At least since Descartes, philosophers have been interested in the special knowledge or authority that we exhibit when we speak about our own thoughts, attitudes, and feelings. This book contends that even the best work in contemporary philosophy of mind fails to account for this sort of knowledge or authority because it does not pay the right sort of attention to the notion of expression. What's at stake is not only how to understand self-knowledge and first-person authority, but also what (...) it is that distinguishes conscious from unconscious psychological states, what the mental life of a nonlinguistic animal has in common with our sort of mental life, and how to think about Wittgenstein's legacy to the philosophy of mind. (shrink)

On a view that emerges from the “law and economics movement,” the purpose of law is to ensure that when individual citizens seek to maximize their individual utility, they will incidentally maximize society’s utility; the law ideally provides individual agents with incentives for efficient behavior. Finkelstein argues that laws that maximize social utility are not necessarily the best legal rules for individuals that seek to maximize their personal utility. In particular, she suggests that ideally rational individuals would be unlikely (...) to select the principle of utility maximization as the basis for choosing ideal legal rules. If Finkelstein is correct, the assumption that human beings are rational utility maximizers would have very different consequences from those that legal economists have identified. Rational actor theory would be more likely to lead us to justify legal rules structured around contractarian principles, i.e., principles of agreement, than around the principle of utility maximization. (shrink)

Claude Bernard (1813–1878) and Emil du Bois-Reymond (1818–1896) rank as two of the most influential scientists of the nineteenth century. Renowned for their experiments, lectures, and writing, Bernard and du Bois-Reymond earned great prestige as professors of physiology in a time when Paris and Berlin reigned as capitals of science. Yet even though they were equals in every way, du Bois-Reymond’s reputation has fallen far more than Bernard’s. This essay compares aspects of the two men’s attitudes to philosophy, history, and (...) biology in an attempt to explain why Bernard remains the better known. The answer lies less in the value of du Bois-Reymond’s contributions than in the way that science is remembered in France and Germany. (shrink)

This book explores the puzzling phenomenon of new veiling practices among lower middle class women in Cairo, Egypt.

Ausgehend von einer Bestimmung der ästhetischen Erfahrung als Erfahrung der Art und Weise der sinnlichen Gegebenheit von Gegenständen und Umwelten geht der vorliegende Text der Frage nach den Spezifika alltagsästhetischen Erfahrens nach. Dabei wird zunächst die alltagsästhetische Einstellung als eine fest in den handelnden Vollzug gewohnter Praktiken und Routinen eingebettete Wahrnehmungshaltung bestimmt. In einem nächsten Schritt werden charakteristische Merkmale alltagsästhetischen Erfahrens herausgearbeitet: Zu nennen sind die Wahrnehmung von – theoretisch näher zu beschreibenden – Ganzheiten, die Kategorien des Vertrauten, des Rhythmus (...) und des Takts sowie schließlich das Zusammenspiel aller Sinne. Die abschließenden Überlegungen widmen sich der engen Verbindung von moralischen, ästhetischen und funktionalen Erfahrungen und Urteilen im Raum des Alltäglichen. (shrink)

Background: The vascular depression hypothesis emphasizes the significance of vascular lesions in late-life depression. At present, no meta-analytic model has investigated whether a difference in hyperintensity burden compared to controls between late-life and late-onset depression is evident. By including a substantial number of studies, focusing on a meaningful outcome measure, and considering several moderating and control variables, the present meta-analysis investigates the severity of hyperintensity burden in major depressive disorder (MDD) and bipolar disorder (BD). A major focus of the present (...) meta-analysis refers to the role of age at illness onset. It is analyzed whether late-onset rather than late-life depression characterizes vascular depression. Method: In total, 68 studies were included in the meta-analysis and a multilevel random effects model was calculated using Hedges’ g as the effect size measure. Results: The severity of hyperintensity burden was significantly greater in the patient group compared to the control group. This effect was evident regarding the whole patient group (g = 0.229) as well as both depression subgroups, with a significantly greater effect in BD (g = 0.374) compared to MDD (g = 0.189). Hyperintensity burden was more pronounced in late-onset depression than in early-onset depression or late-life depression. A considerable heterogeneity between the included studies was observed, which is reflected by the large variability in effects sizes. Conclusion: In conclusion, the present meta-analysis underscores the association of hyperintensities with MDD and BD. Especially late-onset depression is associated with an increased hyperintensity burden, which is in line with the vascular depression hypothesis. The results suggest that it might be more feasible to confine the concept of vascular depression specifically to late-onset depression as opposed to late-life depression. Further research is needed to understand the causal mechanisms that might underlie the relation between hyperintensity burden and depression. (shrink)

A definition is proposed to give precise meaning to the counterfactual statements that often appear in discussions of the implications of quantum mechanics. Of particular interest are counterfactual statements which involve events occurring at space-like separated points, which do not have an absolute time ordering. Some consequences of this definition are discussed.

The great powers of regeneration shown by freshwater planarians, capable of regenerating a complete organism from any tiny body fragment, have attracted the interest of scientists throughout history. In 1814, Dalyell concluded that planarians could “almost be called immortal under the edge of the knife”. Equally impressive is the developmental plasticity of these platyhelminthes, including continuous growth and fission (asexual reproduction) in well‐fed organisms, and shrinkage (degrowth) during prolonged starvation. The source of their morphological plasticity and regenerative capability is a (...) stable population of totipotent stem cells—“neoblasts”; this is the only cell type in the adult that has mitotic activity and differentiates into all cell types. This cellular feature is unique to planarians in the Bilateria clade. Over the last fifteen years, molecular studies have begun to reveal the role of developmental genes in regeneration, although it would be premature to propose a molecular model for planarian regeneration. Genomic and proteomic data are essential in answering some of the fundamental questions concerning this remarkable morphological plasticity. Such information should also pave the way to understanding the genetic pathways associated with metazoan somatic stem‐cell regulation and pattern formation. BioEssays 28: 546–559, 2006. © 2006 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. (shrink)

In recent years, global corporations and national governments have been enacting a growing number of codes of conduct and public regulations to combat dangerous and degrading work conditions in global supply chains. At the receiving end of this activity, local producers must contend with multiple regulatory regimes, but it is unclear how these regimes interact and what results, if any, they produce. This article examines this dynamic in the sugar sector in Brazil. It finds that although private and public agents (...) rarely communicate, let alone coordinate with one another, they nevertheless reinforce each other’s actions. Public regulators use their legal powers to outlaw extreme forms of outsourcing. Private auditors use the trust they command as company insiders to instigate a process of workplace transformation that facilitates compliance. Together, their parallel actions block the low road and guide targeted firms to a higher road in which improved labor standards are not only possible but even desirable. (shrink)

Six variations on the Sleeping beauty theme are presented.

In recent years, there has been a surge in popularity of the fair-trade industry, which seeks to improve trading conditions and to promote the rights of marginalized workers. Although research suggests that fair-trade products are perceived as promoting social and economic responsibility, some individuals—namely, those who seek to maintain existing group inequalities or those induced to think inequality is a good thing—may not share this perception. Across three studies, we found that SDO relates negatively to fair-trade consumption, and this relationship (...) is mediated by the tendency for high-SDO individuals to see fair-trade products as less compatible with their conception of social justice. Our findings held after controlling for related individual-differences variables, and regardless of whether SDO was measured or manipulated. Implications for how to maximize the likelihood that people will perceive fair-trade products as “fair” are discussed. (shrink)

European Journal of Philosophy, Volume 29, Issue 1, Page 256-259, March 2021.

Backstory of "The Man Who Would Be King." A meditation on the limits of scientific and historical representation.

The late 19th-century Ignorabimus controversy over the limits of scientific knowledge has often been characterized as proclaiming the end of intellectual progress, and by implication, as plunging Germany into a crisis of pessimism from which Liberalism never recovered. My research supports the opposite interpretation. The initiator of the Ignorabimus controversy, Emil du Bois-Reymond, was a physiologist who worked his whole life against the forces of obscurantism, whether they came from the Catholic and Conservative Right or the scientistic and millenarian Left. (...) Du Bois-Reymond’s doubt that scientists would ever elucidate consciousness must therefore be seen as an endorsement, and not a rejection, of his faith in reason. (shrink)

The literature on rights in both moral and legal philosophy is voluminous, so voluminous that there may seem to be little justification for one more symposium to swell its ranks. But the discussion of rights has been fairly tightly organized around several narrow topics of debate, among them whether rights should be explained in terms of interests or choices, 1 whether rights are strictly correlative with duties, 2 and the relation between rights and utility. 3 The inspiration for the present (...) symposium is the sense that one topic of central importance has generally been given short shrift: the question of whether rights can conflict. There is, of course, a perfectly good explanation for why this topic has received so little attention; namely that contemporary rights theorists have generally assumed that rights cannot conflict. 4 But this assumption seems to be out of keeping with the way people commonly speak about rights as well as the way in which rights are usually understood in our constitutional tradition. (shrink)