While much has been written about the functional profile of intentions, and about their normative or rational status, comparatively little has been said about the subjective authority of intention. What is it about intending that explains the ‘hold’ that an intention has on an agent—a hold that is palpable from her first-person perspective? I argue that several prima facie appealing explanations are not promising. Instead, I maintain that the subjective authority of intention can be explained in terms of the inner (...) structure of intention. In adopting an intention the agent comes to see herself as criticizable depending on whether she executes the intention. This allows us to explain in first-personal terms why the agent becomes disposed to act and deliberate in ways that are characteristic of intention. As intention-formation involves profound changes to reflexive evaluative attitudes, this is the ‘Self-Evaluation’ view of the subjective authority of intention. (shrink)

In debates about rationalizing action explanation causalists assume that the psychological states that explain an intentional action have both causal and rational features. I scrutinize the presuppositions of those who seek and offer rationalizing action explanations. This scrutiny shows, I argue, that where rational features play an explanatory role in these contexts, causal features play only a presuppositional role. But causal features would have to play an explanatory role if rationalizing action explanation were a species of causal explanation. Consequently, we (...) should conclude that action explanation is not a species of causal explanation. (shrink)

It has been widely accepted that intentional actions are “the actions to which “a certain sense of the question ‘why?’ is given application” (Anscombe 1957/2000: 9). But there are robust reasons for thinking that this claim is false. First, there are intentional actions for which such questions are unsound. We have good reasons for thinking that the questions are not “given application” in these cases. Second, when these questions are “given application” this is best explained, it is argued, not in (...) terms of a necessary link between intentional action and this type of enquiry, but in terms of the fact that this is an enquiry that we pursue when we take an agent to have exercised certain of their rational capacities. (shrink)

What is special about successful action explanation is that it reveals what the agent saw in her action. Most contemporary philosophers assume that this amounts to explanation in terms of the reason for which the agent acted. They also assume that such explanations conform to a realist picture of explanation. What is disputed is whether the reason is a psychological state or a normative state of affairs . I argue that neither psychological states nor their contents suffice to make actions (...) intelligible in the right way , while Anti-Psychologism can’t explain acting on bad reasons . The alternative that I propose, Proceduralism, has it that explaining an action requires simulating the agent’s practical deliberation. On this view, explanation is not grounded in reasons, and thereby avoids the problems with “bad” reasons that Anti-Psychologism faces. Instead, in simulating to the same conclusion as the agent, the “explainer” comes to see what the agent saw in her action, thereby satisfying the Reasonableness Constraint. Proceduralism requires giving up on the assumption that the reason for which the agent acts explains the action and on the realist picture of action explanation. In addition, it accounts for the incomprehension that explainers experience when they encounter “alien” psychologies – psychologies that are deeply different from their own. (shrink)

This special section originates from a workshop `New Horizons in Action and Agency’ that we organized in August 2019 at the University of Helsinki, Finland. The aim of the workshop was to provide a...

There have been a number of challenges to the Simple View—the view that an intention to A is necessary if an agent is to A intentionally. Michael Bratman’s celebrated video game case has convinced many that the view is false. This article presents a novel objection to Bratman’s case. It is argued, first, that the Simple View is not undermined by the case, and second, that the real import of the case is that it raises the question of how we (...) can rationally intend mutually exclusive ends. I offer a solution to this puzzle that draws on what I call the Self-Evaluation aspect of intention. (shrink)

THIS article concerning Mr. Marshall's open letter to Governor Smith does not pretend to be an answer. It suggests some philosophical considerations on the point at issue. The Editor.

A contemporary debate concerning the epistemology of testimony is portrayed by its protagonists as having its origins in the eighteenth century and the respective views of David Hume and Thomas Reid. Hume is characterized as a reductionist and Reid as an anti-reductionist. This terminology has been widely adopted and the reductive approach has become synonymous with Hume. In Sect. 1 I spell out the reductionist interpretation of Hume in which the justification possessed by testimonially-acquired beliefs is reducible to the epistemic (...) properties of perception, memory and inductive inference. This account of testimony is taken to be found in the section ‘On Miracles’ of Hume’s Enquiry concerning Human Understanding. In Sect. 2 I introduce the distinction between global and local reductionism, and Coady’s interpretation of Hume as a global reductionist. He takes Hume’s position to be untenable. The rest of the paper explores alternative interpretations of Hume. Section 3 develops a local reductionist interpretation of Hume on testimony. It is argued, though, that such an approach is unstable and, in response, Sect. 4 turns to anti-reductionism in its contemporary forms and in Reid’s teleological account. In Sect. 5 I argue for an anti-reductionist account of Hume, one drawn from his discussion of the testimony of history in the Treatise of Human Nature, thus moving away from the usually exclusive focus upon the discussion of miracles in the first Enquiry, upon which the reductionist interpretation is based. Given the standard meaning of ‘Humeanism’ in the current debate, my interpretation amounts to the claim that Hume is not a Humean with respect to testimony. (shrink)

A veteran nurse researcher and educator provides a spiritual perspective on the professional nurse's vocation of caring. Grounding each chapter in Scripture, O'Brien explores the Christian nurse's call to love as Jesus loved: without discrimination, reserve and, sometimes, reward.

The twelve specially written essays in this volume investigate the neglected topic of mental action, and show its importance for the metaphysics, epistemology, and phenomenology of mind. The essays investigate what mental actions are, how we are aware of them, and what is the relationship between mental and physical action.

My aim in this piece is to understand what kinds of acts sneering acts are. I aim to look at what sneering acts do and what social function they perform. In particular, I want to mark them out as acts of ‘making people feel’. I explore the grounds on which we might criticize sneering acts, and ask whether the thing that we do when we sneer is always vicious.

THIS article concerning Mr. Marshall's open letter to Governor Smith does not pretend to be an answer. It suggests some philosophical considerations on the point at issue. The Editor.

Hume is usually taken to have an evidentialist account of testimonial belief: one is justified in believing what someone says if one has empincal evidence that they have been reliable in the past. This account is impartialist: such evidence is required no matter who the person is, or what refotions she may have to you. I, however, argue that Hume has another account of testimony, one grounded in sympathy. This account is partialist, in that empincal evidence is not required in (...) order for one to be justified in believing some of the assertions of one's friends. (shrink)

One kind of successful communication involves the transmission of knowledge from speaker to hearer. Such testimonial knowledge transmission is usually seen as conforming to three widely held epistemological approaches: reliabilism, impartialism and evidentialism. First, a speaker must be a reliable testifier in order that she transmits knowledge, and reliability is cashed out in terms of her likelihood of speaking the truth. Second, if a certain speaker's testimony has sufficient epistemic weight to be believed by hearer1, then it should also be (...) believed by hearer2. Third, the normative constraint here is evidentially grounded: whether or not a hearer should believe a speaker depends on the evidence the hearer has that the speaker is telling the truth. I argue that there are cases of testimonial knowledge transmission that are incompatible with these three claims. This is when one accepts the testimony of an intimate friend. (shrink)

Doctors have an ethical and legal duty to respect patient confidentiality. We consider the basis for this duty, looking particularly at the meaning and value of autonomy in health care. Enabling patients to decide how information about them is disclosed is an important element in autonomy and helps patients engage as active partners in their care.Good quality data is, however, essential for research, education, public health monitoring, and for many other activities essential to provision of health care. We discuss whether (...) it is necessary to choose between individual rights and the wider public interest and conclude that this should only rarely be necessary. The paper makes some recommendations on practical steps which could help ensure that good quality information is available for work which benefits society and the public health, while still enabling patients’ autonomy to be respected. (shrink)

Niche construction is the process whereby organisms, through their activities and choices, modify their own and each other’s niches. By transforming natural-selection pressures, niche construction generates feedback in evolution at various different levels. Niche-constructing species play important ecological roles by creating habitats and resources used by other species and thereby affecting the flow of energy and matter through ecosystems—a process often referred to as “ecosystem engineering.” An important emphasis of niche construction theory (NCT) is that acquired characters play an evolutionary (...) role through transforming selective environments. This is particularly relevant to human evolution, where our species has engaged in extensive environmental modification through cultural practices. Humans can construct developmental environments that feed back to affect how individuals learn and develop and the diseases to which they are exposed. Here we provide an introduction to NCT and illustrate some of its more important implications for the human sciences. (shrink)

Prediction-based decisions, which are often made by utilizing the tools of machine learning, influence nearly all facets of modern life. Ethical concerns about this widespread practice have given rise to the field of fair machine learning and a number of fairness measures, mathematically precise definitions of fairness that purport to determine whether a given prediction-based decision system is fair. Following Reuben Binns (2017), we take ‘fairness’ in this context to be a placeholder for a variety of normative egalitarian considerations. We (...) explore a few fairness measures to suss out their egalitarian roots and evaluate them, both as formalizations of egalitarian ideas and as assertions of what fairness demands of predictive systems. We pay special attention to a recent and popular fairness measure, counterfactual fairness, which holds that a prediction about an individual is fair if it is the same in the actual world and any counterfactual world where the individual belongs to a different demographic group (cf. Kusner et al. (2018)). (shrink)

Although connectionism is advocated by its proponents as an alternative to the classical computational theory of mind, doubts persist about its _computational_ credentials. Our aim is to dispel these doubts by explaining how connectionist networks compute. We first develop a generic account of computation—no easy task, because computation, like almost every other foundational concept in cognitive science, has resisted canonical definition. We opt for a characterisation that does justice to the explanatory role of computation in cognitive science. Next we examine (...) what might be regarded as the “conventional” account of connectionist computation. We show why this account is inadequate and hence fosters the suspicion that connectionist networks aren’t genuinely computational. Lastly, we turn to the principal task of the paper: the development of a more robust portrait of connectionist computation. The basis of this portrait is an explanation of the representational capacities of connection weights, supported by an analysis of the weight configurations of a series of simulated neural networks. (shrink)

There are various forms of teleological thinking central to debates in the early modern and modern periods, debates in which David Hume (1711–1776) is a key figure. In the first section, we shall introduce three levels at which teleological considerations have been incorporated into philosophical accounts of man and nature, and sketch Hume’s criticisms of these approaches. In the second section, we turn to Hume’s non-teleological ‘science of man’. In the third section, we show how Hume has an account of (...) human flourishing that is not dependent on teleology. In the fourth section, we shall speculate as to the relation between Hume’s account of human nature and contemporary evolutionary accounts of morality and reasoning. (shrink)

Most models of corporate social responsibility revolve around the controversy as to whether business is a single dimensional entity of profit maximization or a multi-dimensional entity serving greater societal interests. Furthermore, the models are mostly descriptive in nature and are based on the experiences of western countries. There has been little attempt to develop a model that accounts for corporate social responsibility in diverse environments with differing socio-cultural and market settings. In this paper an attempt has been made to fill (...) this gap by developing a two-dimensional model of corporate social responsibility and empirically testing its validity in the context of two dissimilar cultures – Australia and Bangladesh. The two dimensions are the span of corporate responsibility and the range of outcomes of social commitments of businesses. The test results confirm the validity of the two-dimensional model in the two environments. The Factor analysis revealed two leading dimensions. Cluster analysis pointed to two distinctive clusters of managers in both Australia and Bangladesh, one consisting of managers with a broad contemporary concept of social responsibility, and the other with a limited narrow view. The paper concludes that corporate social responsibility is two-dimensional and universal in nature and that differing cultural and market settings in which managers operate may have little impact on the ethical perceptions of corporate managers. (shrink)

_"The Essential Plotinus_ is a lifesaver. For many years my students in Greek and Roman Religion have depended on it to understand the transition from antiquity to the Middle Ages. The translation is crisp and clear, and the excerpts are just right for an introduction to Plotionus's many-layered view of the world and humankind’s place in it." --F. E. Romer, University of Arizona.

Stobaeus records a placitum where Empedocles says that the world is destroyed by the domination in turn of Love and of Strife. The placitum makes perfectly good sense in the context of Empedocles' belief that Love and Strife produce, in turn, a non-cosmic state of total unity (Love) and of total separation (Strife). But for over two hundred years scholars have been unable to hear that simple message. Sturz (1805) emended the text so as to make it fit the non-cyclical (...) interpretation of Empedocles that he had taken over from the pages of Tiedemann (1791). When Diels included Stobaeus' text in his edition of Aetius, in the "Doxographi graeci" (1879), he failed to remove the emendation, although his own reconstruction of the chapter heading in Aetius made the emendation impossible. Twenty years later, Diels saw the light, and printed Stobaeus' placitum, unemended, in his "Poetarum philosophorum fragmenta" (1901) and in successive editions of his "Fragmente der Vorsokratiker" (from 1903 onwards). But Kranz resurrected the emendation in the "Nachträge" to his sixth edition of the "Fragmente der Vorsokratiker" (1951). The emended placitum is used again by Uvo Hölscher (1965) to support a non-cyclical interpretation of Empedocles and is repeated in the latest collection of the fragments and testimonia (Brad Inwood, 1992). Hölscher fails to appreciate that the text that he uses to support his reconstruction is merely Sturz's translation into Greek of the non-cyclical interpretation of Empedocles proposed by Tiedemann at the end of the eighteenth century. (shrink)

Teilhard’s cosmological speculation is a valuable basis for an environmental ethics that perceives individual natural objects as good in themselves and the world as good in itself. Teilhard perceives man as fundamentally part of a cosmic environmental whole that is greater than mankind taken individually or collectively. His holistic views on human biological and psychological and social evolution are, I argue, compatible with a biocentric environmental ethics. I discuss some similarities and differences with the views of the deep ecology movement. (...) I show that Teilhard’s hierarchical system is not humanistically oriented in a way that need be interpreted by Teilhardians as contrary to environmental well-being. I argue that Teilhard’s sympathies toward transportation technology, including the automobile, can be interpreted in his holistic manner. I conclude that Teilhard’s theocentric views are also a basis for supporting an environmental ethics which is both optimistic and not anthropocentric. (shrink)

While new generations of implantable brain computer interface devices are being developed, evidence in the literature about their impact on the patient experience is lagging. In this article, we address this knowledge gap by analysing data from the first-in-human clinical trial to study patients with implanted BCI advisory devices. We explored perceptions of self-change across six patients who volunteered to be implanted with artificially intelligent BCI devices. We used qualitative methodological tools grounded in phenomenology to conduct in-depth, semi-structured interviews. Results (...) show that, on the one hand, BCIs can positively increase a sense of the self and control; on the other hand, they can induce radical distress, feelings of loss of control, and a rupture of patient identity. We conclude by offering suggestions for the proactive creation of preparedness protocols specific to intelligent—predictive and advisory—BCI technologies essential to prevent potential iatrogenic harms. (shrink)

ANALOGY has not just to do with the abstruse details and niceties of metaphysics but rather underlies the structure of all metaphysical thought. It is the heart of metaphysics. No system of metaphysics can discard it, without prejudice to the richness and variety of being. Without analogy there is elimination and over-simplification. Metaphysics is far from being a straightforward science; it is highly complex and its method and style of argument are not easy to master. Its field of inquiry is (...) wide. It is the task of the metaphysician to reduce the world of things to an intelligible unity. (shrink)

It is suggested that George Cotkin's essay is unpersuasive in its two central claims. Firstly, the evidence is not persuasive that there has been a discernible "moral turn" among historians in the last two decades; rather, it is argued that an engagement with morality has been fairly constant in historical scholarship since its ancient origins. Secondly, it is felt that Cotkin is evasive on whether he wishes historians merely to have opinions about the moralities of others in the past or (...) to be moral agents themselves; the first position is thought to be tenable, the latter probably not. (shrink)

Archaeologists have proposed that behavioral knowledge of a tool can be conceptualized as a “recipe”—a unit of cultural transmission that combines the preparation of raw materials, construction, and use of the tool, and contingency plans for repair and maintenance. This parallels theories in cognitive psychology that behavioral knowledge is hierarchically structured—sequences of actions are divided into higher level, partially independent subunits. Here we use an agent-based simulation model to explore the costs and benefits of hierarchical learning relative to holistic learning, (...) where entire behavioral sequences are learned in an all-or-nothing fashion, and diffusionist learning, where actions are completely independent. Hierarchical learning is favored under the reasonable assumptions that learning is associated with some degree of both error and cost, and that behavior can be grouped into subunits that repeat in one or more tool recipes. These general predictions can be tested in the archaeological and ethnographic record. Recent advances in evolutionary developmental biology have revealed a number of parallels between the hierarchically structured, recipe-like organization of behavioral knowledge that we examine here and the manner in which biological organisms develop. (shrink)

O'Brien provides a critical assessment of Ernest Mandel's 1975 monograph Late Capitalism. In so doing, he offers a historical narrative that puts into question Mandel's framing of 'waves' of capitalist development as a process of capital accumulation that was dependent upon uneven development in the Third World. O'Brien starts by problematising Mandel's argument that an initial concentration of money, capital and bullion in the hands of Europeans explains combined and uneven development. He goes on to demonstrate that Mandel's notion of (...) imperialism as a necessary conduit for the flow of surplus capital from industrialising Europe does not stand up to the historical evidence. In fact, O'Brien maintains an alternative thesis, namely that these marginalised regions were insuffciently penetrated by European capital. (shrink)

In recent work Irigaray has continued to meditate on the myopic (we might say ‘monadic’) focus of the Western tradition when it comes to its failure to acknowledge sexuate difference. Irigaray has successfully diagnosed the patriarchally over-determined nature of that tradition masquerading behind a façade of objectivity and neutrality in ways that continue to open up interpretive and critical possibilities in terms of reading the canon today. In some of her work, Irigaray levels a powerful challenge against Heidegger’s conception of (...) Dasein and his point of entry into ‘phenomenological ontology’. Thus, Heidegger, the thinker that Irigaray, arguably, engages with most positively in some of her recent work is charged not just with the ‘exsanguination’ of his conception of Dasein, as it were, but with having neutered Dasein in a way that is all too characteristic of the monadic tendencies of the Western tradition and its enduring suppression of sexuate difference. Part of what we will examine in some depth in this section of the book is a blindspot in Heidegger’s account of Dasein which, for all of his insights concerning the social constitution of Dasein, leaves him open to some of the criticisms which Irigaray has successfully levelled against an entire tradition. As part of our efforts to tease these issues out in some detail, we will consider Derrida’s first Geschlecht essay where he looks to exonerate Heidegger from the charge of phallogocentrism (a charge he had levelled against him in a 1982 interview), along with more recent efforts to artificially cross-pollinate between Heidegger, Derrida and Irigaray. We will further examine the problematic ways that Heidegger looks to ‘neutralise’ Dasein in 1928 as well as his attempts in a series of 1930s texts to introduce a distinction between Dasein and the being of the human being. These attempts dovetail with a series of bizarre and illegitimate moves to exclude “whole peoples and races” from the domain of meaningful historical existence in the 1930s in particular. (shrink)

"This book offers a multidisciplinary environmental approach to ethics in response to the contemporary challenge of climate change caused by globalized economics and consumption. This book synthesises the incredible complexity of the problem and the necessity of action in response, highlighting the unambiguous problem facing humanity in the 21st century, but arguing that it is essential to develop an ethics housed in ambiguity in response. Environmental Ethics and Uncertainty is divided into theoretical and applied chapters, with the theoretical sections engaging (...) in dialogue with theorists and scholars from a variety of disciplines, while the applied chapters offer insight from 20th century activists who demonstrate and/or illuminate the theory, including Martin Luther King, Rachel Carson and Frank Lloyd Wright. This book is written for scholars and students in the interdisciplinary field of environmental studies and the environmental humanities, and will appeal to courses in religion, philosophy, ethics, politics and social theory"--. (shrink)