This chapter contains sections titled: Traditional Analogical Arguments Arguments to the Best Explanation Arguments from the Sciences Probability and World Hypotheses Is the Designer God? Works cited.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Intimacy or Integrity: Philosophy and Cultural DifferenceDavid Jones and John A. SweeneyIntimacy or Integrity: Philosophy and Cultural Difference. By Thomas P. Kasulis. Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 2002. Pp. xii + 183. Paper $14.95.Back in the early days of cross-cultural inquiry, scholars gained some territory in the understanding of cultural difference by focusing their attention on the distinction between the individualistic and the collective. Asians, especially (...) East Asians, were seen as motivated by collectivism, whereas Westerners were firmly rooted in individuality. This distinction afforded some comprehension of cultural difference and served a limited purpose in those early days of trying to understand Asia as a whole and the vast reach of difference among various Asian groups. However, we quickly outgrew our dependence on this distinction, although we continued to insist on making use of it. Thomas Kasulis offers us a new heuristic in his recent book Intimacy or Integrity: Philosophy and Cultural Difference, which is based on his 1998 Gilbert Ryle Lectures at Trent University.The book begins with a series of anecdotes, which is most fitting for what the author has in mind. These seemingly simple stories of cultural misunderstanding actually point to profound differences between Asian and Western cultural perspectives. Kasulis, however, rightly extends the boundaries of his discussion to traverse not only Asian/Western differences but also variations between cultures and subcultures as well. The thesis of the book addresses the too simplistic notion that Asians are simply more collectivist than their Western counterparts, and this thesis applies as well to differences within the structure of any culture's grand narrative. Put directly, the thesis is that there are recursive cultural patterns that orient themselves in two basic ways: "intimacy" and "integrity." These patterns reiterate themselves into complex theoretical manifestations through understandings of fact/value, what is and what should be (p. 11).Aware that he might easily fall into the old trap of a simplistic differentiating between "them and us," Kasulis is quick to point out that "it is unlikely that any culture is ever a perfect example of either an intimacy-dominant or integrity-dominant culture" (p. 11). In other words, "intimacy" and "integrity" (unlike collectivism and individualism) are both positive terms that continually, and recursively, foreground and background themselves in any given culture. For example, Americans, with their penchant for individuality and the benefits arising from it, such as the notion of rights, also value and understand intimacy as a feeling that is primary to one's being either a member of a family, a member of a group, or a citizen of a country. And to think that individuality has no value whatsoever in Asia or that there are no "individuals" in Asia is just being simpleminded. These two different ways of relating—intimacy and integrity—are explored in connection to the key relations of self/world, self/other, knower/known, thing/thing, and so forth (p. 13) throughout the book, as reflected in the chapter titles: "Cultural Orientations," "What Is Intimacy?" "What [End Page 603] Is Integrity?" "Intimacy and Integrity as Worldviews: Epistemology, Analysis and Argument, and Metaphysics," "The Normative Dimensions of Intimacy and Integrity: Aesthetics, Ethics, and Politics," and "Intercultural Conflict: When Intimacy and Integrity Collide."An important concern of this book, and an issue that is often overlooked by philosophers, is that philosophy is both a product and a producer of culture. If culture even becomes a matter of philosophical discussion, it is often cast in terms of a "philosophy of culture," that is, a part of our understanding of the role that culture plays in the more universal context of human existence (p. 13). Kasulis reminds us, however, of another (and perhaps more important) dimension of the study of what he calls "cultural philosophy," and that is that "philosophy itself is a cultural enterprise" (p. 14). By viewing philosophy in this way philosophers are able to check their tendency to believe erroneously that philosophy is a discipline that can achieve an understanding of, or even attempt to search for, universal, eternal, and transcultural truths. Kasulis points out that this too is a "tendency... related to cultural conditions" (p. 14); hence, "philosophy and... (shrink)

Table of contentsI1 Proceedings of the 4th World Conference on Research IntegrityConcurrent Sessions:1. Countries' systems and policies to foster research integrityCS01.1 Second time around: Implementing and embedding a review of responsible conduct of research policy and practice in an Australian research-intensive universitySusan Patricia O'BrienCS01.2 Measures to promote research integrity in a university: the case of an Asian universityDanny Chan, Frederick Leung2. Examples of research integrity education programmes in different countriesCS02.1 Development of a state-run “cyber education program of research ethics” in (...) KoreaEun Jung Ko, Jin Sun Kwak, TaeHwan Gwon, Ji Min Lee, Min-Ho LeeCS02.3 Responsible conduct of research teachers’ training courses in Germany: keeping on drilling through hard boards for more RCR teachersHelga Nolte, Michael Gommel, Gerlinde Sponholz3. The research environment and policies to encourage research integrityCS03.1 Challenges and best practices in research integrity: bridging the gap between policy and practiceYordanka Krastev, Yamini Sandiran, Julia Connell, Nicky SolomonCS03.2 The Slovenian initiative for better research: from national activities to global reflectionsUrsa Opara Krasovec, Renata SribarCS03.3 Organizational climate assessments to support research integrity: background of the Survey of Organizational Research Climate and the experience with its use at Michigan State UniversityBrian C. Martinson, Carol R. Thrush, C.K. Gunsalus4. Expressions of concern and retractionsCS04.1 Proposed guidelines for retraction notices and their disseminationIvan Oransky, Adam MarcusCS04.2 Watching retractions: analysis of process and practice, with data from the Wiley retraction archivesChris Graf, Verity Warne, Edward Wates, Sue JoshuaCS04.3 An exploratory content analysis of Expressions of ConcernMiguel RoigCS04.4 An ethics researcher in the retraction processMichael Mumford5. Funders' role in fostering research integrityCS05.1 The Fonds de Recherche du Québec’s institutional rules on the responsible conduct of research: introspection in the funding agency activitiesMylène Deschênes, Catherine Olivier, Raphaëlle Dupras-LeducCS05.2 U.S. Public Health Service funds in an international setting: research integrity and complianceZoë Hammatt, Raju Tamot, Robin Parker, Cynthia Ricard, Loc Nguyen-Khoa, Sandra TitusCS05.3 Analyzing decision making of funders of public research as a case of information asymmetryKarsten Klint JensenCS05.4 Research integrity management: Empirical investigation of academia versus industrySimon Godecharle, Ben Nemery, Kris Dierickx5A: Education: For whom, how, and what?CS05A.1 Research integrity or responsible conduct of research? What do we aim for?Mickey Gjerris, Maud Marion Laird Eriksen, Jeppe Berggren HoejCS05A.2 Teaching and learning about RCR at the same time: a report on Epigeum’s RCR poll questions and other assessment activitiesNicholas H. SteneckCS05A.4 Minding the gap in research ethics education: strategies to assess and improve research competencies in community health workers/promoteresCamille Nebeker, Michael Kalichman, Elizabeth Mejia Booen, Blanca Azucena Pacheco, Rebeca Espinosa Giacinto, Sheila Castaneda6. Country examples of research reward systems and integrityCS06.1 Improving systems to promote responsible research in the Chinese Academy of SciencesDing Li, Qiong Chen, Guoli Zhu, Zhonghe SunCS06.4 Exploring the perception of research integrity amongst public health researchers in IndiaParthasarathi Ganguly, Barna Ganguly7. Education and guidance on research integrity: country differencesCS07.1 From integrity to unity: how research integrity guidance differs across universities in Europe.Noémie Aubert Bonn, Kris Dierickx, Simon GodecharleCS07.2 Can education and training develop research integrity? The spirit of the UNESCO 1974 recommendation and its updatingDaniele Bourcier, Jacques Bordé, Michèle LeducCS07.3 The education and implementation mechanisms of research ethics in Taiwan's higher education: an experience in Chinese web-based curriculum development for responsible conduct of researchChien Chou, Sophia Jui-An PanCS07.4 Educating principal investigators in Swiss research institutions: present and future perspectivesLouis Xaver Tiefenauer8. Measuring and rewarding research productivityCS08.1 Altimpact: how research integrity underpins research impactDaniel Barr, Paul TaylorCS08.2 Publication incentives: just reward or misdirection of funds?Lyn Margaret HornCS08.3 Why Socrates never charged a fee: factors contributing to challenges for research integrity and publication ethicsDeborah Poff9. Plagiarism and falsification: Behaviour and detectionCS09.1 Personality traits predict attitude towards plagiarism of self and others in biomedicine: plagiarism, yes we can?Martina Mavrinac, Gordana Brumini, Mladen PetrovečkiCS09.2 Investigating the concept of and attitudes toward plagiarism for science teachers in Brazil: any challenges for research integrity and policy?Christiane Coelho Santos, Sonia VasconcelosCS09.3 What have we learnt?: The CrossCheck Service from CrossRefRachael LammeyCS09.4 High p-values as a sign of data fabrication/falsificationChris Hartgerink, Marcel van Assen, Jelte Wicherts10. Codes for research integrity and collaborationsCS10.1 Research integrity in cross-border cooperation: a Nordic exampleHanne Silje HaugeCS10.3 Research integrity, research misconduct, and the National Science Foundation's requirement for the responsible conduct of researchAaron MankaCS10.4 A code of conduct for international scientific cooperation: human rights and research integrity in scientific collaborations with international academic and industry partnersRaffael Iturrizaga11. Countries' efforts to establish mentoring and networksCS11.1 ENRIO : a network facilitating common approaches on research integrity in EuropeNicole FoegerCS11.2 Helping junior investigators develop in a resource-limited country: a mentoring program in PeruA. Roxana Lescano, Claudio Lanata, Gissella Vasquez, Leguia Mariana, Marita Silva, Mathew Kasper, Claudia Montero, Daniel Bausch, Andres G LescanoCS11.3 Netherlands Research Integrity Network: the first six monthsFenneke Blom, Lex BouterCS11.4 A South African framework for research ethics and integrity for researchers, postgraduate students, research managers and administratorsLaetus OK Lategan12. Training and education in research integrity at an early career stageCS12.1 Research integrity in curricula for medical studentsGustavo Fitas ManaiaCS12.2 Team-based learning for training in the responsible conduct of research supports ethical decision-makingWayne T. McCormack, William L. Allen, Shane Connelly, Joshua Crites, Jeffrey Engler, Victoria Freedman, Cynthia W. Garvan, Paul Haidet, Joel Hockensmith, William McElroy, Erik Sander, Rebecca Volpe, Michael F. VerderameCS12.4 Research integrity and career prospects of junior researchersSnezana Krstic13. Systems and research environments in institutionsCS13.1 Implementing systems in research institutions to improve quality and reduce riskLouise HandyCS13.2 Creating an institutional environment that supports research integrityDebra Schaller-DemersCS13.3 Ethics and Integrity Development Grants: a mechanism to foster cultures of ethics and integrityPaul Taylor, Daniel BarrCS13.4 A culture of integrity at KU LeuvenInge Lerouge, Gerard Cielen, Liliane Schoofs14. Peer review and its role in research integrityCS14.1 Peer review research across disciplines: transdomain action in the European Cooperation in Science and Technology “New Frontiers of Peer Review ”Ana Marusic, Flaminio SquazzoniCS14.2 Using blinding to reduce bias in peer reviewDavid VauxCS14.3 How to intensify the role of reviewers to promote research integrityKhalid Al-Wazzan, Ibrahim AlorainyCS14.4 Credit where credit’s due: professionalizing and rewarding the role of peer reviewerChris Graf, Verity Warne15. Research ethics and oversight for research integrity: Does it work?CS15.1 The psychology of decision-making in research ethics governance structures: a theory of bounded rationalityNolan O'Brien, Suzanne Guerin, Philip DoddCS15.2 Investigator irregularities: iniquity, ignorance or incompetence?Frank Wells, Catherine BlewettCS15.3 Academic plagiarismFredric M. Litto16. Research integrity in EuropeCS16.1 Whose responsibility is it anyway?: A comparative analysis of core concepts and practice at European research-intensive universities to identify and develop good practices in research integrityItziar De Lecuona, Erika Löfstrom, Katrien MaesCS16.2 Research integrity guidance in European research universitiesKris Dierickx, Noémie Bonn, Simon GodecharleCS16.3 Research Integrity: processes and initiatives in Science Europe member organisationsTony Peatfield, Olivier Boehme, Science Europe Working Group on Research IntegrityCS16.4 Promoting research integrity in Italy: the experience of the Research Ethics and Bioethics Advisory Committee of the Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche Cinzia Caporale, Daniele Fanelli17. Training programs for research integrity at different levels of experience and seniorityCS17.1 Meaningful ways to incorporate research integrity and the responsible conduct of research into undergraduate, graduate, postdoctoral and faculty training programsJohn Carfora, Eric Strauss, William LynnCS17.2 "Recognize, respond, champion": Developing a one-day interactive workshop to increase confidence in research integrity issuesDieter De Bruyn, Bracke Nele, Katrien De Gelder, Stefanie Van der BurghtCS17.4 “Train the trainer” on cultural challenges imposed by international research integrity conversations: lessons from a projectJosé Roberto Lapa e Silva, Sonia M. R. Vasconcelos18. Research and societal responsibilityCS18.1 Promoting the societal responsibility of research as an integral part of research integrityHelene IngierdCS18.2 Social responsibility as an ethical imperative for scientists: research, education and service to societyMark FrankelCS18.3 The intertwined nature of social responsibility and hope in scienceDaniel Vasgird, Stephanie BirdCS18.4 Common barriers that impede our ability to create a culture of trustworthiness in the research communityMark Yarborough19. Publication ethicsCS19.1 The authors' forum: A proposed tool to improve practices of journal editors and promote a responsible research environmentIbrahim Alorainy, Khalid Al-WazzanCS19.2 Quantifying research integrity and its impact with text analyticsHarold GarnerCS19.3 A closer look at authorship and publication ethics of multi- and interdisciplinary teamsLisa Campo-Engelstein, Zubin Master, Elise Smith, David Resnik, Bryn Williams-JonesCS19.4 Invisibility of duplicate publications in biomedicineMario Malicki, Ana Utrobicic, Ana Marusic20. The causes of bad and wasteful research: What can we do?CS20.1 From countries to individuals: unravelling the causes of bias and misconduct with multilevel meta-meta-analysisDaniele Fanelli, John PA IoannidisCS20.2 Reducing research waste by integrating systems of oversight and regulationGerben ter Riet, Tom Walley, Lex Marius BouterCS20.3 What are the determinants of selective reporting?: The example of palliative care for non-cancer conditionsJenny van der Steen, Lex BouterCS20.4 Perceptions of plagiarism, self-plagiarism and redundancy in research: preliminary results from a national survey of Brazilian PhDsSonia Vasconcelos, Martha Sorenson, Francisco Prosdocimi, Hatisaburo Masuda, Edson Watanabe, José Carlos Pinto, Marisa Palácios, José Lapa e Silva, Jacqueline Leta, Adalberto Vieyra, André Pinto, Mauricio Sant’Ana, Rosemary Shinkai21. Are there country-specific elements of misconduct?CS21.1 The battle with plagiarism in Russian science: latest developmentsBoris YudinCS21.2 Researchers between ethics and misconduct: A French survey on social representations of misconduct and ethical standards within the scientific communityEtienne Vergès, Anne-Sophie Brun-Wauthier, Géraldine VialCS21.3 Experience from different ways of dealing with research misconduct and promoting research integrity in some Nordic countriesTorkild VintherCS21.4 Are there specifics in German research misconduct and the ways to cope with it?Volker Bähr, Charité22. Research integrity teaching programmes and their challengesCS22.1 Faculty mentors and research integrityMichael Kalichman, Dena PlemmonsCS22.2 Training the next generation of scientists to use principles of research quality assurance to improve data integrity and reliabilityRebecca Lynn Davies, Katrina LaubeCS22.3 Fostering research integrity in a culturally-diverse environmentCynthia Scheopner, John GallandCS22.4 Towards a standard retraction formHervé Maisonneuve, Evelyne Decullier23. Commercial research and integrityCS23.1 The will to commercialize: matters of concern in the cultural economy of return-on-investment researchBrian NobleCS23.2 Quality in drug discovery data reporting: a mission impossible?Anja Gilis, David J. Gallacher, Tom Lavrijssen, Malwitz David, Malini Dasgupta, Hans MolsCS23.3 Instituting a research integrity policy in the context of semi-private-sector funding: an example in the field of occupational health and safetyPaul-Emile Boileau24. The interface of publication ethics and institutional policiesCS24.1 The open access ethical paradox in an open government effortTony SavardCS24.2 How journals and institutions can work together to promote responsible conductEric MahCS24.3 Improving cooperation between journals and research institutions in research integrity casesElizabeth Wager, Sabine Kleinert25. Reproducibility of research and retractionsCS25.1 Promoting transparency in publications to reduce irreproducibilityVeronique Kiermer, Andrew Hufton, Melanie ClyneCS25.2 Retraction notices issued for publications by Latin American authors: what lessons can we learn?Sonia Vasconcelos, Renan Moritz Almeida, Aldo Fontes-Pereira, Fernanda Catelani, Karina RochaCS25.3 A preliminary report of the findings from the Reproducibility Project: Cancer biologyElizabeth Iorns, William Gunn26. Research integrity and specific country initiativesCS26.1 Promoting research integrity at CNRS, FranceMichèle Leduc, Lucienne LetellierCS26.2 In pursuit of compliance: is the tail wagging the dog?Cornelia MalherbeCS26.3 Newly established research integrity policies and practices: oversight systems of Japanese research universitiesTakehito Kamata27. Responsible conduct of research and country guidelinesCS27.1 Incentives or guidelines? Promoting responsible research communication through economic incentives or ethical guidelines?Vidar EnebakkCS27.3 Responsible conduct of research: a view from CanadaLynn PenrodCS27.4 The Danish Code of Conduct for Research Integrity: a national initiative to promote research integrity in DenmarkThomas Nørgaard, Charlotte Elverdam28. Behaviour, trust and honestyCS28.1 The reasons behind non-ethical behaviour in academiaYves FassinCS28.2 The psychological profile of the dishonest scholarCynthia FekkenCS28.3 Considering the implications of Dan Ariely’s keynote speech at the 3rd World Conference on Research Integrity in MontréalJamal Adam, Melissa S. AndersonCS28.4 Two large surveys on psychologists’ views on peer review and replicationJelte WichertsBrett Buttliere29. Reporting and publication bias and how to overcome itCS29.1 Data sharing: Experience at two open-access general medical journalsTrish GrovesCS29.2 Overcoming publication bias and selective reporting: completing the published recordDaniel ShanahanCS29.3 The EQUATOR Network: promoting responsible reporting of health research studiesIveta Simera, Shona Kirtley, Eleana Villanueva, Caroline Struthers, Angela MacCarthy, Douglas Altman30. The research environment and its implications for integrityCS30.1 Ranking of scientists: the Russian experienceElena GrebenshchikovaCS30.4 From cradle to grave: research integrity, research misconduct and cultural shiftsBronwyn Greene, Ted RohrPARTNER SYMPOSIAPartner Symposium AOrganized by EQUATOR Network, Enhancing the Quality and Transparency of Health ResearchP1 Can we trust the medical research literature?: Poor reporting and its consequencesIveta SimeraP2 What can BioMed Central do to improve published research?Daniel Shanahan, Stephanie HarrimanP3 What can a "traditional" journal do to improve published research?Trish GrovesP4 Promoting good reporting practice for reliable and usable research papers: EQUATOR Network, reporting guidelines and other initiativesCaroline StruthersPartner Symposium COrganized by ENRIO, the European Network of Research Integrity OfficersP5 Transparency and independence in research integrity investigations in EuropeKrista Varantola, Helga Nolte, Ursa Opara, Torkild Vinther, Elizabeth Wager, Thomas NørgaardPartner Symposium DOrganized by IEEE, the Institute of Electrical and Electronics EngineersRe-educating our author community: IEEE's approach to bibliometric manipulation, plagiarism, and other inappropriate practicesP6 Dealing with plagiarism in the connected world: An Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers perspectiveJon RokneP7 Should evaluation of raises, promotion, and research proposals be tied to bibliometric indictors? What the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers is doing to answer this questionGianluca SettiP8 Recommended practices to ensure conference content qualityGordon MacPhersonPartner Symposium EOrganized by the Committee on Freedom and Responsibility in the Conduct of Science of ICSU, the International Council for ScienceResearch assessment and quality in science: perspectives from international science and policy organisationsP9 Challenges for science and the problems of assessing researchEllen HazelkornP10 Research assessment and science policy developmentCarthage SmithP11 Research integrity in South Africa: the value of procedures and processes to global positioningRobert H. McLaughlinP12 Rewards, careers and integrity: perspectives of young scientists from around the worldTatiana Duque MartinsPartner Symposium FOrganized by the Online Resource Center for Ethics Education in Engineering and Science / Center for Engineering, Ethics, and Society of the National Academy of EngineeringP13 Research misconduct: conceptions and policy solutionsTetsuya Tanimoto, Nicholas Steneck, Daniele Fanelli, Ragnvald Kalleberg, Tajammul HusseinPartner Symposium HOrganized by ORI, the Office of Research Integrity; Universitas 21; and the Asia Pacific Research Integrity NetworkP14 International integrity networks: working together to ensure research integrityPing Sun, Ovid Tzeng, Krista Varantola, Susan ZimmermanPartner Symposium IOrganized by COPE, the Committee on Publication EthicsPublication without borders: Ethical challenges in a globalized worldP15 Authorship: credit and responsibility, including issues in large and interdisciplinary studiesRosemary ShinkaiPartner Symposium JOrganized by CITI, the Cooperative Institutional Training InitiativeExperiences on research integrity educational programs in Colombia, Costa Rica and PeruP16 Experiences in PeruRoxana LescanoP17 Experiences in Costa RicaElizabeth HeitmanP18 Experiences in ColumbiaMaria Andrea Rocio del Pilar Contreras NietoPoster Session B: Education, training, promotion and policyPT.01 The missing role of journal editors in promoting responsible researchIbrahim Alorainy, Khalid Al-WazzanPT.02 Honorary authorship in Taiwan: why and who should be in charge?Chien Chou, Sophia Jui-An PanPT.03 Authorship and citation manipulation in academic researchEric Fong, Al WilhitePT.04 Open peer review of research submission at medical journals: experience at BMJ Open and The BMJTrish GrovesPT.05 Exercising authorship: claiming rewards, practicing integrityDésirée Motta-RothPT.07 Medical scientists' views on publication culture: a focus group studyJoeri Tijdink, Yvo SmuldersPoster Session B: Education, training, promotion and policyPT.09 Ethical challenges in post-graduate supervisionLaetus OK LateganPT.10 The effects of viable ethics instruction on international studentsMichael Mumford, Logan Steele, Logan Watts, James Johnson, Shane Connelly, Lee WilliamsPT.11 Does language reflect the quality of research?Gerben ter Riet, Sufia Amini, Lotty Hooft, Halil KilicogluPT.12 Integrity complaints as a strategic tool in policy decision conflictsJanneke van Seters, Herman Eijsackers, Fons Voragen, Akke van der Zijpp and Frans BromPoster Session C: Ethics and integrity intersectionsPT.14 Regulations of informed consent: university-supported research processes and pitfalls in implementationBadaruddin Abbasi, Naif Nasser AlmasoudPT.15 A review of equipoise as a requirement in clinical trialsAdri LabuschagnePT.16 The Research Ethics Library: online resource for research ethics educationJohanne Severinsen, Espen EnghPT.17 Research integrity: the view from King Abdulaziz City for Science and TechnologyDaham Ismail AlaniPT. 18 Meeting global challenges in high-impact publications and research integrity: the case of the Malaysian Palm Oil BoardHJ. Kamaruzaman JusoffPT.19 University faculty perceptions of research practices and misconductAnita Gordon, Helen C. HartonPoster Session D: International perspectivesPT.21 The Commission for Scientific Integrity as a response to research fraudDieter De Bruyn, Stefanie Van der BurghtPT. 22 Are notions of the responsible conduct of research associated with compliance with requirements for research on humans in different disciplinary traditions in Brazil?Karina de Albuquerque Rocha, Sonia Maria Ramos de VasconcelosPT.23 Creating an environment that promotes research integrity: an institutional model of Malawi Liverpool Welcome TrustLimbanazo MatandikaPT.24 How do science policies in Brazil influence user-engaged ecological research?Aline Carolina de Oliveira Machado Prata, Mark William NeffPoster Session E: Perspectives on misconductPT.26 What “causes” scientific misconduct?: Testing major hypotheses by comparing corrected and retracted papersDaniele Fanelli, Rodrigo Costas, Vincent LarivièrePT.27 Perception of academic plagiarism among dentistry studentsDouglas Leonardo Gomes Filho, Diego Oliveira GuedesPT. 28 a few bad apples?: Prevalence, patterns and attitudes towards scientific misconduct among doctoral students at a German university hospitalVolker Bähr, Niklas Keller, Markus Feufel, Nikolas OffenhauserPT. 29 Analysis of retraction notices published by BioMed CentralMaria K. Kowalczuk, Elizabeth C. MoylanPT.31 "He did it" doesn't work: data security, incidents and partnersKatie SpeanburgPoster Session F: Views from the disciplinesPT.32 Robust procedures: a key to generating quality results in drug discoveryMalini Dasgupta, Mariusz Lubomirski, Tom Lavrijssen, David Malwitz, David Gallacher, Anja GillisPT.33 Health promotion: criteria for the design and the integrity of a research projectMaria Betânia de Freitas Marques, Laressa Lima Amâncio, Raphaela Dias Fernandes, Oliveira Patrocínio, and Cláudia Maria Correia Borges RechPT.34 Integrity of academic work from the perspective of students graduating in pharmacy: a brief research studyMaria Betânia de Freitas Marques, Cláudia Maria Correia Borges Rech, Adriana Nascimento SousaPT.35 Research integrity promotion in the Epidemiology and Health Services, the journal of the Brazilian Unified Health SystemLeila Posenato GarciaPT.36 When are clinical trials registered? An analysis of prospective versus retrospective registration of clinical trials published in the BioMed Central series, UKStephanie Harriman, Jigisha PatelPT.37 Maximizing welfare while promoting innovation in drug developmentFarida LadaOther posters that will be displayed but not presented orally:PT.38 Geoethics and the debate on research integrity in geosciencesGiuseppe Di Capua, Silvia PeppoloniPT.39 Introducing the Professionalism and Integrity in Research Program James M. DuBois, John Chibnall, Jillon Van der WallPT.40 Validation of the professional decision-making in research measureJames M. DuBois, John Chibnall, Jillon Van der Wall, Raymond TaitPT.41 General guidelines for research ethicsJacob HolenPT. 42 A national forum for research ethicsAdele Flakke Johannessen, Torunn EllefsenPT.43 Evaluation of integrity in coursework: an approach from the perspective of the higher education professorClaudia Rech, Adriana Sousa, Maria Betânia de Freitas MarquesPT.44 Principles of geoethics and research integrity applied to the European Multidisciplinary Seafloor and Water Column Observatory, a large-scale European environmental research infrastructureSilvia Peppoloni, Giuseppe Di Capua, Laura BeranzoliF1 Focus track on improving research systems: the role of fundersPaulo S.L. Beirão, Susan ZimmermanF2 Focus track on improving research systems: the role of countriesSabine Kleinert, Ana MarusicF3 Focus track on improving research systems: the role of institutionsMelissa S. Anderson, Lex Bouter. (shrink)

In this book, I will discuss three main topics: the roots and aims of scientific knowledge, scientific knowledge in society, and science and values I understand scientific knowledge as being a planned and continuous production of the general and common knowledge of scientific communities. I begin my discussion with a brief analysis of the main differences between sciences, on the one hand, and everyday experience, philosophies, religions, and ideologies, on the other. I define the concept of science as (...) a set of family resemblances (in Wittgenstein's sense). The sciences can be distinguished along three lines, in terms of the difference between empirical and non-empirical sciences, differences in degrees of theoretical and methodological structure among individual sciences and scientific disciplines. Scientific knowledge is based upon some grounds, paradigmatic knowledge bases. Scientific knowledge is founded on a unified paradigmatic knowledge base. The latter includes fundamental theories, basic facts, generally accepted empirical regularities (laws), scientific research methods, scientific explanations, and established relations to other sciences. Scientific knowledge in general is defined well in classical terms by the definition that knowledge is a true and rationally-justified belief. In this connection, scientific truth is relative, depending on the given paradigmatic knowledge base and on the precision and accessibility of the measurements and observations involved. In the book's first part, I consider the production and testing of scientific hypotheses, scientific explanations, the structure of scientific theories, and the problem of scientific realism. I consider explanation an integral part of a wider nexus of heuristic and theoretical activities in science like giving reasons, understanding, clarification, and founding. Continuous production of scientific explanations is a necessary condition for the systematic reproduction of scientific knowledge. Accordingly, it does not suffice to describe them in terms of the logical structure of the arguments on which they are based, but rather, scientific explanations ought to be given complete with an epistemic and pragmatic context of the explanation. I consider especially deductive-nomological, inductive-statistical, dispositional, teleological-functional, and genetic explanations. I emphasize the ever-increasing importance of explanations by analogy and by model. Orthogonal to these distinctions lies the distinction between causal and epistemic explanation. Epistemic explanations relate scientific discoveries to epistemic progress, and causal explanations are these epistemic explanations that relate scientific discoveries to reality too. Causal explanations inform us that certain changes occur in the world as agents of other changes, or rather, that certain changes are real consequences of other changes. Thus, by having explanations of causes, we can intervene in the world to induce by design certain changes in some course of phenomena. I consider scientific theories as logically and epistemically ordered wholeness of scientific knowledge in a realm of research that enables us to construct useful models of reality. After the discussion of different 'statement' views on theories and different interpretations of the theory-experience relation, I introduce the 'model' theoretical (non-statement) views on theories, especially the structural theory of science. The model views on theories transcend the realism-antirealism dualism by introducing models between theory and reality. Therefore, the question of scientific realism is not merely whether and, if so, which element(s), of scientific theories represent reality, but rather which conditions suffice to infer from a theory that one of its models truly expresses reality. In other words, under which conditions do models of a theory represent models of reality? Generally, models are just as much images of reality in a theory as they are images of a theory in reality. The actual problem of scientific realism doesn't originate in the observable-unobservable distinction (even if this distinction is otherwise theoretically loaded), but rather in ontological quandaries, of the sort especially encountered in modern physical theories such as quantum mechanics, relativity theory, and cosmological theories, although they are known to arise in other sciences as well. Scientific theories may be real, even if they describe nothing about the world. However, such theories can be given this status only if their formal, mathematical postulates exhibit some formal homology between reality and mathematical forms. The very fact that it is possible to describe reality with the help of mathematics even in cases, where every (representational, conceptual) language and thought fall short, would indicate that even mathematics itself is, in some sense, a part of reality, although 'outside' of the empirical world. It follows we have to distinguish the non-empirical reality and the empirical world. Formal objectivity and non-arbitrariness of theories do not emerge from either our language or thoughts, or from the world of facts, causes, and effects, but rather from non-empirical reality, which frames the world as some kind of objective transcendental condition for the possibility of the existence of the world, thoughts, and language. In the second part of the book, I consider the incorporation of scientific work and scientific knowledge into modern society and its relations to values and ethics. Production of scientific knowledge goes on as a parallel distributed process of a special kind of social (shared) cognition. The central part of this cognition is the presentation of parts of the world by scientific (theoretical) models which are warranted by the shared and public practice of justification, and in reflective acting in the world as it would. I consider various formal concepts of collective propositional knowledge (distributed, mutual, common knowledge). Scientific knowledge is an achievement to be ascribed to a scientific community or, indirectly, to all those who apply or expand it, rather than to individuals per se. It presents the continuous and partially planned production of non-trivial common knowledge of the research communities in modern societies. However, besides common knowledge, shared dispositional knowledge (knowledge how of scientific teams) and shared knowledge by acquiring (knowledge of fundamental similarities and differences in scientific teams) are parts of the real body of scientific knowledge. Scientific common knowledge implies the projection into idealized universal knowledge of all real or potentially rational and well-informed individuals. The respect of scientific knowledge thus presents the norm of rationality. Science as the intensively shared and socially distributed kind of cognition enters into modern society as a special kind of work (general work), as a productive force (social invention drive), and as a form of capital (human, social, cultural, informational, etc.). However any of these categories can adequately represent the socio-economical role of science in modern societies, and we are still waiting for a more adequate general concept that would theoretically cover the 'scientification' of modern societies. My thesis is that the most important general effect of scientification is (and will be) the growth of social processes that structurally resemble parallel distributed shared social cognition of science, and not so much the rise of the use of scientific knowledge and scientifically based information in all kinds of production. Scientification of modern societies inevitably includes a much stronger need for moral and social responsibility of scientists for their work and its effects in their local society and the global world. This need comes in contradiction with the quite large accepted idea (and even the 'norm') on value-free research. I discuss to some degree different arguments for the absence of non-epistemic values and ethical reasoning from science and find them non-convincing. The sound idea of value-free research lies in the need for the absence of categorical value statements from scientific explanations and theoretical deductions. Values and ethical judgment have, and sometimes they even have to play an important role in another part of research and its application in science or outside it. Not the value-loudness of research is a danger for science but its blind, non-reflective use. It leads to the ideologization and politicization of science. A similar danger lies in the purely value-neutrality of research. It leads to the instrumentalization of science to the technical or bureaucratic means for 'any' aims. (shrink)

Volumes 1 and 2 of Hume’s Treatise of Human Nature, first published in January 1739, were soon after publication the subject of five notices and four reviews. Volume 3, published at the end of October 1740, received no notices and was reviewed only in the Bibliothèque raisonnée. This anonymous review of vol. 3 is of interest not only for David Norton is Professor of Philosophy Emeritus, McGill University, and Adjunct Professor of Philosophy, University of Victoria. His address is (...) 8-4305 Maltwood Lane, Victoria, BC, Canada V8X 5G9. what it says about Hume’s views as set out in the third book of the Treatise, but also because of questions that have arisen about the authorship of this and an earlier review of vol. 1 of the Treatise published in the same journal. In Part I of this paper we begin by reviewing the grounds for attributing to Pierre Des Maizeaux the notice of vols. 1 and 2 of the Treatise published by the Bibliothèque raisonnée in its April–June, 1739 issue. We then focus principally on the question of the authorship of the review of vol. 3 of the Treatise published by the Bibliothèque raisonnée in its April–June, 1741 issue, but we also consider in passing the grounds that have been offered for attributing to Francis Hutcheson the critical components of the Bibliothèque raisonnée review of vol. 1 of the Treatise. In Part II of the paper we present a transcription of the French text, never before reprinted, of this review. Part III is a new English translation of this text. In an effort to show the differences between the sense of the Treatise presented by translated quotations of it and Hume’s original texts, Part IV offers some three-column comparisons of three relatively lengthy French “quotations” of Treatise 3 found in the review, our back-translations of these texts, and the versions of these texts found in the Treatise. It then offers in a similar format, comparisons of the present and earlier translations of passages of the review of vol. 3. (shrink)

Science lies at the intersection of ideas and society, at the heart of the modern human experience. The study of past science should therefore be central to our humanistic attempt to know ourselves. Nevertheless, past science is not studied as an integral whole, but from two very different and divergent perspectives: the intellectual history of science, which focuses on the development of ideas and arguments, and the social history of science, which focuses on the development of science as (...) a social undertaking within its broader contexts. There is almost universal agreement that this bifurcation of the field is lamentable, and nearly universal disagreement about where, exactly, the problem lies. In order to identify the difficulty, this paper examines the institutional histories and disciplinary philosophies that have constituted the study of past science. I argue that science history, eventually allied itself with either History or Philosophy in order to find institutional support, thereby suffering the artificial imposition of the disciplinary prejudices of its allied fields, which lead science historians to adopt either the intellectual or the social perspective. Science history must reconcile its distinctions on its own terms, as an integrated unity with its own disciplinary bounds, and apart from History and Philosophy. As a catalyst for rapprochement, the historical and philosophical examination also yields a mapping of the field of science history that can be used to locate the problematic divisions in present scholarship and to draw new disciplinary bounds. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Bishop Berkeley Exorcises the Infinite: Fuzzy Consequences of Strict Finitism1 David M. Levy Introduction It all began simply enough when Molyneux asked the wonderful question whether a person born blind, now able to see, would recognize by sight what he knew by touch (Davis 1960). After George Berkeley elaborated an answer, that we learn to perceive by heuristics, the foundations ofcontemporarymathematics wereinruin. Contemporary mathematicians waved their hands and (...) changed the subject.2 Berkeley's answer received a much more positive response from economists. Adam Smith,in particular, seizedupon Berkeley's doctrine that welearn to perceive distance tobuild anelaborate system in which one learns to perceive one's self-interest.3 Perhaps because older histories of mathematics are a positive hindrance in helping us understand the importance of Berkeley's argument against infinitesimals,4 its consequences for economics have passed unnoticed. If infinitesimal numbers are ruled out, and we wish to maintain an algebra, then we rule out infinite numbers. This implication of Berkeley's argumenthas a dramatic implication for our understanding ofthe history ofideas about rule-directed action. Let me motivate this claim with a well-known historical problem. The social doctrine set forth by John Locke outside the Two Treatises depends critically upon individual belief about possible states of infinite pain or pleasure. The critical issue for the intolerance of atheism in Locke's system is his claim that without beUefin the infinite bliss of heaven forgone by a criminal, there is no reason to think a calculating individual will avoid crime.5 Locke's discussion is so different from the discussion of religion by David Hume and Smith. Here, questions of the substance of belief—the infinite worth of Heaven—have largely vanished.6 What happened between Locke and Hume-Smith? One answer is Pierre Bayle and Bernard Mandeville. Berkeley's doctrine that only the finite is perceived is, I think, a better answer. Out of sight, out ofmind. In this paper I propose to give a close look at the content and consequences ofBishop Berkeley's once famous Towards a New Theory ofVision. While there are other aspects ofBerkeley's work that attract Volume XVIII Number 2 511 DAVID M. LEVY attention from historians ofeconomics,7 1 shall claim that Berkeley's insight into human perception in the Theory of Vision is central to Adam Smith's attempt to found economic behaviour on the self-awareness of systematic illusion. There is no doubt that Smith finds that much ofhuman behaviour is characterized by illusion.8 The difficulty arises, or so it seems to me, from modern unwilUngness to beheve that illusion can be systematic. There are four pieces to my argument. First, we consider Berkeley's statementofwhat we shall call his doctrine ofstrict finitism in perception.9 Berkeley puts forward two postulates: 1) there exists some minimum perceptible quantity, and 2) distance is not perceived directly but by experience. Second, we define strict finitism and demonstrate that it translates into the claim that perception is fuzzy in a technical sense. If Berkeleian perception is fuzzy, then some modern criticism of Berkeley's strict finitism is based upon a simple misunderstandingofthe propertiesoffuzzyrelations. Thisis quite easy to set right. (Getting right the doctrine of those who implicitly take perception to be fuzzy—Adam Smith is my prime candidate—will be muchharder.)Third, wereconsiderBerkeley's dispute withMandeville on the role ofinfinite gain in choice. Here, we find Mandeville putting forward the Berkeleian position that if infinite amounts mattered, people would not behave as they do. Berkeley's position against Mandeville, however, seems to depend upon the supposition that infinite distance is sensible.10 Earlier, however, the position that Mandeville argued for was defended by Berkeley. Fourth, we ask why all this isn't well known. The debate between Berkeley and Mandeville has been well studied, as has been the link between Berkeley and the Scots. In fact, our work focuses on one aspect of Berkeley's work that led to his challenge of the contemporary foundations of the calculus. If sense is a matter of perception, and infinitesimals cannot be perceived, then they are quite literally nonsense. Armed with this insight, Berkeley refuted contemporary mathematics. Nevertheless, the calculus was too... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Bishop Berkeley Exorcises the Infinite: Fuzzy Consequences of Strict Finitism1 David M. Levy Introduction It all began simply enough when Molyneux asked the wonderful question whether a person born blind, now able to see, would recognize by sight what he knew by touch (Davis 1960). After George Berkeley elaborated an answer, that we learn to perceive by heuristics, the foundations ofcontemporarymathematics wereinruin. Contemporary mathematicians waved their hands and (...) changed the subject.2 Berkeley's answer received a much more positive response from economists. Adam Smith,in particular, seizedupon Berkeley's doctrine that welearn to perceive distance tobuild anelaborate system in which one learns to perceive one's self-interest.3 Perhaps because older histories of mathematics are a positive hindrance in helping us understand the importance of Berkeley's argument against infinitesimals,4 its consequences for economics have passed unnoticed. If infinitesimal numbers are ruled out, and we wish to maintain an algebra, then we rule out infinite numbers. This implication of Berkeley's argumenthas a dramatic implication for our understanding ofthe history ofideas about rule-directed action. Let me motivate this claim with a well-known historical problem. The social doctrine set forth by John Locke outside the Two Treatises depends critically upon individual belief about possible states of infinite pain or pleasure. The critical issue for the intolerance of atheism in Locke's system is his claim that without beUefin the infinite bliss of heaven forgone by a criminal, there is no reason to think a calculating individual will avoid crime.5 Locke's discussion is so different from the discussion of religion by David Hume and Smith. Here, questions of the substance of belief—the infinite worth of Heaven—have largely vanished.6 What happened between Locke and Hume-Smith? One answer is Pierre Bayle and Bernard Mandeville. Berkeley's doctrine that only the finite is perceived is, I think, a better answer. Out of sight, out ofmind. In this paper I propose to give a close look at the content and consequences ofBishop Berkeley's once famous Towards a New Theory ofVision. While there are other aspects ofBerkeley's work that attract Volume XVIII Number 2 511 DAVID M. LEVY attention from historians ofeconomics,7 1 shall claim that Berkeley's insight into human perception in the Theory of Vision is central to Adam Smith's attempt to found economic behaviour on the self-awareness of systematic illusion. There is no doubt that Smith finds that much ofhuman behaviour is characterized by illusion.8 The difficulty arises, or so it seems to me, from modern unwilUngness to beheve that illusion can be systematic. There are four pieces to my argument. First, we consider Berkeley's statementofwhat we shall call his doctrine ofstrict finitism in perception.9 Berkeley puts forward two postulates: 1) there exists some minimum perceptible quantity, and 2) distance is not perceived directly but by experience. Second, we define strict finitism and demonstrate that it translates into the claim that perception is fuzzy in a technical sense. If Berkeleian perception is fuzzy, then some modern criticism of Berkeley's strict finitism is based upon a simple misunderstandingofthe propertiesoffuzzyrelations. Thisis quite easy to set right. (Getting right the doctrine of those who implicitly take perception to be fuzzy—Adam Smith is my prime candidate—will be muchharder.)Third, wereconsiderBerkeley's dispute withMandeville on the role ofinfinite gain in choice. Here, we find Mandeville putting forward the Berkeleian position that if infinite amounts mattered, people would not behave as they do. Berkeley's position against Mandeville, however, seems to depend upon the supposition that infinite distance is sensible.10 Earlier, however, the position that Mandeville argued for was defended by Berkeley. Fourth, we ask why all this isn't well known. The debate between Berkeley and Mandeville has been well studied, as has been the link between Berkeley and the Scots. In fact, our work focuses on one aspect of Berkeley's work that led to his challenge of the contemporary foundations of the calculus. If sense is a matter of perception, and infinitesimals cannot be perceived, then they are quite literally nonsense. Armed with this insight, Berkeley refuted contemporary mathematics. Nevertheless, the calculus was too... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Ernst Cassirer, Historian of the WillDavid A. Wisner‘Tis not Wit merely, but a Temper, which must form a Well-Bred Man. In the same manner, ‘tis not a Head merely, but a Heart and a Resolution which must compleate the real Philosopher. 1In order to possess the world of culture we must incessantly reconquer it by historical recollection. But recollection does not mean merely the act of reproduction. It is (...) a new intellectual synthesis—a constructive act.... History is not knowledge of external facts or events; it is a form... an organon of our self-knowledge, an indispensable instrument for building up our human universe. 2Ernst Cassirer is probably best known to historians of ideas for his work on the problem of knowledge, which began with a neo-Kantian historical analysis of epistemological questions and culminated in the philosophy of symbolic forms. As he himself always admitted, even in his last public writings, this focus on epistemology was the foundation of his philosophical interests. Yet by the last two decades of his life he had in true Socratic fashion endowed his investigations with heightened emphasis. “That self-knowledge is the highest aim of philosophical inquiry,” he wrote in the opening lines of An Essay on Man, “appears to be generally acknowledged.” 3 Cassirer perceived, however, [End Page 145] that the need for such an effort to be made had reached monumentally critical proportions: the early twentieth century had engendered grave historical and philosophical crises which threatened to reverse the progress of modern thought. Paradoxically, modern philosophy had many tools for attaining “knowledge of human nature” and yet stood farther from its goal than ever before. What Cassirer called “anthropological philosophy,” concerned as it was “with the whole destiny of man,” still required special consideration, in both its theoretical and its historical dimensions. 4 It was essentially to these twin domains that Cassirer would devote himself in his later years.The transformation of Cassirer’s philosophical perspectives thus had two facets. In order to outline his program Cassirer had first to consider a broader range of human activities than thought alone, from which he concluded that human culture consisted of a hierarchy of symbolic forms beginning with myth and culminating in science. However, he also felt compelled to elucidate the historical process by which these symbolic forms could progressively manifest themselves, and more specifically the individual human effort which was required for true self-knowledge. This he did principally in his historical works of the late 1920s and early 1930s, and with particularly profound results: from a historian of knowledge Cassirer became a historian of the will; from an epistemologist he became an ethical thinker; from an academic he became an exemplar of self-conscious moral action, a paragon of human autonomy and freedom. Indeed, in this endeavor he proved to be more thoroughly and fundamentally a Kantian than ever his theory of knowledge would reveal.I would go so far as to suggest that Cassirer’s history of the will was an integral part of his mature constructive philosophy. On the surface this history can be restated in the following terms. First, Cassirer insists on a fundamental opposition between the rationalism and intellectualism of ancient Greek philosophy and the voluntarism of the Judeo-Christian tradition, both of which represent in Cassirer’s view manifestations of a struggle in Western thought continuing well into the twentieth century. Second, he suggests that the historical task of Western philosophy since the first mature articulation of Latin Christian theology by Saint Augustine has been to liberate the individual human will from any and all forms of subservience. Such views are most forcefully expressed in The Myth of the State, Cassirer’s last book, but they actually constitute an essential and coherent element in all of Cassirer’s later work on the history of ideas and culture. Indeed, Cassirer’s history of the will provides us with a particularly keen and nuanced account of this essential Western legacy, while at the same time reading into it in Kantian manner a moral for the life of the individual human being. [End Page 146]In making such claims I am situating myself among... (shrink)

Jared Diamond and other leading scholars have argued that the domestication of animals for food, labor, and tools of war has advanced the development of human society. But by comparing practices of animal exploitation for food and resources in different societies over time, David A. Nibert reaches a strikingly different conclusion. He finds in the domestication of animals, which he renames "domesecration," a perversion of human ethics, the development of large-scale acts of violence, disastrous patterns of destruction, (...) and growth-curbing epidemics of infectious disease. Nibert centers his study on nomadic pastoralism and the development of commercial ranching, a practice that has been largely controlled by elite groups and expanded with the rise of capitalism. Beginning with the pastoral societies of the Eurasian steppe and continuing through to the exportation of Western, meat-centered eating habits throughout today's world, Nibert connects the domesecration of animals to violence, invasion, extermination, displacement, enslavement, repression, pandemic chronic disease, and hunger. In his view, conquest and subjugation were the results of the need to appropriate land and water to maintain large groups of animals, and the gross amassing of military power has its roots in the economic benefits of the exploitation, exchange, and sale of animals. Deadly zoonotic diseases, Nibert shows, have accompanied violent developments throughout history, laying waste to whole cities, societies, and civilizations. His most powerful insight situates the domesecration of animals as a precondition for the oppression of human populations, particularly indigenous peoples, an injustice impossible to rectify while the material interests of the elite are inextricably linked to the exploitation of animals. Nibert links domesecration to some of the most critical issues facing the world today, including the depletion of fresh water, topsoil, and oil reserves; global warming; and world hunger, and he reviews the U.S. government's military response to the inevitable crises of an overheated, hungry, resource-depleted world. Most animal-advocacy campaigns reinforce current oppressive practices, Nibert argues. Instead, he suggests reforms that challenge the legitimacy of both domesecration and capitalism. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Psychophysical Causation and a Pragmatist Approach to Human BehaviorDavid H. Brendel (bio)Keywordsmind-body problem, philosophy, pragmatism, psychology, psychophysical causationJochen Fahrenberg and Marcus Cheetham have performed a valuable service by conducting and presenting an empirical study of some basic philosophical assumptions of psychologists, philosophers, and scientists. Well-designed, large-scale empirical studies of this kind are all too rare in the literature. Those of us interested in the human sciences are (...) rather in the dark about the assumptions of others working in our own and related fields. For the most part, we are privy only to the philosophical assumptions of friends and colleagues we know intimately and of those relative few who publish their views. We can only speculate about the views of the countless others with whom we have not had the opportunity to establish direct philosophical discourse. The findings presented by Fahrenberg and Cheetham give us an intriguing glimpse at some of the key philosophical assumptions of a variety of clinicians and academics who are interested in human nature and the human sciences.My aim in this commentary is to present an interpretation of a central finding of this questionnaire study: that psychologists were more likely than philosophers and scientists to embrace “psychophysical causation” as a part of their philosophical worldview. It is not, I think, too much of an oversimplification to define psychophysical causation as the presumption that mental events and physical events can cause other mental events and physical events. Psychophysical causation can be distinguished from other positions on the mind–body relation, some of which Fahrenberg and Cheetham mention in their article. Among these alternative positions is epiphenomenalism, the position that physical events cause other physical events and can cause mental events, but that mental events themselves have no causal power. Another philosophical position distinct from psychophysical causation is monism, which holds that all events in the world in general (and in human beings in particular) are physical and are best described in physical terms. Fahrenberg and Cheetham do not describe the multiple forms of monism in detail, but it is worth noting that reductive materialism (Wilson 1998) and eliminative materialism (Churchland 1981) are two highly developed forms of the kind of monism to which they allude. It is beyond the scope of this commentary to explore the differences between the two, but suffice it to say that both these forms of materialism reject the legitimacy of mental [End Page 205] events or the mental vocabulary that refers to such events.It is also beyond the scope of this commentary to advance arguments either for or against psychophysical causation in the philosophy of mind. The concept of psychophysical causation certainly has multiple proponents among philosophers, including those who are ontological monists. The compelling nonreductive materialism of a philosopher such as Terence Horgan, for example, suggests the viability of combining ontological monism with methodological pluralism. In a book chapter entitled “Nonreductive Materialism and the Explanatory Autonomy of Psychology,” Horgan (1993) developed the position that the world is entirely physical (i.e., there are no disembodied minds, persons, or other entities) but is so complex that it can only be understood and explained by employing many vocabularies and methodologies, spanning “the microphysical, neurobiological, macrobiological, and psychological.” This kind of methodological pluralism in the philosophy of mind can be disputed on conceptual grounds, but it seems to be at least as justifiable (and perhaps more justifiable) when compared with other well-defined positions on the mind–body relation.The appeal of nonreductive materialism and psychophysical causation comes into particularly clear focus in contexts where our philosophical concerns are pragmatic in nature. In other words, when we need to achieve practical goals in our everyday lives, we usually benefit from a philosophy that provides us with the flexibility to use a broad range of ideas, conceptual tools, and causal hypotheses that can be adapted to specific needs and challenges. Nonreductive materialism regards the world as a purely physical place, but ensures this kind of conceptual and methodological flexibility when it comes to explaining and predicting complex human experience and behavior. “Typically, certain context-relative features of discourse,” Horgan wrote (1993, 298), “will determine, in a given... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Journal of the History of Philosophy 38.4 (2000) 503-528 [Access article in PDF] Occasionalism and Occasional Causation in Descartes' Philosophy David Scott University of Victoria According to Descartes, the physical world's contact with the mind is through the sense organs and the brain, although the mechanics of this contact is by no means clear. Indeed, for many the idea that the physical world can act upon the mind (...) at all is a complete mystery on Descartes' principles, not least because the difference between the spatial and divisible nature of body and the non-spatial and indivisible nature of mind seems to preclude the possibility of body-mind contact or of a mechanism for such contact.1 Despite this, however, Descartes repeatedly affirms that body and mind interact causally. He claims that the fact of their disparate natures poses no special difficulty, and he even affirms that the mind and body can form a union (in the case of the human being).2In this paper I wish to examine two issues pertaining to the body-mind relation in Descartes' philosophy. First, I ask whether Descartes advances body-mind occasionalism: is there evidence in his writings of the view that bodies are not genuine causes of sensations, but are mere 'occasions' for God's production of sensations? Recently, it has been urged that Descartes begins his career as a body-mind causal interactionist, but perhaps ends as an occasionalist.3 [End Page 503] In Section 1 of what follows I argue against this. I attempt to show both that Descartes never strays from the body-mind interactionism which he is generally thought to espouse, and that he would undermine his proof of the material world if he did. The second issue I deal with concerns a position closely related to occasionalism which Steven Nadler has recently identified as body-mind "occasional causation."4 In Section 2 of the following I provide an interpretation of occasional causation as it appears in Descartes' reply to Regius in the Comments on a Certain Broadsheet. I argue that Descartes' occasional causation amounts to a form of interactionism which I term "inefficacious body-mind transmissionism." 1. Does Descartes Espouse Body-Mind Occasionalism? 1.1. Daniel Garber's Case for Descartes' Move Toward Body-Mind Occasionalism Occasionalism, roughly defined, is a doctrine according to which God's will is the only genuine efficient or productive cause that exists, and all other so-called 'causes' are really just 'occasions' for the exercise of that will.5 As Daniel Garber understands the term in "Descartes and Occasionalism," an occasional cause is "a cause whose effect is produced through the activity of God," and not through the exercise of any causal power within finite things.6 Body-mind occasionalism is a logical inevitability in Descartes' philosophy, Garber claims, because for Descartes "God is responsible for all motion in the inanimate world."7 The idea is that because there is no causal action on the part of bodies, bodies cannot act causally on anything, let alone minds.8Because for Garber body-body occasionalism is "as clear as anything" in Descartes' philosophy, he sets out to find evidence in Descartes' writings for [End Page 504] the body-mind occasionalism which it implies. It is Garber's case for body-mind occasionalism that I contest below, where I argue that Descartes remains a body-mind interactionist throughout his life. Clearly, my assessment of Descartes puts me at odds with Garber's more general view that Descartes is a body-body occasionalist, at least on the assumption that Descartes has a logically consistent position on body-body and body-mind causation. For, to reiterate Garber's point, to be logically consistent overall Descartes cannot be both a body-body occasionalist and a body-mind interactionist. Of course, Garber and I need not be at odds on body-body occasionalism; for since we need not assume that Descartes is logically consistent, he and I could say that Descartes as a matter of historical fact holds both positions. Within the confines of... (shrink)

continent. 2.2 (2012): 155–158 Michel Serres. Biogea . Trans. Randolph Burks. Minneapolis: Univocal Publishing. 2012. 200 pp. | ISBN 9781937561086 | $22.95 Conveying to potential readers the significance of a book puts me at risk of glad handing. It’s not in my interest to laud the undeserving, especially on the pages of this journal. This is not a sales pitch, but rather an affirmation of a necessary work on very troubled terms: human, earth, nature, and the problematic world we (...) made. It is this world that aspirates the silence (so to speak), and therefore the subject which, along with the development of the “made world” exports the excess augmentation of the cosmically missing, this silence of the natural, et cetera. Had we learned from Locke that lesson of “labor,” to consume what we need… but perhaps we need more than what matters? Serres’ Biogea has several functions on this manner, if it is indeed a book to be consumed. First, readers searching for novelistic entertainment have a place to dwell. Biogea deserves a place in your back pocket; biographical generosity and poetic fluidity should satisfy most textual fetishes. For lay philosophers who want to refresh their acumen, Biogea deserves a place on the book shelf, one already reads a sorely needed postmodern tune-up here. Serres’ style is clearly French; he leaves few cheese crumbs on his words, rather preciseness and breathing in the work give way to a sweeping manner that breaks the narrative line of sight. A circular narrative and anachronistic fragmentation of terms allows an abyssal atmosphere to swell, if only to pump into the book the externality of its broader text. Biogea aspires to a higher standard and the book, at times, is thinking this negentropic problem too. Univocal, the publisher, has crafted a book appropriate for the hands to hold and the translations are an achievement of an otherwise difficult writer to translate. Terms are the conditions of a broader text. It is important to note that Serres’ content is as much a thinking of terminal ports. There is a regard for the transportation technology of the written word. For me, this is the mark of genius, a craftiness that tells of a book device that I may trust. Serres is an accomplished thinker and a necessary voice to check the putative trendiness of anti-postmodernist and market-driven theory of endless cultural liquidation. Offering interventions on subjectivity as an open system we are given a chance to affirm the human, not merely to discard it, but to engage its poetic image emotion, the calibratory silent sense of the analogic world; the terms on which we base our efforts. 1 The human is the center of its own negation, constantly mediating it. Something deeper at stake appears in the work then, and it is quite obvious from the onset. Certainly, a book is an intensification of possible text and those who brought this actual book into existence have captured a rarity in regards to the subject matter and artistic accomplishment. I mentioned terms as conditions, so let us understand Biogea as bio-yea, a yes to bios . An affirmation of living and accepting presence for all of its defiance of images, words, and things temporal. Therefore Serres’ existence and its existants plays parts; out of linearity and still like a porous bone pumping blood it manufactures into the fleshy life it becomes. Starting from a man named silence chaos emerges, or the man “Old Taciturn” takes up a journey anticipating a great flood. In other words, a development akin to the one in Genesis. In dealing with this ancestral occupation, fusing Genesis with contemporary philosophical terms, Serres initiates this anachronistic fragmentation under the forming subjectivity of his own autobiography. This mutation in the open system is precisely one of Serres’ terms. There an abyss is at work, stated, but also measured by heels on the ground—the abyss dispatching earthen tensions, that which plays our tunes, that which we abide by and recognize in volcanoes, rivers, oceans, earthquakes and weaponry in the battles of the world. Set in later stages of the book, such tensions are harnessed through scientific principles in an attempt to unify the terms of natural force if only to terminate the world. Thus the elevation of the earth into the world is clearly set forth. Here already, and few pages in, a resonance is set forth under appellations such as the river Garonne, a subjectivity as much as it is inhuman, the river is the inhuman that makes us human. I get the sense that Serres is taking up a challenge issued by Wallace Stevens; namely, that the great poems of heaven and hell have been written, but that only the poem of the earth has resisted composition. 2 On this level we cannot avoid the killing factor of silence, given that our cognition blocks its pure, radical obliteration. Thus a silence of attunement to the earth is in a novel dialectic of the rithmic and rhythm. A technological world, a triumph of termination is set forth. If a text imposes its will given the reader who authorizes it, it is made to convey or convect a presupposition to a reader or its inhabitant(s). Text is therefore both, in-content, contenting, contentedness, and in reading it, a way to navigate self-destruction (dis-content). Here then would one note that the “inhuman” reveals itself, “an aperiodic rhythm of lovers and beloved…the sea as our friend…but as our enemy…maternal vivifying sea.” The sea is an open book, or vaginal birth canal, where the engagement of text comes forth: “…woman sea, open vulva.” One sees like the sea, but only after it, when the uninhabitable truth of inhabiting it switches the polarity of the sailors soul: “I was seeing like the sea” (9-11). In other words, we are invited to embrace the nonsense of the visible. At this point I am taken to Jean-François Lyotard’s work The Inhuman , specifically the first entry on negentropy that would be congruent with Serres’ thematic. 3 The human being exports, deports, or transplants its relation through text, through the system— and this is its sense or relation to silence, to music. Unaware of Serres’ proximity to this work, the concept of gender interrelation as regards a solar catastrophe runs clear. It would be, on this basis, that Serres references his peers, the other texts that, as mentioned above, are discarded in philosophy today. For students of philosophy what we have here is perhaps a gift, a needed project. If silence and death are at work, there is a political valence to deal with, and here, much like the domain of the text and the dominion of the reader, we confront the world of natural, fluid violence. The anti-postmodernist critique is in part based on a weak idea that the loss of ideology, of a world vision, motivates the “correlationist” project. 4 Serres seems to offer another way to view this when he notes that whereas persons “sometimes kill,” it is clearly “the collective” that “always kills” (17). What is the collective today, if not an organizing function we never see yet acts in its favor in the name of truth? One feels a sense of enigma here, if only to link to what Stevens remarked of communism as a “grubby faith,” providing this applies for capitalism as well, namely any ideology of progress overly interested in absolutes. Here we get the sense that the inhuman, silence, this type of killing, always killing, could not be matched by human-made, political dynamos. Or that if it comes to an equilibrium, a catastrophe is never too far from us to read with our heels. We are left to note that the forces of nature presuppose and permeate political systems, the more these systems obtain force, the more the system takes upon itself the proper name of nature that motivates its dissemination, albeit falsely. This note, that in an age of ecocide and technological captivity (sustainability and transparency) political regimes won’t grow our soul-learning ears any larger than our tongues, stands clear to us. The promise of technological desubjectification is here pushed aside. Regarding politics, Serres illustrates this fact: Where did this corpse come from? Who was it? Who killed it? I don’t know. I won’t try to find out. I refuse to get vengeance for it. And I only see Garonne. For our victims, today, are the rivers, too. Their waters have irrigated my life, enchanted my thought, invigorated my body; I’ve known them to be threatening, untamable, as dangerous as the sea when it rages. Yes, murderous. They decided to control their courses; dams, sometimes senseless, destroying sites and valleys, reduced entire populations to servile displacements; programs for the irrigation of thirsty farmland, often beneficial of course, completed their drying up.(22) Serres enters into his idea concerning the captivity of language from the natural into a world system: For thousands of years, we have been licking things with our tongues, covering and daubing them so as to appropriate things for ourselves. If language boils down to a convention, this convention took place between the speakers without consulting the thing named, become as a result the property of those who covered it in this way with their drawn or voiced productions. Malfeasance analyzes these acts of appropriation. Thus every inert object, every living thing as well, sleeps under the covers of signs, a little in the way that, today, a thousand posters shouting messages and ugly riots of color drown, with their filthy flood, the landscapes, or better, exclude them from perception because the meaning, almost nil, of this false language and these base images forms an irresistible source of attraction to our neurons and eyes. This appropriation covers the world’s beauty with ugliness. (38-39) Technological concealment coming to bear, we begin to get a sense of another commentary on the condition of sensing, driving home the necessity of a text dealing with such subject matter to be what its terms insist. Thus toward new openings: The new opening. As low beneath our feet as you like, the Biogea opens us to another space, high enough for us to be able to acquire a wisdom there, that of redeveloping this same place differently from our fathers, this place that’s still politically cut up by old hatreds, beneath the flood of tears and blood that we call history. Without this soft place, spiritually very old, but newly conceived in this way, without the juridical construction of a common good, opposed to our filthy ownership, I don’t see how our planet, hard, will survive. Hardness that depends on a softness, material belonging that depends on this temporary rented location (51). Serres enters into a summit on the content and the structure of his work. Archimedes is brought in with the concept of three volcanoes. Meaning fire, but as well earth, water, air. For it was Archimedes’ war machines that sought to lift the earth, thus bringing in the question of principles of science: “can a principle be invented while controlling its consequences?” (66-7). May the earth be put in a sentence, terminated by terminology, appellations, gone wild? By means of these element-dominating laws, this old physicist began to tear nature away from the ancient myths; by a strange return, today we’re plunging our successes back into the anxieties and terrors from which that ancient physics was born. Yes, our new history of science and technology is plunging, today, as though in a loop, into the fundamental human myths from which Empedocles’ first laws came. A major progression and a regression on the nether side of the origins. Consequently, the contemporary time requires that we try to return to that unity in which the principles of hate and love are at the same time human, living, inert and global. We will never attain a deontology of our knowledge and actions without thinking the subjective, the objective, the collective, and the cognitive all together simultaneously. Here, hate and love are the result of these four components.(71) Working then on the concept of fire-starting mirrors to the atomic annihilation of the Second War, Serres works into the subjectivity in question on the matter of rhythm—say rithmic— precisely at that point: Knowledge is changing today. The all-political is dying; the monarchy of the sciences said to be hard is coming to a close. The science of the things of the world will have to communicate just as much as the things of the world do, which do it much better than humans do, who don’t always want to do it. Let’s celebrate two changes this morning. The first one strikes a new blow to our narcissism. No, knowledge and the world don’t resemble our analytical enjoyments of refined cutting up, of endless debates and of exclusions full of hate. They, on the contrary, form a bloc and a sum, alliance and alloys. Uniting the fields of knowledge among themselves the way the things are connected among themselves, the second newness puts into place sets united by interlacing, webs and simplexes that combine with the things of the world, themselves combined, the combined knowledge that understands them.(130-1) Biogea closes on its opening flood thematic, approaching the initial telos of Genesis. Here the trees are brought into a position with atmosphere, the opaque abyssal reservoir, the tomb of the sun, sea in the polarity of the earthen heaven and hell. The poem of the earth then is silent but deadly, indeed, as funny as that phrase is, mainly a tomb gas. The meaning of the living and the non-meaning of things converge in the muteness of the world; this meaning and non-meaning plunge there and come out, the ultimate eddy. Mundus patet: through a fissure, through an opening, a fault, a cleft come noises, calls as small as these apertures. I’m listening, attentive, I’m translating, I’m advancing in the scaled-down meaning and science. Mundus patet: should the world open greatly, it will launch me into its silence. The totality remains silent. Knowledge expanded in elation. White origin of meaning, fountain of joy. (198) Final Remarks One test of a review is the long term trajectory the referee thinks the book will have. I see Serres’ text lending greatly into the vision of Biogea . In fact, in the vision of the novel inquiries of Stephen Jay Gould’s work there is something to be thought on the level of the individual and the species; namely, that humanity and its uniqueness is in its deferral, its thinking and naming, a thinking surrounded by silence that filters into everything, that pulls us through the world, the kinetic pulse we recognize, and all of that we cleave away in the base philosophical maxim of difference itself. Unique individuals are spatial creatures: we dwell, and we ought to get good at it. Yet this is an imaginative space that, if you are crazy enough to believe it, de-term-ine the conditions of its own terms. That is why we are not merely creating spaces on the acceleration of time, or so this ignoramus thinks, to accidentally transcend. Imagination already has this insatiable silence that we drink up and fail to manifest. Space is timeless. The imagination itself, shared by humans for themselves, their objects, and the species as a whole, is a non-defined space of relation; a whole human trajectory as part of nature, and part of worlds that are the other side of thinking nature, the consequence of it, at least our attempt to do so. Our survival is based on our deliberation, our caution, our natural deconstructive sense toward this silence that is already part of the song, sung, singing of this century without end. Good books will let us inhabit this space and recognize a form of life. Serres’ text moves toward dwelling, as noted, in masterful and accessible ways. The pitched battles are the falling replays of anemic and dead politics. As soon as we realize there is humanity, we may be able to enjoy the end of it, our inhuman capability of listening to silence. NOTES 1. See Michel Serres. The Parasite . Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. 2007. 2. Wallace Stevens, “Imagination as Value” [ca. 1945], in Collected Poetry and Prose . New York: The Library of America. 1997. 724-39. 3. Jean-François Lyotard. The Inhuman: Reflections on Time . Trans. Geoffrey Bennington & Rachel Bowlby. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. 1992. 4. See the introduction: Quentin Melliassoux. After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency . Trans. Ray Brassier. New York: Continuum. 2008. EDITOR'S NOTE: This review was updated on August 8, 2012. Substantial edits include block quotes from the book under review as well as the inclusion of comments from the author. (shrink)

Background and AimPsycho-oncology is a cross-disciplinary and collaborative sub-specialty of oncology that focuses on the psychological, behavioral, ethical, and social aspects of cancer in clinical settings. The aim of this bibliometric study was to analyze and characterize the research productivity and trends in psycho-oncology between 1980 and 2021.MethodologyIn May 2022, the Scopus® database was searched for psycho-oncology-related publications using predetermined search keywords with specific restrictions. Lotka’s law was applied to check the authors’ productivity, while Bradford’s law was used to (...) assess the core journals in this field. The data was analyzed for different bibliometric indicators in the Biblioshiny package, an RStudio tool for bibliometric analysis.ResultsThe initial search resulted in a total of 2,906 publications. Of which, 1,832 publications were included in the final analysis, published between 1980 and 2021. The analyzed publications were written by 7,363 authors from 74 countries and published in 490 journals. There has been a significant increase in psycho-oncology-related publications after 2010. The most productive year was 2021. The annual scientific growth rate was found to be 13.9%. The most relevant leading author in terms of publications was Luigi Grassi from the University of Ferrara, Italy. Lotka’s law found that the number of authors declined as the number of papers written increased. The core journals were Psycho-Oncology, Supportive Care in Cancer, and Journal of Psychosocial Oncology. The most frequently used author’s keywords other than searching keywords were cancer, oncology, quality of life, depression, and anxiety. Recent psycho-oncology-related topics included mental health, COVID-19 infection in humans, people, pandemic, and tumor. The University of Sydney was the top-ranked institution. The leading country in terms of publications, citations, corresponding author country, and international collaboration was the United States of America. The United States had the strongest collaboration with Australia and Canada.ConclusionThe research hotspots include mental health conditions and interventions in cancer patients. We identified international collaboration and research expenditure to be strongly associated with psycho-oncology research productivity. Researchers’ collaboration, which is visible among developed countries, should be extended to low-income countries in order to expand psycho-oncology-related research and understanding. (shrink)

Long before the current dispute in the USA about the teaching of evolution, Hume's dialogues presented and critically analyzed the idea of intelligent design. What should we teach our children about the creation of the world? What should we teach them about religion? The characters Demea, Cleanthes, and Philo passionately present and defend different answers to that question. Demea opens the dialogue with a position derived from René Descartes and Father Malebranche — God's nature is a mystery, but God's (...) existence can be proved logically. Cleanthes attacks that view, both because it leads to mysticsm and because it attempts the impossible task of trying to establish existence on the basis of pure reason, without appeal to sense experience. As an alternative, he offers a proof of both God's existence and God's nature based on the same kind of scientific reasoning established by Copernicus, Galileo, and Newton. Taking a skeptical approach, Philo presents a series of arguments that question any attempt to use reason as a basis for religious faith. He suggests that human beings might be better off without religion. The dialolgue ends without genuine agreement among the characters, justifying Hume's choice of dialogue as the form of presentation. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Significance of R. G. Collingwood’s Principles of HistoryDavid BoucherThe Principles of History is the work that Collingwood saw as his principal philosophical enterprise, the book for which his whole intellectual life had been a preparation. It was to have been a work divided into three books. 1 In the first there was to be a discussion of the characteristics that make the special science of history distinctive. (...) In the second history was to be compared with other sciences. Third, he intended to investigate the relationship between history and practical life. He thought of beginning his project by giving a brief account of the different senses of the concept of history. Book one was divided into four chapters. The first was to concentrate on evidence and testimony relating them to scissors-and-paste history. Chapter two was to present a theory of action, res gestae, or action expressive of thought, in contrast with the idea of process, or change, associated with pseudo-history. In chapter three reenactment was to be discussed and contrasted with the idea of a dead past. Chapter four was to argue that history in contrast with other purported pretenders to the title can justifiably claim to be the science of the mind. Book two was divided into three chapters. Chapter one was to discuss history and natural science, showing that neither could be reduced to each other. He also wanted to contend that the natural sciences are themselves historical achievements in that they depend upon the historical facts of observation and thought. Chapter two was to deal with history and the human sciences, such as economics, which he describes as crypto-histories. In the third chapter Collingwood intended to explore the relation between history and philosophy. In book three, which is described less precisely, he wanted to argue that history overcomes the distinction between theory and practice, and that reenactment overcomes the dualism between mind and its objects. This, he thought, would enable him to give a characterization of historical morality and historical civilization in contrast with their utilitarian counterparts.He began writing the book on 15 February 1939 and had finished the first three chapters by 23 February. Over a month later, on 26 and 27 March, he began chapter four but was unable to formulate his thoughts on the past, and the relation between history and philosophy. At this point he stopped, never to return to the manuscript again. What we have left of The Principles of History deviates considerably from the original plan. Only three chapters were written, the third of which does not contain the crucial discussion of re-enactment. In addition, uncompleted fragments of the beginnings of a fourth chapter remain.In this paper I intend to look at why Collingwood’s explicit authorization to publish the Principles of History was disregarded by Knox and Oxford University Press. In addition, I want to look at three aspects of the rediscovered manuscript. In the second and third sections, on the method and subject matter of history respectively, I examine the extent to which Knox’s suppression of the Principles of History contributed to a good deal of the confusion surrounding the interpretation of Collingwood’s key ideas. What emerges from the pages of the Principles of History is how integral The Principles of Art and An Essay on Metaphysics are to understanding Collingwood’s later philosophy of history, a connection that is distorted by the patchwork nature of The Idea of History.In the fourth section of the paper I suggest that the most significant omission to which Collingwood never returned was the theory of reenactment. Reenactment more than any other aspect of his writings has been placed by interpreters at the centre of Collingwood’s philosophy of history. W. H. Dray’s new book is wholly focused upon this theme. Dray did not, however, see The Principles of History in time to incorporate the implications for reenactment theory of Collingwood’s broadening of the subject matter of history to include the emotions. 2 The theory of reenactment could no longer be sustained by the earlier argument found in The Idea of History, because Collingwood, in The Principles of... (shrink)

Long before the current dispute in the USA about the teaching of evolution, Hume's dialogues presented and critically analyzed the idea of intelligent design. What should we teach our children about the creation of the world? What should we teach them about religion? The characters Demea, Cleanthes, and Philo passionately present and defend different answers to that question. Demea opens the dialogue with a position derived from René Descartes and Father Malebranche — God's nature is a mystery, but God's (...) existence can be proved logically. Cleanthes attacks that view, both because it leads to mysticsm and because it attempts the impossible task of trying to establish existence on the basis of pure reason, without appeal to sense experience. As an alternative, he offers a proof of both God's existence and God's nature based on the same kind of scientific reasoning established by Copernicus, Galileo, and Newton. Taking a skeptical approach, Philo presents a series of arguments that question any attempt to use reason as a basis for religious faith. He suggests that human beings might be better off without religion. The dialolgue ends without genuine agreement among the characters, justifying Hume's choice of dialogue as the form of presentation. (shrink)

Computational design uses artificial intelligence (AI) to optimise designs towards user-determined goals. When combined with 3D printing, it is possible to develop and construct physical products in a wide range of geometries and materials and encapsulating a range of functionality, with minimal input from human designers. One potential application is the development of bespoke surgical tools, whereby computational design optimises a tool’s morphology for a specific patient’s anatomy and the requirements of the surgical procedure to improve (...) surgical outcomes. This emerging application of AI and 3D printing provides an opportunity to examine whether new technologies affect the ethical responsibilities of those operating in high-consequence domains such as healthcare. This research draws on stakeholder interviews to identify how a range of different professions involved in the design, production, and adoption of computationally designed surgical tools, identify and attribute responsibility within the different stages of a computationally designed tool’s development and deployment. Those interviewed included surgeons and radiologists, fabricators experienced with 3D printing, computational designers, healthcare regulators, bioethicists, and patient advocates. Based on our findings, we identify additional responsibilities that surround the process of creating and using these tools. Additionally, the responsibilities of most professional stakeholders are not limited to individual stages of the tool design and deployment process, and the close collaboration between stakeholders at various stages of the process suggests that collective ethical responsibility may be appropriate in these cases. The role responsibilities of the stakeholders involved in developing the process to create computationally designed tools also change as the technology moves from research and development (R&D) to approved use. (shrink)

Preface The status of sovereignty as a highly ambiguous concept is well established. Pointing out or deploring, the ambiguity of the idea has itself become a recurring motif in the literature on sovereignty. As the legal theorist and international lawyer Alf Ross put it, “there is hardly any domain in which the obscurity and confusion is as great as here.” 1 The concept of sovereignty is often seen as a downright obstacle to fruitful conceptual analysis, carried over from its proper (...) setting in history to “plague and befog contemporary thought.” 2 . . . So contested is the concept that, rather than pursuing the contestation, many political theorists think we should give up so protean a notion. Granting that the debate on the relevance of sovereignty frustratingly oscillates between claims that it will either continue to exist or that it is about to disappear, forgetting it altogether, and thereby escaping this seemingly endless argument, can easily appear as the most urgent task for political theory . The following argument makes a case that the “urgent task” is not the abandonment of the concept of sovereignty, but an understanding of its essential philosophical nature as an integrated and evolving expression of practical reason. Sovereignty is neither ambiguous nor obscure once its fundamental presuppositions are laid bare and its many philosophical and historical manifestations shown to be the product, in actuality, of a single, dialectally dynamic but integrated set of metaphysical elements. This is the first of three arguments describing the evolution of international law as a manifestation of practical reason through an application of philosophical method to the source , locus , and scope of the concept of sovereignty. It moves from a dialectic balance favoring utility to a balance dominated by legal right to a dialectic of duty to humanity and nature. All three arguments are meant to be a contribution to the new field of International Legal Philosophy as defined by Phillip Allott. 4 This field combines a sensitivity to legal practice with an effort to understand the underlying philosophical determinants of empirical choice and behavior. One purpose of international legal philosophy is to “remove” from the minds of those who study the law what Diderot defined as “the sophism of the ephemeral,” and what Allott calls “the disempowering idea that what xii Preface happens to exist now is inevitable and permanent.” 5 A core imperative is to “reunderstand what it is to be a thinking being” 6 and to rediscover the dialectic between the private and the public as it determines, and is redetermined by, legal practice. This requires a “revolution in the human mind” 7 so that we may transcend the current dependence on positivist methods and empirical fact as an end-in-itself, and try to understand the underlying and more constant and essential ideas and inherent dialectics that constitute the substructure or “metaphysics” of international law. I will approach this “revolution” with the use of R. G. Collingwood’s philosophical method 8 and the philosophy of David Hume, applied to international law as an expression of practical reason. The goal of philosophical method is the construction of a comprehensive policy argument (CPA) for a public policy or legal issue. In addition to the conventional use of empirical models and their logic of investigation in the study of policy and law, CPA requires that an underlying philosophical logic of concepts be deciphered to identify the ideas within the issue, and their definition, overlap, and systematic interdependence. Philosophical method is a means with which to interpret and understand competing systematic and complete conceptual logics, existing at the core of an issue and pertinent to policy change. Philosophical method is therefore not meant to be a replacement for the empirical investigation of a policy or legal issue, or the use of scientific method in social studies. Rather, it is a complimentary and prerequisite method that seeks to transcend the limitations of positivism and present a more complete understanding of the philosophical presuppositions of positivist ideas like power, interest, or strategic rationality. Philosophical method is meant to be used with the facts of the policy or legal issue to match an illuminating logic of concepts with a pertinent logic of investigation . Within the CPA, the use of philosophical method and the metaphysics of a policy or legal issue is assumed to be critical to the full understanding of the overlapping concepts, dialectics, and scale of forms that determine, and are determined by, the empirical context of the policy or legal topic. Specifically, instead of utilizing bits and pieces of various theoretical arguments to address narrowly focused empirical questions, as positivism prescribes, I will address the evolution of international law as practical reason in three phases. Each will be approached through a single integrated logic of philosophical concepts from a particular philosopher (i.e., David Hume, G. W. F. Hegel, Immanuel Kant). This philosophically holistic approach to the law is based on the assumption that only through the use of a single integrated argument in legal analysis can sovereignty, or any concept, be understood as a truly systematic and logical whole. A complete philosophical paradigm has a dialectic integrity and systematic logic that can more adequately describe the evolving essence of a concept like sovereignty. This approach also has the advantage of generating a number of distinct holistic descriptions of the law through the application of different philosophical systems, one at a time, to its factual structure. 9 Positivism does not seek Preface xiii holism, and rejects the idea that “theory” has such a characteristic. The essential or comprehensive substructure of any idea is therefore ignored in a method that recommends the observation of empirical problems through the use of whatever hodgepodge of theoretical elements is seen fit to frame its superstructure. This failure to deal with metaphysics has retarded both an essential understanding of international law as a species of legal system, and any holistic and dialectical conceptualization of its inherent concepts, like sovereignty. A second positivist convention expects modern theorists to create new theory rather than to refine and apply that of existing philosophy. This predisposition is driven by the positivist goal of discovery that ignores refinement as a possible purpose of philosophical analysis. Collingwood argues that philosophy must take that set of ideas already known and utilize existing systematic philosophical arguments to refine them so that they evolve closer to their essence as concepts. Considering this imperative, the idea of sovereignty can be assumed to have had valid usage for hundreds of years, over which time, the concept has evolved to mean different things, each a refinement of the definition that preceded it. Transcending positivism means that the scholar’s search is not for “new” material, but to decipher the metaphysical essence of a concept as it has been made manifest over time and context. These manifestations are rooted, and refined from, the known terms of that concept’s inherent idea(s). Rather than depending exclusively on positivism and its conventions, my work utilizes, in addition to Collingwood, the intact philosophical systems of Hume, Hegel, and Kant to trace the refinement of international law as a product of human practical reason. These paradigms, or integrated systems of logical concepts, will be applied to legal practice individually, so that each CPA can be deciphered separately. This provides a set of integrated and logically intact paradigms for the evolutionary stages of practical reason in international law. Because each argument is applied systematically, a deeper understanding of the source, locus, and scope in the development of law in general, and international law in particular, is possible where it is not with the application of various disconnected components of many theories. Each CPA based on Hume, Hegel, or Kant can then be used to describe a distinct context that its logic of concepts best illuminates; specifically, the (1) genesis, (2) contemporary dilemmas, and (3) future of the international legal system. By widening the perspective of international lawyers and policymakers, they can more easily perceive the dialectic of ideas that has created, and is refined by, the legal practice in which they participate. We also move toward Allott’s goal of “human self-perfecting.” 10 And, in addition, by providing a more complete knowledge of the origins of legal practice and its evolution, we illuminate the practical possibilities for what we might “choose to be” 11 in the future. To achieve this, the essential metaphysical elements of state sovereignty and its inherent evolutionary scale of forms will be deciphered and described. This will transform what appears to be a multitude of definitions and xiv Preface practical realizations of the concept of sovereignty into a set of interdependent manifestations of a single substructure, made of a single set of dialectic elements. The interpretation of international law through practical reason sorts and integrates a diverse and discordant literature and defines state sovereignty as a single concept evolving on a scale of forms that allows it to exhibit diverse character traits, all arising from different combinations of common and essential metaphysical elements. This approach, compared to positivist methods and legal realism, allows one to transcend current agreement that sovereignty is, at best, a narrowly focused set of empirical characteristics or, at worst, “organized hypocrisy.” 12 This method also encourages the scholar and practitioner to understand the predispositions and pitfalls of the concept of sovereignty, as well as its potential future paths, more effectively. The use of philosophical method to create policy paradigms out of preexisting philosophical systems and apply these to international law will be called Philosophical-Policy & Legal Design . This approach allows the use of preexisting and complete philosophical arguments that provide an adequate logic of concepts to chart the evolution of the idea of sovereignty along its scale of forms. An examination of the source of practical reason in human social convention with the employment of a philosophical-policy drawn from Hume’s logic of concepts about human nature will demonstrate this new approach. Why Hume? Because, up to now, without an adequate substructure we have arguments, like Brunne é’ s and Troope’s, 13 that may correctly identify international law as an “interactional” system, but cannot present any argument as to why it is, where this empirical reality comes from, or what its implications are for the future. Comparatively, Hume provides a logic of philosophical concepts that answers these concerns. First, he fulfills the requirements for a fuller understanding of the origin and evolution of law from social convention and the dependence of social convention on the human imperative for society. Second, he offers a more adequate delineation of the overlapping concepts of the law in terms of the ideas and institutions that deal with norms and justice (e.g., principle, process, practice, rule, power, interest). Third, he provides a fundamental understanding of the essential dialectics at the core of a conceptualization of the law with both unconscious and conscious human participation (i.e., passion. (shrink)

Much of the recent discussion in progressive circles [e.g., Stiglitz; Galbraith; Piketty] has focused the obscene mal-distribution of wealth and income as if that was "the" problem in our economic system. And the proposed redistributive reforms have all stuck to that framing of the question. To put the question in historical perspective, one might note that there was a similar, if not more extreme, mal-distribution of wealth, income, and political power in the Antebellum system of slavery. Yet, it should be (...) obvious to modern eyes that redistributions in favor of the slaves, while leaving the institution of owning workers intact, would not address the root of the problem. The system of slavery was eventually abolished in favor of the system we have today which differs in two important respects: the workers are only rented, hired, or employed ; and the rental relationship between employer and employee is voluntary. Today, the root of the problem is the whole institution for the voluntary renting of human beings, the employment system itself, not the terms of the contract or the accumulated consequences in the form of the mal-distribution of income and wealth. (shrink)

Questions have been raised over the acceptability of conducting human challenge studies in low and middle income countries. Most of these concerns are based on theoretical considerations and there exists little data on the attitudes of stakeholders in these countries. This study examines the view of researchers and REC members in Thailand regarding the design and conduct of challenge studies in the country. A questionnaire was developed based on ethical frameworks for human challenge studies. The target respondents (...) included those who had experience with health-related research at universities, non-university hospitals, and research institutes. A total of 240 respondents completed the on-line survey. In general, the respondents felt that the ethical issues raised by human challenge studies in LMICS do not differ significantly from those in high income countries, including: scientific rationale, safety, appropriate risks, and robust informed consent process. In contrast, issues that have been described as important for human challenge studies in LMICs were rated as having lower importance, including: a publicly available rationale, national priority, and community engagement. Responses did not vary significantly between researchers in different fields, nor between researchers and REC members. These findings provide an important perspective for assessing existing frameworks for human challenges studies in LMICs. (shrink)

Photo by Jonathan Ford on Unsplash ABSTRACT Since 2008, an average of twenty million people per year have been displaced by weather events. Climate migration creates a special setting for a duty to rescue. A duty to rescue is a moral rather than legal duty and imposes on a bystander to take an active role in preventing serious harm to someone else. This paper analyzes the idea of expanding a duty to rescue to climate migration. We address who should have (...) the duty and to whom the duty should extend. The paper discusses ways to define and apply the duty to rescue as well as its limitations, arguing that it may take the form of an ethical duty to prepare. INTRODUCTION Climate migration creates a special setting for a duty to rescue. A duty to rescue is a moral rather than legal duty and imposes on a bystander to take an active role in preventing serious harm to someone else. Examples of circumstances range from person-to-person intimate rescue to saving those in poverty, even in distant parts of the world.[1] Since 2008, an average of twenty million people per year have been displaced by weather events.[2] Circumstances like being thrust from homes under the threat of fire, mudslide, and flooding vary greatly from long-term changes like land becoming too arid for crops or temperatures increasing annually gradually pushing up the number of heat-related deaths, with the area slowly becoming uninhabitable. Imminence in fleeing affects resettling and need for rescue with important implications for how the duty to rescue might apply. This paper reevaluates the ethical framing of the duty to rescue and, while it is arguably a stretch, applies it to climate migration. Climate migration has become common and is expected to increase due to rises in sea level, increases in weather events that make areas uninhabitable, and changes to land that preclude farming or other necessary land uses. We argue that a duty to rescue may help highlight who has moral obligations to whom. Because the problem is so large in scope, we suggest a change in the ethical limits to humans' duty to rescue other humans who are in distress. We imagine an expansion or extension of the duty to rescue to meet some of the basic needs created by climate migration. Yet how it should expand, and how much depend on ethical framing and practical limitations. l. Expanding the Geographical Boundaries Two commonly recognized emergencies, Hurricane Katrina in the case of weather events and the current COVID-19 pandemic, provide a historical and current backdrop to evaluate ethical obligations as more disasters displace people. A significant reassessment of the ethical scope of an obligation to rescue in the case of weather events will be limited by the ability to render aid to those in distress in the case of a planet-wide weather catastrophe. The problems may overwhelm the ability to rescue or the reasonableness of attempting rescue. The extent of the moral obligation borne by humans to other humans in the case of a weather event has been largely defined by its locality and limited geographic influence. Whether we are imagining the scope of ethical obligation in the case of hurricane, flood, tornado, drought, or wildfire events, the perceived ethical obligation is significantly defined by the limited impact of these weather events on people outside the zone of the weather event's direct impact, yet close to that zone. A hurricane affecting New Orleans will not have immediate impact on the residents of California or even those on the northeast coast of the United States until a later time. Wildfires in the Pacific Northwest do not impair the ability of those in the rest of the country to come forward with assistance. But as climate migration crosses international borders, and climate events occur simultaneously in many regions, a more expansive duty to rescue may provide the ethical impulse to help those who live afar or migrate long distances. In this respect, the need for help in the event of widespread climate migration due to global warming is more like a pandemic than a weather event. Its broad impact area diminishes the capability of nearly the entire balance of the human population to help due to those populations' awareness that they will, in short order, have the same need for the same resources, from the same cause. Those living near current flood zones may find their historically safe havens are also a flood zone. Those previously best positioned to rescue may find themselves also needing to relocate. Thus, we may observe the need for new rescuers. ll. The Rule of Rescue The Rule of Rescue as defined by Al Jonsen describes the moral impetus or knee jerk reaction to save identifiable people facing death.[3] A duty to rescue has since been expanded beyond imminent death and beyond the near and identifiable. But there are limitations. For example, by most accounts, the ethical duty tends not to require extreme bodily risk or financial depletion. In comparing Good Samaritans to humanitarians, Scott M. James argues the duty to rescue arises from unique dependence, but the ethical obligation to help strangers through humanitarian aid is of a different nature.[4] The wrongness of failing to help is arguably more egregious when one is in a unique position to help. Like in the tragedy of the commons, where there is no unique positioning, when the global community is called upon to help, each individual in it may feel less obliged to do so. Climate migration falls in between—it requires helping strangers, yet it may move forward without anyone seeing themselves as uniquely positioned to help until those strangers become part of communities, at which time, there may be more moral justification to help a community member in need. Generally, arguments about Good Samaritans hinge on extraordinary acts, praiseworthy because they are acts of compassion, not obligation. Now all US states have Good Samaritan laws[5] which protect helpers from liability for help gone wrong or for a failure to succeed once engaged in an act of rescue. Extraordinary help as a moral good is thus somewhat encouraged through legal protection, but not imposed. Conversely, jobs like firefighting, search and rescue, and emergency medical care tend to oblige employees to take on risks that would be extraordinary if undertaken by the average bystander, yet they are rendered ordinary rescue as part of the job. Three states, Minnesota, Rhode Island, and Vermont have a broad duty to rescue, adding legal considerations to an otherwise moral conundrum. The laws do not require bystanders to take on risk for the sake of rescuing strangers.[6] The moral duty will require looking beyond law, but it is unclear how the moral duty to rescue should be distributed in the case of climate migration. A bare minimum would prevent taking advantage of newcomers, paying sub-minimum wage, and discriminating against them. Yet such a minimum is hardly rescue. lll. An Ethical Rather than Legal Duty The difficulty in defining the duty to rescue as a legal obligation is that it is difficult to determine the extent of risk a rescuer ought to be required to take. The nature of this ethical duty is also arguably tied to the experiences of both the rescuer and the rescued. There are subjective aspects like what someone perceives as a danger that make it difficult to write enforceable laws requiring rescue. It is one thing to expect a rescuer to step into several inches of relatively warm water to lift a person lying face down in a pond and enable them to breathe. It is something altogether different to expect that rescuer to dive into frigid water and attempt to extricate someone trapped in a submerged automobile. As the legal philosopher H.L.A. Hart observed, it is always easier to define application of the core intention of any rule, whether law or ethical norm. It is more difficult to create legal certainty about how the law applies to what he described as “penumbra circumstances”. In the case of a hurricane, it is easier to define what surplus resources are available in areas geographically remote from the impact of the storm and demand, as a moral obligation, that those nearby but outside the area provide assistance. It is more difficult to obligate people, organizations, or governments to supply a quantity of medication or some number of ventilators to an adjacent community when they expect to imminently need them for their own community. In the early stages of climate migration, the ethics of extreme weather event assistance, a common application of the duty to rescue, will be useful and appropriate. The rising sea levels first experienced by island nations in the South Pacific[7] will not render those living in other coastal communities, those with greater available “high ground”, unable to supply resources to those in need. But when sea level rise and climate change affect more communities simultaneously, albeit in varying degree, the task of defining what response is ethically obligatory becomes increasingly complicated. Pinpointing the obligations of those communities which are resource rich to those communities which are resource deprived, and of those partly affected to those more severely affected may become necessary. The limitations of the traditional duty to rescue could expand to meet the needs. lV. Contribution to the Problem Many argue that the duty to rescue may depend on any appropriate claim of those needing rescue. One issue is whether preferential claims among those who can identify the source of the harm should call for a greater duty or whether everyone in need should be approached as like candidates for rescue, shaping the duty as equal across those on the receiving end. As climate change does have human-made causes, there are strong arguments to impose a greater ethical duty on any entity that caused the climate-related problems leading to the mass exodus. While the global north is often implicated in pollution that causes migration, industries like energy, transportation, and agriculture are tied to climate change and associated with significant greenhouse gas emissions.[8] Practices like directing agriculture to less sustainable single crop growth generally made land less farmable. Yet it is difficult to place blame and identify specific causal relationships as most migration is due to many factors. A movement toward greater accountability can be reframed as a greater duty to rescue, a duty to engage in the extraordinary. The fossil fuel industry, for example, should have a larger obligation than the average person. Similarly, some may argue anyone unjustly enriching themselves while contributing to climate change or people who over-consume have an elevated duty to rescue.[9] Climate change lawsuits demonstrate an eagerness to hold governments and corporations accountable, despite difficulty proving causation. V. The Most Vulnerable One ethical dimension of climate migration that remains unexplored is how a duty to rescue applies to vulnerable populations who stand to be left behind or unable to migrate without assistance. Researchers from the Global North working across the Global South are increasingly observing the phenomenon of ethics dumping, where the research ethics of some countries are imposed on research subjects in other countries.[10] In that vein, rescuers should be careful not to impose unwelcome cultural standards or exploit people who are in the process of migrating. There is a gap in discussions reflecting voices that have been left out. The duty to rescue is incomplete without an attempt to understand the ethical experiences of those being rescued. The actual people affected by climate migration who are the least likely to have the means to migrate, or to do so without extreme hardship, should have a voice informing the global community including those in a position to carry out rescue. People who have the means and are young and healthy may easily make decisions to avoid the catastrophic consequences that climate migration brings. However, what about those who are left behind? For example, especially recognizing cultural differences, the homeless community, disabled community, refugees, the elderly community, and women[11] and children may suffer differently and call for more attention. In some parts of the world, human rights are severely constrained. An ethical duty to rescue, with many considerations and variables, may be more justified in the case of those most in need. As climate migration continues and increases significantly, it may be reasonable to ask the local and global community to focus on those least well positioned to migrate successfully. In this context, the use of phenomenology to understand the lived experiences of those migrating, sometimes termed “ethical experiences”, may help flesh out how a duty to rescue takes shape. The discussion of duty and obligation requires an articulation of the ethical experiences (how the local community in need of rescue views the proposed rescue). Then, the obligation to interpret the duty as ‘one shall not’ or ‘one must’ can be focused on the migrants’ needs rather than the rescuers’ feelings of obligation.[12] A revised theory of the duty to rescue taking into account the asymmetrical experiences of communities involved could ensure that the needs of people whose living situations, gender, ethnicity, age, or race impact their ability to even begin the migration process are considered. In this discussion, the rescuing is directed toward communities /collectives of persons migrating, whether at once or across a period of time. Often, the climate migrant may not be in a state to articulate the nature of this event when it happens, given its subjective proximity. Yet, when communities are given the space and opportunity to articulate their shared values, the ethical action of rescue derives its meaningfulness from the community rather than the rescuers. In other words, allowing climate migrants to explain their feelings can add complexity to what some see as a binary receiver-giver (of rescue) dynamic. This is necessary because the concept of vulnerable populations is fraught with problematic assumptions. There have been various definitions and criteria to determine what would constitute vulnerable populations.[13] For example, the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change[14] identifies and assesses vulnerable populations. These criteria may be helpful. However, they do not provide the full picture. Rather than identifying categorical criteria of vulnerable populations, engaging with people who are experiencing climate migration and listening to their current experiences and concerns helps determine need. Knowing what people need may prevent the kneejerk reaction to label people who are quite resilient yet have appropriate needs “vulnerable”. Proceeding with caution is important because the duty to rescue has hierarchical underpinnings of "us" and "them." Often when people swoop in to save, there are good and bad consequences of the intervention. We should proceed with caution because often the helper misses the actual needs of those in need. The only way to combat this would be to make sure that people are empowered to inform those agencies that are able to help. In addition to more practical approaches, large scale oral histories could allow those who have migrated already to share their experiences. It would be important to capture the lived experiences of people who are already experiencing the consequences of climate migration or of other migration like that due to political or economic extreme events. These experiences could shape our analysis of whether people in fact wish for rescue. If so, further conversations can determine best actions as well as give important insight into what resources might be necessary to empower people now and in the future. Vl. A Duty to Rescue as a Duty to Prepare If we view Good Samaritans as going above and beyond, then a duty to rescue, something ethically compelled, must bring rescue out of the framework of charity and place it in the context of humanity and obligations. Such a view would also support expanding the geographical reach of the otherwise more proximate duty. The duty may be stronger and take shape in a more workable way if it applies to preparing places expecting to see an influx of people due to climate migration and to helping those most in need. The duty may arise out of expectations of what type of community the place welcoming those migrating due to climate should be—does it want to offer good housing, schooling, and medical care as well as economic opportunity to new people? And if so, at what cost, or with which risks? If the newcomers are viewed as community members rather than strangers, a model of acceptance may lead to better preparation. Some considerations like whether the actions will reasonably help the persons in need of rescue[15] will shape the application of a duty to rescue in the context of climate migration. Similarly, ensuring that people have the chance to articulate their values may help communities support the newcomers. New relationships should not be defined as migrant and rescuer. Voluntariness in participation and not forcing any action deemed rescue would help ensure the human rights of those migrating. In the United States, President Biden issued an executive order addressing impending climate migration steeped in a duty to prepare by making plans for resettlement and to address the impact of climate migration.[16] Vll. At What Risk? As we investigate the ethical obligations to meet even basic needs, we must also ask what level of risk is ethically compelled. There is an extraordinary need to integrate newcomers successfully, but it is difficult to stretch an ethical duty to rescue to require all the prerequisites for successful climate migration. Even defining success would create deep ethical arguments. As observed in almost all migrations, extraordinary charitable acts may be the key to success, while an ethical duty to rescue must try to require the important government and community-based basics and ensuring respect for human rights. That is, the migrating people should be rescued from circumstances that contradict basic human rights. Rather than comparing communities to bystanders, mere places where people will arrive and need to hash out how to find housing, jobs, education, and opportunity, a duty of preparation may be the key to rescue those disenfranchised by migration. There are cultural, personal, physical, psycho-social, and geopolitical issues surrounding how to best help those needing to permanently relocate. Ethics arguments will certainly range from “do nothing”, which may fail people, to “do everything”, which could waste taxpayer money in futile over-preparation while failing to actually help. Communities must avoid planning exclusively for one scenario only to have it not take place. Striking the balance, a duty to rescue as it could apply to climate migration should set goals of societal integration, and providing the basics like education, housing, food, health care, and job opportunity, the precursors to flourishing. Recommending the extraordinary, morally preferred but perhaps not compulsory, when charitable actors are participating, or when wrongdoers are compensating, may be more workable than seeing the duty to rescue as compelling people or local governments to take on significant financial and personal risk for newcomers. While humanitarian ethics supports helping everyone, it is likely that people who resettle in advance of a need to flee will find themselves with more choices and opportunities. Help is warranted for those with more dire needs. Preparing for them may do just that. Vlll. Rescue Prior to Migration and Rescue in the Process of Resettlement The duty to enable the migration in the first-place hints to the inadequacy of a duty to prepare. The traditional duty to rescue perhaps steps in if rescue looks like those geographically just out of harm's way rescuing those in danger. That resembles the traditional moral requirement, or duty to rescue according to the Rule of Rescue. Humanitarian aid typically provided by many institutions makes sense and is in place, although financial support for additional humanitarian aid is always needed. Despite having moved to purportedly more capable communities, migrant communities may be able to develop more egalitarian orders of living. Rather than continually being identified as having been rescued, it is important to make sure people keep or make social ties during and after migration. Immigrants often face social isolation.[17] Small shifts in gestural language also have the potential to welcome people and show they are valued. For instance, some migrants may not like questions like “Where are you from?” and “What brings you here?” as they emphasize differences over fitting in. CONCLUSION The ethical duty to rescue should be expanded to better match those in need of relocation with a welcome environment and the resources needed to achieve success and fully integrate socially and culturally. Expanding a dialogue that includes the voices of people who have recently migrated whether due to violence, poverty, or climate, could properly frame the extent of the duty. If we are to apply the duty of rescue to climate migration, rescuers should avoid labeling people vulnerable, dependent, or needy, although there is reason to focus on those whose needs are the most dire. A soft duty to rescue people during the course of climate migration can come in the form of preparation. People will need help finding housing, education, access to food, and employment. Ultimately, to help them help themselves may be the best goal. While the obligations should be borne differently by people, whether due to a special responsibility, or a special relationship that creates a clearer duty, the global community must prepare for its role in rescuing those displaced by climate events. By helping those displaced at the start of the climate migration process according to a more commonly held notion of the duty to rescue, and by preparing to incorporate newcomers successfully according to an expanded duty to rescue, effectively a duty to prepare, countries that take on climate refugees may find themselves rewarded by the cultural diversity and workplace talents that people bring. A duty to those at a distance is a reasonable expansion of the duty to rescue. But what one ought to do in the global community varies somewhat from the traditional Rule of Rescue. - [1] Singer, P. (1972). Famine, Affluence, and Morality. Philosophy and Public Affairs, 1(3): 229-43. [2] Irfan, U. (2022, March 16). Why We Still Don’t Yet Know How Bad Climate Migration Will Get. Vox. https://www.vox.com/2022/3/16/22960468/ipcc-climate-change-migration-migrant-refugee, citing the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) (2022). Sixth Assessment Report, Climate Change 2022, Impacts, Adaptation, and Vulnerability. https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar6/wg2/ [3] McKie, J., Richardson, J. (2003) The Rule of Rescue. Social Science & Medicine, 56(12): 2407-2419. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0277-9536(02)00244-7. [4] James, S.M. (2007). Good Samaritans, Good Humanitarians. Journal of Applied Philosophy, 24(3):238-254. [5] Overview of Good Samaritan laws. https://worldpopulationreview.com/state-rankings/good-samaritan-law-states [6] Fifield, J. (2017, Sept. 19). Why It’s Hard to Punish ‘Bad Samaritans’. Stateline Blog, Pew Charitable Trusts, https://www.pewtrusts.org/en/research-and-analysis/blogs/stateline/2017/09/19/why-its-hard-to-punish -bad-samaritans [7] Cassella, C. (2019). There’s a Climate Threat Facing Pacific Islands That’s More Dire Than Losing Land, Science Alert, https://www.sciencealert.com/pacific-islanders-are-in-a-climate-crisis-as-rising-sea-levels-threaten -water; Hassan, H. R., and Cliff, V. (2019). For Small Island Nations, Climate Change is not a Threat. It’s Already Here, World Economic Forum, https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2019/09/island-nations-maldives-climate-change/ [8] For example, Lyons, K. (2019). Australia Coal use is Existential threat to Pacific Islanders, The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/aug/12/australia-coal-use-is-existential-threat-to-pacific-is lands-says-fiji-pm [9] Cripps, E. (2013). Climate Change and the Moral Agent: Individual Duties in an Interdependent World. Oxford: Oxford University Press. [10] Schroeder, D., Chatfield, K., Singh, M., Chennells, R., and Herissone-Kelly, P.. Ethics Dumping and the Need for a Global Code of Conduct. In Cham. (Ed.)(2019). Equitable Research Partnerships. SpringerBriefs in Research and Innovation Governance. Springer. 2019. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-15745-6_1 [11] Giudice L.C., Llamas-Clark E.F., DeNicola N., Pandipati, S., Zlatnik, M.G., Decena, D.C.D., Woodruff, T.J., Conry, J.A. (2021). Climate Change, Women’s Health, and the Role of Obstetricians and Gynecologists in Leadership, International J Gynecol Obstet, 155(3), 345-356. 10.1002/ijgo.13958 [12] See Ferrarello, S. and Zapien, N. (2020). Ethical Experience: A Phenomenology, Bloomsbury. (for understanding phenomenological determinants of ethical action). [13] McLeman, R.A., Hunter, L.M., (2010). Migration in the context of vulnerability and adaptation to climate change: insights from analogues. Wiley Interdiscip Rev Clim Change, 1(3): 450-461. [14] Least Developed Countries Expert Group. (2018). Considerations Regarding Vulnerable Groups, Communities and Ecosystems in the Context of the National Adaptation Plans: United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. [15] Jecker, N.S. 2013. "The Problem with Rescue Medicine." J Med Philos, 38(1):64-81. [16] White House Report. (February 9, 2021), Executive Order (E.O.) 14013, “Rebuilding and Enhancing Programs to Resettle Refugees and Planning for the Impact of Climate Change on Migration.” (calls on the National Security Advisor to prepare a report on climate change and its impact on migration. “This report marks the first time the U.S. Government is officially reporting on the link between climate change and migration.” https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/presidential-actions/2021/01/27/executive-order-on-tackling -the-climate-crisis-at-home-and-abroad/ [17] Torres, J.M., Casey, J.A. (2017) The centrality of social ties to climate migration and mental health. BMC Public Health, 17: 600. https://doi.org/10.1186/s12889-017-4508-0. (shrink)

In this paper, particular key aspects of the philosophies of Plotinus and Wang Yangming have been analysed comparatively on the basis of important passages of their works. The method used for this investigation can be defined as that of transversal comparative induction, in which the focus is more on working out the details of affinities and similarities. As this means a first step in an encompassing systematic context, differences will be introduced more briefly. The present investigation aims to provide (...) a foundation for a more differentiating and therefore complementing second part, which will consider other contents and topics in both philosophies. The present analysis is performed in three systematic steps and with regard to three basic philosophical ideas: (1) the idea that human consciousness is a central medium in the universal process and interrelatedness of (biological) life as a whole; (2) the idea that the self-unfoldment of reality represents a meta-cognitive process beyond the limits of subjectivity and finite consciousness; and (3) the idea that it is our major task to perfect and know ourselves by means of a “return” to the highest underlying foundation of this universal process. In their own ways, Plotinus and Wang Yangming both show that by enfolding human reflexivity toward the ineffable source of all reality in thought, feeling, human activity, and natural processes, namely by actively pursuing the path of moral and intellective perfection, we become fulfilled mediators of a universal process and of that which all of it represents. (shrink)

Against Nature – Chapter Abstracts Chapter 1. A Transdisciplinary Approach. In this short book you will find philosophy – metaphysical and political - economics, critical theory, complexity theory, ecology, sociology, journalism, and much else besides, along with the signposts and reference texts of the Information Systems field. Such transdisciplinarity is a challenge for both author and reader. Such books are often problematic: sections that are just old hat to one audience are by contrast completely new and difficult to another. My (...) hope is that in the interconnections, arguments and thrust of this polemic, readers will discover both interest and insight, alongside a range of new avenues to explore. This introductory chapter sets the scene – today’s digital world of Tech Giants and Fake News, its roots in the philosophical arguments of the 1920s, and the book’s key claims: (i) that the early 20th century philosophical grounding of today’s digital revolution is culpable in digital’s (growing) contribution to the ecological catastrophe unfolding in the 21st century; (ii) that process philosophy offers a new way to rethink that philosophical grounding, and reshape the digital revolution to support strategies to counter that catastrophe. Chapter 2. The Problem with Digital. This chapter begins with a brief overview of the research approaches in information systems as an academic field, before turning to the deeper roots of its malaise, in individualism, and its looming consequences. The three branches of Information Systems research, in academia, prove to be a useful lens through which to understand the field: Positivism, Interpretivism, and the Critical stance taken by this book. The ‘scientism’ at the root of positivism is examined, and the positivism in Information Systems critiqued as a historically contingent response to the ascendancy of a new brand of economics in Business Schools after the Second World War. But the computational market-fundamentalist form of economics sponsored in the 1950s (and applied by governments since the 1970s) centred around notions of the individual rational actor as an information processor. The philosophical underpinning of methodological and possessive individualism in this approach is exposed, and its influence upon the development – long before computing – of the science of ecology, and our notion of ecosystems, introduced. Chapter 3. The Future Does Not Exist. The philosophical core of the book, this chapter introduces process philosophy. Through an examination of the irreversible reality of subjectivity, Bergson’s famous notion of the durée reélle, and Whitehead’s critique of the bifurcation of subject and object, are introduced. The causally closed ‘time’ of positive science determines existence from the beginning to the end of the universe, be it three seconds or three trillion years. But the reality, of course, is that the future does not exist: our choices are real, and only one of myriad potential futures comes into being at each moment. As Bergson insists, durational succession exists, I am conscious of it; it is a fact. Bergson’s star – once the brightest of any living philosopher in the world – faded almost as quickly as it rose, under the onslaught from the logical positivists whose verificationism insisted that any proposition has no factual meaning if no evidence of observation can count for or against it: all ethics, aesthetics, romance, and metaphysics – and the very subjectivity with which duration is experienced - were thus closed down and dismissed. In this chapter it is reintroduced, to a new audience. Chapter 4. The World in a New Light. Many fundamental problems in the world can be seen as resulting from the false philosophy of bifurcation, fixity, and the reification of abstractions critiqued by process philosophy. Being – with all the isolation and focus upon the individual that it entails – must, if we are to address these problems, be seen as secondary to Becoming, with all the connection, interrelatedness, and complex collectivity that it implies. Choices become clearer, between positivism and interpretivism, between accents upon individualism or collectivism, between reductionist and complex adaptive systems approaches. The systemic individualism in Anglo-American societies can be regarded as actually harmful: the Tech Giants severing ties and bonds rather than connecting us; algebraic ecological models actually breaking the co-dependencies and co-requisites upon which real – complex - ecological health depends. Positivism, built as it is upon methodological individualism, seen in the light of process philosophy, becomes a danger to personal psychological balance – cutting us off from one another; a danger to the social fabric – undermining and impoverishing our civic life; and a danger to the ecological health of the planet – ignoring the immense (eco)systemic impact of our activities over the last centuries upon everything around us in the natural world. Chapter 5. A Theoretical Manifesto for Green IT. We are not islands, and in a process-relational social organisation much must be held in common. We are individuals, but we cannot survive alone. Four different perspectives on individualism show it to be little more than greed. An ecological economics reintegrating the household, the social, the supportive State, and – crucially – the life-giving earth into our polities is introduced and promoted. I introduce the concept of ‘Infomateriality’ – a non-bifurcated digital world where the physical bodies of people - fingers touching keyboards and eyes scanning screens - are as much ‘hardware’ as cabling, circuitboards and haptic interfaces, and the social practices, power relations, and embedded politics within IT artefacts define all such techné as fundamentally social. Abstract divisions are false, and whole, socially embedded systems should be the focus of IS, and from a philosophically and sociologically much deeper perspective. ‘Tech for Good’ is held up as movement in the right direction. My hope is that this book will help promote action, in the field of information systems, toward a better world, where Green Tech for Good is deployed for Nature, rather than against it. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:DAVID HUME AND EIGHTEENTH CENTURY MONETARY THOUGHT: A CRITICAL COMMENT ON RECENT VIEWS To the argument that it makes little difference what precise roles were played by various actors in a great movement, and that the busy modern reader cannot be bothered to go behind the scenes of popular successes, the answer is simple: it is on the whole better to call men and events by their (...) right names; it is on the whole wiser not to make false diagrams of the way things happen. What, after all, are we so busy about? Jacques Barzun, Darwin, Marx, Wagner The praise that has been bestowed upon David Hume's monetary thought in recent years would suggest that however little attention is paid to the history of economic thought otherwise, no one is averse to a long and respectable lineage.1 However, it is just when an individual is singled out and focused upon that the most misleading ideas can arise; furthermore, when the scholars who provide this attention are renowned authorities in specialized fields, their views receive very widespread circulation. It would not be easy to find a contemporary student of the eighteenth century who would assert that the mercantilists believed real wealth to consist of gold and silver, yet the late Harry Johnson made just such an assertion not very long ago, and the number of economists who read Harry Johnson must far outnumber those who read eighteenthcentury scholars.2 By the same token, the liberal praise bestowed upon those credited with having "demolished" mercantilism, such as David Hume, requires careful scrutiny. A recent article by Dietrich Fausten3 has shown how different Hume's analysis 157 actually was from modern monetarism, despite the many attempts to designate Hume the father of monetarist doctrines, and this critical approach can be taken farther. Before turning to an examination of Hume's position, it may be worthwhile to make a methodological point. There are those who consider delving into indebtedness and priorities "antiquarian" (but not if their own contributions are in question!). After all, they claim, Hume's views are there in black and white, he wrote elegantly and his philosophical merits are widely admired; does it really matter if Hume did not acknowledge his sources, that he was somewhat inconsistent, or that he caricatured his opponents? Surely some compassion is appropriate for someone who wrote at the very dawn of "economic science." This is to miss the point of such historical scrutiny altogether. If compassion were required, why should it be bestowed upon Hume, rather than on such predecessors as Gervaise, Cantillon or Vanderlint? Scholars employ certain critical standards in judging published work; let us employ these standards to Hume and if sympathy be required, let it follow and not precede the analysis. II The following passage is certainly one of the most frequently quoted in the history of economics but its importance for our argument makes repetition necessary. Suppose, that all the money of Great Britain were multiplied fivefold in a night, must not the contrary effect follow? Must not all labour and commodities rise to such an exorbitant height, that no neighbouring nations could afford to buy from us; while 158 their commodities, on the other hand, became comparatively so cheap, that, in spite of all the laws which could be formed, they would be run in upon us, and our money flow out; till we fall to a level with foreigners, and lose that great superiority of riches, which had laid us under such disadvantages?4 Two points should be noted about the above. First, Hume assumes a sudden, large inflow of money to make his point. This is a very different thing from the small [relative to the money stock] and steady inflow advocated by the so-called mercantilists. Secondly, Hume assumes that this sudden inflow is met by instantaneous adjustment in prices. Otherwise, if the change in, say, wages attracts more labour, there is no reason why the increased money supply could not lead to a greater output and thus avoid inflation. International labour mobility was a standard feature of mercantilist thought and so it will be seen that Hume's "new" result is obtained by his... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:DAVID HUME AND EIGHTEENTH CENTURY MONETARY THOUGHT: A CRITICAL COMMENT ON RECENT VIEWS To the argument that it makes little difference what precise roles were played by various actors in a great movement, and that the busy modern reader cannot be bothered to go behind the scenes of popular successes, the answer is simple: it is on the whole better to call men and events by their (...) right names; it is on the whole wiser not to make false diagrams of the way things happen. What, after all, are we so busy about? Jacques Barzun, Darwin, Marx, Wagner The praise that has been bestowed upon David Hume's monetary thought in recent years would suggest that however little attention is paid to the history of economic thought otherwise, no one is averse to a long and respectable lineage.1 However, it is just when an individual is singled out and focused upon that the most misleading ideas can arise; furthermore, when the scholars who provide this attention are renowned authorities in specialized fields, their views receive very widespread circulation. It would not be easy to find a contemporary student of the eighteenth century who would assert that the mercantilists believed real wealth to consist of gold and silver, yet the late Harry Johnson made just such an assertion not very long ago, and the number of economists who read Harry Johnson must far outnumber those who read eighteenthcentury scholars.2 By the same token, the liberal praise bestowed upon those credited with having "demolished" mercantilism, such as David Hume, requires careful scrutiny. A recent article by Dietrich Fausten3 has shown how different Hume's analysis 157 actually was from modern monetarism, despite the many attempts to designate Hume the father of monetarist doctrines, and this critical approach can be taken farther. Before turning to an examination of Hume's position, it may be worthwhile to make a methodological point. There are those who consider delving into indebtedness and priorities "antiquarian" (but not if their own contributions are in question!). After all, they claim, Hume's views are there in black and white, he wrote elegantly and his philosophical merits are widely admired; does it really matter if Hume did not acknowledge his sources, that he was somewhat inconsistent, or that he caricatured his opponents? Surely some compassion is appropriate for someone who wrote at the very dawn of "economic science." This is to miss the point of such historical scrutiny altogether. If compassion were required, why should it be bestowed upon Hume, rather than on such predecessors as Gervaise, Cantillon or Vanderlint? Scholars employ certain critical standards in judging published work; let us employ these standards to Hume and if sympathy be required, let it follow and not precede the analysis. II The following passage is certainly one of the most frequently quoted in the history of economics but its importance for our argument makes repetition necessary. Suppose, that all the money of Great Britain were multiplied fivefold in a night, must not the contrary effect follow? Must not all labour and commodities rise to such an exorbitant height, that no neighbouring nations could afford to buy from us; while 158 their commodities, on the other hand, became comparatively so cheap, that, in spite of all the laws which could be formed, they would be run in upon us, and our money flow out; till we fall to a level with foreigners, and lose that great superiority of riches, which had laid us under such disadvantages?4 Two points should be noted about the above. First, Hume assumes a sudden, large inflow of money to make his point. This is a very different thing from the small [relative to the money stock] and steady inflow advocated by the so-called mercantilists. Secondly, Hume assumes that this sudden inflow is met by instantaneous adjustment in prices. Otherwise, if the change in, say, wages attracts more labour, there is no reason why the increased money supply could not lead to a greater output and thus avoid inflation. International labour mobility was a standard feature of mercantilist thought and so it will be seen that Hume's "new" result is obtained by his... (shrink)

We are quickly passing through the historical moment when people work in front of a single computer, dominated by a small CRT and focused on tasks involving only local information. Networked computers are becoming ubiquitous and are playing increasingly significant roles in our lives and in the basic infrastructure of science, business, and social interaction. For human-computer interaction o advance in the new millennium we need to better understand the emerging dynamic of interaction in which the focus task is (...) no longer confined to the desktop but reaches into a complex networked world of information and computer-mediated interactions. We think the theory of distributed cognition has a special role to play in understanding interactions between people and technologies, for its focus has always been on whole environments: what we really do in them and how we coordinate our activity in them. Distributed cognition provides a radical reorientation of how to think about designing and supporting human-computer interaction. As a theory it is specifically tailored to understanding interactions among people and technologies. In this article we propose distributed cognition as a new foundation for human-computer interaction, sketch an integrated research framework, and use selections from our earlier work to suggest how this framework can provide new opportunities in the design of digital work materials. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:David Hume and Adam Smith: A Japanese Perspective by Tatsuya SakamotoEstrella TrincadoTatsuya Sakamoto. David Hume and Adam Smith: A Japanese Perspective. London and New York: Routledge, 2021. Pp. 297. ISBN 9780367683023. Hardback. £130.This book is a collection of essays and articles by the Japanese scholar Tatsuya Sakamoto. In the foreword, Ryu Susato, professor of the Faculty of Economics at Keio University, Tokyo, notes that in Japanese (...) society Marxism has been the dogma of the history of social and economic thought. As a consequence, Japanese society has been labelled as “collectivist.” In this context, only a privileged intellectual background allowed Sakamoto to find his own way, as he graduated from Keio University and was part of its faculty. The Faculty of Economics of Keio University has spread the academic culture of liberalism that descended from Yukichi Fukuzawa (1834–1901), a reformer and founder of Keio and one of the most influential liberal thinkers in Meiji Japan (1868–1930). In addition, the family background of Sakamoto and the interest of his mother in the English language left a mark on him. Sakamoto was one of the rare Japanese scholars to study abroad in the 1980s, in particular at the University of Glasgow for two years (1984–1986) under the academic guidance of Andrew Skinner. There, he took interest in biographical and bibliographical studies. During his initial research, he found on a note by George Chalmers some evidence for David Hume’s authorship of an anonymous review of Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments, published in the Critical Review of May 1759.1 Then, along with David D. Raphael, Sakamoto transcribed the material with a commentary in the Journal of the History of Philosophy2 (Chapter 6 of the reviewed book) and he published “Hume’s Early Memoranda and the Making of His Political Economy” in Hume Studies3 (Chapter 4). There, Sakamoto gives interesting insights on Hume’s Early [End Page 163] Memoranda of manuscripts published by Mossner.4 This manuscript compilation shows the desire of Hume to pursue a systematic discourse on political economy. These efforts resulted in a large number of works published by Hume from 1748 to 1757 and even after his death, in Essays, Moral and Political, in The Natural History of Religion, and in Political Discourses.Later, Sakamoto published various articles on Hume’s economic thought in English (Chapters 1 and 5). In addition, he published his first monograph in Japanese.5 He argued that the “civilized society”—an idealization of Western societies—which was thought to be a prerequisite in Japan for the socialist revolution, concealed the different eighteenth-century historical realities of European countries in which Hume and Smith lived. Sakamoto received for this monograph the Suntory Academic Prize for Social Sciences and Humanities in 1996 and the Japan Academy Prize in 2001. In his Japanese monographs, Sakamoto interprets Hume as a firm defender of modernity and civilization, using his empiricist theory to inspire the spirit of serving the public good of a civilized society. Hume is a main character of the historiographical odyssey of the conflict between order and liberty.6 Hume tried to bridge the gap between the practical empiricism of mercantilist literature7 and the normative rationalism of natural jurisprudence,8 developing the science of economics on a philosophical foundation.After a brief leave spent at Boston University under the care of Knud Haakonssen, Sakamoto coedited a collection of essays written by Japanese scholars9 (Sakamoto’s contribution is included in Chapter 3). Another of Sakamoto’s important contributions is Chapter 9 of this book, originally published in The Adam Smith Review in 2017.10 There, we learn of Yoshihiko Uchida (1913–1983), a Japanese historian of social thought who specialized in Smith and Marx, and paid much early attention to the Smith-Rousseau connection in his The Birth of Economic Science (never published in English). As Sakamoto says, Uchida’s original view of this great Scottish philosopher, Adam Smith, proves that scholars infuse new life into classical texts, no matter how distant they may be from the object of their study in space and time. Besides, by discussing in English previous Japanese scholars’ contributions, Sakamoto is... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Enchantment of Art: Abstraction and Empathy from German Romanticism to ExpressionismDavid MorganA familiar tradition since the eighteenth century has invested art with the power to heal a decadent human condition. Inheriting this ability from religion—the romantic enthusiast Wilhelm Wackenroder considered artistic inspiration to originate in “divine inspiration” in the case of his hero, Raphael 1 —art eventually replaced institutionalized belief in an evolutionary schedule of cultural development (...) determined by German idealism. Hegel, for instance, theorized the evolution of spirit from religion to art as a qualitative advancement over time. Rejecting the metaphysics of German idealism, Friedrich Nietzsche nevertheless contended that “Art raises its head where religions decline.” By assuming the “feelings and moods” of religion which had been dismantled by enlightenment, Nietzsche claimed that art gave new form to the life of feeling and imbued human endeavors with a “loftier, darker coloration.” 2 In the early twentieth century Wassily Kandinsky believed that the “spiritual in art” was the historical manifestation of an “inner necessity” that was in itself timeless and universal. Kandinsky portrayed the “life of the spirit” as “a large acute-angled triangle divided horizontally into unequal parts.” In a kind of “trickle down” aesthetic, the compartments of the triangle move slowly upward toward the apex, which is inhabited by the solitary genius of an age whose vision gradually elevates all those who occupy the lower stages. 3 [End Page 317]The point for proponents of the spiritual in art from romanticism to expressionism (and beyond) was to find in works of art what can best be described as an enchantment. 4 As the negotiation of the gaps or disjunctures separating human beings from complete power over their lives, enchantment conjoins the plane of immediate human experience to a desirable state of affairs through the mediation of such symbolic devices as rituals, incantations, or charms. Thus, evil can be warded off by the use of an apotropaic amulet, and fertility can be enhanced by the recitation of a suitable prayer or the performance of a certain ritual. In a modern analogy a sense of impotence is often alleviated by a trip to the mall where the bored therapeutically lose themselves in symbolic acts of self-renewing consumption. In the traditions of philosophy and science, systems of representation such as astrology, the microcosm, the harmony of the spheres, the great chain of being, the celestial hierarchies, or the mechanisms of theurgy and divination situate humanity within a cosmos that follows a particular order accessible to and in some degree manipulable by human beings. Enchantment consists of an apparatus of belief whose form of representation or enactment is thought to exert influence over the realities it configures.But enchantment is not limited to the spells and magic of premodern metaphysics (or modern consumerism). By means of religion, morality, and aesthetics, Nietzsche once averred, “man likes to believe that... he is touching the heart of the world.” 5 This study will focus on the manner in which art as constructed within the idealist tradition of German art theory functioned as an enchantment. Specifically, it will explore what the history of ideas about abstraction and empathy has to tell us about the spiritualization or enchantment of art. After identifying the philosophical and aesthetic wherewithal of enchantment in nineteenth-century Germany, attention focusses on Franz Marc’s early twentieth-century theorization of abstraction. It is certainly more customary to study Kandinsky, whose writings and early efforts at abstraction are much better known, but Marc’s ideas offer more immediate connections to German intellectual history and clarify the aims of his abstract art as a strategy of enchantment. Moreover, Marc was unusually articulate and wrote often, exploring ideas and artistic efforts with great insight. Focusing on Marc therefore offers a corrective to the historiography that has favored Kandinsky’s writings. Finally, Marc differed from his Russian friend over the cause of the war. Manifesting a difference that is portentous for this study, Kandinsky left Germany for Russia in 1914, while Marc enthusiastically took up arms for the fatherland. Given these circumstances and the unfortunate tendency of art historians to valorize expressionist art rather than situate it in the ideological context of... (shrink)

David Hume is the greatest and also one of the most provocative philosophers to have written in the English language. No philosopher is more important for his careful, critical, and deeply perceptive examination of the grounds for belief in divine powers and for his sceptical accounts of the causes and consequences of religious belief, expressed most powerfully in the Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion and The Natural History of Religion. The Dialogues ask if belief in God can be inferred from (...) the nature of the universe or whether it is even consistent with what we know about the universe. The Natural History of Religion investigates the origins of belief, and follows its development from harmless polytheism to dogmatic monotheism. Together they constitute the most formidable attack upon the rationality of religious belief ever mounted by a philosopher. This edition also includes Section XI of The Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding and a letter concerning the Dialogues, as well as particularly helpful critical apparatus and abstracts of the main texts, enabling the reader to locate or relocate key topics. (shrink)

This paper opens by distinguishing between the multiple concepts of system and the philosophical idea of system. It then goes on to discuss the differences between systems and other proximate ideas, such as whole, set, aggregate and structure. Subsequently, it proposes a definition of system, and then lays out three classifications of systems. When elaborating a general definition of system, the main challenge is finding a general criterion with which to characterize both technical systems built (...) by men, and scientific systems independent of human subjects. The criterion proposed in the text solves this difficulty. Lastly, from the tenets of Gustavo Bueno’s hyperrealist philosophy of categorial closure, I put forward the consideration of the sciences as systems. (shrink)

Newsome ((2003). The debate between current versions of covariation and mechanism approaches to causal inference. Philosophical Psychology, 16, 87-107.) recently published a critical review of psychological theories of human causal inference. In that review, he characterized covariation and mechanism theories, the two dominant theory types, as competing, and offered possible ways to integrate them. I argue that Newsome has misunderstood the theoretical landscape, and that covariation and mechanism theories do not directly conflict. Rather, they rely on distinct sets (...) of reliable indicators of causation, and focus on different types of causation (type vs. token). There are certainly debates in the research field, but the theoretical landscape is not as fractured as Newsome suggests, and a potential unifying framework has already emerged using causal Bayes nets. Philosophical work on causal epistemology matters for psychologists, but not in the way Newsome suggests. (shrink)

Did we get Aquinas’ Epistemology right? St. Thomas is often interpreted according to Kantian principles, particularly in Transcendental Thomism. When this happens, it can appear as though Aquinas, too—along with Kant—had made the “turn to the subject”; as if Aquinas were no longer the Aristotelian “believer” who thinks nature is what it is but, instead, the Kantian “thinker” who holds that nature is what we think of it; as if St. Thomas, like Kant, had concluded that nature is intelligible not (...) only when we think of it, but because we think of it. After much struggle with this problem, the challenge seemed obvious to me: to show the radical difference between Aquinas and Kant. Kant had reasons to make his turn, his Copernican revolution. Could I explain those reasons, could I pinpoint the problem leading Kant to think in those terms? Could I show Aquinas facing the same problem and clearly taking a different direction in his proposed solution? That is what I have tried to do in this book. This book provides an interpretation of Aquinas’ agent intellect focusing on Summa Theologiae I, qq. 75-89, and proposing that the agent intellect is a metaphysical rather than a formal a priori of human understanding. A formal a priori is responsible for the intelligibility as content of the object of human understanding and is related to Kant’s epistemological views, whereas a metaphysical a priori is responsible for intelligibility as mode of being of this same object. We can find in Aquinas’ text many indications that the agent intellect is not productive of the intelligible object but is, rather, productive of the abstracted or intelligible mode of being of this object. This is because for Aquinas the universal as nature, which is the object of human understanding, is present in the things themselves but with a different mode of being. In this four-chapter book, Chapter 1 is intended to establish the fact which requires for Aquinas an agent intellect, and provides two very important principles: one is that the object of human understanding (the universal as nature) is present in the things themselves and, the other, that it is not in the things themselves with a mode of being which makes it available to the intellectual eye. These two principles lead us to the main point of Chapter 2, namely the distinction between the intelligible object and its intelligible mode of being. Now, because knowing is receptive of the intelligible object (Chapter 3), which is present in the things themselves (Chapter 1), the agent intellect is productive not of the object’s intelligible content, but of its abstracted or intelligible mode of being (Chapter 4). (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Hume Studies Volume XIX, Number 2, November 1993, pp. 289-299 Hume on Personal Identity DAVID PEARS The question that I discuss in this paper has often been raised and it has been answered in many different ways. "Why did Hume retract his theory of personal identity?" He puts it forward in the main text of the Treatise with his usual panache, and then takes it back in the (...) Appendix. Why? Many different answers have been given to this question and what most of them have in common is the confidence with which they are given. Each interpreter sticks to his own interpretation in spite of the plausibility of its rivals, few of which are actually excluded by what Hume says. For this is an extreme case of the underdetermination of interpretation by evidence. I confess that in spite of all the recent work on this subject, I remain loyal to my own suggestion, which I first made in 1975.1 I will start with a sketch of my interpretation. Then I will quote Hume's recantation and develop an argument for my interpretation, based on that text and on others. After that, I will show how my suggestion is related to some of its rivals and I will say something about their comparative merits. Naturally, there is a considerable amount of overlap between the more plausible answers to the question, why Hume recanted. 1. My Interpretation In his Appendix, Hume confesses that his theory of personal identity seems to him to understate the strength of the connections between the David Pears is Emeritus Professor of Philosophy, Oxford University. 290 David Pears impressions and ideas that constitute a single person; or, as I would prefer to express his doubts, the impressions and ideas that constitute a single person's mind. He says that he would have been content if he could have attributed all those perceptions to a single substance; or alternatively, if he could have found some real connection between them. But all that he can find are connections based on the three natural relations: resemblance, contiguity, and causation. And those connections are, he implies, not enough. It is certain that he is thinking of a fundamental difficulty. For he evidently sees some reason for doing something which is simply not possible within his system, namely finding stronger connections between perceptions than those allowed by the doctrine of the main text of the Treatise. But what is his fundamental difficulty? The suggestion that I put forward was this: when an impression of sense occurs in my series of perceptions, it does not hold its place in the series by possessing any property, or by standing in any specific relation to any other perception in the series (except, of course, the relation of being co-experienced). Consequently, when I review the series, I do not find that the sensation is anchored by anything other than the fact of its contingent occurrence at the point where it occurred. Nevertheless, there is a strong modal statement that can be made about it: It, the very same sensation, could not conceivably have occurred in any other series. This modal statement is based on the special character of the identity-line of a particular perception: the identity-line of a particular perception starts at the point where it occurs in a particular series, and no sense can be attached to the speculation that it, the very same perception, might have occurred in some other series. However, in Hume's system, perceptions are treated like stars which form constellations, but only form them contingently, and it is obvious that the discovery of additional contingent relations between perceptions would never provide any support for the strong modal statement. Yet in Hume's system the only possible relations between perceptions are contingent relations. The other alternative, that the self is a substance, would, perhaps, do the trick, but for Hume it is unthinkable. It may seem fanciful to suggest that Hume's problem was the difficulty of accounting for the necessary ownership of perceptions within the framework of his system. But it is hard to see what other reason he could have had for requiring stronger relations... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:189 HUME'S MORAL ONTOLOGY* My concern here is the claim, made in my recent book, that Hume is a moral realist. In general terms I would describe this book as one of several that represent a sustained effort to consider Hume within an eighteenth-century context, an effort to see him not as a timeless figure, or to treat him as a brilliantly successful contemporary of ourselves, but as a (...) brilliant eighteenth-century philosopher responding to eighteenth-century issues with, for all his timelessness, eighteenth-century conceptual tools and 2 from an eighteenth-century perspective. It would be hopelessly naive to suppose that any of us can view Hume without any historical distortion, but it is equally naive to read Hume, as he is often read, without historical sensitivity. Furthermore, such insensitivity closes us off from what is uniquely valuable about Hume, for, instead of seeing his writings as the consequence of his unique efforts to confront and answer the philosophical questions posed to him, the historically insensitive read into him their own questions and their own answers. The past studied as an echo of the present is of little interest (and none of that intrinsic), nor can there be much value in the study of those who saw but through a glass, darkly, the truths now so apparent to us. Our intellectual past is important to us because it is different from our intellectual present, and not because it seconds what we presume already to know. I was entirely serious, then, when I said that both the plausibility, and the very meaning of my claim that Hume is a common-sense moralist or a moral realist depends upon considering this claim — and, consequently, Hume — within a particular philosophical context. It will not do to suppose that moral realism 190 is a term with an eternal, unchanging, and Platonic connotation, and then to reject my suggestion outright because Hume was, as I would certainly agree, virtually without sympathy for anything revealing a tincture of Platonism. Philosophical terms as well as philosophical issues are historical, changing entities; it is those who think or act otherwise who smuggle 4 Platonism into the discussion. Doubtless, however, some of the misunderstanding to which I refer is my own responsibility. I can join Hume in saying "I have found by experience, that some of my expressions have not been so well chosen, as to guard against all 5 mistakes in the readers," and so I shall here offer some clarifications of my view. I. To begin, I wish to bring together in one place evidence of the significant qualifications I put on my claim about Hume's moral realism. Taken together, these remarks show that my position is consistent with the widely held (and generally correct, I would say) view that Hume is in one highly important sense a naturalist, and that I ascribe to him a realism that is neither Platonic, Scholastic, Cartesian, nor Hutchesonian: A. If naturalism is thought to be the view "that the whole of the universe or experience may be accounted for by a method like that of the physical sciences," then Hume must certainly be called a naturalist because of his efforts to extend the "experimental Method of Reasoning into moral Subjects".... Hume is a naturalist in that he sought to produce coherent philosophical explanations without the slightest recourse to supernatural entities or transcendental principles... an obvious example of this kind of naturalism... is his attempt to explain moral values as derived from human nature or from, that is, human beings as constituted and active in the world (DH 15-16). 191 B. By no stretch of the imagination can Hume be supposed to have borrowed this providential aspect of Hutcheson's thought, not even in morals (DH 54; also see p. 93). C I submit that /Hume/ holds that vice and disapprobation are not identical and that moral qualities are not merely sentiments but, rather, the objective correlates of sentiments. /Footnote:/ No rash conclusions should be drawn from this claim about objective correlates. I do not suggest that virtue and vice are objects in the ordinary sense (physical objects), or that they are transcendently existing qualities of... (shrink)

In the growing phenomenological and humanistic literature on environmental design and theory, genius loci--that is, sense of place--receives increasing academic and professional attention. Genius loci has become a major focus in this work because it draws together the various natural, built and human qualities that are present in a particular building or environment. This essay asks how genius loci might be explored in terms of such underlying phenomenological structures. The author uses the question of how places are the (...) same and how they are different to identify 3 structures--people, space, and environment--that may provide value in understanding genius loci as a whole, particularly in terms of design implications. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2020 APA, all rights reserved). (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Journal of the History of Ideas 61.3 (2000) 361-379 [Access article in PDF] The Idea and the Reality of the City in the Thought of Philo of Alexandria * David T. Runia The theme of my paper is the conception of the city as a social and cultural phenomenon held by the Jewish exegete and philosopher Philo of Alexandria (15 bc to 50 ad). There can be no (...) doubt that the city occupied a central position in his own life. As an inhabitant of Alexandria he was thoroughly immersed in a highly urbanized form of life. From a more theoretical angle the city has an important place in his thought because of what it represents: of all physical products of human activity the city is the largest and most complex (here there is in fact little difference between Philo and us, although there is an obvious difference in scale). It is not my aim to examine Philo's political philosophy, i.e., his views on how the city should be governed, nor his views on the actual political administration of the Roman Empire in his time. These subjects have already been treated with sufficient competence by others. 1 I will argue that, though as an Alexandrian Philo was very much a homo urbanus, he nevertheless reveals a significant ambivalence towards the city. This attitude is related to his dual ideological background (Jewish and Greek), and anticipates developments in later antiquity.As always in the case of Philo, it is necessary to reflect on the methodology that should be used to reach our aim. True to his usual method, Philo nowhere examines the nature of the city in a sustained way. It is necessary to cull statements from many different places in his various works. For his views on living in the city of Alexandria we can examine his historical treatises. A more theoretical perspective is gained from his exegetical and philosophical works; but these, too, are not wholly devoid of topical remarks, such as the famous text in [End Page 361] which he complains that he has had to exchange the contemplative life for immersion in the maelstrom of Alexandrian political life (De specialibus legibus 3.1-6).In the analysis of the numerous texts in which Philo speaks of the city, it would be a mistake to try to compartmentalize his thought too much, i.e., to make a sharp distinction between historical-apologetic and exegetical-philosophical modes of thinking. It is true that Philo devotes the greatest part of his oeuvre to giving exegesis of the Law of Moses. But for him this is far from a merely antiquarian exercise. Philo is convinced of the universal relevance of the Pentateuch for both Jew and Gentile, including those who live in a complex urban environment utterly different from the circumstances of tent-dwelling Patriarchs or itinerant Israelites. The Law, it is assumed, represents the constitution of a Mosaic politeia deserving of universal admiration. So when Philo speaks of the city in his exegesis of Mosaic texts, his remarks may well be relevant to our theme. This applies also to allegorical forms of interpretation. The method of allegory enables him to bring forward the more theoretical and "philosophical" aspects of the theme.It remains a problem that our material consists of a large number of scattered and episodic remarks. These can be assembled together into the shape of a plausible and informative picture, but the aspect of a scholarly construct cannot be entirely avoided. There are compensations in Philo's case through the sheer volume of the material he has left behind. This lessens the chance that we should attribute too much significance to what may be no more than casual remarks. We should, however, have no illusions about the extent to which we can pene-trate behind the facade of his works. These were not written with the motive of disclosing his personal views on a wide scale of issues. The personality of Philo the Alexandrian Jew remains largely hidden from view... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Constructive Postmodernism: Toward Renewal in Cultural and Literary StudiesDavid CarrierConstructive Postmodernism: Toward Renewal in Cultural and Literary Studies, by Martin Schiralli. Westport, CT, and London: Bergin and Garvey, 1999, 165pp., $55 cloth.Concerned with the consequences of Jacques Derrida's philosophy of deconstruction for cultural and literary studies, Martin Schiralli's elegantly written book offers, first, a critique of these claims and, then, a constructive alternative analysis. He admires Derrida's brilliantly (...) innovative writing, which as he rightly notes is "serious and philosophical" even if "the most patient reader can easily become disoriented and confused" (24). But even if, as Derrida argues, Ferdinard de Saussure's theory of meaning is flawed, we need not—he urges—become deconstructionists. Looking to the work of Stephen Toulmin, John Dewey, and late Wittgenstein, Schiralli finds suggestive ways of identifying concerns with cognitive value in literary texts. It then is possible, he argues, to offer a more reasonable perspective on recent debates about culture and politics than the recent academic arguments between "postmodern revisionists... [and] often hostile and defensive traditionalists" (73).In the second part of his book Schiralli illustrates the value of this perspective by offering a great deal of productive positive discussion. He discusses how "theoretically pertinent knowledge" (95) may be found in the novels of Jane Austen, Barbara Pym, and Anita Brookner. Appealing to Michael Polanyi's conception of tacit knowledge, he argues that Austen's ability to intuit "the rules governing social meaning... represents the tacit emergence of insight, just as her ability to use those insights explicitly in her fiction marks the emergence of more focal knowledge" (123). In analyzing an emotional response, he claims, we can ask whether it is "warranted or unwarranted in a given circumstance" (31). Using E. M. Forster's Howards End as his model, he develops this claim in an analysis that is brief, clear, and convincing. Finally, in his concluding pages he looks at the studies of character provided by Henry James and Marcel Proust. A proper theory of literary intelligence, he argues, should "treat those forms of cognitive acuity involved imaginatively in miming and representing verbally the intricacies and particularities of all aspects of human sensibility" (150).This bold, far-reaching book avoids the fanaticism that, as Schiralli notes, has marred all too much recent debate in the humanities. At this time, when the influence of Derrida has faded, I think this argumentation about his philosophical position is of less value than the constructive parts of the analysis. Treating Derrida as a theorist whose arguments tell us how to analyze literature is an unpromising project, as Schiralli well shows. Once that point is acknowledged, then we are ready to look seriously at literature as a form of social knowledge. Humanists teaching literature will find much of value in this graceful volume—and along with their colleagues in philosophy, these scholars will benefit from study of this well-argued analysis. [End Page 122]David CarrierCase Western Reserve University and Cleveland Institute of ArtCopyright © 2008 Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:The Christian Consumer: Living Faithfully in a Fragile World by Laura M. HartmanDavid CloutierThe Christian Consumer: Living Faithfully in a Fragile World LAURA M. HARTMAN New York: Oxford University Press, 2011. 256 pp. $29.95Laura Hartman has written an elegant, graceful, and gentle book about a topic often inspiring jeremiads: consumer society. Setting out to provide “an effective and explicitly practical ethics of consumption” (5), she develops an ethical (...) language that goes beyond sociological generalizations about “consumerism.” She structures her study by engaging ancient and contemporary theological sources to discuss “four primary considerations” (21): avoiding sin, embracing creation, loving the neighbor, and envisioning the future. Each represents a “node” of “theological reflection: sin, creation, love, and the reign of God” (25). In each area, she is unusually careful to point out the limitations of any one consideration without the others. Avoiding sin, for example, can become “a self-focused pursuit of holiness” (52); embracing creation can ignore justice concerns or, worse, lead to prosperity theology. Such limitations are less apparent when considering the final two areas. In loving the neighbor, the challenge is balancing considerations between close and distant neighbors. Finally, Hartman makes an impassioned case for Sabbath-keeping and Eucharist as practices of our destined eschatological fullness, even while recognizing that an overemphasis on these can lead to escapism and bickering over “vague and idiosyncratic” differences among Christians (167). By attending to all four notions, Hartman is able to offer a much richer picture of the conceptual field in which our consumption choices should be made. A closing chapter imagines a dinner conversation among three of her frequent interlocutors, Shannon Jung, Elizabeth Theokritoff, and James Nash, as well as applying the concepts to concrete choices of transportation and meat-eating.The book goes a long way toward its stated goal. Hartman has a skillful grasp of the complexities of both contemporary consumption practices and theological description. She displays a remarkably generous attitude toward a variety of voices, engaging positively figures as disparate as the severe abolitionist John Woolman and the prosperity televangelist Creflo Dollar. Her generosity works well; I can imagine this book being especially effective with students or church groups who might be alienated by a stronger anticonsumerism screed. As a work [End Page 247] of constructive ethics, though, the generosity leaves open a lot of questions. Hartman describes her methodology as “using a blend of methods,” owing some debts to “principalism” and to virtue ethics, explaining her four considerations “as diverse lenses on one holistic vision of virtuous consumption” (28). The four “considerations” are described as “not principles” but “actions that produce virtue” or “a school of virtue” (27)—neither are they moral rules, despite their being phrased in the form of verbal commands to action. This methodological looseness enables her to voice multiple harmony lines, which “form a chorus of perspectives on consumption” (5). But this approach can slip from generosity to vagueness. How does one determine what is off-key? The application section seems to have difficulty adjudicating particular actions; there is in effect a nonrational “weighing” that goes on, one that sometimes seems to reduce to a consideration of (incommensurable) competing consequences.The project could be furthered in two ways. First, Hartman could consider some way of ordering the considerations—not strictly ordinally but rather, for example, by recognizing that avoiding sin is a prelude to a proper embrace of creation and that creation is ordered to communion. The sequencing of her chapters hints at such an ordering, but she does not make use of it. While not reducing everything to love of God and neighbor, certainly sin, creation, and even eschatology point to this telos. Second, Hartman could go further in developing the language of virtue—for example, temperance and prudence—as a way of specifying more clearly what both avoiding sin and embracing creation mean. But her template is a valuable orientation to further needed work on this important topic. It should find a wide audience. [End Page 248]David CloutierMount St. Mary’s UniversityCopyright © 2014 Society of Christian Ethics... (shrink)

Thucydidean politicians recognize the difficulty posed by the uncertainties of the future in times of war, yet they differ sharply in their conclusions about how best to respond. Thucydides’ analysis of the rhetoric of wartime decision-making focuses upon the deterioration of political culture under a major national crisis, as well as the role of effective leadership in countering this tendency. The dilemma of Thucydidean politics is how to ensure a deliberative process that will not be taken captive by the pressures (...) and emotions of war, and the demagogic leaders who seek to exploit such pressures and emotions for their own ends. By studying the failures and successes of the past (as documented and analyzed in his History), decision-makers in the future can better understand the political dynamics of wartime decision-making and the corrosive forces that crises too often produce. Thucydides’ narrative analyzes the political, social, and moral psychological dynamics that produce aggression, violence, and the desire for domination and revenge. On his view, these are not inevitable products of human nature, merely dispositions that normative institutions are designed to check. Rather he portrays human nature as running amok when such checks are weakened. What can restrain ‘human nature’ are the norms and institutions that promote communal as opposed to factional or individual interests. (shrink)

In the range of his intellectual interests and the profundity of his mathematical thought Hermann Weyl towered above his contemporaries, many of whom viewed him with awe. This volume, the most ambitious study to date of Weyl's singular contributions to mathematics, physics, and philosophy, looks at the man and his work from a variety of perspectives, though its gaze remains fairly steadily fixed on Weyl the geometer and space‐time theorist. Structurally, the book falls into two parts, described in the general (...) introduction by the editor: Part 1 contains four essays on particular aspects of Weyl's work, highlighting ideas he developed in various editions of his classic Raum‐Zeit‐Materie. Part 2 presents a lengthy study by Robert Coleman and Herbert Korté covering nearly the whole gamut of Weyl's mathematical research, an impressive feat. Both in the introduction as well as in footnotes to the articles Erhard Scholz's editorial voice chimes in discreetly, helping tie all five studies together.Coleman and Korté begin chronologically with Weyl's early work in analysis and the modern theory of Riemann surfaces before turning to differential geometry, unified field theory, and the space problem, a topic they use as a springboard for a discussion of their own recent work on the foundations of space‐time. They then take up Weyl's shift to group representation theory and its applications to quantum mechanics, ending with his much earlier research on the structure of the continuum. All of these topics are well handled, but the authors' own agendas coupled with their penchant for overlooking chronology in order to package Weyl's work into neat little bundles leave one feeling rather stranded and far removed from the sources of Weyl's inspiration. Moreover, the narrative style makes this part of the volume read like a technical appendix, albeit a most informative one. Readers who tackle Scholz's far more contextualized essay will be amply rewarded by comparing his views with the opinions set forth by Coleman and Korté in Part 2.Scholz gives a masterful account of Weyl's intellectual journeys from 1917 to 1925 in a study that serves as a fulcrum for the entire volume. Drawing on a number of recently published studies, including his own, on the interplay between mathematics and physics inspired by Einstein's theory of general relativity, Scholz describes how Weyl responded to this challenge by developing a truly infinitesimal space‐time geometry that generalized classical Riemannian geometry. Although unconvinced by Einstein's critique of his unified field theory, Weyl shifted his focus from this realm to the classical space problem, analyzed earlier with more primitive techniques by Hermann Helmholtz and Sophus Lie. In this connection, it should be mentioned that Thomas Hawkins has given a probing analysis of Weyl's related work on the representation of Lie groups in his tour‐de‐force work, Emergence of the Theory of Lie Groups . Scholz argues that Weyl's struggle to tame his modernized version of the space problem stemmed from a deep‐seated belief in his geometrical ideas, which in turn were nourished by philosophical musings. By demonstrating the closely related conceptual links that motivated Weyl's research in infinitesimal geometry, space‐time physics, and the foundations of mathematics, Scholz nicely illuminates the underlying fabric of epistemological concerns that occupied Weyl's attention during this fertile period.The three remaining essays in Part 1 focus on other aspects of Weyl's work in mathematical physics and cosmology. Skuli Sigurdsson's “Journeys in Spacetime” offers a broad interpretation of Weyl's career, one that emphasizes Weyl's sensitivity to cultural tensions as reflected in his philosophical roots, which combined phenomenology with facets of German idealism. Shaken by the annihilation of cultural values in Nazi Germany, Weyl became deeply aware of the gulf that separated his earlier life in Göttingen and Zurich from the one he took up at Princeton's Institute for Advanced Study in 1933. He tried to adapt, but felt out of place in an Anglo‐American scientific culture openly hostile toward metaphysics and speculative philosophy. Sigurdsson stresses these tensions, contrasting the introspective, creative individual against the backdrop of the collective in the age of the machine, but without spelling out which collective were most important for him. Wolfgang Pauli thought he knew and, like Einstein before him, he had no compunction about bluntly telling Weyl he was a mathematician, not a physicist.Pauli's opinions notwithstanding, Weyl did far more than just dabble around the mathematical edges of the new physics. If Coleman and Korté perhaps press their case for his visionary accomplishments too far, Norbert Straumann's essay “Ursprünge der Eichtheorien” suggests why Weyl's reputation among physicists has risen steadily ever since the advent of Yang‐Mills theory in the 1950s. In the course of describing Weyl's adaptation of his gauge transformation formalism to Dirac's electron theory, Straumann sheds considerable light on Pauli's role as self‐appointed watchman guarding the disciplinary boundary that separated theoretical physics from physical mathematics . He further suggests that disciplinary jealousy was a major reason why Pauli dismissed Weyl's two‐component formalism for spinors out of hand.In the realm of cosmology, on the other hand, Weyl's work has long since passed into the dustbins of history, as Hubert Goenner remarks in recounting a fascinating chapter in the infancy of space‐time physics. While doing so, Goenner shows how initially Weyl almost slavishly adopted what Einstein called Mach's principle, which asserts that the metric structure of space‐time is solely determined by the distribution of matter in the universe. This notion was quickly challenged by Willem De Sitter, who showed that Einstein's matter‐free field equations admitted a global solution with non‐zero constant curvature. Both Einstein and Weyl tried to argue that invisible masses must be present just over the “spatial horizon” of De Sitter's world in order to account for its curvature. Goenner meticulously analyzes the physical and mathematical issues at stake in this debate, stressing how Weyl gradually moved away from a strong physical interpretation to one in which mathematics models rather than physics models simply reveal natural phenomena. He argues further that Weyl's cosmological principle arose as the final expression of his search for a deeper physical meaning.Given the quality of these essays, it is regrettable that this book contains so little about Weyl's professional career, a weakness the editor could have redressed at least partially in his general introduction. This omission is all the more unfortunate given the dearth of readily accessible information about Weyl's life available elsewhere. For however mundane his outward existence may have been, the reader cannot be expected to appreciate the interplay between the world Weyl knew and his creative responses to it without fairly detailed knowledge of his biography. Shorn from these contexts, it becomes difficult to form a flesh‐and‐blood image of Weyl beyond the cliché‐ridden stereotype that sees him as a “heroic thinker in the grand German tradition.” While none of the authors falls into this trap, the collective impression they leave suggests a most enigmatic figure. Either Weyl the man tends to get lost in the shadows of his collected scientific output or he appears as a mystic loner, an outcast who abhorred the machine age in which he lived. Closer attention to the people in his life would no doubt produce a very different picture of the man and his interests. This major lacuna notwithstanding, the present volume will surely remain an indispensable resource for any future investigations of Weyl's staggering intellectual achievements. (shrink)

Many philosophers maintain that causation is to be explicated in terms of a kind of dependence between cause and effect. These “dependence” theories are opposed by “production” accounts which hold that there is some more fundamental causal “oomph”. A wide range of experimental research on everyday causal judgments seems to indicate that ordinary people operate primarily with a dependence-based notion of causation. For example, people tend to say that absences and double preventers are causes. We argue that the impression (...) that commonsense causal discourse is largely dependence-based is the result of focusing on a very narrow class of causal verbs. Almost all of the vignette-based experimental work on causal judgment has been prosecuted using the word “cause”. But much ordinary causal discourse involves special causal verbs, such as “burn” and “crack”. We find that these verbs display a quite different pattern from the verb “cause”. For instance, for absences and double preventers (Studies 1-3), we find that while people are inclined to say that X caused Y to burn, turn, crack or start, they are less inclined to think that X burned, turned, cracked or started Y. In Study 4, we find that for chains involving a distal and proximal event, people are inclined to say that the distal event is not a special cause of the outcome, though it is a “cause” of the outcome. Together, we find a surprising double dissociation between “cause” and a stock of special causal verbs. We conclude by suggesting that much commonsense causal judgment, which heavily trades in special causal verbs, might be better captured by production-based accounts of causation. (shrink)

This paper presents a comparison of social kinship (patrilineage) and biological kinship (genetic relatedness) in predicting cooperative relationships in two different economic contexts in the fishing and whaling village of Lamalera, Indonesia. A previous analysis (Alvard, Human Nature 14:129–163, 2003) of boat crew affiliation data collected in the village in 1999 found that social kinship (patrilineage) was a better predictor of crew affiliation than was genetic kinship. A replication of this analysis using similar data collected in 2006 finds the (...) same pattern: lineage is a better predictor than genetic kinship of crew affiliation, and the two together explain little additional variance over that explained by lineage alone. However, an analogous test on food-sharing relationships finds the opposite pattern: biological kinship is a better predictor of food-sharing relationships than is social kinship. The difference between these two cooperative contexts is interpreted in terms of kin preferences that shape partner choice, and the relative autonomy with which individuals can seek to satisfy those preferences. Drawing on stable matching theory, it is suggested that unilineal descent may serve as a stable compromise among multiple individuals’ incongruent partner preferences, with patriliny favored over matriliny in the crew-formation context because it leads to higher mean degrees of relatedness among male cooperators. In the context of food-sharing, kin preferences can be pursued relatively autonomously, without the necessity of coordinating preferences with those of other households through the institution of lineage. (shrink)

The focus of social simulation on representing the social world calls for an investigation of whether its implementations are inherently value-laden. In this article, I investigate what kind of thing implementation is in social simulation and consider the extent to which it has moral significance. When the purpose of a computational artefact is simulating human institutions, designers with different value judgements may have rational reasons for developing different implementations. I provide three arguments to show that different implementations amount to (...) taking moral stands via the artefact. First, the meaning of a social simulation is not homogeneous among its users, which indicates that simulations have high interpretive malleability. I place malleability as the condition of simulation to be a metaphorical vehicle for representing the social world, allowing for different value judgements about the institutional world that the artefact is expected to simulate. Second, simulating the social world involves distinguishing between malfunction of the artefact and representation gaps, which reflect the role of meaning in simulating the social world and how meaning may or not remain coherent among the models that constitute a single implementation. Third, social simulations are akin to Kroes’ techno-symbolic artefacts, in which the artefact’s effectiveness relative to a purpose hinges not only on the functional effectiveness of the artefact’s structure, but also on the artefact’s meaning. Meaning, not just technical function, makes implementations morally appraisable relative to a purpose. I investigate Schelling’s model of ethnic residential segregation as an example, in which different implementations amount to taking different moral stands via the artefact. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:diacritics 30.2 (2000) 113-126 [Access article in PDF] Dissenting Words:A Conversation with Jacques Rancière 1 Davide Panagia:In your writings you highlight the political efficacy of words. In The Names of History, for instance, this emphasis is discussed most vividly in terms of what you refer to as an "excess of words" that marks the rise of democratic movements in the seventeenth century. Similarly, in On The Shores of Politics, (...) you begin your discussion with an excursus on the end of politics as the end of the promise. Finally, in Dis-agreement you speak of "the part of those who have no-part" as voicing a "wrong" for the sake of equality.In each of these instances, however, your treatment of words (and language more generally) is very different from those thinkers of the "linguistic turn" in political philosophy who expound on an ethics of deliberation as the first virtue of modern democracies. For that matter, your approach is quite different from those thinkers who focus on the aporias of language as such.Could you discuss this thematic of the proliferation of words in your thinking about democratic politics?Would it be fair to characterize your research on and exposition of democratic thinking as a "poetics of politics"?Rancière's Reply:In order to address your question adequately, it would be wise to enlarge the sense of "linguistic turn" you invoke. In its most generally accepted sense, the linguistic turn in philosophy consists in ascribing to linguistic processes certain phenomena and specifiable modes of relating objects attributed, in a previous instance, either to factual processes or lines of thought. This approach is not limited to the two figures you invoke in your question. The linguistic turn also has two stages of development that, from my experience, have been more noticeable in France than in the United States. The first phase, then, emerged with Lévi-Strauss and his structural approach to social relations founded on a linguistic model of relationality, subsequently reprised in Lacan's psychoanalytic notion that "the unconscious is structured like a language" that, in its turn, conjoins the energetic mental processes Freud discusses to linguistic practices. The primacy of "the linguistic" thus granted language all the properties of the Freudian unconscious [End Page 113] along with those of a Marxist notion of infrastructure. The Saussurian opposition between langue and parole provided a privileged status to a linguistic model whose role was that of a general law that unconsciously structures the behavior of individuals and societies. It is on the basis of these parameters that the structuralist moment of the linguistic turn was constituted. At one and the same time, the analysis of speech acts became first and foremost a "symptomatic" analysis of those procedures of misrecognition that linguistically structured both the behavior of individuals and social relations. When we "read" Le Capital with Althusser, the interpretive and methodological schema for linguistic phenomena operated like a kind of "policing of the enunciated": that is, a search for those unsuccessful (i.e., inadequate) modes of expression that exemplify such symptomatic procedures of misrecognition.The second phase of the linguistic turn constituted itself more ambiguously. For those who shared intellectual experiences similar to my own, this version involved a critique of the langue/infrastructure model; that is, a further and more favorable consideration of the value of the political and the linguistic games therein that, according to the Althusserian/Marxist model (and, indeed, with structuralism more generally), were to be treated as ideological artifacts. In a very real sense, it all began with the May '68 assertion that "we are all German Jews"--an entirely ideological statement, the validity of which, if analyzed at the level of its content, one finds to rest entirely on the capacity to overturn the political relationship between the order of designations and that of events by emphasizing the gap that separates subject and predicate. From there, an entire field of understanding speech acts as political gestures opened up: a field that reconfigured the division between words and things while rearranging the distinction between legitimate... (shrink)

In a significant early case, the ICTY commented: “The essence of the whole corpus of international humanitarian law as well as human rights law lies in the protection of the human dignity of every person…. The general principle of respect for human dignity is . . . the very raison d'être of international humanitarian law and human rights law.” Is it true that international humanitarian law and international human rights law share the same “essence,” (...) and that essence is the general principle of respect for human dignity? Is it true that, in the words of Charles Beitz, humanitarian law is “perhaps better described as the law of ‘human rights in armed conflicts’”? To answer yes, I argue, amounts to a reinterpretation of IHL that drifts far from its history. This reinterpretation is what I label human rights thinking . In its origins, IHL was not designed to protect human dignity, but to reduce human suffering; it was a form of disaster relief. Human rights law, by contrast, originated as a blueprint for the kind of peacetime societies that would no longer plunge the world into what the UN Charter calls the “untold sorrow” of war. Nevertheless, law changes. Perhaps the nature of IHL has evolved over time in the direction of human rights thinking, and should evolve that way. That is the view I defend-–with some qualifications-–in the final sections of this essay. First, I explore the very different genealogies of IHL and human rights law, and explain how human rights thinking migrated into IHL. I attribute the migration to international criminal law, military occupations, and reactions to the U.S. war on terrorism. In the final sections, I explore two ways human rights thinking can be pursued in wars. One of them, I will argue, overplays and overestimates what human rights thinking can accomplish. It does so by, in effect, willing away fundamental differences between war and peace. The other is an approach that I have defended for more than three decades. It consists, at bottom, of taking a civilian’s-eye view of the disasters of war and reading the law accordingly-–recognizing, one might say, that Mother Courage and her children matter just as much to the law of war as Henry V and his band of brothers. (shrink)

A theory of property needs to give an account of the whole life-cycle of a property right: how it is initiated, transferred, and terminated. Economics has focused on the transfers in the market and has almost completely neglected the question of the initiation and termination of property in normal production and consumption (not in some original state or in the transition from common to private property). The institutional mechanism for the normal initiation and termination of property is an invisible-hand (...) function of the market, the market mechanism of appropriation. Does this mechanism satisfy an appropriate normative principle? The standard normative juridical principle is to assign or impute legal responsibility according to de facto responsibility. It is given a historical tag of being "Lockean" but the basis is contemporary jurisprudence, not historical exegesis. Then the fundamental theorem of the property mechanism is proven which shows that if "Hume's conditions" (no transfers without consent and all contracts fulfilled) are satisfied, then the market automatically satisfies the Lockean responsibility principle, i.e., "Hume implies Locke." As a major application, the results in their contrapositive form, "Not Locke implies Not Hume," are applied to a market economy based on the employment contract. It is shown the production based on the employment contract violates the Lockean principle (all who work in an employment enterprise are de facto responsible for the positive and negative results) and thus Hume's conditions must also be violated in the marketplace (de facto responsible human action cannot be transferred from one person to another—as is readily recognized when and employer and employee together commit a crime). (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Some Questions on Confucian Relationality:Reading Human BecomingsDavid Elstein (bio)Human Becomings: Theorizing Persons for Confucian Role Ethics. By Roger T. Ames. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2021.This recent book by Roger Ames continues his (and Henry Rosemont's) project of articulating and defending the interpretation of Confucian thought using the category "role ethics." This project perhaps originated with Rosemont's 1991 article "Rights-Bearing Individuals and Role-Bearing Persons" and (...) more recently continued with Ames' Confucian Role Ethics: A Vocabulary (2011) and their jointly authored Confucian Role Ethics: A Moral Vision for the 21st Century? (2016). In Human Becomings, Ames expands on what he calls "a focus-field, narrative, and relationally constituted conception of persons" (p. xii). That is, the view of personhood that constitutes the foundation for role ethics. In a sense, this description is too modest, as Ames extends this ontology far beyond persons to all events, continuing to develop a process cosmology that describes the world in general.Over many years, Ames has forged an innovative and influential theoretical interpretation of Confucian philosophy. As an occasional critic of Ames, I appreciate this book tremendously for the way he articulates his vision of how to approach Chinese philosophy, his careful construction of his interpretation, and how he answers questions and objections concerning Confucian role ethics. It is a very rich book that merits careful study, and even in an expanded review such as this I will have to be selective in the points that I address.Ames has developed role ethics and the associated view of relationally constituted persons in part because he believes it is the best way to understand Confucian philosophy on its own terms instead of uncomfortably shoehorning it into existing Western philosophical categories (most commonly, virtue ethics in other Anglophone scholarship). One of his motives is to take Chinese philosophy on its own terms free from the distortions introduced by relying on familiar categories (pp. 20–21). The most important such distortion is that the individual is the starting point for philosophizing. One of Ames' main points in the book is that it is very hard to escape the assumption of the discrete, independent, and autonomous individual when [End Page 172] thinking in familiar Western categories, whether of virtue ethics, utilitarianism, or deontology (p. 46). We must rather appreciate how different Confucianism is.However, he has another goal beyond proffering a superior interpretation of Confucian philosophy. Foundational individualism is also the ultimate cause for what Ames calls the "perfect storm" we find ourselves in: the combination of environmental, economic, social, and political problems that are rooted in misplaced individualism, and that cannot be resolved without deep reconsideration of our values and indeed ourselves (pp. 12–14). Hence, it is not merely that the Confucian relational person is different, but in making relations the basic category the Confucian conception is superior and presumably we would do well do adopt it. One gets a sense of the scope of Ames' argument here.There is much in this book I want to respond to and question, and so I will forego much summary. Instead, I will raise a series of questions about parts of the argument and, in the course of discussing these, touch on some of the main points of the book. I will be questioning a series of related claims that I believe are the heart of what Ames wants to demonstrate: a relationality or process cosmology (not substance ontology) is fundamental to Confucian thought; this relational view naturally implies or entails role ethics, not virtue ethics or deontology; relational persons and role ethics together are a better account of our moral life and will go a considerable way toward resolving the problems caused by foundational individualism. In response, I want to raise the following questions:1. Is relationality truly a part of original Confucian thought?2. Does relationality rule out any notion of essential human nature, and does it necessarily imply or entail role ethics?3. Is relationality true or merely a useful way of thinking (if these can be distinguished)? Do we know that it is useful?4. Is there anything in Confucian role ethics that a... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reconquest Colonialism and Andalusī Narrative Practice in the Conde LucanorDavid A Wacks (bio)In the tenth century, when Cordova was the richest and most populous city in Europe, and the Umayyad Caliphate was setting the standard for cultural florescence in the Islamic world, a group of Christian nobles in the rocky precincts of northernmost Spain sought to expand their territorial holdings southward, into al-Andalus. Their aim was to unseat Islamic (...) political power on the Iberian Peninsula, and they sought to authorize this project by discrediting Muslim leaders as the usurpers of lands to which the Christians were rightful heirs. In their view, Christian conquests of al-Andalus were the recuperation of lands that, in the eyes of God himself, belonged to them.Spanish culture as we know it today is the product of this medieval frontier society, in which Christians and Muslims—during a span of some 700 years—continuously negotiated a political border that was culturally quite porous. By the middle of the thirteenth century, Christian rulers had gained control of the large majority of the Iberian Peninsula, including the populous and important cities of Cordova and Seville in the south. The Christians who populated these newly conquered lands found themselves in close contact with a sizeable population of Andalusī Muslims (and Jews and Christians) who had remained. The conquering Christians were great consumers of Andalusī culture in general, especially arts and sciences, and even literature. At the same time, they viewed Islam, the dominant religion of al-Andalus, as a purely illegitimate basis for political power and social organization. If the official narrative of Reconquest argues for tidy cultural purity and conformity, the reality on the ground is, in contrast, a messy and emergent pluralism, one that resonates with early modern and modern colonial experiences.1While medievalists have been slower to embrace postcolonial theoretical approaches than their colleagues working on modern and contemporary texts, they have begun to adapt the ideas of thinkers such as Fanon, Memmi, Bhabha, Spivak, and others to medieval European perceptions of and experience in the East.2 However, it is curious [End Page 87] that Hispanists (with what may be the sole exception of David Hanlon) have completely avoided reading the Christian conquest of al-Andalus as a colonial project. Despite the substantial differences between medieval and modern colonialisms as regards political reality, public discourse, and the construction of subjectivity, one may safely argue that the Christian conquests of al-Andalus were a colonial endeavor, one of several studied by historians of medieval Europe.3 The case of medieval Christian Iberian colonialism was distinct from other medieval colonialisms (such as French and English crusading in the Middle East) in that it contributed fundamentally to the formation of a Spanish national identity, and served as a domestic proving ground for the conquest of Spanish territories in the Americas.Don Juan Manuel, author of the Conde Lucanor (1340) [CL],4 was the most powerful nobleman of his time. He held extensive lands in Murcia, which retained a far higher proportion of its preconquest Muslim population than did neighboring Castile and Leon [O’Callaghan, History 459]. While his military and political career depended on eradicating Islam from the Iberian Peninsula, he earned his literary renown—in part—by imitating and incorporating Andalusī narrative tradition and history into his own writings. In Juan Manuel’s adaptation of the frametale genre, the CL, this dissonance between the religious and political agendas of the Reconquest manifests in narrative. If the CL shows us the ideology of the Reconquest, it also offers the reader a reflection of the more complicated and nuanced reality of daily life and human behavior characteristic of Reconquest-era Castile-Leon [Linehan, “At the Spanish Frontier” 53]. In it, Juan Manuel distills the political realities, religious discourse, and cultural interaction of the time into the first original frametale in any European vernacular.5Juan Manuel’s religious agenda and frontier political philosophy come across quite clearly in the 50 exemplos of the CL. The idea of the Christian nobleman’s duty to wage war against Islam permeates the work, most starkly in these words of the Count’s advisor Patronio: “... Dios vos poblo... (shrink)

The study of social, ethical, and political issues from a naturalistic perspective has been pervasive in social sciences and the humanities in the last decades. This articulation of empirical research with philosophical and normative reflection is increasingly getting attention in academic circles and the public spheres, given the prevalence of urgent needs and challenges that society is facing on a global scale. The contemporary world is full of challenges or what some philosophers have called ‘existential risks’ to humanity. Nuclear wars, (...) natural and/or engineered pandemics, climate change, global totalitarianism, and emergent technologies, are some of the challenges mentioned by many authors devoted to the study of long-term potential risks for the survival of the human species. However, while there are many reasons to be a pessimist about the future of humanity, there is also a lot of ink wasted in showing that the world today is far better than we had in the past and also that there have been many instances of social and moral progress in the last centuries. Some authors have even claimed that “we have made more progress over the last 100 years than in the first 100,000”. According to ‘our world in data’, some of the most relevant advances of humanity in the last centuries have to do with the reduction of poverty and/or inequality, better health and security, the decline of violence and war, and the development of democracy and institutional mechanisms to guarantee individual freedom and rights. Yet, there is a more concrete concern that our world faces nowadays, and requires a particularly detailed analysis. In a few words, the advance in information and communication technologies, the huge volume of people migration because of prevalent instances of global inequality, and the reality of an interconnected world that just mirrors an extensive history of massive human intergroup relations open the question about the feasibility of social and moral progress in the contexts of diverse, multicultural, and unequal societies. This makes it crucial to reflect not only on whether human societies may keep advancing on a path of social progress, but how this can be achieved by addressing the challenges of inequality and potential intergroup conflict. This concern closely relates to the further consolidation of democratic values and the achievement of a more generalized consideration of the equal moral value of human individuals far from group, ethnic, or collective distinctions. This vision of progress follows the moral convictions that have been considered right and worthy to be pursued by most ethical theories explored by philosophers and social scientists so far. This work aims to contribute to the study of the mechanisms and feasibility of social and moral progress grounded on the precept of human equality and is guided by the idea that social and moral progress in a plural world requires the accomplishment of a more democratic and tolerant society. These forms of progress have already been defined by philosophers Allen Buchanan and Russel Powell as inclusivist forms of moral progress. According to these authors, inclusivist moral progress is featured by the transformation of moral judgments, motivations, and norms guided by the rejection of “group-based restrictions on moral standing and moral status” (2018). The work of Buchanan and Powell is fundamental for the argumentation developed in this work since they have pioneered a more complex debate in the field of evolutionary social sciences and philosophical anthropology. In brief, these authors have inquired how human nature, conceptualized by the advances in evolutionary thinking and the empirical sciences, is related to our moral convictions and the possibilities that we have to establish certain forms of social and moral progress. The work of Buchanan and Powell contributes to the debate on moral progress by incorporating empirically-informed concepts and arguments. With this objective in mind, they develop their discussion around a generalized tension between exclusivist and inclusivist forms of moral progress. This tension revolves around the question of whether and to what extent human moral concerns, motivations, and norms, are limited or bounded by social identities, group thinking, or collective values. This question is at the center of this work. In other words, I aim to answer whether and to what extent the nature of our social and moral cognition hinders or enables the development of inclusivist forms of morality and moral progress. As I mentioned so far, the distinction between exclusivist and inclusivist forms of morality has a practical implication and facilitates the reflection on the mechanisms and feasibility of concrete forms of progress based on the precept of human equality, which is the road to progress that we should follow according to most ethical theories. The distinction between exclusivist and inclusivist morality is not used here as a form of summarizing highly divergent descriptive approaches to morality, but as a way to address the practical implications of morality research, particularly around the question of the feasibility of social forms of progress based on the precept of equality and tolerance. My objective then has less to do with offering a conceptualization of human morality or with the proposition of a new ethical perspective. Instead, I aim to identify, from an empirically informed perspective, what enables the achievement of egalitarian forms of social progress, to subsequently offer a normative reflection about what we should do if we want to accomplish such inclusivist forms of progress. This task is of great relevance, having in mind that some theoretical proposals on the matter have claimed that human prosocial behavior and morality are constrained by exclusivist fixed tendencies as a product of our evolutionary history. According to these views, human morality is a group-centered cognitive and behavioral expression that has severe limits in its scope and extent, which hinders in the end the emergence of inclusivist forms of moral concerns and behaviors. These claims align with the philosophical intuition about the ‘dissociation of empathy’, or the fact that human individuals tend to express empathy and sympathy preferably for members of their group whereas their empathic and moral concern and recognition for outgroup individuals tend to be reduced or eliminated in real-life social interactions. Multiple theorists have expressed, however, that these assumptions are wrong for empirical and philosophical reasons, which results in a serious challenge to the conception of human morality as exclusivist by nature. Furthermore, simple intuition and practical experience constantly show us that human individuals can develop and endorse a broad spectrum of moral considerations and adopt an arguably inclusivist stance concerning the kind of persons or agents that deserve moral concern. Moreover, and adopting a historical perspective, the expansion of cultural and commercial exchanges, the consolidation of democracy, the development of welfare states, or the emergence of institutions based on the concept of universal human rights, have partially driven human progress based on the impartial concern for the well-being of persons. These historical instances of cultural evolution and institutional design have shown that it is feasible to promote behaviors and attitudes grounded in impersonal prosocial and inclusivist principles. This optimistic perspective, however, still begs the question of the exact relationship between social, cultural, and historical contexts, and the emergence of certain behavioral expressions of inclusivist morality. This is crucial since a great number of human individuals around the world still do not make part of these instances of social progress, and some authors have suggested that such instances of social and moral progress are particularly favored by the contexts of the WEIRD world, that is the world of Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic societies. Some of these approaches consider moral inclusivity a ‘luxury good’ and follow the ‘dependency thesis’ according to which the expression of moral inclusivity depends on the presence of very concrete material conditions that trigger inclusivist and impersonal prosocial tendencies that human beings are not able to express in threatening contexts without physical security. This thesis is problematic for various reasons and has led to incomplete explanations about the enabling and causal factors of inclusivist moral progress, as well as unsatisfactory suggestions about what we should do to foster the accomplishment of more generalized instances of progress based on inclusivist concerns. In an attempt to contribute to this debate, the main objective of this thesis is to offer an alternative proposal about the nature of human morality and a more detailed reflection on what we should do if we want to further accomplish such instances of progress. More precisely, this work adopts a particular developmental and constructivist vision of human morality to answer the question of how feasible it is to reach generalized forms of social progress based on the precepts of moral inclusivity. Furthermore, it offers some ideas about what are the most adequate and favorable conditions to foster such progress both at the individual and the collective level. At this point, a preliminary clarification of some starting points is necessary. In the first place, and contrary to what other authors have proposed when debating moral progress from an empirically-based approach, my perspective adopts a radical developmental and constructivist perspective, following particularly the conceptual and empirical ideas of the social-domain theory in moral psychology. From this perspective, morality is a domain of normative and social knowledge that develops and emerges in human interactions. Moral concerns, judgments, and norms are not only the result of the expression of innate adaptive intuitions, nor the product of social conformity and a simple process of mirroring the normativity that communities have established to organize their social life. Human individuals, instead, construct moral concerns and judgments during their situated interactions. More specifically, the constructivist tradition claims that we need to research how moral concerns, judgments, and reasons emerge in social interactions and how human beings construct the content of their moral knowledge in the first place. Based on these ideas, morality is defined here as the result of a constructive process through which human individuals, by the means of constant interactions on a background of mutual respect and recognition, develop evaluative concerns about how we ought to treat others, and how to ‘care’ and ‘respect’ others’ well-being, needs, and vulnerabilities. This developmental-constructivist theory of human psychology contributes to an alternative understanding of the origins of moral variability and informs a very particular normative stance about the most desirable contexts needed for the urgent accomplishment of inclusivist forms of morality in contemporary societies. This is so given that the very same definition of morality adopted presupposes the feature of inclusivity. The main objective of this work is then to argue, based on a developmental perspective, what are the most favorable conditions to foster the development of moral inclusivity and what we should do to accomplish concrete instances of moral progress that truly help us to overcome our most urgent moral challenges. The whole thesis is organized as follows. In part I, I show how received visions about human social evolution have informed conceptions of morality as an adaptive function evolved to solve the challenges of cooperative life. Based on these assumptions, some theories argue that human morality is limited by the boundaries of group thinking, and always obeys the mandates of collective interests and the will of the majority. However, this conception has problematic implications from a normative and ethical perspective. The aim of Chapter 1 is to present this introductory debate in detail. In chapter 2, I consider a relevant amount of scientific evidence that helps to consolidate a more optimistic and inclusivist perspective about the starting conditions of human prosocial behavior. Later, I will summarize some ideas offered to explain the possible evolutionary mechanisms that led to the consolidation of these inclusivist capacities. However, I will also show how evolutionary theories that share the same adaptationist foundations but initially seem relevant to explain the feasibility of moral inclusivity, result incomplete when considering the complexity of moral behavior and its ethical implications. Part II is devoted to presenting a developmental alternative to the adaptationist versions around the starting conditions of morality. In this section, I first summarize the epistemological, conceptual, and empirical basis of a constructivist perspective already proposed by several authors in the last decades. This is the goal of chapter 3. More precisely, I adopt the conceptualization of morality established by the social-domain theory school and clarify its conception of the situated development of moral concerns, motivations, and norms. All these ideas are essential for my argumentation on the feasibility of inclusivist moral progress offered later. Chapter 4 provides a more detailed idea of constructivist thinking about moral development, by analyzing one particular dimension: the development of moral concerns for fairness and the sense of justice in distributive dilemmas. In Part III, I assume a constructivist perspective on morality to contribute to the philosophy of moral progress. In particular, I discuss the implications of such a perspective for the conceptualization of human moral nature and discuss what are the most favorable conditions for moral inclusivity to emerge. Answering that question is of enormous relevance since favoring the transition of human societies towards more inclusivist forms of moral concern and behavior supposes a more generalized accomplishment of our most urgent moral convictions. Previous developmental or culturally-sensible attempts to explore this issue are already on the market. As mentioned before, most authors have approached the topic by situating the cultural evolution and development of (inclusivist) moral progress in the WEIRD world. For instance, some of these authors claim that very concrete material conditions (mostly present in the Western World) have been necessary for triggering inclusivist and impersonal prosocial tendencies that human beings are not able to express in threatening contexts without physical security. Despite their interest in explaining inclusivist morality and the feasibility of inclusivist forms of progress following a naturalistic and culturally situated approach, these theories are problematic for two main reasons. In the first place, most of the authors that explain moral progress tend to focus exclusively on the consolidation of liberal values in the Western world and the underlying adoption of laws, social-epistemic practices, and public narratives about tolerance and inclusivity, as unequivocal signs of inclusivist morality. Nevertheless, there is an enormous distance between the institutional and public support of inclusivist moral values or the construction of public images of tolerance and inclusivity, and the real materialization of impersonal moralities in situated social interactions. Secondly, the variability of human moral behavior is far bigger than most of the theories in moral psychology and moral progress tend to assume. Accordingly, inclusivist and exclusivist forms of morality may develop simultaneously in similar or divergent geographical and socio-ecological environments, including those with harsh conditions such as competition for scarce resources, potential intergroup conflict, and risks of disease transmission. In addition, harsh environmental conditions are usually present in almost all societies around the globe, and the presence of socio-ecological conditions such as physical security and prosperity, predominant in highly resourced populations, do not prevent the existence of exclusivist moral tendencies. My model explores a different perspective on the relationships between cultural, institutional, and historical factors, and the situated development of human morality. This supposes a clear distinction from previous approaches to the matter since it offers a different view on what we should do to pursue further instances of inclusivist social progress. In the fifth chapter, I first analyze the proposals of some defenders of the ‘dependency’ theory. The attention is focused on the ‘Evolutionary Developmental Model’ proposed by Buchanan and Powell (2018). Based on a critique of this approach, I will argue that to explain the evolution and development of human morality in its multiple manifestations, it is essential to put focus on social interactions. This also involves a different perspective on human-environment relations that in line with a constructivist worldview makes an innovative contribution to the philosophy of moral behavior and moral progress. Later, in the sixth chapter, I will define my alternative relational view of inclusivist morality and I will offer my view on how to establish favorable conditions that make inclusivist morality possible. Complementing the constructivist approach, my conception is based on the essential role of equality and individuality and on how moral inclusivity is favored if moral concerns do not develop driven by the accomplishment of group-centered, binding, and communitarian concerns and values. In brief, my relational model suggests that the accomplishment of moral inclusivity not only depends on the overall achievement of certain levels of physical security or economic prosperity. Instead, its development is favored by transforming the interactional contexts in which moral concerns towards autonomy and individuality emerge. In arguing so, I will need to start with a critique of contemporary situated and embodied approaches in ethics. Then, I will show how societies guided by the accomplishment of group-centered values of power, dominance, and relational inequality tend to express exclusivist moral behaviors, while individualistic societies tend to be more inclusivist. Starting from this diagnosis, my final attempt is then to reflect on which are the best conditions for the moral valuation of individuality to emerge and what we should do to promote the accomplishment of moral inclusivity at the societal level. (shrink)