Perspectives on Quine, now available in paperback, is a collection of twenty-one new essays dealing with the thought of America's most distinguished living philosopher, Willard Van Orman Quine. After the editors' brief introduction to Quine's thought, the volume opens with an important new essay by Quine entitled Three Indeterminacies. The essays that follow, written by leading philosophers, are rich with insights into a wide variety of Quine's concerns ranging from logic and set theory to natural language, truth, evidence, natural (...) kinds, naturalized epistemology, and much more. Each essay concludes with a summary and response from Quine himself. (shrink)

Political realists claim that international relations are in a state of anarchy, and therefore every state is allowed to disregard its moral duties towards other states and their inhabitants. Realists argue that complying with moral duties is simply too risky for a state’s national security. Political moralists convincingly show that realists exaggerate both the extent of international anarchy and the risks it poses to states who act morally. Yet moralists do not go far enough, since they do not question realism’s (...) normative core: the claim that when national security is really at risk, states are allowed to disregard their moral duties. I contend that there is at least one moral duty that states should not disregard even if their inhabitants are at risk of death by military aggression: the duty to reduce extreme global poverty. The reason is that even granting that national security is about securing individuals’ right to life, global poverty relief is about that as well. (shrink)

Political realists claim that international relations are in a state of anarchy, and therefore every state is allowed to disregard its moral duties towards other states and their inhabitants. Realists argue that complying with moral duties is simply too risky for a state’s national security. Political moralists convincingly show that realists exaggerate both the extent of international anarchy and the risks it poses to states who act morally. Yet moralists do not go far enough, since they do not question realism’s (...) normative core: the claim that when national security is really at risk, states are allowed to disregard their moral duties. I contend that there is at least one moral duty that states should not disregard even if their inhabitants are at risk of death by military aggression: the duty to reduce extreme global poverty. The reason is that even granting that national security is about securing individuals’ right to life, global poverty relief is about that as well. (shrink)

In this article we identify three previously unnoticed problems with flexible moral theories, i.e., theories according to which different moral rules apply when there is full compliance and when there is partial compliance. The first problem is that flexible theories are necessarily very complex, which undermines their ability to motivate and guide action. The second problem is that flexible theories allow for a troubling kind of (moral) domination: the duties an agent has depend on other agents' willingness to comply. Finally, (...) flexible theories introduce indeterminacy: it is sometimes impossible to determine which moral rules apply. When agents stand at the threshold—i.e., when a different rule would apply if a single additional act of noncompliance took place—it is impossible to determine which rule should apply. (shrink)

Nearly forty years after his death, social philosopher Frantz Fanon remains a towering intellectual figure. Born in Guadeloupe and trained as a psychologist in France, Fanon rejected his French citizenship to join the Algerian liberation movement in the 1950s. A brilliant scholar who developed the theory that some neuroses are socially generated, Fanon's revolutionary works—The Wretched of the Earth, Toward the African Revolution, and Black Skin, White Masks—spurred an African intellectual awakening. The rebirth of Fanonism today in universities and (...) the English-speaking world is a testament to his relevance. Edited by distinguished African-studies professor Nigel C. Gibson, Rethinking Fanon opens with an authoritative biography which corrects fallacious assertions about Fanon's life, situating him in Marxism, Negritude, Pan-Africanism, and the historical context of postwar decolonization, specifically the Algerian revolution. Section one is highlighted by extended discussions of Marx, Fanon's theories on sophisticated forms of cultural racism, and "true liberation." The next section examines Fanon's humanist philosophy, his philosophical and geographical journeys, and his attitude toward the necessity of revolution. Also included is Homi Bhabha's well-known essay "Remembering Fanon," which contemplates the seeming rejection of Fanon in Britain in the 1970s, in contrast to his major following in America and the influence of Fanon on South African writer Steven Biko. Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Edward Said discuss the importance of the 1980s' and 1990s' cultural and literary debates on Fanon. Gates notes that Fanon has been reinstated -not as a global theorist of "third world" revolution, but instead as a critic of English writers and British romanticists. Benita Parry reexamines African nationalism and liberation, and sheds new light on Fanon's questions of identity and agency. This excellent collection reflects the continuing impact of Fanon's thought on African-American and African studies, feminism, postcolonialism, and cultural studies. (shrink)

W. V. Quine was quite simply the most distinguished analytic philosopher of the later half of the twentieth century. His celebrated attack on the analytic/synthetic tradition heralded a major shift away from the views of language descended from logical positivism. His most important book, Word and Object, introduced the concept of indeterminacy of radical translation, a bleak view of the nature of the language with which we ascribe thoughts and beliefs to ourselves and others. Quine is also famous for the (...) view that epistemology should be naturalized, that is conducted in a scientific spirit with the object of investigating the relationship between the inputs of experience and the outputs of belief. The eleven essays in this volume cover all the central topics of Quine's philosophy: the underdetermination of physical theory, analycity, naturalism, propositional attitudes, behaviorism, reference and ontology, positivism, holism and logic. (shrink)

This virtual special issue of the Journal of Business Ethics is dedicated to the role that social theory and sociological research can play in understanding business ethics in the contemporary world. Articles have been selected for this virtual issue that highlight the insights provided by the long tradition of sociological theorising, that focus upon enduring social problems and which deal with particularly twenty-first century issues.

ABSTRACT There is a growing acceptance of user rights models with regard to dependent populations such as nursing home residents, but classic theories of rights presuppose levels of human rationality and human agency often lacking in the case of highly dependent populations. While user rights models have strong advantages at a rhetorical level, the reduced capacity for dependent groups to assert their rights constitutes a significant structural limitation. Policies, practices and regulatory strategies developed on the assumption that very dependent groups (...) can indeed assert such rights thus proceed on a premise which is fatally flawed. (shrink)

A key component of research on human sentence processing is to characterize the processing difficulty associated with the comprehension of words in context. Models that explain and predict this difficulty can be broadly divided into two kinds, expectation‐based and memory‐based. In this work, we present a new model of incremental sentence processing difficulty that unifies and extends key features of both kinds of models. Our model, lossy‐context surprisal, holds that the processing difficulty at a word in context is proportional to (...) the surprisal of the word given a lossy memory representation of the context—that is, a memory representation that does not contain complete information about previous words. We show that this model provides an intuitive explanation for an outstanding puzzle involving interactions of memory and expectations: language‐dependent structural forgetting, where the effects of memory on sentence processing appear to be moderated by language statistics. Furthermore, we demonstrate that dependency locality effects, a signature prediction of memory‐based theories, can be derived from lossy‐context surprisal as a special case of a novel, more general principle called information locality. (shrink)

Firstly, it is hoped to give an informative and well-ordered account of aesthetic and callistic concepts as they occur in the works of Plato and Aristotle. ...

This book provides a clear and informed account of aesthetic and callistic concepts as they occur in the works of Plato and Aristotle. The author illustrates their ideas on art and beauty by close reference to their texts and finds a profound similarity which unites them, revealing many of their differences to be complementary aspects of an essentially similar viewpoint. He also shows how Greek notions of art and beauty are not merely primitive steps in the advance to modern ideas (...) but have a direct relevance to modern critical controversies. (shrink)

This book provides a clear and informed account of aesthetic and callistic concepts as they occur in the works of Plato and Aristotle. The author illustrates their ideas on art and beauty by close reference to their texts and finds a profound similarity which unites them, revealing many of their differences to be complementary aspects of an essentially similar viewpoint. He also shows how Greek notions of art and beauty are not merely primitive steps in the advance to modern ideas (...) but have a direct relevance to modern critical controversies. (shrink)

There is little question as to whether there is good boring art, though its existence raises a number of questions for both the philosophy of art and the philosophy of emotions. How can boredom ever be a desideratum of art? How can our standing commitments concerning the nature of aesthetic experience and artistic value accommodate the existence of boring art? How can being bored constitute an appropriate mode of engagement with a work of art as a work of art? More (...) broadly, how can there be works of art whose very success requires the experience of boredom? Our goal in this paper is threefold. After offering a brief survey of kinds of boring art, we: i) derive a set of questions that we argue constitutes the philosophical problem of boring art; ii) elaborate an empirically informed theory of boredom that furnishes the philosophical problem with a deeper sense of the affect at the heart of the phenomenon; and iii) conclude by offering and defending a solution to the problem that explains why and how artworks might wish to make the experience of boredom key to their aesthetic and artistic success. (shrink)

John Locke is probably one of the highest-regarded English philosophers, and the first of the British empiricists. His ideas on the mind and consciousness have continued to resonate throughout philosophy and philosophical thought ever since An Essay Concerning Human Understanding first appeared in 1690. James Gibson's Locke's Theory of Knowledge and its Historical Relations was first published in 1917, and saw its fourth reprinting in 1968. Here, it is made available for the first time in paperback. This hugely (...) detailed work is an invaluable collation of Locke's theories, exploring his thoughts on the problems of knowledge, the formation of ideas, causality and the self. Furthermore, Gibson also provides an in-depth historical evaluation of the effects of these theories on contemporary philosophy as a whole, and on thinkers such as Descartes, Kant and Leibniz more specifically. As such, this book is a valuable reference work for any student of philosophy. (shrink)

Literary fiction is of crucial importance in human life. It is a source of understanding and insight into the nature of the human condition, yet ever since Plato, philosophers have struggled to provide a plausible explanation of how this can be the case. For surely the fictionality - the sheer invented character - of the literary text means that fiction presents not our world, but other worlds? In Fiction and the Weave of Life, John Gibson offers a novel and (...) intriguing account of the relationship between literature and everyday life, and shows how literature can give us an understanding of our world without literally being about our world. (shrink)

_The Routledge Companion to Philosophy of Literature_ is an in-depth examination of literature through a philosophical lens, written by distinguished figures across the major divisions of philosophy. Its 40 newly-commissioned essays are divided into six sections: historical foundations what is literature? aesthetics & appreciation meaning & interpretation metaphysics & epistemology ethics & political theory _The Companion_ opens with a comprehensive historical overview of the philosophy of literature, including chapters on the study’s ancient origins up to the 18 th -20 (...) th centuries. The second part defines literature and its different categories. The third part covers the aesthetics of literature. The fourth and fifth sections discuss the meaning and consequences of philosophical interpretation of literature, as well as epistemological and metaphysical issues such as literary cognitivism and imaginative resistance. The sixth section contextualizes the place of philosophy of literature in the "real world" with essays on topics such as morality, politics, race and gender. Fully indexed, with helpful further reading sections at the end of each chapter, this Companion is an ideal starting point for those coming to philosophy of literature for the first time as well as a valuable reference for readers more familiar with the subject. (shrink)

Wittgenstein is often regarded as the most important philosopher of the twentieth century, and in recent decades, his work has begun to play a prominent role in literary studies, particularly in debates over language, interpretation, and critical judgment. Wittgenstein and Literary Studies solidifies this critical movement, assembling recent critics and philosophers who understand Wittgenstein as a counterweight to longstanding tendencies in both literary studies and philosophical aesthetics. The essays here cover a wide range of topics. Why have contemporary writers been (...) so drawn to Wittgenstein? What is a Wittgensteinian response to New Historicism, Post-Critique, and other major critical movements? How does Wittgenstein help us understand the nature of style, fiction, poetry, and the link between ethics and aesthetics? As the volume makes clear, Wittgenstein's work provides a rare bridge between professional philosophy and literary studies, offering us a way out of entrenched positions and their denials-what Wittgenstein himself called 'pictures' 'that held us captive.'. (shrink)

Social support networks play a key role in human livelihood security, especially in vulnerable communities. Here we explore how evolutionary ideas of kin selection and intrahousehold resource competition can explain individual variation in daily support network size and composition in a south-central Ethiopian agricultural community. We consider both domestic and agricultural help across two generations with different wealth-transfer norms that yield different contexts for sibling competition. For farmers who inherited land rights from family, firstborns were more likely to report daily (...) support from parents and to have larger nonparental kin networks. Compared with other farmers, firstborns were also more likely to reciprocate their parents’ support, and to help nonparental kin without reciprocity. For farmers who received land rights from the government, middle-born farmers reported more nonparental kin in their support networks compared with other farmers; nonreciprocal interactions were particularly common in both directions. This suggests a diversification of adult support networks to nonparental kin, possibly in response to a long-term parental investment disadvantage of being middle-born sons. In all instances, regardless of inheritance, lastborn farmers were the most disadvantaged in terms of kin support. Overall, we found that nonreciprocal interactions among farmers followed kin selection predictions. Direct reciprocity explained a substantial part of the support received from kin, suggesting the importance of the combined effects of kin selection and reciprocity for investment from kin. (shrink)

_From Naming to Saying_ explores the classicquestion of the unity of the proposition, combining an historical approach with contemporary causal theories to offer a unique and novel solution. Presents compelling and sophisticated answers to questions about how language represents the world. Defends a novel approach to the classical question about the unity of the proposition. Examines three key historical theories: Frege’s doctrine of concept and object, Russell’s analysis of the sentence, and Wittgenstein’s picture theory of meaning. Combines an historical (...) approach with discussion and defense of a contemporary causal theory of the unity of the proposition. Establishes a view compatible with, though not dependent on, a causal theory of meaning. (shrink)

This paper interrogates and reclaims clown practices in children’s rehabilitation as ‘foolish.’ Attempts to legitimize and ‘take seriously’ clown practices in the health sciences frame the work of clowns as secondary to the ‘real’ work of medical professionals and diminish the ways clowns support emotional vulnerability and bravery with a willingness to fail and be ridiculous as fundamental to their work. Narrow conceptualizations of clown practices in hospitals as only happy and funny overlook the ways clowns also routinely engage with (...) sadness, despair, discomfort and many other ways of being and doing. Our exploration of clown practices as foolish exposes the ways children’s rehabilitation upholds particular neoliberal models of success and invites a re-centring of rehabilitation and health care research and practice towards relationship building, supporting meaningful projects and a continued nurturing of aesthetic and pleasurable ways of being-in-the-world in the present moment as valuable unto themselves. (shrink)

Absolute linguistic universals are often justified by cross-linguistic analysis: If all observed languages exhibit a property, the property is taken to be a likely universal, perhaps specified in the cognitive or linguistic systems of language learners and users. In many cases, these patterns are then taken to motivate linguistic theory. Here, we show that cross-linguistic analysis will very rarely be able to statistically justify absolute, inviolable patterns in language. We formalize two statistical methods—frequentist and Bayesian—and show that in both (...) it is possible to find strict linguistic universals, but that the numbers of independent languages necessary to do so is generally unachievable. This suggests that methods other than typological statistics are necessary to establish absolute properties of human language, and thus that many of the purported universals in linguistics have not received sufficient empirical justification. (shrink)

The authors distinguish three perspectives to be found in contemporary religious social ethics, which stem from three different views of the source and nature of the ethos: the ontological approach, the actional approach and hermeneutic ontology. They trace the implications of each view for both theory and practice; and they consider the prospects for an integrative discipline of religious social ethics which can accommodate all three perspectives.

This introduction positions the special issue by highlighting the inherent relationality of place as well as how place is not just an object of analysis but something that shapes thinking, writing and experiences of the world. We reflect on why sociology has found it somewhat more difficult than its social science counterparts to give place the centrality it merits, and discuss whether this reflects a problem with dealing with questions of ‘scale’ and thinking the ‘in-betweenness’ of place. We assess important (...) formulations of place in recent place theories, including non-essentialist framings of place such as ‘progressive’ and as ‘assemblage’. We make a case for seeing the articles in this special issue (and Thesis Eleven’s own long history of publishing writing on the topic of place) as resonating with the themes of place as materiality, atmospheres and spaces of belonging. (shrink)

The present study applied Ajzen's (1985) theory of planned behavior to the explanation of ethical decision making. Nurses in three hospitals were provided with scenarios that depicted inadequate patient care and asked if they would report health professionals responsible for the situation. Study results suggest that the theory of planned behavior can explain a significant amount of variation in the intent to report a colleague. Attitude toward performing the behavior explained a large portion of the variance; subjective norms (...) explained a moderate amount of the variance; and, perceived behavioral control added little to the explanation of variance. Implications for research and practice are discussed. (shrink)

_From Naming to Saying _explores the classicquestion of the unity of the proposition, combining an historical approach with contemporary causal theories to offer a unique and novel solution. Presents compelling and sophisticated answers to questions about how language represents the world. Defends a novel approach to the classical question about the unity of the proposition. Examines three key historical theories: Frege’s doctrine of concept and object, Russell’s analysis of the sentence, and Wittgenstein’s picture theory of meaning. Combines an historical (...) approach with discussion and defense of a contemporary causal theory of the unity of the proposition. Establishes a view compatible with, though not dependent on, a causal theory of meaning. (shrink)

_The Literary Wittgenstein_ is a stellar collection of articles relating the philosophy of Ludwig Wittgenstein to core problems in the theory and philosophy of literature. Amid growing recognition that Wittgenstein's philosophy has important implications for literary studies, this book brings together twenty-one articles by the most prominent figures in the field. Eighteen of the articles are published here for the first time. _The Literary Wittgenstein_ applies the approach of Wittgenstein to core areas of literary theory, including poetry, deconstruction, (...) the ethical value of literature, and the nature and logic of fictional discourse. The literary dimension of Wittgenstein's own writings is also explored, such as the authorial strategy of the _Tractatus_, and writing and method in the _Philosophical Investigations_. Major literary figures discussed in the book include William Faulkner, Joseph Conrad, and Friedrich Hölderlin. By mapping out the foundations of a new approach to literature, _The Literary Wittgenstein_ is essential reading for anyone interested in the relevance and application of Wittgenstein's thought to literary theory, aesthetics, and the philosophy of language and logic. (shrink)

BackgroundArtificial intelligence has been described as the “fourth industrial revolution” with transformative and global implications, including in healthcare, public health, and global health. AI approaches hold promise for improving health systems worldwide, as well as individual and population health outcomes. While AI may have potential for advancing health equity within and between countries, we must consider the ethical implications of its deployment in order to mitigate its potential harms, particularly for the most vulnerable. This scoping review addresses the following question: (...) What ethical issues have been identified in relation to AI in the field of health, including from a global health perspective?MethodsEight electronic databases were searched for peer reviewed and grey literature published before April 2018 using the concepts of health, ethics, and AI, and their related terms. Records were independently screened by two reviewers and were included if they reported on AI in relation to health and ethics and were written in the English language. Data was charted on a piloted data charting form, and a descriptive and thematic analysis was performed.ResultsUpon reviewing 12,722 articles, 103 met the predetermined inclusion criteria. The literature was primarily focused on the ethics of AI in health care, particularly on carer robots, diagnostics, and precision medicine, but was largely silent on ethics of AI in public and population health. The literature highlighted a number of common ethical concerns related to privacy, trust, accountability and responsibility, and bias. Largely missing from the literature was the ethics of AI in global health, particularly in the context of low- and middle-income countries.ConclusionsThe ethical issues surrounding AI in the field of health are both vast and complex. While AI holds the potential to improve health and health systems, our analysis suggests that its introduction should be approached with cautious optimism. The dearth of literature on the ethics of AI within LMICs, as well as in public health, also points to a critical need for further research into the ethical implications of AI within both global and public health, to ensure that its development and implementation is ethical for everyone, everywhere. (shrink)

In this paper we examine a nation’s obligations to report infectious diseases under the World Health Organization’s new International Health Regulations. We argue that acceptance of the Regulations signals a concrete turn to cosmopolitan citizenship in the area of health. But we also show that the new global health regime and its economic consequences raise ethical tensions for both the conceptualization and practice of cosmopolitanism. Specifically: 1) using global public heath as a lens makes visible how current conceptions of cosmopolitan (...) theory are not truly in conversation with those who are the subject of their concern; and, 2) focusing on global public health illustrates the limits of present cosmopolitan citizenship. In matters of virulent pathogens, nations are required to be good global citizens by protecting citizens of other states in the absence of a framework by which other states bear some of the costs that such global citizenship demands. (shrink)

In this paper we examine a nation’s obligations to report infectious diseases under the World Health Organization’s new International Health Regulations. We argue that acceptance of the Regulations signals a concrete turn to cosmopolitan citizenship in the area of health. But we also show that the new global health regime and its economic consequences raise ethical tensions for both the conceptualization and practice of cosmopolitanism. Specifically: 1) using global public heath as a lens makes visible how current conceptions of cosmopolitan (...) theory are not truly in conversation with those who are the subject of their concern; and, 2) focusing on global public health illustrates the limits of present cosmopolitan citizenship. In matters of virulent pathogens, nations are required to be good global citizens by protecting citizens of other states in the absence of a framework by which other states bear some of the costs that such global citizenship demands. (shrink)

A viable theory of literary humanism must do justice to the idea that literature offers cognitive rewards to the careful reader. There are, however, powerful arguments to the effect that literature is at best only capable of offering idle visions of a world already well known. In this essay I argue that there is a form of cognitive awareness left unmentioned in the traditional vocabulary of knowledge acquisition, a form of awareness literature is particularly capable of offering. Thus even (...) if it is the case that literature has nothing interesting to give us in the way of knowledge, the literary humanist can consistently maintain that literary experience is thoroughly cognitive. (shrink)

Individuals with body integrity identity disorder seek to address a non-delusional incongruity between their body image and their physical embodiment, sometimes via the surgical amputation of healthy body parts. Opponents to the provision of therapeutic healthy-limb amputation in cases of BIID make appeals to the envisioned harms that such an intervention would cause, harms such as the creation of a lifelong physical disability where none existed before. However, this concept of harm is often based on a normative biomedical model of (...) health and disability, a model which conflates amputation with impairment, and impairment with a disability. This article challenges the prima facie harms assumed to be inherent in limb amputation and argues in favour of a potential treatment option for those with BIID. To do this, it employs the social model of disability as a means to separate the concept of impairment and disability and thereby separate the acute and chronic harms of the practice of therapeutic healthy-limb amputation. It will then argue that provided sufficient measures are put in place to ensure that those with atypical bodily constructions are not disadvantaged, the chronic harms of elective amputation would cease to be. (shrink)

Individuals with body integrity identity disorder seek to address a non-delusional incongruity between their body image and their physical embodiment, sometimes via the surgical amputation of healthy body parts. Opponents to the provision of therapeutic healthy-limb amputation in cases of BIID make appeals to the envisioned harms that such an intervention would cause, harms such as the creation of a lifelong physical disability where none existed before. However, this concept of harm is often based on a normative biomedical model of (...) health and disability, a model which conflates amputation with impairment, and impairment with a disability. This article challenges the prima facie harms assumed to be inherent in limb amputation and argues in favour of a potential treatment option for those with BIID. To do this, it employs the social model of disability as a means to separate the concept of impairment and disability and thereby separate the acute and chronic harms of the practice of therapeutic healthy-limb amputation. It will then argue that provided sufficient measures are put in place to ensure that those with atypical bodily constructions are not disadvantaged, the chronic harms of elective amputation would cease to be. (shrink)

Individuals with body integrity identity disorder seek to address a non-delusional incongruity between their body image and their physical embodiment, sometimes via the surgical amputation of healthy body parts. Opponents to the provision of therapeutic healthy-limb amputation in cases of BIID make appeals to the envisioned harms that such an intervention would cause, harms such as the creation of a lifelong physical disability where none existed before. However, this concept of harm is often based on a normative biomedical model of (...) health and disability, a model which conflates amputation with impairment, and impairment with a disability. This article challenges the prima facie harms assumed to be inherent in limb amputation and argues in favour of a potential treatment option for those with BIID. To do this, it employs the social model of disability as a means to separate the concept of impairment and disability and thereby separate the acute and chronic harms of the practice of therapeutic healthy-limb amputation. It will then argue that provided sufficient measures are put in place to ensure that those with atypical bodily constructions are not disadvantaged, the chronic harms of elective amputation would cease to be. (shrink)