offers the following exotic case as one which “conforms to a familiar, if not often explicitly artic-ulated pattern or form” of skeptical reasoning: 1 imagine that there is an evil scientist who deceives subjects into falsely believing that there are rocks. Living in a world bereft of rocks, he induces belief in their existence using electrodes (...) implanted into the appropriate parts of the subjects’ brai ns, protoplasm, or systems through which he sends patterns of electrical impulses in accord with his deceptive designs. Unger then offers the following argument, which is supposed to instantiate the pattern or form of this kind of skeptical reasoning:If you know that there are rocks, then you can know that there is no such scientist doing this to you. But no one can ever know that there is no evil scientist who is, by means of electrodes, deceiving him into falsely believing there to be rocks. So... you never know that there are rocks. But of course we have chosen our person, and the matter of there being rocks, quite arbitrarily, and this argument... may be generalized to cover any external matter at all. From this, we may conclude... that nobody knows anything about the external world. 2After presenting this case and articulating its form, Unger claims that “this argument is the same in form as the ‘evil demon’ argument in Descartes’s [End Page 109] Meditations; it is but a more modern, scientific counter-part, with its domain of application confined to matters concerning the external world.” He then proceeds to describe Descartes’s argument as “the most compelling sceptical argument the phil osophical literature has to offer,” calling it in fact “the classical argument for scepticism.” 3These claims may seem a little bit surprising; for it is not obvious, even from the most careful attention to the text, that what is written about the evil demon in the First Meditation constitutes a skeptical argument at all, and the scholarly literature is generally, and perhaps surprisingly, quite confusing about just what is going on at the end of the First Meditation. Further, rather than being exceedingly compelling as Unger thinks, arguments of this form are not only assiduously avoided by Descarte s during his descent into skepticism but are in fact, as I shall argue with some help from Descartes, weak and considerably less compelling than the kind of skeptical challenges Descartes actually offers.My purpose in this paper, then, is to make two related points, one historical and the other philosophical. First, I will try to demonstrate, on the basis of both textual and critical evidence, that Descartes was not offering a (further and final) skeptica l argument when he invented his demon. I will try to exhibit some of the confusions in the scholarly literature about the text of the last three paragraphs of the First Meditation and, by so doing, support Gouhier’s position that the idea of the demon “ha s no metaphysical significance; it is purely a methodological artifice which permits doubt to continue....” 4 Second, I will show that embodied in Descartes’s rejection of this kind of skeptical reasoning is the very reason for its weakness, a weakness that should prevent it from being considered, as Unger considers it, the classical form of skeptical argument. The inventions of the First Meditation still exercise considerable hold on our philosophical imaginations. I hope to show that, at least as far as the demon is concerned, Descartes would have been surprised at some of the most conventional and entrenched scholarly interpretations given his use of it and not at all sympathetic to its employment in a skeptical argument. Lest the demon seem an old and tired subject of philosophical scrutiny, let me beg the reader’s indulgence by promising both a deeper than usual look into the text of the end of the First Meditation and some significant conclusions about Cartesian skepticism that are hardly commonplace and thus neither old nor tired. [End Page 110]I. The Textual EvidenceThe demon makes its first appearance in the last paragraph of the... (shrink)

Acknowledgments 1. Culture Is Essential 2. Culture Exists 3. Culture Evolves 4. Culture Is an Adaptation 5. Culture Is Maladaptive 6. Culture and Genes Coevolve 7. Nothing about Culture Makes Sense except in the Light of Evolution.

This book articulates and defends Fregean realism, a theory of properties based on Frege's insight that properties are not objects, but rather the satisfaction conditions of predicates. Robert Trueman argues that this approach is the key not only to dissolving a host of longstanding metaphysical puzzles, such as Bradley's Regress and the Problem of Universals, but also to understanding the relationship between states of affairs, propositions, and the truth conditions of sentences. Fregean realism, Trueman suggests, ultimately leads to a (...) version of the identity theory of truth, the theory that true propositions are identical to obtaining states of affairs. In other words, the identity theory collapses the gap between mind and world. This book will be of interest to anyone working in logic, metaphysics, the philosophy of language or the philosophy of mind. (shrink)

In Context and Content Robert Stalnaker develops a philosophical picture of the nature of speech and thought and the relations between them. Two themes in particular run through these collected essays: the role that the context in which speech takes place plays in accounting for the way language is used to express thought, and the role of the external environment in determining the contents of our thoughts. Stalnaker argues against the widespread assumption of the priority of linguistic over mental (...) representation, which he suggests has had a distorting influence on our understanding. The first part of the book develops a framework for representing contexts and the way they interact with the interpretation of what is said in them. This framework is used to help to explain a range of linguistic phenomena concerning presupposition and assertion, conditional statements, the attribution of beliefs, and the use of names, descriptions, and pronouns to refer. Stalnaker then draws out the conception of thought and its content that is implicit in this framework. He defends externalism about thought--the assumption that our thoughts have the contents they have in virtue of the way we are situated in the world--and explores the role of linguistic action and linguistic structure in determining the contents of our thoughts. Context and Content offers philosophers and cognitive scientists a summation of Stalnaker's important and influential work in this area. His new introduction to the volume gives an overview of this work and offers a convenient way in for those who are new to it. The Oxford Cognitive Science series is a new forum for the best contemporary work in this flourishing field, where various disciplines--cognitive psychology, philosophy, linguistics, cognitive neuroscience, and computational theory--join forces in the investigation of thought, awareness, understanding, and associated workings of the mind. Each book constitutes an original contribution to its subject, but will be accessible beyond the ranks of specialists, so as to reach a broad interdisciplinary readership. The series will be carefully shaped and steered with the aim of representing the most important developments in the field and bringing together its constituent disciplines. (shrink)

The thirty chapters work through various fundamental metaphysical issues, sometimes focusing more on scholastic thought, sometimes on the seventeenth century.

Robert C. Neville, Dean of Theology and Professor of Philosophy, Boston University, in his comments on Chuang-Tzu for Spiritual Transformation for the State University of New York press: ‘The present outstanding volume by Robert Allinson ... initiates a new direction ... His new direction for understanding Chuang-Tzu is his comprehensive and detailed argument that Chuang Tzu was advocating an ideal of sageliness. Whereas many interpreters have claimed that Chuang Tzu used his metaphorical language to defend a relativism, Allinson (...) shows with convincing mastery that Chuang Tzu had a position, namely, the importance of achieving the ideal of sageliness ... he brings the discussion of Chuang Tzu into the heart of contemporary Western philosophy. Professor Allinson’s book, like his many articles, contributes to the growing body of literature that is creating an effective dialogue between Chinese and Western philosophy. The sophistication of this book demonstrates that the dialogue has worked and that we are in a new era of substantive comparative philosophy ... he also makes a substantial contribution to the philosophy of religion. Currently in its 8th impression, "Chuang-Tzu for Spiritual Transformation: An Analysis of the Inner Chapters" has been translated into Chinese and Korean. This book offers a fundamentally new interpretation of the philosophy of the Chuang-Tzu. It is the first full-length work of its kind which argues that a deep level cognitive structure exists beneath an otherwise random collection of literary anecdotes, cryptic sayings, and dark allusions. The author carefully analyzes myths, legends, monstrous characters, paradoxes, parables and linguistic puzzles as strategically placed techniques for systematically tapping and channeling the spiritual dimensions of the mind. Allinson takes issue with commentators who have treated the Chuang-Tzu as a minor foray into relativism. Chapter titles are re-translated, textual fragments are relocated, and inauthentic, outer miscellaneous chapters are carefully separated from the transformatory message of the authentic, inner chapters. Each of the inner chapters is shown to be a building block to the next so that they can only be understood as forming a developmental sequence. In the end, the reader is presented with a clear, consistent and coherent view of the Chuang-Tzu that is more in accord with its stature as a major philosophical work. (shrink)

Social isolation and loneliness are growing concerns around the globe that put people at increased risk of disease and early death. One much‐touted approach to addressing them is deploying artificially intelligent agents to serve as companions for socially isolated and lonely people. Focusing on digital humans, we consider evidence and ethical arguments for and against this approach. We set forth and defend public health policies that respond to concerns about replacing humans, establishing inferior relationships, algorithmic bias, distributive justice, and data (...) privacy. (shrink)

After Certainty offers a reconstruction of the history of epistemology, understood as a series of changing expectations about the cognitive ideal that we might hope to achieve in this world. Pasnau ranges widely over philosophy from Aristotle to the 17th century, and examines in some detail the rise of science as an autonomous discipline.

Stakeholder theory has become a central issue in the literature on business ethics / business and society. There are, however, a number of problems with stakeholder theory as currently understood. Among these are: 1) the lack of a coherent justificatory framework, 2) the problem of adjudicating between stakeholders, and 3) the problem of stakeholder identification. In this essay, I propose that a possible source of obligations to stakeholders is the principle of fairness (or fair play) as discussed in the political (...) philosophic literature of Rawls, Simmons, and Cullity among others. The principle of fairness states that, “Whenever persons or groups of persons voluntarily accept the benefits of a mutually beneficial scheme of co-operation requiring sacrifice or contribution on the parts of the participants and there exists the possibility of free-riding, there exist obligations of fairness on the part of these persons or groups to co-operate in proportion to the benefits accepted.” In this essay I discuss the gaps in the current stakeholder literature, elucidate and defend a principle of fairness that fills the gap, compare the fairness model to other similar models of business ethics, and draw some conclusions for the future of stakeholder theory. (shrink)

The Souls of Black Folk is Du Bois’s outstanding contribution to modern political theory. It is his still influential answer to the question, “What kind of politics should African Americans conduct to counter white supremacy?” Here, in a major addition to American studies and the first book-length philosophical treatment of Du Bois’s thought, Robert Gooding-Williams examines the conceptual foundations of Du Bois’s interpretation of black politics. For Du Bois, writing in a segregated America, a politics capable of countering Jim (...) Crow had to uplift the black masses while heeding the ethos of the black folk: it had to be a politics of modernizing “self-realization” that expressed a collective spiritual identity. Highlighting Du Bois’s adaptations of Gustav Schmoller’s social thought, the German debate over the Geisteswissenschaften, and William Wordsworth’s poetry, Gooding-Williams reconstructs Souls’ defense of this “politics of expressive self-realization,” and then examines it critically, bringing it into dialogue with the picture of African American politics that Frederick Douglass sketches in My Bondage and My Freedom. Through a novel reading of Douglass, Gooding-Williams characterizes the limitations of Du Bois’s thought and questions the authority it still exerts in ongoing debates about black leadership, black identity, and the black underclass. Coming to Bondage and then to these debates by looking backward and then forward from Souls, Gooding-Williams lets Souls serve him as a productive hermeneutical lens for exploring Afro-Modern political thought in America. (shrink)

Surprisingly, the dimples on a golf ball (typically around 300-400) cannot be spaced evenly on the surface. I will explain how this is connected to the Platonic solids. The example is interesting, because it illustrates a difference between efficient and formal causation and explanation. I will discuss a few interesting consequences.

This book is a major contribution to the history of philosophy in the later medieval period (1250-1350). It focuses on cognitive theory, a subject of intense investigation during these years. In fact many of the issues that dominate philosophy of mind and epistemology today - intentionality, mental representation, scepticism, realism - were hotly debated in the later medieval period. The book offers a careful analysis of these debates, primarily through the work of Thomas Aquinas, John Olivi, and William Ockham. Each (...) of these figures attempts to reconceptualise cognition along direct realist lines, criticising in the process the standard Aristotelian account. Though of primary interest to medieval philosophers, the book presupposes no background knowledge of the medieval period, and will therefore interest a broader community of philosophers concerned with the origins of contemporary cognitive theory. (shrink)

Abstract:This paper is a preliminary attempt to better understand the concept of legitimacy in stakeholder theory. The normative component of stakeholder theory plays a central role in the concept of legitimacy. Though the elaboration of legitimacy contained herein applies generally to all “normative cores” this paper relies on Phillips’s principle of stakeholder fairness and therefore begins with a brief description of this work. This is followed by a discussion of the importance of legitimacy to stakeholder theory as well as the (...) general ambiguity of the term. A distinction is then drawn between normative and derivative legitimacy. Reference to this distinction helps distinguish between a relationship with the organization based on direct moral obligation and one based on the power to help or harm the organization. It is concluded that stakeholders who retain the ability to affect the organization arelegitimate(derivatively), but that this legitimacy is derived from the moral obligation owed other (normative) stakeholders and that the two sorts of legitimacy are importantly different from one another. An example of the normative/derivative distinction at work in managerial decision making is elaborated upon and managerial and research implications are then suggested. (shrink)

The standard view of academic freedom and free speech is that they play complementary roles in universities. Academic freedom protects academic discourse, while other public discourse in universities is protected by free speech. Here I challenge this view, broadly, on the grounds that free speech in universities sometimes undermines academic practices. One defense of the standard view, in the face of this worry, says that campus free speech actually furthers the university’s academic aims. Another says that universities have a secondary (...) democratic function, which cannot be fulfilled without free speech on campus. I identify shortcomings in both types of arguments. (shrink)

Although ethics consultation is offered as a clinical service in most hospitals in the United States, few valid and practical tools are available to evaluate, ensure, and improve ethics consultation quality. The quality of ethics consultation is important because poor quality ethics consultation can result in ethically inappropriate outcomes for patients, other stakeholders, or the health care system. To promote accountability for the quality of ethics consultation, we developed the Ethics Consultation Quality Assessment Tool. ECQAT enables raters to assess the (...) quality of ethics consultations based on the written record. Through rigorous development and preliminary testing, we identified key elements of a quality ethics consultation, established scoring criteria, developed training guidelines, and designed a holistic assessment process. This article describes the development of the ECQAT,.. (shrink)

This brief introduction to a special issue of Disputatio succinctly summarizes John Perry’s pluri-propositionalist reflexive framework and notes some potential applications to varieties of context-sensitivity.

In Deep Medicine, Eric Topol argues that the development of artificial intelligence (AI) for healthcare will lead to a dramatic shift in the culture and practice of medicine. Topol claims that, rather than replacing physicians, AI could function alongside of them in order to allow them to devote more of their time to face-to-face patient care. Unfortunately, these high hopes for AI-enhanced medicine fail to appreciate a number of factors that, we believe, suggest a radically different picture for the future (...) of healthcare. Far from facilitating a return to “the golden age of doctoring”, the role of economic and institutional considerations in determining how medical AI will be used mean that it is likely to further erode therapeutic relationships and threaten professional and patient satisfaction. (shrink)

Epistemology today centrally concerns the conceptual analysis of knowledge. Historically, however, this is a concept that philosophers have seldom been interested in analysing, particularly when it is construed as broadly as the English language would have it. Instead, the overriding focus of epistemologists over the centuries has been, first, to describe the epistemic ideal that human beings might hope to achieve, and then go on to chart the various ways in which we ordinarily fall off from that ideal. I discuss (...) in detail two historical manifestations of idealized epistemology — Aristotle and Descartes — and then consider how this perspective might make a difference to the discipline today. In the end, an idealized epistemology points toward a normative, prescriptive rather than descriptive enterprise. (shrink)

An anthology of writings by proponents and critics of intelligent design creationism.

In a recent article, Hofweber presents a new, and surprising, argument for idealism. His argument is surprising because it starts with an apparently innocent premiss from the philosophy of language: that ‘that’-clauses do not refer. I do not think that Hofweber's argument works, and my first aim in this paper is to explain why. However, I agree with Hofweber that what we say about ‘that’-clauses has important metaphysical consequences. My second aim is to argue that, far from leading us into (...) idealism, denying that ‘that’-clauses refer is the first step toward a kind of direct realism about belief. (shrink)

The argument of Julian Savulescu’s 2001 paper, “Procreative Beneficence: Why We Should Select the Best Children” is flawed in a number of respects. Savulescu confuses reasons with obligations and equivocates between the claim that parents have some reason to want the best for their children and the more radical claim that they are morally obligated to attempt to produce the best child possible. Savulescu offers a prima facie implausible account of parental obligation, as even the best parents typically fail to (...) do everything they think would be best for their children let alone everything that is in fact best for their children. The profound philosophical difficulties which beset the attempt to formulate a plausible account of the best human life constitute a further independent reason to resile from Savulescu’s conclusion. Savulescu’s argument also requires parents to become complicit with racist and homophobic oppression, which is yet another reason to reject it. Removing the equivocation from Savulescu’s argument allows us to see that the assertion of an obligation to choose the “best child” has much more in common with the “old” eugenics than Savulescu acknowledges. (shrink)

Presentism states that everything is present. Crucial to our understanding of this thesis is how we interpret the ‘is’. Recently, several philosophers have claimed that on any interpretation presentism comes out as either trivially true or manifestly false. Yet, presentism is meant to be a substantive and interesting thesis. I outline in detail the nature of the problem and the standard interpretative options. After unfavourably assessing several popular responses in the literature, I offer an alternative interpretation that provides the desired (...) result. This interpretation is then used to clarify the distinction between ‘real change’ from mere variation and temporal relativisation. Reflecting on my solution, I try to diagnose the source of confusion over these issues. Then, building upon Fine’s distinction between ontic and factive presentism, I elucidate what the presentist thesis specifically concerns and how best to formalise it. In the process I distinguish a weak and strong version of the presentist thesis. Finally, I end by drawing out some limitations of the paper. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:THE MOB AND THE VICTIM IN THE PSALMS AND JOB Robert Hamerton-Kelly Woodside Church IrecaiI a passage from Elie Wiesel's novel, Night, where, looking at the frail body of a young boy writhing on the gallows—his body weight was too light to kill him outright when he dropped through the trap door—someone asksthe narrator, "Where is nowyourGod?" This question is often on my mind, not least because for (...) the last seven years ofmy tenure at Stanford I studied ethnic conflict and filled my mind with the most discouraging images. I found myselfsaying on occasion that I felt ashamed to be a human being, which was only a slight exaggeration. I noted with wry amusement that a few years ago it was reported that the wolves were fleeing from the Caucasus in great numbers because ofthe human violence there, a sad irony in the light of Thomas Hobbes' motto, Homo homini lupus. I had long suspected thatthat was an insult to wolves, and now I had the proof. Lately we have Philip Gourewitch's new book on the Rwanda holocaust of 1994, where they killed one million people in ten weeks, not with weapons ofmass destruction butwith machetes and clubs primedwith six-inch nails, and Rwanda is a Christian country. The voice ofconscience cries out, "Where is our God?" in all this; why does He spend his time causing statues to ooze oil in suburban Massachusetts rather than defending the children of Kosovo against depraved nationalists.1 It is some comfort that the psalmist cried the same question and thus provides a convenient way into a meditation on violence in the Psalms. It occurs first in 42,3: "I have no food but tears / day and 1I refer to the phenomena reported in connection with the comatose teenage girl, Audrey Sosa, who is believed by some to be a channel for miracles. 152Robert Hamerton-Kelly night:/ and all day long men say to me,/ Where is now your God?" and again at 42,10, "Nearly breaking my bones / my oppressors insult me / as all day long they ask me / Where is now your God?" In 79, 10 it occurs in a national lament, "Why should the pagans ask, Where is their God?" and this recalls two prophetic oracles, in Joel 2,9, "Spare yourpeople Yahweh!/ Do not make your heritage a thing of shame, a byword for the nations./ Why should it be said amongthe nations,/ Where is their God?" and Micah 7,10 "When my enemy sees it (my vindication)/ she will be covered with shame,? she who said to me: Where is Yahweh your God?" So there are two classes of such sayings, one by an individual and one by the nation. Much ink has been spilled on the questions, Who is the victim?, and Who are the enemies? The answers have canvassed all the possibilities from the lone individual beset by spiritual temptations, or David himselfin his days and nights as a fugitive, to the nation beset by rival nations.2 The victim surrounded by persecutors is clearly a major category in the Psalms, present in two thirds ofthe collection; one hundred out ofthe one hundred and fifty explicitly or implicitly refer to a victim surrounded by enemies.3 Let me cut to the chase and recall that according to René Girard's mimetic theory, which I take as a point of departure, the situation of the victim surrounded by a mob ofenemies is a structural not an historical situation.4 The deep structure ofhuman history is a victim surrounded by the mob, a lamb slain since the foundation ofthe world. This deep structure controls the shape of emergent history but that emergence conceals its deep structure by turning history into myth. Myth covers up the blood stains and stifles the voice of the victim, myth accuses the victim, presents the victim as guilty or willing and the persecutors as innocent. To this day much that claims to be history is really myth. History happens only when the voice ofthe victim comes to word, and for that reason the gospel is irreducibly history and not myth. The 2Raymund Schwager (53ff) gives the following information... (shrink)

ABSTRACT:How does the diagnosis process work? This essay traces the philosophical underpinnings of diagnosis from Hume through Kant, Peirce, and Popper, analyzing how pathologists amalgamate sensibility, intuition, and imagination to form new hypotheses that can be tested by evidence and experience.

In the 2005 Kitzmiller v Dover Area School Board case, a federal district court ruled that Intelligent Design creationism was not science, but a disguised religious view and that teaching it in public schools is unconstitutional. But creationists contend that it is illegitimate to distinguish science and religion, citing philosophers Quinn and especially Laudan, who had criticized a similar ruling in the 1981 McLean v. Arkansas creation-science case on the grounds that no necessary and sufficient demarcation criterion was possible and (...) that demarcation was a dead pseudo-problem. This article discusses problems with those conclusions and their application to the quite different reasoning between these two cases. Laudan focused too narrowly on the problem of demarcation as Popper defined it. Distinguishing science from religion was and remains an important conceptual issue with significant practical import, and philosophers who say there is no difference have lost touch with reality in a profound and perverse way. The Kitzmiller case did not rely on a strict demarcation criterion, but appealed only to a “ballpark” demarcation that identifies methodological naturalism (MN) as a “ground rule” of science. MN is shown to be a distinguishing feature of science both in explicit statements from scientific organizations and in actual practice. There is good reason to think that MN is shared as a tacit assumption among philosophers who emphasize other demarcation criteria and even by Laudan himself. (shrink)

Controversy over the epistemology of disagreement endures because there is an unnoticed factor at work: the intrinsic value we give to self-trust. Even if there are many instances of disagreement where, from a strictly epistemic or rational point of view, we ought to suspend belief, there are other values at work that influence our all-things considered judgments about what we ought to believe. Hence those who would give equal-weight to both sides in many cases of disagreement may be right, from (...) the perspective of pure rationality. But their critics are right too, in seeing something undesirable in the consequences of giving equal weight. Among epistemologists, there is a tendency to set aside trust and other such non-epistemic factors, on the grounds that these are not germane to their topic. But ultimately, the value of self-trust shows signs of encroaching on the strictly epistemic question of when our beliefs may be said to be justified. Hence again, even if the equal-weighters are right about what is rational, they may be wrong about what knowledge requires. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:RESPONSE TO QAMAR-UL HUDA Robert Hamerton-Kelly Stanford University Qamar and I communicated by email. The text of my response is basically what I sent him by email. Dear Qamar: Thanks for your greeting. I have read your paper with interest and learned from it. Here is a brief account of what I plan to say. My response will be chiefly from the point of view of the mimetic (...) theory which holds that religion in its human, pagan, unrevealed form is a structure of sacred violence that lives by scapegoating and sacrifice and generates culture out ofthe victim by means of, firstly ritual, the repetition of the first murder as sacrifice, secondly prohibition, religious law that enforces differentiation, and thus prevents the crisis of undifferentiation, that is the precursor of surrogate victimage and thirdly myth, the account of the originary violence told from the point of views of the perpetrators, coverup for their violence. Islam's monotheism is a powerful antidote to this pagan sacred, indeed, in terms ofmimetic theory, all the great religions are more or less in reaction against the pagan sacred, against generative violence; and one ofthe marks oftheir greatness resides in the candor with which they address the problem of the residual sacred violence in themselves. This was my problem with Rabbi Kimelman's presentation yesterday, and I confess it is my problem with your presentation. In this regard Iconsider the Buddhistcontribution to this symposiumto be the best of the lot, precisely because it is so candid about the residue of sacred 100Robert Hamerton-Kelly violence in this truly great religion. I think that the presentation on Christianity too was, in this regard, candid. Islam's monotheism is a powerful antidote to this pagan sacred, and I want to drawjust for a minute on that. As you yourself mentioned, the rise ofIslamwas aconflictual phenomenon within thepagan diversity ofArabia in the sixth century. Andthat itselfis disclosive oftherelationshipbetween this emerging monotheism and the residual pagan sacred. Now, you understand, that in terms of mimetic theory, the god is the transfigured victim. So the god is essentially a center of violence. And the emergence of monotheism emerges as a critique of the pagan sacred, the transfigured victim. Now here are some indications in the biblical tradition that illustrate this that I find are quite interesting. You recall that monotheism in the Bible first emerges in the texts of Second Isaiah, Deutero Isaiah. Where the Israelite—in this case Jewish—experience of exile leads the prophet to perceive that God is not just the God of Israel—that is, it's not just henotheism—but is the God of all the world, and that he can indeed work through Cyrus, King ofthe Medes and Persians. It is surely significant that monotheism emerges in the very same text in which the figure of the Suffering Servant of Yahweh appears. It seems as if the emergence of monotheism goes along with the emerging recognition that the victim is innocent. That, ifyou like, is the demythologization ofthe sacred victim of the pagan divinity. I refer you now, secondly, to the ten commandments, the ten words of Moses from Sinai in Exodus 20 and Deuteronomy 6. As we discussed in our seminar at Stanford and as René has made clear in his most recent book (ISee Satan Falling likeLightening ), the tenth commandment,"Thou shalt not covet" is indeed a prohibition on mimetic desire. This is what the Apostle Paul understood when he picked up in a book epithumesis—in Greek: "you shall not desire." By the way thuo, the root thu in Greek is the root for sacrifice. So epithumia/desire, is etymologically in Greek linked to sacrifice. "You shall not desire" is a prohibition on sacred violence. That's the last commandment and, I take it as an important summary of the previous nine commandments. What I have not seen generally appreciated is that the first commandment is a prohibition on idolatry. It is in fact the establishment of the absolute monotheism. So it is as if the ten commandments are bracketed by two stridently mimetic antimimetic injunctions: theinjunction on idolatry and the injunction on mimetic desire. And I think you can... (shrink)

Stakeholder theory is often unable to distinguish those individuals and groups that are stakeholders from those that are not. This problem of stakeholder identity has recently been addressed by linking stakeholder theory to a Rawlsian principle of fairness. To illustrate, the question of stakeholder status for the non-human environment is discussed. This essay criticizes a past attempt to ascribe stakeholder status to the non-human environment, which utilized a broad definition of the term "stakeholder." This paper then demonstrates how, despite the (...) denial of stakeholder status, the environment is nonetheless accounted for on a fairness-based approach through legitimate organizational stakeholders. In addition, since stakeholder theory has never claimed to be a comprehensive ethical scheme, it is argued that sound reasons might exist for managers to consider their organization's impact on the environment that are not stakeholder-related. (shrink)

Following David Hitchcock and Stephen Toulmin, this paper takes warrants to be material inference rules. It offers an account of the form such rules should take that is designed (a) to implement the idea that an argument/inference is valid only if it is entitlement preserving and (b) to support a qualitative version of evidence proportionalism. It attempts to capture what gives warrants their normative force by elaborating a concept of reliability tailored to its account of the form such rules should (...) take. (shrink)

A discussion is emerging within the contemporary philosophy of technology over issues of discrimination through design. My suggestion is that a productive way to approach this topic is through a combination of insights from the postphenomenological and critical constructivist perspectives. In particular, I recommend that we build on the postphenomenological notion of “multistability” and conceive of instances of discrimination through design as a kind of discriminatory “stability,” one possible instantiation of a device that could be usefully contrasted with others. Through (...) the adoption of ideas from critical constructivism and postphenomenology, it is possible to draw out some of the features of discriminatory stabilities, including how systems of bias can go unnoticed, especially by those not targeted by them. These ideas could be of use in the identification of ways that unjust systematic biases become set within dominant culture, designed into technologies, sedimented within individual bodily-perceptual habits, and even constructed into prevailing senses of reason. As a practical contribution to this ongoing discussion, I identify a distinction that can be made between two broad categories of discrimination via technology: 1. that occurring along what could be called “an axis of difference,” and 2. “an axis of usage.” In the former, discriminatory efforts occur as different users are advantaged and disadvantaged by a device, even as they use it for similar purposes. In the latter, discriminatory effects occur as the particular usage of a technology preferred by a vulnerable group is shut down through design choices. Although the various emerging discussions on technology and discrimination each tend to gravitate toward analysis along one of these axes, it will of course be important to keep our eyes on the variety of ways that biases are faced by the vulnerable. (shrink)

The dead donor rule (DDR) has facilitated the saving of hundreds of thousands of lives. Recent advances in heart donation, however, have exposed how DDR has limited donation of all organs. We propose advancing the moment in the dying process at which death can be determined to increase substantially the supply of organs for transplantation. We justify this approach by identifying certain flaws in the Uniform Determination of Death Act and proposing a modification of that law that permits earlier procurement (...) of healthier organs in greater numbers. (shrink)

Argumentation involves offering and/or exchanging reasons – either reasons for adopting various attitudes towards specific propositional contents or else reasons for acting in various ways. This paper develops the idea that the force of reasons is through and through a normative force because what good reasons accomplish is precisely to give one a certain sort of entitlement to do what they are reasons for. The paper attempts to shed light on what it is to have a reason, how the sort (...) of entitlement arising from reasons differs from other species of entitlement and how the norms by which such entitlement is assessed obtain their status as norms. (shrink)

Recent structural innovations in global commerce present difficult challenges for legacy understandings of responsibility. The rise of outsourcing, sub-contracting, and mobile app-based platforms have dramatically restructured relationships between and among economic actors. Though not entirely new, the remarkable rise in the prevalence of these “not-quite-arm’s-length” relationships present difficulties for conceptions of responsibility based on interrogating the past for specifiable actions by blameworthy actors. Iris Marion Young invites investigation of a “social connection model of responsibility” (SCMR) that is, in many ways, (...) better suited to this new commercial reality. Scholars working to understand corporate responsibility have invoked Young’s model to some good effect, though often superficially and uncritically. In this paper, we look closely at Young’s social connection model and its potential for helping us understand corporate responsibility in a radically networked world. (shrink)

Philosophers today have largely given up on the project of categorizing being. Aristotle’s ten categories now strike us as quaint, and no attempt to improve on that effort meets with much interest. Still, no one supposes that reality is smoothly distributed over space. The world at large comes in chunks, and there remains a widespread intuition, even among philosophers, that some of these chunks have a special sort of unity and persistence. These, we tend to suppose, are most truly agents (...) and subjects, and are what exist in the most proper sense of the term. We believe, in other words, in substances. (shrink)

Cross-national studies of business-related ethicality frequently have concluded that Americans possess higher ethical standards than non-Americans. These conclusions have generally been based on survey responses of relatively small convenience samples of individuals in a very limited number of countries. This article reports a study of the relationship between nationality and business-related ethicality based on survey responses from more than 6300 business students attending 120 colleges and universities in 36 countries. Two well-documented determinants of business ethics (gender and religiosity) were investigated (...) as moderators of the nationality–business ethicality relationship. The major research finding is that, while statistically significant differences were found between the business-related ethicality of American survey participants and the business-related ethicality of the non-American survey participants, the magnitudes of the differences were not substantial. The results of the study suggest that (i) more empirical cross-cultural/national research is required on business-related ethicality and (ii) previous explanations for cross-cultural/national differences in ethics need to be reconsidered before further generalizations are warranted. (shrink)

This chapter presents the text of a lecture on the Industrial Revolution in Great Britain given at the British Academy's 2009 Keynes Lecture in Economics. This text suggests that the Industrial Revolution was Britain's response to the global economy that emerged after 1500 and that Britain's success in world trade resulted in one of the most urbanised economies in Europe with unusually high wages and cheap energy prices. The text here also highlights the contribution of Britain in the invention of (...) the steam engine and the cotton spinning machines and in scientific discoveries relating to atmospheric pressure. (shrink)