Kant’s essay Idea for a universal history with a cosmopolitan purpose differs in deep ways from standard Enlightenment views of human history. Although he agrees with many contemporaries that unsocial sociability can drive human progress, he argues that we know too little about the trends of history to offer either metaphysical defence or empirical vindication of the perfectibility of man or the inevitability of progress. However, as freely acting beings we can contribute to a better future, so have grounds for (...) committing ourselves to human progress even if we cannot guarantee or know that it will continue indefinitely. As Kant sees, it, human progress is better seen as a practical assumption—an Idea of Reason—than as a theoretical claim.Keywords: Cosmopolitanism; Historical trends; Ideas of Reason; Immanuel Kant; Philosophy of history; Optimism; Pessimism; Progress; Unsocial sociability. (shrink)

BackgroundSocial support plays an important role for health outcomes. Support for those living with chronic conditions may be particularly important for their health, and even for their survival. The role of support for the survival of cancer patients after receiving an allogeneic hematopoietic cell transplant is understudied. To better understand the link between survival and support, as well as different sources and functions of support, we conducted two studies in alloHCT patients. First, we examined whether social support is related (...) to survival. Second, we examined who provides which support and which specific support-related functions and tasks are fulfilled by lay caregivers and healthcare professionals.MethodsIn Study 1, we conducted a retrospective chart review of alloHCT patients and registered availability of a dedicated lay caregiver and survival. In Study 2, we prospectively followed patients after alloHCT from the same hospital, partly overlapping from Study 1, who shared their experiences of support from lay caregivers and healthcare providers in semi-structured in-depth interviews 3 to 6 months after their first hospital discharge.ResultsPatients with a dedicated caregiver had a higher probability of surviving to 100 days than patients without a caregiver, OR = 2.84, p = 0.042. Study 2 demonstrated the importance of post-transplant support due to patients’ emotional needs and complex self-care regimen. The role of lay caregivers extended to many areas of patients’ daily lives, including support for attending doctor’s appointments, managing medications and financial tasks, physical distancing, and maintaining strict dietary requirements. Healthcare providers mainly fulfilled medical needs and provided informational support, while lay caregivers were the main source of emotional and practical support.ConclusionThe findings highlight the importance of studying support from lay caregivers as well as healthcare providers, to better understand how they work together to support patients’ adherence to recommended self-care and survival. (shrink)

This article seeks to provide some support for the troublesome report of Damascius in the De Principiis that, for Porphyry, the first principle is the Father of the Noetic Triad—and thus more closely implicated with the realm of Intellect and Being than would seem proper for a Neoplatonist and faithful follower of Plotinus. And yet there is evidence from other sources that Porphyry did not abandon the concept of a One above Being. A clue to the complexity of the (...) situation may be provided by a passage from Proclus (In Parm. 1070, 155ff. Cousin) which criticises him for making the One the subject also of the Second Hypothesis of the Parmenides. Here, I consider a series of passages from Porphyry's Sententiae which seem to indicate a doctrine of the One essentially faithful to that of Plotinus, but modulated in the direction of closer linkage to the levels of reality below it. (shrink)

One response to the chronic shortage of organs for transplant in the United States has been the passage of laws establishing first-person authorization for donation of organs, providing legal grounds for the retrieval of organs and tissues from registered donors, even over the objections of their next of kin. The ethical justification for first-person authorization is that it is a matter of respecting the donor’s wishes. The objection of some next of kin may be that the donor would (...) not have wished for his or her loved ones to have their preferences overridden, had they considered that possibility. This article examines the basis of the conflict and suggests a remedy grounded in the provision of donor-intent options that have the ability to clarify the donor’s wishes. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Plato and Aristotle in Agreement? Platonists on Aristotle from Antiochus to PorphyryR. M. DancyGeorge E. Karamanolis. Plato and Aristotle in Agreement? Platonists on Aristotle from Antiochus to Porphyry. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2006. Pp. x + 419. Cloth, $125.00.Coleridge wrote: “Every man is born an Aristotelian or a Platonist. I do not think it possible that anyone born an Aristotelian can become a Platonist; and I am sure that (...) no born Platonist can ever change into an Aristotelian. They are two classes of man, beside which it is next to impossible to conceive a third.”Ancient Platonists could not be counted on to accept this kind of dichotomy, and that is what Karamanolis’s book is about. (It may be usefully compared with Lloyd P. Gerson’s 2005 book, Aristotle and Other Platonists.) It covers Antiochus (second century BC), Plutarch [End Page 634] of Chaeronea, Numenius, Atticus, Ammonius Saccas, Plotinus, and Porphyry (third century AD). And it does so with incredible thoroughness, making it a tough read. The book began as a dissertation; it still has something of the air of one.The longest chapter is devoted to Porphyry, whom Karamanolis claims to be the first Platonist to write commentaries on books of Aristotle, and the first to adopt the view that Aristotle simply was in agreement with Plato—the founder of a tradition in scholarship to the effect that “Plato is named as the authority in metaphysics, and Aristotle in logic” (330). His concluding paragraph is this:It is this understanding of philosophizing which lies behind the formation of the Pla-tonist syllabus I described in the beginning of this book. This remains the situation until the Renaissance. When Renaissance humanists revive ancient philosophy, especially Platonism, as happened in Renaissance Florence, they re-establish this very model. Few other shifts in the history of Western philosophy are of such significance as the one which we, quite rightly, attribute to Porphyry.(330)The “Platonist syllabus” to which Karamanolis here adverts is perhaps summed up when he says that “from the third to the sixth century AD... Aristotle was appropriated by Platonists because they found his philosophy, if properly studied, a prerequisite for, and conducive to, an understanding of Plato’s thought” (4). More precisely, Karamanolis’s book is about Porphyry’s view and the background of its formation.Answering Karamanolis’s title question is not what is at stake; rather, he is concerned with how the Platonists listed above answered it. So we are not getting a history of the reading of Plato and Aristotle as agreeing or disagreeing from the very beginning. The early Academy and the skeptical Academy before Antiochus, for example, do not figure, except incidentally, in Karamanolis’s story (although there is a useful appendix on the early peripatetics). There is enough here to keep us busy without this.Dealing with any of Karamanolis’s Platonists is made more difficult by the nature of the material that remains: except for Plutarch and Plotinus, it is almost entirely fragmentary. So it is a question of interpreting not just the target authors, whose works we do not possess, but the sources we have for them, who have their own hobby-horses to ride, and hence are not always reliable. Karamanolis pays suitable attention to such details. But the back-and-forth discussion required can make it difficult to keep the larger picture in view.Karamanolis’s Platonists do not uniformly go for the agreement of Plato and Aristotle. As Karamanolis has it, Porphyry is the only one to swallow it whole: “... nowhere does Porphyry criticize Aristotle,” he concludes (322). This requires him to explain away what he regards as misunderstandings of the evidence (243–45 records some disagreements, and the Porphyry chapter throughout is dedicated to rebuttal). Karamanolis is at least prima facie convincing. At the opposite end of the spectrum are Atticus and Numenius, whose antipathy toward Aristotle is universal.For the rest, whether we are to say that Plato and Aristotle were in agreement obviously depends on what the agreement is to be about. There is, among Karamanolis’s Platonists, a good deal of interesting variation over that. Most of those who... (shrink)

I aspire to answer two questions regarding the concept of a corrective duty. The first concerns what it means to wrong others, thus triggering a demand for corrections (the ground question). The second relates to the proper content of corrective duties. I first illustrate how three prominent accounts of corrective duties—the Aristotelian model of correlativity, the Kantian idea that wronging corresponds to the violation of others’ right to freedom, and the more recent continuity view—have failed to answer the (...) two questions satisfactorily. I then introduce my proposal, which holds that we wrong others when we fail to treat their status as moral agents as a source of stringent constraints on our action. I call it the moral neglect account. Once we have identified a common aim of corrective duties (counterbalancing moral neglect), we can fill their content in the various contexts in which wronging has occurred. I conclude by observing that it is not the primary role of corrective justice to assign responsibilities for damage reparations; in fact, requests for compensation make more sense if framed in distributive rather than corrective terms. (shrink)

When its atmosphere processing plant's fusion reactor exploded, it turned it into a desolate, irradiated hunk of rock uninhabitable by humans for thousands of years. The explosion was not far off from what the surviving humans in Aliens were planning anyway: nuke the site from orbit. To set the stage for considering the military decisions of Colonial Marines from an ethical perspective, strap in like it's a simulated combat drop from low orbit. This chapter looks at the Aliens future of (...) the twenty‐second century. After the first tragic encounter with the Xenos in Aliens, the remaining humans are trying to figure out their next steps in the back of the armored personnel carrier (APC). Many of the ideas being tossed around in the APC (even slimy Carter Burke's) keep the Xenos distant and so actually reduce the threat, backing the humans away from the need to make decisions in a “supreme emergency”. (shrink)

The first volume in a landmark commentary on an important and influential work of ancient philosophy This is the first volume of a groundbreaking commentary on one of the most important works of ancient philosophy, the Enneads of Plotinus—a text that formed the basis of Neoplatonism and had a deep influence on early Christian thought and medieval and Renaissance philosophy. This volume covers the first three of the six Enneads, as well as Porphyry's Life of Plotinus, a (...) document in which Plotinus’s student—the collector and arranger of the Enneads—introduces the philosopher and his work. A landmark contribution to modern Plotinus scholarship, Paul Kalligas’s commentary is the most detailed and extensive ever written for the whole of the Enneads. For each of the treatises in the first three Enneads, Kalligas provides a brief introduction that presents the philosophical background against which Plotinus’s contribution can be assessed; a synopsis giving the main lines and the articulation of the argument; and a running commentary placing Plotinus’s thought in its intellectual context and making evident the systematic association of its various parts with each other. (shrink)

The first volume in a landmark commentary on an important and influential work of ancient philosophy This is the first volume of a groundbreaking commentary on one of the most important works of ancient philosophy, the Enneads of Plotinus—a text that formed the basis of Neoplatonism and had a deep influence on early Christian thought and medieval and Renaissance philosophy. This volume covers the first three of the six Enneads, as well as Porphyry's Life of Plotinus, a (...) document in which Plotinus’s student—the collector and arranger of the Enneads—introduces the philosopher and his work. A landmark contribution to modern Plotinus scholarship, Paul Kalligas’s commentary is the most detailed and extensive ever written for the whole of the Enneads. For each of the treatises in the first three Enneads, Kalligas provides a brief introduction that presents the philosophical background against which Plotinus’s contribution can be assessed; a synopsis giving the main lines and the articulation of the argument; and a running commentary placing Plotinus’s thought in its intellectual context and making evident the systematic association of its various parts with each other. (shrink)

Although recent scholarship has begun to clarify Porphyry’s position on the first principle in its distinction from that of Plotinus we must be careful not to gloss over the crucial ramifications of Porphyry’s developments. The Plotinian One is beyond Being, and thus beyond all relation and difference. In his attempt to understand how such a principle can be productive of all else that follows from it, Porphyry considers the Plotinian One in both its transcendent and creative aspects, introducing the (...) notions of difference and self-relation within the One itself. Porphyry’s modifications of Plotinus’s doctrine, however, result in a first principle having a character utterly distinct from what Plotinus envisioned, and from what I believe Plotinus would have accepted. Because Porphyry’s first principle is relational, it loses its decisive Plotinian character as absolutely transcendent. This distinction between the first principles of Porphyry and Plotinus has important ramifications for each of their philosophical itineraria, and further strengthens the status of Plotinus within the Neoplatonic tradition. Plotinus is a unique thinker within the Neoplatonic tradition, and we must be careful not to equate Neoplatonism with Plotinus, when in fact, it is Plotinus who against both his own predecessors and successors often stands alone. (shrink)

Porphyry's Commentary, the only surviving ancient commentary on a technical text, is not merely a study of Ptolemy's Harmonics. It includes virtually free-standing philosophical essays on epistemology, metaphysics, scientific methodology, aspects of the Aristotelian categories and the relations between Aristotle's views and Plato's, and a host of briefer comments on other matters of wide philosophical interest. For musicologists it is widely recognised as a treasury of quotations from earlier treatises, many of them otherwise unknown; but Porphyry's own reflections on musical (...) concepts and his snapshots of contemporary music-making have been undeservedly neglected. This volume presents the first English translation and a revised Greek text of the Commentary, with an introduction and notes designed to assist readers in engaging with this important and intricate work. (shrink)

The debate on the Prophet’s parents’ (abawayn al-Rasūl) religious status and their position in the hereafter goes back to several narrations from the Prophet himself. This subject, which can principally be considered part of the problem of the religious status of ahl al-fatrah, seems to be raised by the Shīʿah as an issue of creed in line with their understanding of imamate. Abū Ḥanīfah’s (d. 150/767) statement in his al-Fiqh al-akbar that “Prophet’s parents passed away on kufr/jāhiliyyah” is seen as (...) a Sunnī reaction to this earlier position and led to a new area of discussion shaping the approach of several scholars to the issue. The earliest treatises dedicated to this issue are attributed to al-Ghazzālī (d. 505/1111) and Abū Bakr Ibn al-ʿArabī (d. 543/1148), but these works did not survive to this day. The earliest examples available today are the six epistles that al-Suyūṭī (d. 911/1505) penned. Literature on the Prophet’s parents flourished during the Ottoman times after the introduction of al-Fiqh al-akbar to the Ottoman scholarship. Starting with the first examples that belong to Ibrāhīm al-Ḥalabī (d. 956/1549), Ibn al-Khaṭīb al-Amāsī (d. 940/1534), and Kamālpashazādah (d. 940/1534), the treatises in question were mostly written in Arabic in the Ottoman scholarly milieu. Consequently, it seems that Rawḍat al-ṣafā fī wāliday al-Muṣṭafá is the first treatise dedicated to the issue in Ottoman Turkish. In the library catalogue records, some bio-bibliographical sources, and consequently in some modern studies on the issue of abawayn al-Rasūl, Rawḍat al-ṣafā wrongly attributed to a certain Wajdī Aḥmad Efendī (in Turkish: Vecdî Ahmed Efendi). This is probably due to the author’s presentation of himself in the introduction as just “Wajdī,” without making further description. Besides the data in Bursalı Meḥmed Ṭāhir’s Osmanlı Müʾellifleri, no more information could be provided about the identity of Wajdī Aḥmad Efendī who is shown as the author of the treatise. Intra-textual signs such as the author’s words about the reason and process of writing the work, the way he handled the subject and the evidence he put forward indicate that the treatise belongs to Nūḥ ibn Muṣṭafá al-Qūnawī (d. 1070/1660). Indeed, it overlaps with the fact that Nūḥ ibn Muṣṭafá presented himself as Wajdī in many of his other works. Seemingly the fact that Nūḥ ibn Muṣṭafá defends the view that the parents of the Prophet are among the people of salvation (ahl al-najāh), and while doing this, he was mainly based on the view that they were resurrected after death and that their souls are recaptured after they believed in the Prophet, stem from various reasons such as the view that attributed to Abū Ḥanīfah, Nūḥ’s Sufi identity to the extent that he was initiated to the Khalwatiyyah/Gulshaniyyah along with the ever-growing Sufi influences and the consequent idea of nūr-i Muḥammadī in the public sphere, the authority of the narrations attributed to the Prophet, and perception about the Prophet Muḥammed in the public imagination. (shrink)

To identify Porphyry’s place in the Neoplatonic tradition is not only to contribute to our understanding of the development of Neoplatonism between Plotinus and Proclus, but is also to clarify our perspective on the last Greek philosopher to be known in, and to influence to an important degree, Latin thought in the later Roman Empire and in the early Medieval period. In this revised version of a University of Hull doctoral dissertation, Smith attempts to characterize Porphyry’s philosophical positions, as compared (...) with those taken by Plotinus, Iamblichus, and Proclus, with particular reference to theories concerning the "ascent" and "salvation" of the soul, insofar as these theories are attested in the traditional—and meagre—corpus of Porphyrian fragments and testimonia. In the first part of his book, Smith reviews Porphyry’s opinions regarding the nature of soul, its relation to body, its separation from body, its ascent to the transcendent realm, its fate after death, and related eschatological topics. Porphyry’s thought is considered against a background of extensive reference to Plotinus. Smith finds both philosophers at one on a large number of issues. However, Porphyry, he thinks, gives more attention to the place of natural death in the life of the soul, locating the life of the soul more precisely within the framework of the Platonic cycle of reincarnation, whilst at the same time making allowance for the possibility of permanent escape from this cycle. In the second part of the book, the author examines "theurgy," insofar as Porphyry seems to have made use of it in his theories concerning the "salvation" of the soul. This subject is of particular interest, as it relates to what seems characteristic of later Neoplatonism: an interest in religious and magical practices, taken by modern interpreters to represent a "sacrifice" by Neoplatonism of the tradition of "Greek rationalism." Smith shows that Neoplatonic theurgy, in the form in which Porphyry introduced it, represents a development of aspects of Plotinism, [[sic]] and must be distinguished from the practices of the charlatans who gave it its notoriety. In dealing with theurgy, Smith clarifies Porphyry’s position by approaching it from the more developed positions of Iamblichus and of Proclus. Neoplatonic theurgy seems to originate in Plotinus’ views on the role of transcendent causality in the elevation of the soul. A religious expression of this is provided by Porphyry, together with an emphasis on man’s need of divine "aid" which is radicalized in Iamblichus. Smith maintains that Porphyry nevertheless remained wary of, and restricted, the role of theurgy in the salvation of the soul. The "sacrifice" of philosophy to religious belief he finds to have come later, with Iamblichus. A Postscript examines the Neoplatonists’ attitudes to the actual performance of magic, and a Conclusion gives a careful summary of results attained in the book, which ends with two Appendices, a Bibliography, and Indices. (shrink)

Massimiliano Tomba’s Insurgent Universality traces a global history of revolutionary institution-building as ‘theory in action’, pushing radical democracy beyond an ontology of the political. This contribution aims to clarify the place of ‘insurgent institutions’ in Tomba’s work and suggests that an unresolved tension persists between insurgent universality as popular institutions on the one hand, and as a negative dis-ordering on the other. Exploring the promise and limitations of ‘insurgent institutions’ in light of their durability, its first part reads Insurgent (...) Universality alongside Santi Romano, the legal pluralist whose concept of the institution Tomba adopts. Secondly, the article turns to Hannah Arendt’s understanding of authority and Miguel Abensour’s discussion of ‘insurgent institutions’ as two potentially helpful accounts of democratic practice within durational time. Where Tomba remains focused on constellations between moments of rupture, Arendt and Abensour offer a politically generative understanding of durability specific to radical-democratic institutions. (shrink)

The Enneads by Plotinus is a work which is central to the history of philosophy in late antiquity. This volume is the first complete edition of the Enneads in English for over seventy-five years, and also includes Porphyry's Life of Plotinus. Led by Lloyd P. Gerson, a team of experts present up-to-date translations which are based on the best available text, the editio minor of Henry and Schwyzer and its corrections. The translations are consistent in their vocabulary, making the (...) volume ideal for the study of Plotinus' philosophical arguments. They also offer extensive annotation to assist the reader, together with cross-references and citations which will enable users more easily to navigate the texts. This monumental edition will be invaluable for scholars of Plotinus with or without ancient Greek, as well as for students of the Platonic tradition. (shrink)

The author's fascination with Me'Shell NdegeOcello's Leviticus: Faggot, is turned into an investigation in this chapter involving three basic questions. The first question interrogates the common thought that there is such a thing as black music, and asks what this music is, and what constitutes its blackness. The second question asks what this blackness is supposed to mean for music, by interrogating the familiar thought of Leopold Senghor: that blackness is somehow bound up with rhythm. The third question deals (...) with the way music's rhythms move us. Taking up Peter Kivy's questions in relation to rhythmic music is helpful, as it helps close the gap between the how‐possible and the how‐wondrous, and locate the point at which the preoccupations of analytical aesthetics overlap with the concerns of critical race aesthetics. The key to both moves lies in Kivy's argument against what he calls “the stimulus theory” of musical enjoyment. (shrink)

Many commentators lament that American democracy is in crisis. It is becoming a system of minority rule, wherein a party with a minority of the nationwide vote can control the national government. Partisan gerrymandering in the House of Representatives fuels this crisis, as does the equal representation of small and large states in the Senate. But altering these features of the legislature would not end minority rule. Indeed, it has long been held that majority rule cannot be guaranteed within any (...) district system, as a minority of voters nationwide can be efficiently distributed such that a minority party wins a majority of districts by narrow margins. -/- This Article offers a way to save majority rule. Since the way a party can gain control of the legislature with a minority of the vote is to win a majority of districts by narrow margins of victory and lose a minority of districts by large margins of victory, the solution is to make margins matter. Hence, this Article proposes that we preserve electoral districts in which the candidate with the most votes wins, while making the weight of their vote in the legislature (a representative’s “legislative power”) a function of margins of victory. The first goal of this Article is to outline how this proposal, which I call “weighted voting by margin of victory” (WVMV), retains the democratic virtues of district systems while ending minority rule. This is the first basis for the democratic imperative to make margins matter. -/- There is, however, a second basis for that same imperative, which turns on the political equality of voters. The U.S. Supreme Court has long held that the democratic equality should be understood in terms of equal voting power (one person, one vote). But when margins of victory don’t matter, the power of a vote lies exclusively in its potential decisiveness. A vote that changes the margin of victory without changing the victor is “wasted”. But it is an electoral reality that votes in competitive districts are more likely to be decisive, and votes in uncompetitive districts are more likely to be wasted; as a result, candidates and parties are more responsive to some voters than others. So voters are not political equals. They do not have equal voting power, except in an empty formalistic sense. By contrast, WVMV gives votes a second type of power. The power of a vote is to potentially decide who wins and to actually change the legislative power of the victor. Each vote, in effect, transfers a unit of political power to a democratic representative. This “transference” power can be meaningfully equalized between voters. A voter in an uncompetitive district is far less likely to change who wins, but is equally able to change the margin of victory, such that their vote is no longer wasted. This gives candidates and parties a strong reason to be more equally responsive to all voters who can change the margins. Hence, there is a democratic imperative to make margins matter, in order to give voters a meaningfully equal form of voting power. -/- The final goal of this Article is to explain how we can implement WMVM in modern democracies, focusing on three particularly challenging cases: the U.S. Senate, the Parliament of the United Kingdom, and the U.S. House of Representatives. These cases are challenging for several reasons, the most pertinent of which turn on the ways we should understand margins of victory when electorates are of unequal sizes (as in the U.S. Senate) or are contested by more than two parties (as in the U.K.) or are conducted under different voting procedures (as in many districts in the U.S. House). I argue that WVMV should be considered feasible in such contexts, and hence offers a practical, rather than purely theoretical, alternative to the status quo. (shrink)

A key figure in the history of Aristotelianism, Porphyry (AD 232/3 - c. 305) was born in Tyre and was a student of Longinus' in Athens and of Plotinus' in Rome. In his commentary on the Categories, Porphyry provided an authoritative interpretation of a notoriously controversial work. Commentators on Aristotle had disagreed fundamentally over whether the Categories was a work of logic, concerning simple terms or the simple concepts they represent, or a metaphysical work addressing the classification by genera of (...) simple entities or concepts. Approaching the Categories as the first of Aristotle's works in logic, Porphyry adopted an earlier Peripatetic view of the Categories as being concerned principally with terms or linguistic items, which he calls "predicates." He successfully defended the Categories against Plotinus, arguing that while it seemed to attack orthodox Platonism by denying the separation of forms and the ontological priority of the universal, it was in fact entirely compatible with Platonism. Because of Porphyry's intervention, the Categories came to serve as a basic textbook of logic for subsequent Neoplatonist teaching. His commentary influenced the Arabic tradition, and Boethius drew heavily on it as well. The full text of Porphyry's commentary was lost, but the extant version is available here in Steven K. Strange's new translation. Ancient philosophers, historians of philosophy, classicists, and medievalists will welcome its appearance in English. (shrink)

This paper asks about the ways in which embodimentoriented cognitive science contributes to our understanding of phenomenal consciousness. It is first argued that central work in the field of embodied cognitive science does not solve the hard problem of consciousness head on. It is then argued that an embodied turn toward neurophenomenology makes no distinctive headway on the puzzle of consciousness; for neurophenomenology either concedes dualism in the face of the hard problem or represents only a slight methodological variation (...) on extant cognitive-scientific approaches to the easy problems of consciousness. The paper closes with the positive suggestion that embodied cognitive science supports a different approach to phenomenal consciousness, according to which the mind is massively representational, cognitive science has no use for the personal-level posits that tend to drive philosophical theorizing about consciousness and mind, and the hard problem is illusory. (shrink)

Drawing on ancient writers, from Aesop to Ovid, classicist and working farmer, Mark Usher compiles in this book an anthology of Greco-Roman passages illustrating how they thought about animals and illuminating they might help us to rethink our relationships with them. Not many contemporary readers will know, for example, the compelling arguments the second century AD Greek philosopher Porphyry makes for vegetarianism, long before a plant-based diet began to garner headlines. Plutarch's serio-comic exposition of the rationality and inherent dignity of (...) non-human creatures-put on the lips of one of Circe's pigs-is so fresh that it sounds like it was formulated just yesterday. The knowledge the poet Theognis derived from Greek sponge divers about the behavior of octopods rivals our contemporary fascination with the octopus. Aristotle's introduction to the scientific study of animal morphology and behavior remains unparalleled for its elegance and insight, and it represents one of the first forays into natural history writing. Seneca, employing an ingenious etymological pun on the word animal, endeavors to show that we humans are morally inferior to our animal cousins, who instinctively know and are satisfied with their place in Nature. The Greeks and Romans, amidst all their magnificent cultural achievements and reckless, destructive behavior, lived closer than most of us to the perils and prospects of their environments. This afforded them a sensitivity to their environments and, in particular, to their fellow creatures that can perhaps help to disabuse us of our disconnectedness from animal life. This small volume demonstrates how astoundingly relevant the ancients still are in this regard. (shrink)

This paper represents one of the first critical social science interrogations of an agrifood just-in-case transition. The just-in-case transition speaks to a philosophy that values building buffers and flexibility into longer value chains to make them more resilient to shocks, which stands in contrast to the just-in-time philosophy with its emphasis on long, specialized, and often inflexible networks. Influenced by COVID-related disruptions and climate change induced uncertainties, the just-in-case transition examined here centers on the heightened interest in vertical (...) farm-anchored supply chains. Interviewing actors responsible for promoting vertical farm-anchored local supply chains in the US and Canada, I attempt to sketch out how these spaces, infrastructures, and practices care. Put differently, as understood through a feminist ethics of care, _whom_ and _what_ are cared for and _how_ is care practiced in these just-in-case transitions and _why_? Enumerative politics was observed in the data—the idea that we can make care count. Practices and discourses linked to infrastructural/supply chain transitions are highlighted that result in care being narrowly conceived as a technical or transactional matter. The paper concludes reflecting on what it means to afford just-in-case agrifood transitions animated by matters of care that hold greater emancipatory potentials. (shrink)

Obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) is a deeply enigmatic psychiatric condition associated with immense suffering worldwide. Efficacious therapies for OCD, like exposure and response prevention (ERP) are sometimes poorly tolerated by patients. As many as 25 percent of patients refuse to initiate ERP mainly because they are too anxious to follow exposure procedures. Accordingly, we proposed a simple and tolerable (immersive yet indirect) low-cost technique for treating OCD that we call “multisensory stimulation therapy.” This method involves contaminating a rubber hand during the (...) so-called “rubber hand illusion” (RHI) in which tactile sensations may be perceived as arising from a fake hand. Notably, Jalal and Ramachandran (2015), showed that such fake hand contamination during the RHI provokes powerful disgust reactions in healthy volunteers. In the current study, we explored the therapeutic potential of this novel approach. OCD patients (n = 29) watched as their hidden real hand was being stroked together with a visible fake hand; either synchronously (inducing the RHI) (i.e., the experimental condition; n = 16) or asynchronously (i.e., the control condition; n = 13). After 5 minutes of tactile stimulation, the rubber hand was contaminated with fake feces, simulating conventional exposure therapy. Intriguingly, results suggested sensory assimilation of contamination sensations into the body image via the RHI: patients undergoing synchronous stimulation did not report greater contamination sensations when the fake hand was initially contaminated relative to asynchronous stroking. But contrary to expectations, they did so after the rubber hand had been contaminated for 5 minutes; as assessed via disgust facial expressions (a secondary outcome) and in vivo exposure (upon discontinuing the illusion). Further to our surprise, synchronous and asynchronous stroking induced an equally vivid and fast emerging illusion, which helps explain why both conditions initially (5 minutes after initiating tactile stimulation) provoked contamination reactions of equal magnitude. This study is the first to suggest heightened malleability of body image in OCD. Importantly, it may pave the way for a tolerable technique for the treatment of OCD—highly suitable for poorly resourced and emergency settings, including low-income and developing countries with minimal access to high-tech solutions like virtual reality. (shrink)

"Abelard composed four works on logic: (1) Introductiones Parvulorum, which consists of short glosses on Porphyry Eisagoge and Aristotle Categories and De Interpretatione; (2) Logica Ingredientibus (so called because ingredientibus is the first word of its text), which consists of longer glosses on the texts covered by the previous work together with Boethius' De Differentiis Topicis and was probably written while Abelard was teaching in Paris before 1120; (3) Logica Nostrorum Petitioni (so called because nostrorum petitioni are the (...) class='Hi'>first words of its text), which consists of longer glosses on the Eisagoge and may date from the time of his teaching at the hermitage of the Paraclete; (4) Dialectica, which has the form of an independent work about the subjects covered by Boethius' logical writings and Victorinus' treatise De Definitionibus and seems to contain materials from different periods of Abelard's life but probably did not reach its final form until a late date, perhaps the time of his stay at Cluny shortly before his death. Of these the second and the fourth are the most valuable. The Dialectica indeed, though based, like that of Garland, chiefly on the works of Boethius and written with the prolixity which was all too common among medieval authors, is an original composition of great importance for the development of logic. Abelard's mind was the keenest (though not in all respects the most admirable) that had been devoted to the subject for more than a thousand years, and he approached his task with the belief that it was still possible to make discoveries: 'Non enim tanta fuit antiquorum scriptorum perfectio ut non et nostro doctrina indigeat studio, nec tantum in nobis mortalibus scientia potest crescere ut non ultra possit augmentum recipere.' (1) The Dialectica survives in a single manuscript which lacks the opening sections. Excerpts from it were published by Victor Cousin in 1836 in his Ouvrages inédits d' Abelard. But unfortunately the text was not printed in full until 1956, and before that date it was therefore not possible to appreciate the magnitude of Abelard's contribution to the doctrines we regard as characteristically medieval.. (shrink)

The thesis deals with a section of the major philosophical summa by Avicenna (Ibn Sīnā, d. 1037), namely the Book of the Healing (Kitāb al-Šifāʾ). The summa is structured into four parts, devoted to Logic, Natural Philosophy, Mathematics and Metaphysics; the section at stake is Avicenna’s reworking of Porphyry’s Isagoge (Kitāb al-Madḫal, i.e. “Book of the Introduction”) opening the section of Logic of the Šifāʾ. The thesis is articulated into three main parts, namely (i) an edition of the Arabic text (...) of Avicenna’s Madḫal, (ii) an English translation and (iii) a systematic commentary; these three main parts are preceded by an Introduction (0) divided into two halves: (0a) a General Introduction focused on the doctrinal major innovations of the work and (0b) an Introduction to the Edition of the text, which offers a first comprehensive study of its direct and early indirect tradition and explains the criteria of the edition. (i) The only previous edition of Avicenna’s Madḫal was the one printed in Cairo in 1952 (then reprinted in Tehran in 1983 and in Beirut in 1993), based on ten manuscripts. The huge manuscript tradition of Avicenna’s Madḫal – and, more in general, of Avicenna’s Book of the Healing – is still a matter of investigation. According to the provisional results of the bibliographical research conducted in the present work, it can be estimated that the manuscript tradition of the Madḫal amounts to at least 119 certain witnesses and 14 possible additional witnesses (as explained in the Introduction to the edition, 0b). The text of the Cairo edition, far from being representative of the whole textual tradition, was reconstructed on the basis of ten manuscripts that were not selected on the basis of philological criteria and whose reciprocal stemmatic relations were not clear. Although a critical edition based on all the 119 certain witnesses of the work exceeds the scope of the present work, the edition provided in the thesis takes into account a larger number of manuscripts than the Cairo edition did and, most importantly, selects them by means of a preliminary collation made on portions of the text. The purpose of this preliminary collation is making the selection of the manuscripts employed less arbitrary and providing a reconstruction of their stemmatic relations (in the Introduction, 0b). Overall, 32 manuscripts among the 68 inspected were employed in the edition here proposed, 21 of which were systematically collated and 11 were eliminated as codices descripti. The present edition also assumes as a witness the twelfth-century Latin translation of the work, which is, at the present moment, among the earliest extant witnesses of the text. Hopefully, this editorial work allowed us to improve the text of the Cairo edition in a number of points that are crucial to the correct understanding of Avicenna’s argumentation. (ii) As this project started, complete translations of Avicenna’s Madḫal in modern languages were only available in Turkish and Russian. Chapters of the work had also been translated in other languages, but an English translation of the whole work was still a desideratum. A complete English translation is provided in the thesis, based on the newly-established Arabic text of the work and aiming at preserving the major possible consistency in rendering the relevant philosophical terms. As a complement to the translation, an apparatus of notes is offered to facilitate the immediate understanding of the text. (iii) The third section of the thesis consists in a systematic commentary on Avicenna’s Madḫal, which is meant to support a deeper understanding of the text in its entirety. The commentary deals with both historical and philosophical aspects; more in detail, it includes an analysis and an identification, when possible, of Avicenna’s sources, and underlines the points of major philosophical interest of the work, which are dealt in a more comprehensive manner in the General Introduction (0a). (shrink)

What would something unlike us--a chimpanzee, say, or a computer--have to be able to do to qualify as a possible knower, like us? To answer this question at the very heart of our sense of ourselves, philosophers have long focused on intentionality and have looked to language as a key to this condition. Making It Explicit is an investigation into the nature of language--the social practices that distinguish us as rational, logical creatures--that revises the very terms of this inquiry. Where (...) accounts of the relation between language and mind have traditionally rested on the concept of representation, this book sets out an alternate approach based on inference, and on a conception of certain kinds of implicit assessment that become explicit in language. Making It Explicit is the first attempt to work out in detail a theory that renders linguistic meaning in terms of use--in short, to explain how semantic content can be conferred on expressions and attitudes that are suitably caught up in social practices. -/- At the center of this enterprise is a notion of discursive commitment. Being able to talk--and so in the fullest sense being able to think--is a matter of mastering the practices that govern such commitments, being able to keep track of one’s own commitments and those of others. Assessing the pragmatic significance of speech acts is a matter of explaining the explicit in terms of the implicit. As he traces the inferential structure of the social practices within which things can be made conceptually explicit, the author defines the distinctively expressive role of logical vocabulary. This expressive account of language, mind, and logic is, finally, an account of who we are. (shrink)

The four papers in this volume arise out of a research project, “Making Visible: The visual and graphic practices of the early Royal Society,” funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council of the United Kingdom.1 The project sought to understand how visual resources and practices contributed to, and shaped the development and dissemination of scientific knowledge in the first fifty years of the Royal Society. The Royal Society, as an early institution dedicated to promoting natural knowledge, has received (...) substantial scholarly attention from historians of science, aided by a rich administrative archive that has been preserved virtually unbroken since its foundation.2 Because modern cataloguing of manuscripts... (shrink)

The critical narrative of this interdisciplinary book offers a first-time look at the interrelationship between biology, mythology and philosophy in human development. Its daring premise follows the trajectory of human thought, starting with the biological roots of fear and the original need for religion, truth-seeking, and myth-making. The narrative then innovatively links a number of maverick philosophical teachings over the centuries, from pre-Buddhist times to the Buddha, from Epicurus and Pyrrho to Lucretius, and eventually to the seminal poetry of (...) Omar Khayyam. These emergent philosophies exemplified liberation from the grasp of mythical and religious thinking and instead espoused an empirical and joyful mind. The narrative concludes with a look at the emancipating philosophical movement that resulted in the European Enlightenment, and it suggests that the philosophical teachings explored in the book may offer the potential for a second, broader Enlightenment. (shrink)

This book presents the first collection of essays on the philosophy of Ueda Shizuteru in a Western language. Ueda, the last living member of the Kyoto school, has fostered the East-West dialogue in all his works and has helped to open up the Western image of philosophy by engaging the Zen tradition. The book reflects this particular trait of Ueda’s philosophy, but it also covers all thematic fields of his writings. Contributions from both young and established scholars and experts (...) from Japan, Europe and the U.S. make this a unique introduction to and reception of Ueda’s philosophy. Readers will discover discussions of mysticism in the East and West, and consideration of modern philosophy topics including self-awareness, nature and poetic language. The book also presents a focussed look at language and nothingness, considering silence and nihilism. Chapters allow the reader to understand the timeliness of a thinking that mediates and transcends the dichotomy of East and West. This volume will appeal not only to scholars of Nishida, Japanese philosophy, mysticism and religious experience in Japan, but also to scholars of Western philosophy, especially those interested in Meister Eckhart, Martin Heidegger and Martin Buber. It makes an ideal introduction to Zen philosophy and presents important contributions to scholarship on language and experience. (shrink)

BackgroundBreakthroughs in animal studies make the topic of human application of ectogenesis for medical and non-medical purposes more relevant than ever before. While current data do not yet demonstrate a reasonable expectation of clinical benefit soon, several groups are investigating the feasibility of artificial uteri for extracorporeal human gestation.Main textThis paper offers the first comprehensive and up to date discussion of the most important pros and cons of human ectogenesis in light of clinical application, along with an examination (...) of crucial ethical (and legal) issues that continued research into, and the clinical translation of, ectogenesis gives rise to. The expected benefits include advancing prenatal medicine, improving neonatal intensive care, and providing a novel pathway towards biological parenthood. This comes with important future challenges. Prior to human application, important questions have to be considered concerning translational research, experimental use of human fetuses and appropriate safety testing. Key questions are identified regarding risks to ectogenesis’ subjects, and the physical impact on the pregnant person when transfer from the uterus to the artificial womb is required. Critical issues concerning proportionality have to be considered, also in terms of equity of access, relative to the envisaged application of ectogenesis. The advent of ectogenesis also comes with crucial issues surrounding abortion, extended fetal viability and moral status of the fetus.ConclusionsThe development of human ectogenesis will have numerous implications for clinical practice. Prior to human testing, close consideration should be given to whether (and how) ectogenesis can be introduced as a continuation of existing neonatal care, with due attention to both safety risks to the fetus and pressures on pregnant persons to undergo experimental and/or invasive procedures. Equally important is the societal debate about the acceptable applications of ectogenesis and how access to these usages should be prioritized. It should be anticipated that clinical availability of ectogenesis, possibly first as a way to save extremely premature fetuses, may spark demand for non-medical purposes, like avoiding physical and social burdens of pregnancy. (shrink)

This paper intends to recover the “phenomenological” basis of Sartre’s trajectory since his very first reception of Edmund Husserl’s and Martin Heidegger’s philosophies until the moment in which the main synthesis of his existentialism is published, entitled Being and Nothingness (1943). In this sense, the paper situates the status of Husserl’s and Heidegger’s phenomenologies for Sartrean thought, as well as the originality of Being and Nothingness, which is also influenced by a very particular interpretation of Hegelian negation.

We often assume that religious beliefs are no different in kind from ordinary factual beliefs—that believing in the existence of God or of supernatural entities that hear our prayers is akin to believing that May comes before June. Neil Van Leeuwen shows that, in fact, these two forms of belief are strikingly different. Our brains do not process religious beliefs like they do beliefs concerning mundane reality; instead, empirical findings show that religious beliefs function like the imaginings that guide (...) class='Hi'>make-believe play. -/- Van Leeuwen argues that religious belief—which he terms religious “credence”—is best understood as a form of imagination that people use to define the identity of their group and express the values they hold sacred. When a person pretends, they navigate the world by consulting two maps: the first represents mundane reality, and the second superimposes the features of the imagined world atop the first. Drawing on psychological, linguistic, and anthropological evidence, Van Leeuwen posits that religious communities operate in much the same way, consulting a factual-belief map that represents ordinary objects and events and a religious-credence map that accords these objects and events imagined sacred and supernatural significance. -/- It is hardly controversial to suggest that religion has a social function, but Religion as Make-Believe breaks new ground by theorizing the underlying cognitive mechanisms. Once we recognize that our minds process factual and religious beliefs in fundamentally different ways, we can gain deeper understanding of the complex individual and group psychology of religious faith. [Abstract writing credit: book editor Andrew Kinney, HUP]. (shrink)

ABSTRACTP.F. Strawson claimed that forgiveness is such an essential part of our moral practices that we could not extricate it from our form of life even if we so desired. But what is it about forgiveness that would make it such a central feature of our moral experience? In this paper, I suggest that the answer has to do with what I will call the normative significance of forgiveness. Forgiveness is normatively significant in the sense that, in its paradigmatic (...) instances, forgiving alters the operative norms bearing on the interaction between the victim and the wrongdoer in certain characteristic ways. My project here is, first, to clarify the ways that paradigmatic cases of forgiveness alter the norms of interaction between victim and wrongdoer and to argue that it is in this respect that forgiveness is a normatively significant feature of our moral responsibility practices. Second, I show that most extant theories of forgiveness fail to explain the characteristic ways in which forgiving alters norms. Th... (shrink)

One of his six introductions to philosophy, widely used by students in Alexandria, Ammonius' lecture on Porphyry was recorded in writing by his students in the commentary translated here. Along with five other types of introductions (three of which are translated in the Ancient Commentators on Aristotle volume Elias and David: Introductions to Philosophy with Olympiodorus: Introduction to Logic) it made Greek philosophy more accessible to other cultures. These introductions became standard in Ammonius' school and included a popular set of (...) five or more definitions of philosophy, some of them drawn from commentaries on quite different works. Ammonius' lecture expounded the most celebrated and discussed previous introduction written by Porphyry 200 years earlier, which was devoted to five main technical terms of Aristotle's logic. Ammonius was sympathetic to Porphyry because they both sought to harmonise the views of Plato and Aristotle with each other, arguing in different ways that the two philosophers did not disagree about the nature of universals. Porphyry's introduction was a hugely influential work for centuries after its composition, and this commentary by Ammonius served to maintain its position at the centre of later schools of philosophy. This English translation of Ammonius' work is the latest volume in the Ancient Commentators on Aristotle series and makes this philosophical work accessible to a modern readership. The translation is accompanied by an introduction, comprehensive commentary notes, bibliography, glossary of translated terms and a subject index. (shrink)

This chapter aims to attempt no more than to make some informal and unsystematic remarks on the transformation of analytic philosophy. It deals with a few sketchy remarks on the historiography of recent analytic philosophy. Writing in 1981, David Lewis described “a reasonable goal for a philosopher” as bringing one’s opinions into stable equilibrium. A natural comparison is between Lewis’s Quinean or at least post‐Quinean methodology and the methodology of Peter Strawson, Quine’s leading opponent from the tradition of ordinary (...) language philosophy. Analytic epistemology provides a good case study of the philosophical application of Gricean pragmatics outside the philosophy of language. On Michael Dummett picture of the history of philosophy, Descartes had made epistemology first philosophy, the engine for the rest of philosophy, and then Frege had replaced epistemology by the philosophy of language as first philosophy. The chapter suggests that philosophy sometimes already uses an abductive methodology and ought to use it more in the future. (shrink)

Autonomous vehicles are one of the most spectacular recent developments of Artificial Intelligence. Among the problems that still need to be solved before they can fully autonomously participate in traffic is the one of making their behaviour conform to the traffic laws. This paper discusses this problem by way of a case study of Dutch traffic law. First it is discussed to what extent Dutch traffic law exhibits features that are traditionally said to pose challenges for AI & Law (...) models, such as exceptions, rule conflicts, open texture and vagueness, rule change, and the need for commonsense knowledge. Then three approaches to the design of law-conforming AV are evaluated in light of the challenges posed by Dutch traffic law, which includes an assessment of the usefulness of AI & Law models of nonmonotonic reasoning, argumentation and case-based reasoning. (shrink)

A libertarian theory of justice holds that persons are self-owners and have the Hohfeldian moral power to justly acquire property rights in initially unowned external resources. Different variants of libertarianism can be distinguished according to their stance on the famous Lockean proviso. The proviso requires, in Locke’s words, to leave ‘enough and as good’ for others, and thus specifies limits on the acquisition of property. Left-libertarians accept an egalitarian interpretation of the proviso, ‘right-libertarians’ either reject any kind of proviso or (...) accept rather weak versions of it. In be-tween there is room for moderate interpretations of the proviso, and in particular for a sufficientarian interpretation: a ‘sufficiency proviso.’ The resulting theory of justice can be called ‘moderate libertarianism.’ In this article I make a case for moderate libertarianism, so understood. I argue that moderate libertarianism has advantages over both left- and right-libertarianism because it better coheres with the most plausible rationale for endorsing a libertarian theory of justice in the first place. (shrink)

This volume, the first part of Paul Ricoeur's Philosophy of the Will, is an eidetics, carried out within carefully imposed phenomenological brackets. It seeks to deal with the essential structure of man's being in the world, and so it suspends the distorting dimensions of existence, the bondage of passion, and the vision of innocence, to which Ricoeur returns in his later writings. The result is a conception of man as an incarnate Cogito, which can make the polar unity (...) of subject and object intelligible and provide a basic continuity for the various aspects of inquiry into man's being-in-the-world. (shrink)

A full account of purposive action must appeal not only to propositional attitude states like beliefs, desires, and intentions, but also to motor representations, i.e., non-propositional states that are thought to represent, among other things, action outcomes as well as detailed kinematic features of bodily movements. This raises the puzzle of how it is that these two distinct types of state successfully coordinate. We examine this so-called “Interface Problem”. First, we clarify and expand on the nature and role of (...) motor representations in explaining intentional action. Next, we characterize the respective functions of intentions and motor representations, the differences in representational format and content that these imply, and the interface challenge these differences in turn raise. We then evaluate Butterfill and Sinigaglia’s recent answer to this interface challenge, according to which intentions refer to action outcomes by way of demonstrative deference to motor representations. We present some worries for this proposal, arguing that, among other things, it implicitly presupposes a solution to the problem, and so cannot help to resolve it. Finally, we suggest that we may make some progress on this puzzle by positing a “content-preserving causal process” taking place between intentions and motor representations, and we offer a proposal for how this might work. (shrink)

What is curiosity? An attractive option is that it is a desire to know. This analysis has been recently challenged by what I call interrogativism, the view that inquiring attitudes such as curiosity have questions rather than propositions as contents. In this paper, I defend the desire-to-know view, and make three contributions to the debate. First, I refine the view in a way that avoids the problems of its simplest version. Second, I present a new argument for the (...) desire-to-know view that focuses on ascriptions of the form ‘S is curious to φ’, which, despite their prevalence, have been ignored in the literature. Third, I examine the central motivation for interrogativism—the argument from metacognition, according to which animals can be curious yet do not have the metacognitive capacities required by desires to know—and argue that it rests on questionable assumptions about desires and attitude ascriptions. (shrink)

S. Matthew Liao argues here that children have a right to be loved. To do so he investigates questions such as whether children are rightholders; what grounds a child's right to beloved; whether love is an appropriate object of a right; and other philosophical and practical issues. His proposal is that all human beings have rights to the fundamental conditions for pursuing a good life; therefore, as human beings, children have human rights to the fundamental conditions for pursuing a good (...) life. Since being loved is one of those fundamental conditions, children thus have a right to be loved. Liao shows that this claim need not be merely empty rhetoric, and that the arguments for this right can hang together as a coherent whole. This is the first book to make a sustained philosophical case for the right of children to be loved. It makes a unique contribution to the fast-growing literature on family ethics, in particular, on children's rights and parental rights and responsibilities, and to the emerging field of the philosophy of human rights. (shrink)

This book is the first to introduce readers to contemporary philosophical works on moral judge- ment stemming from France, Germany and the Anglo-American world — many of which remain untranslated. By integrating Kantian and Aristotelian reflections on this subject, the author combines historiography and critical reflection to offer a rich picture of what it means to make good moral decisions. -/- As both Kantians and Aristotelians argue, moral judgements are ultimately grounded in the normativity of practical identities. Thus, (...) it is by identifying the obligations tied to the multiple dimensions of our identities (e.g., friend, teacher, romantic partner, citizen) that we can ultimately understand how we ought to act. Yet, Aristotle and Kant also remind us that doing so requires the acquisition of moral virtues which allow us to better discern practical reasons in concrete situations. (shrink)

Physicians, philosophers, and theologians consider how to address death and dying for a diverse population in a secularized century.Most of us are generally ill-equipped for dying. Today, we neither see death nor prepare for it. But this has not always been the case. In the early fifteenth century, the Roman Catholic Church published the Ars moriendi texts, which established prayers and practices for an art of dying. In the twenty-first century, physicians rely on procedures and protocols for the efficient (...) management of hospitalized patients. How can we recapture an art of dying that can facilitate our dying well? In this book, physicians, philosophers, and theologians attempt to articulate a bioethical framework for dying well in a secularized, diverse society.Contributors discuss such topics as the acceptance of human finitude; the role of hospice and palliative medicine; spiritual preparation for death; and the relationship between community, and individual autonomy. They also consider special cases, including children, elderly patients with dementia, and death in the early years of the AIDS epidemic, when doctors could do little more than accompany their patients in humble solidarity.These chapters make the case for a robust bioethics—one that could foster both the contemplation of finitude and the cultivation of community that would be necessary for a contemporary art of dying well.ContributorsJeffrey P. Bishop, Lisa Sowle Cahill, Daniel Callahan, Farr A. Curlin, Lydia S. Dugdale, Michelle Harrington, John Lantos, Stephen R. Latham, M. Therese Lysaught, Autumn Alcott Ridenour, Peter A. Selwyn, Daniel Sulmasy. (shrink)

This paper begins with the thought that there is something out of place about offloading inquiry into one's own mind to AI. The paper's primary goal is to articulate the unease felt when considering cases of doing so. It draws a parallel between the use of algorithms in the criminal law: in both cases one feels entitled to be treated as an exception to a verdict made on the basis of a certain kind of evidence. Then it identifies an account (...) of first‐person authority that can make good on this: agentialism. Thus, the paper constitutes an argument in favor of an agentialist treatment of self‐knowledge and first‐person authority. (shrink)

This important book is the first serious philosophical examination of the modern state. It inquires into the justification of this particular form of political society. It asks whether all states are 'nation-states', what are the alternative ways of organizing society, and which conditions make a state legitimate. The author concludes that, while states can be legitimate, they typically fail to have the powers that they claim. Many books analyze government and its functions but none focuses on the state (...) as a distinctive form of political organization or examines critically the claims states make for themselves. In filling this lacuna Christopher Morris has written a book that will command the attention of political philosophers, political scientists, legal theorists, and specialists in international relations. (shrink)

Sen's Liberal Paradox has received a good deal of attention in the literature. However, it is worth re-opening the discussion since the solutions offered so far have serious problems and since there is more to say about the nature of the problem displayed by the Liberal Paradox. I propose a new solution to the paradox in the following sense: First, I argue that its range of applicability is not very broad. Second, there is nothing paradoxical about a conflict of (...) the principles involved in the Liberal Paradox. (Nagel's thesis of the ``fragmentation of value'' is important to make this point.) Third, I make a recommendation about how to remove conflicts when they occur in a restricted class of cases. For the other cases, no recommendation of similar appeal is available. But in the light of the first point, the availability of a generally applicable recommendation was not to be expected. (shrink)

This book redraws the intellectual map and sets the agenda in philosophy for the next fifty or so years. By making the theory of signs the dominant theme in Four Ages of Understanding, John Deely has produced a history of philosophy that is innovative, original, and complete. The first full-scale demonstration of the centrality of the theory of signs to the history of philosophy, Four Ages of Understanding provides a new vantage point from which to review and reinterpret the (...) development of intellectual culture at the threshold of "globalization". Deely examines the whole movement of past developments in the history of philosophy in relation to the emergence of contemporary semiotics as the defining moment of Postmodernism. Beginning traditionally with the Pre-Socratic thinkers of early Greece, Deely gives an account of the development of the notion of signs and of the general philosophical problems and themes which give that notion a context through four ages: Ancient philosophy, covering initial Greek thought; the Latin age, philosophy in European civilization from Augustine in the 4th century to Poinsot in the 17th; the Modern period, beginning with Descartes and Locke; and the Postmodern period, beginning with Charles Sanders Peirce and continuing to the present. Reading the complete history of philosophy in light of the theory of the sign allows Deely to address the work of thinkers never before included in a general history, and in particular to overcome the gap between Ockham and Descartes which has characterized the standard treatments heretofore. One of the essential features of the book is the way in which it shows how the theme of signs opens a perspective for seeing the Latin Age from its beginning with Augustine to the work of Poinsot as an indigenous development and organic unity under which all the standard themes of ontology and epistemology find a new resolution and place. A magisterial general history of philosophy, Deely's book provides both a strong background to semiotics and a theoretical unity between philosophy's history and its immediate future. With Four Ages of Understanding Deely sets a new agenda for philosophy as a discipline entering the 21st century. (shrink)

In most cases, discussions on the right to education focus on the way access to education can be warranted for all and which aims should be pursued in rather abstract terms. This article approaches the topic starting from the case of Roma people. The particularity of their living circumstances raises the question what it is that we are aiming at when trying to realize a universal right to education for them. After confronting their social practices with the education system, three (...) suggestions are made how to make sense of a right to education. First, the need for a holistic approach towards human rights is expressed. Second, the right to education is thought of in terms of a right to qualification. Finally, an open dialogue of social practices is proposed, as a fixed idea of what the school should look like is not desirable in a multicultural society. (shrink)

The Common Prior Assumption (CPA) plays an important role in game theory and the economics of information. It is the basic assumption behind decision-theoretic justifications of equilibrium reasoning in games (Aumann, 1987, Aumann and Brandenburger, 1995) and no-trade results with asymmetric information (Milgrom and Stokey, 1982). Recently several authors (Dekel and Gul, 1997, Gul, 1996, Lipman, 1995) have questioned whether the CPA is meaningful in situations of incomplete information, where there is no ex ante stage and where the primitives of (...) the model are the individuals' beliefs about the external world (their first-order beliefs), their beliefs about the other individuals' beliefs (second-order beliefs), etc., i.e. their hierarchies of beliefs. In this context, the CPA is a mathematical property whose conceptual content is not clear. The main results of this paper (Theorems 1 and 2) provide a characterization of Harsanyi consistency in terms of properties of the belief hierarchies that are entirely unrelated to the idea of an ex ante stage. (shrink)

Many philosophers treat mental imagery as a kind of perceptual representation – it is either a perceptual state, or a representation of a perceptual state. In the sciences, writers point to mental imagery by way of a standard gloss – mental imagery is said to be (often, early) perceptual processing not directly caused by sensory stimuli (Kosslyn et al. 1995). Philosophers sometimes adopt this gloss, which I will call the basic view. Bence Nanay endorses it, and appeals to it in (...) a number of places to argue that mental imagery plays various functional or explanatory roles, as well as to argue that some mental phenomena should be seen as forms of mental imagery. In places he goes even further, relying on this view of mental imagery to explain how mental imagery is a unified kind despite heterogeneous appearances, and using this view to support his claim that mental imagery is a natural kind. Nanay’s book – which is a both a useful introduction to the many ways that mental imagery appears in discussions across philosophy, neuroscience, and psychology, as well as an extended argument for the multi-faceted relevance of mental imagery to a range of projects in the philosophy of mind and psychology – thus also serves as a nice test case for whether this basic view of mental imagery is good enough to aid theorizing across philosophy and the sciences. I think not. I will illustrate why by looking at two areas. First, I will discuss Nanay’s argument regarding mental imagery and object files. Second, I will discuss an issue Nanay raises, regarding the relationship between mental and motor imagery. A longer discussion might look to many more areas – as already mentioned, Nanay’s book covers a wide range of mental phenomena – with the same lesson emerging. The nature of mental imagery cannot be fully understood without facing an array of choice points, many of which push us to make commitments beyond the basic view. (shrink)