If philosophical moral reflection tends to promote moral behavior, one might think that professional ethicists would behave morally better than do socially comparable non-ethicists. We examined three types of courteous and discourteous behavior at American Philosophical Association conferences: talking audibly while the speaker is talking (versus remaining silent), allowing the door to slam shut while entering or exiting mid-session (versus attempting to close the door quietly), and leaving behind clutter at the end of a session (versus leaving one's seat tidy). (...) By these three measures, audiences in ethics sessions did not appear to behave any more courteously than did audiences in non-ethics sessions. However, audiences in environmental ethics sessions did appear to leave behind less trash. (shrink)

We review and present a new meta‐analysis of research suggesting that ethicists in the United States appear to behave no morally better overall than do non‐ethicist professors. Measures include: returning library books, peer evaluation of overall moral behavior, voting participation, courteous and discourteous behavior at conferences, replying to student emails, paying conference registration fees and disciplinary society dues, staying in touch with one's mother, charitable giving, organ and blood donation, vegetarianism, and honesty in responding to survey questions. One multi‐measure study (...) found ethicists tending to embrace more stringent moral views, especially about meat eating and charitable donation. The same multi‐measure study found ethicists and other professors to show similarly small‐to‐medium correlations between their expressed normative attitudes and their self‐reported or directly measured behavior. (shrink)

Do philosophy professors specializing in ethics behave, on average, any morally better than do other professors? If not, do they at least behave more consistently with their expressed values? These questions have never been systematically studied. We examine the self-reported moral attitudes and moral behavior of 198 ethics professors, 208 non-ethicist philosophers, and 167 professors in departments other than philosophy on eight moral issues: academic society membership, voting, staying in touch with one's mother, vegetarianism, organ and blood donation, (...) responsiveness to student emails, charitable giving, and honesty in responding to survey questionnaires. On some issues, we also had direct behavioral measures that we could compare with the self-reports. Ethicists expressed somewhat more stringent normative attitudes on some issues, such as vegetarianism and charitable donation. However, on no issue did ethicists show unequivocally better behavior than the two comparison groups. Our findings on attitude-behavior consistency were mixed: ethicists showed the strongest relationship between behavior and expressed moral attitude regarding voting but the weakest regarding charitable donation. We discuss implications for several models of the relationship between philosophical reflection and real-world moral behavior. (shrink)

Key elements of John Searle’s articulation of the Standard Model of Social Ontology can be found within Max Weber’s ideal type of legal-rational authority. However, the fact that, for Weber, legal-rational authority is just one of three types of legitimate authority, along with traditional and charismatic authority, suggests limitations to the Standard Model’s scope of applicability. Where Searle takes himself to have provided an account of “the structure of human civilization,” Weber’s taxonomy suggests that Searle has only given us an (...) account of a way of being a civilization. This understanding of traditional authority also reveals why the Standard Model misconstrues the structure of ordinary, informal statuses, such as friendship. (shrink)

In Bernard Suits’ The Grasshopper and Return of the Grasshopper, game-play is claimed to be the ‘ideal of existence’ and the only activity that could sustain us through the ‘endless and endlessly boring summer’ of utopia. Christopher Yorke has challenged these claims by way of a constructive dilemma. If these games are sufficiently akin to the games we play, then they are not adequate to the task of rendering immortality tolerable. If these games are importantly different than the games we (...) play, then, in being ‘unknown and unknowable’, they would characterize a form of life that is importantly different from our own and, so, would be inappropriate objects of social and political aspiration. Against Yorke’s skepticism, I argue that the games that constitute the ideal of existence are intelligible to us because we already play what the Grasshopper calls ‘open games’. Steffen Borge concedes that utopian games are intelligible, but argues that such games would fail to ‘grab our minds and imagination’. In the second half of the paper, I contend, against Borge, that such open games are adequate to the task of sustaining the interest of an immortal community. (shrink)

This paper aims to uncover the explanatory profile of an idealized version of Karl Ernst von Baer’s notion of individuation, wherein the special develops from the general. First, because such sequences can only be exemplified by a multiplicity of causally-related events, they should be seen as the topics of historical why-questions, rather than initial condition why-questions. Second, because historical why-questions concern the diachronic unity or genidentity of the events under consideration, I argue that the von Baerian pattern elicits a distinctive (...) response to such questions, wherein we are inclined to simultaneously affirm and reject the temporal unity of these events. I buttress this claim by considering non-biological expressions of the von Baerian principle, drawn from institutional history and literature. In the second half of the paper, I consider the implications of my findings for ontogenetic and phylogenetic sequences. I argue that the explanatory profile of von Baer’s principle neatly describes the distinctive speciation events that characterize deep metazoan phylogeny, as described by Stuart Newman. I also argue that parallel considerations should move us to accept a sense in which ontogenetic stages are not diachronically unified. (shrink)

John Searle (1932-) is one of the most famous living American philosophers. A pupil of J. L. Austin at Oxford in the 1950s, he is currently Mills Professor of the Philosophy of Mind and Language at the University of California, Berkeley. In 1995 John Searle published "The Construction of Social Reality", a text which not only promises to disclose the institutional backdrop against which speech takes place, but initiate a new 'philosophy of society'. Since then "The Construction of (...) Social Reality" has been subject to a flurry of criticism. While many of Searle's interlocutors share the sense that the text marks an important breakthrough, he has time and again accused critics of misunderstanding his claims. Despite Searle's characteristic crispness and clarity there remains some confusion, among both philosophers and sociologists, regarding the significance of his proposals. This book traces some of the high points of this dialogue, leveraging Searle's own clarifications to propose a new way of understanding the text. In particular, Joshua Rust looks to Max Weber in suggesting that Searle has articulated an ideal type. In locating The Construction of Social Reality under the umbrella of one of sociology's founding fathers, this book not only makes Searle's text more accessible to the readers in the social sciences, but presents Max Weber as a thinker worthy of philosophical reconsideration. Moreover, the recharacterization of Searle's claims in terms of the ideal type helps facilitate a comparison between Searle and other social theorists such as Talcott Parsons. (shrink)

Against the neo-Darwinian assumption that genetic factors are the principal source of variation upon which natural selection operates, a phenotype-first hypothesis strikes us as revolutionary because development would seem to constitute an independent source of variability. Richard Watson and his co-authors have argued that developmental memory constitutes one such variety of phenotypic variability. While this version of the phenotype-first hypothesis is especially well-suited for the late metazoan context, where animals have a sufficient history of selection from which to draw, appeals (...) to developmental memory seem less plausible in the evolutionary context of the early metazoans. I provide an interpretation of Stuart Newman’s account of deep metazoan phylogenesis that suggests that spandrels are, in addition to developmental memory, an important reservoir of phenotypic variability. I conclude by arguing that Gerd Müller’s “side-effect hypothesis” is an illuminating generalization of the proposed non-Watsonian version of the phenotype-first hypothesis. (shrink)

The similarities between Vico and Heidegger have been explored throughout the critical literature and in most detail by Ernesto Grassi. Both Vico and Heidegger were interested in elevating poetic thought, in emphasizing the ontological difference, and in criticizing the modern, technological age. Both thinkers began with the question of Being and were interested in reopening the thought that lies at philosophy's beginning in order to better understand modernity's present condition which they felt lies at philosophy's end. ;While these (...) general themes are indeed present in both Vico and Heidegger, thinkers like Grassi have failed to explore the vital differences between the two thinkers--particularly in the area of practical philosophy. For Vico, questions concerning Being always give us insight into questions concerning human action. Wisdom is always connected to prudence. Vico's work thus is concerned not simply with metaphysics and ontology, but also with ethics and morals. Heidegger, on the other hand, never provides his readers with an ethics. ;The differences between Vico and Heidegger on the question of practical philosophy can be traced directly to their respective ontologies. Both Vico and Heidegger are interested in the disclosure of Being instead of beings and thus are critical of purely logical attempts to categorize the attributes of individual objects. This interest prompts both to turn to poetry and poetic thought. For Heidegger, however, poetry is used to think Being as such. It allows us to preserve our essence--to let it be. Vico, on the other hand, turns to Being and poetic thought for the sake of the proper disclosure of beings. For Vico, we went to know Being as a whole so that we can understand how individual beings might fit in the context of that whole and so that we can act accordingly. ;Thinking Being, for Vico, thus always is for the sake of truth and proper action. Philosophical thought, for Heidegger, always will be concerned with that which is prior to such concerns--the poetic disclosure of Being itself. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:A Literary Common GroundLee Rust BrownLet me make note of a few things that have occurred to me during this conference. Some of these will be observations; some will be practical inferences. One of them, though, involves the crossing of an expectation, or maybe a fear, I had brought with me to Minneapolis. Since this has to do with the whole tone of the conference, we might as well (...) begin with it.It, of course, was the question of the polemical nature of this gathering. Would this conference be diagnostic and denunciatory in nature, or would it seek to start something truly new? Certainly we all feel the need of something new—not new, either, in the sense that movements or ideological positions claim to be new, but in the sense of a fresh gathering of common attention in the place where literature is, the place where each of us who loves literature already goes alone. This would be a possibility for something original rather than just another novelty—which makes the question of polemics all the more urgent. An association that founded itself in complaint would be only one more identity-group making a virtue out of its grudge. And the grudge, in that case, would have been a sad reflex of feeling superseded and powerless.But where have the polemics against current orthodoxies been? I am delighted not to have heard them in any strenuous capacity. Even their relative absence hasn’t commanded any extended attention, and that may be an even more telling point. I take this to be partly the result of foresight and good sense. But the clean air here has been more than a reward for our mutual constraint. Instead, it seems evidence of the fact [End Page 193] that, when literature occupies our attention, there is no need for self-defense. Justice, or justification, happens by itself when we “do our own work,” as Socrates recommended.What is our own work, then? This association has made a point, it seems, of declining to prescribe what it should be. The only thing we are absolutely sure of is that its subject is literature, and that its standards and rewards should be of a literary nature. From there the field opens up—and this conference has succeeded in keeping it open in some very concrete ways.Let’s think briefly about the two panels we attended yesterday. The morning panel on “Intellectual Craftsmanship” seemed unified in its concern with the disciplined ways by which we commit ourselves to literary experience. Literature itself, as well as what we do with it, teaches us this discipline, which is “aesthetic” in every sense of that word. Roger Shattuck set the tone when he described the discipline of reading as an issue of preparation and assimilation on the one hand, and as a kind of complete perceptual openness on the other. Such openness, in our normal experience, allows us to be surprised, to see actual things, perhaps, instead of their institutional categories. But literature also requires that we craft our receptivity. The surprises we prepare ourselves to undergo are achieved breakthroughs, which makes them no less unpredictable but all the more deeply affecting.Criticism cultivates such surprising experience. (I think experience is the crucial word, by the way, since everyone on that first panel seemed to be devoted to a kind of free empiricism.) The spectacular moments of visionary power that Robert Alter isolated in Dickens are places that startle and disturb us—and we track our own surprise, and intensify it, when we look closely at how those dark places of power emerge from Dickens’s refiguring of a world where darkness otherwise tends toward an entirely unredeemable opacity. We have to read “synesthetically,” as Shattuck says, “with both eyes open,” to let ourselves be for a moment blinded by such literary places.Once again, the discipline of reading—devotedly and resistantly—frees us for the achieved experience. Slowing down, in Sven Birkerts’s sense of “retardation and deceleration,” is precisely a matter of stepping into a field of experience shaped (or, in an auditory sense, fostered and conserved) by the special demands of literature. It... (shrink)

To adequately model mathematical arguments the analyst must be able to represent the mathematical objects under discussion and the relationships between them, as well as inferences drawn about these objects and relationships as the discourse unfolds. We introduce a framework with these properties, which has been used to analyse mathematical dialogues and expository texts. The framework can recover salient elements of discourse at, and within, the sentence level, as well as the way mathematical content connects to form larger argumentative structures. (...) We show how the framework might be used to support computational reasoning, and argue that it provides a more natural way to examine the process of proving theorems than do Lamport’s structured proofs. (shrink)

The philosophical position against procreation is known as anti‐natalism, and Rust is an anti‐natalist. Rust's insights, coupled with the philosophy of David Benatar, not only require the characters of True Detective to cease procreation but also morally compel all people to stop procreating. This chapter explores whether or not anti‐natalism is a philosophically cogent position by presenting Rust's perspective on human existence and connecting it with Benatar's argument that coming into existence is necessarily harmful. According to Benatar's (...) philosophy, one can see that Rust's anti‐natalism is actually quite reasonable. Benatar's points are that pleasure is good and pain is bad. However, it also is true that "the absence of pain is good, even if that good is not enjoyed by anyone", whereas "the absence of pleasure is not bad unless there is somebody for whom this absence is a deprivation". (shrink)

This chapter describes motivations of Rust Cohle's pessimism in the first season of True Detective. On the one hand, Rust's pessimism is linked to the tragic death of his daughter, implying that a profound, personal tragedy made him a pessimist. On the other hand, Rust never appeals to this tragedy or any other personal experience to justify his belief in the meaninglessness of existence, arguing always that it comes from a rational evaluation of reality. In the season finale, Rust (...) has a near‐death experience that leads him away from pessimism and back to optimism. Central to this event is his experience of Sophia's love. Rust's feeling of Sophia's love would not be a turning away from philosophy but a turning toward philosophy or perhaps a turning toward a different notion of philosophy than the one found in rationalism or empiricism. (shrink)

The Warnock Committee decided not to sanction artificial insemination by donor (AID) and in vitro fertilisation (IVF) for single heterosexual women or for lesbian women on the grounds that it is better for children to be born into a two-parent heterosexual family. From an examination of the effects on children of growing up in fatherless heterosexual and lesbian families, this paper questions that assumption.

There is growing political pressure for farmers to use more sustainable agricultural practices to protect people and the planet. The farming press could encourage farmers to adopt sustainable practices through its ability to manipulate discourse and spread awareness by changing the salience of issues or framing topics in specific ways. We sought to understand how the UK farming press framed sustainable agricultural practices and how the salience of these practices changed over time. We combined a media content analysis of the (...) farming press alongside 60 qualitative interviews with farmers and agricultural advisors to understand whether the farming press influenced farmers to try more sustainable practices. Salience of sustainable agricultural practices grew between 2009 and 2020. Many of the practices studied were framed by the press around economic and agronomic aspects, and farmer respondents said the most common reasons for trying sustainable agricultural practices were for economic and agronomic reasons. The farming press tended to use more positive rather than negative tones when covering sustainable agricultural practices. Respondents used the farming press as a source of information, though many did not fully trust these outlets as they believed the farming press were mouthpieces for agribusinesses. Whilst a minority of farmers stated they were motivated to try a new sustainable agricultural practice after learning about it in the farming press, this was rare. Instead, the farming press was used by respondents to raise their awareness about wider agricultural topics. We reflect on the role and power given to agribusinesses by the farming press and what this means for agricultural sustainability. (shrink)

Insulin is a member of a family of hormones, growth factors and neuropeptides which are found in both vertebrates and invertebrates. A common ‘insulin fold’ is probably adopted by all family members. Although the specificities of receptor binding are different, there is possibility of co‐evolution of polypeptides and their receptors.

This paper is an investigation into the possibility of institutional agency and proceeds via the elaboration of two, nested claims. First, if genuine agency is attributable to certain social institutions, it would not be the full-blown, intentional agency that characterizes human activity, but would rather fall under a minimal modality of agency. Moreover, since enactivists aim to articulate minimal conceptions of agency that are applicable across the sphere of the living, this suggests that such accounts of minimal agency might additionally (...) be brought to bear onto some institutions. The second claim concerns which of two ideally typical enactivist accounts of minimal agency can more promisingly be applied to our institutions. Where some enactivists endorse a Jonasian account of minimal agency, which stresses a protentive, forward-looking orientation to a self-persistence goal, other enactivists apply a retentive ideal type of minimal agency, the norms of which are founded on a backward-looking responsiveness to precedent. By way of a critical analysis of structural functionalism, I argue that the retentive approach better explains the kind of agency that would be expressed by some institutions. I also claim that some philosophers, including Christian List, Philip Pettit and Ronald Dworkin, have independently come to the conclusion that institutional agency is retentive agency. (shrink)

Do professional ethicists behave any morally better than other professors do? Do they show any greater consistency between their normative attitudes and their behavior? In response to a survey question, a large majority of professors (83 percent of ethicists, 83 percent of nonethicist philosophers, and 85 percent of nonphilosophers) expressed the view that “not consistently responding to student e-mails” is morally bad. A similarly large majority of professors claimed to respond to at least 95 percent of student e-mails. These professors, (...) and others, were sent three e-mails designed to look like queries from students. Ethicists’ e-mail response rates were not significantly different from the other two groups’. Expressed normative view correlated with self-estimated rate of e-mail responsiveness, especially among the ethicists. Empirically measured e-mail responsiveness, however, was at best weakly correlated with self-estimated e-mail responsiveness; and professors’ expressed normative attitude was not significantly correlated with empirically measured e-mail responsiveness for any of the three groups. (shrink)

Do professional ethicists behave any morally better than other professors do? Do they show any greater consistency between their normative attitudes and their behavior? In response to a survey question, a large majority of professors (83 percent of ethicists, 83 percent of nonethicist philosophers, and 85 percent of nonphilosophers) expressed the view that “not consistently responding to student e‐mails” is morally bad. A similarly large majority of professors claimed to respond to at least 95 percent of student e‐mails. These professors, (...) and others, were sent three e‐mails designed to look like queries from students. Ethicists’ e‐mail response rates were not significantly different from the other two groups’. Expressed normative view correlated with self‐estimated rate of e‐mail responsiveness, especially among the ethicists. Empirically measured e‐mail responsiveness, however, was at best weakly correlated with self‐estimated e‐mail responsiveness; and professors’ expressed normative attitude was not significantly correlated with empirically measured e‐mail responsiveness for any of the three groups. (shrink)

The objectives of this study were to develop a high-density chromosome bin map of homoeologous group 7 in hexaploid wheat, to identify gene distribution in these chromosomes, and to perform comparative studies of wheat with rice and barley. We mapped 2148 loci from 919 EST clones onto group 7 chromosomes of wheat. In the majority of cases the numbers of loci were significantly lower in the centromeric regions and tended to increase in the distal regions. The level of duplicated loci (...) in this group was 24% with most of these loci being localized toward the distal regions. One hundred nineteen EST probes that hybridized to three fragments and mapped to the three group 7 chromosomes were designated landmark probes and were used to construct a consensus homoeologous group 7 map. An additional 49 probes that mapped to 7AS, 7DS, and the ancestral translocated segment involving 7BS also were designated landmarks. Landmark probe orders and comparative maps of wheat, rice, and barley were produced on the basis of corresponding rice BAC/PAC and genetic markers that mapped on chromosomes 6 and 8 of rice. Identification of landmark ESTs and development of consensus maps may provide a framework of conserved coding regions predating the evolution of wheat genomes. (shrink)

ABSTRACT Since the 1970s there has been a significant paradigm shift in psychology away from behaviourism and towards cognitive psychology. Indeed a recent survey discovered that by 1983 more than half American psychologists were describing their approaches as cognitive. However, while behaviourism has had an identifiable philosophical ‘line’ in positivism, reductionism and the hypothetico‐deductive model, such a framework has been noticeably lacking from cognitive psychology. A view of cognitive psychology based on functionalism and ideas from systems analysis is put forward.

It has been shown that when participants are asked to make sensibility judgments on sentences that describe a transfer of an object toward or away from their body, they are faster to respond when the response requires a movement in the same direction as the transfer described in the sentence. This phenomenon is known as the action compatibility effect. This study investigates whether the ACE exists for volunteers with Alzheimer's disease, whether the ACE can facilitate language comprehension, and also whether (...) the ACE can still be produced if the order of the two events is inverted, that is, whether overt movement can prime comprehension of transfer sentences. In Study 1, participants with AD, younger, and older adults were tested on an adaptation of the ACE Paradigm. In Study 2, the same paradigm was modified to include an arm movement that participants had to perform prior to sentence exposure on screen. In Study 1, young, older adults, and individuals with AD were faster to respond when the direction of the response movement matched the directionality implied by the sentence. In Study 2, no traditional ACE was found; participants were faster when the direction of the movement immediately preceding the sentence matched the directionality of the sentence. It was found that compatibility effects generated a relative advantage, that transfer schemata are easier to process, and that an ACE-like effect can be the result of mutual priming between language and movement. Results suggested preservation in AD of the neural systems for action engaged during language comprehension, and conditions under which comprehension in AD can be facilitated in real life may be identified. (shrink)

Sociobiology has always had a strong relationship with classical psychometrics, and with intelligence testing in particular. The major ideological impact of Eugenics prior to 1940 led many psychometricians to adopt a sociobiological perspective, but when this turned out, in the 1960's, to be controversial many of the procedures of classical psychometrics were abandoned. Their place was taken by functional psychometrics, based on criterion reference testing, where the content of test items was related directly to very specific skills which may be (...) required in the work place or other setting, and the use of intervening psychological traits such as intelligence was eliminated. It is demonstrated here that much of the theory of traits can be derived directly from functional psychometrics, without the need to make any sociobiological presuppositions. (shrink)

This volume gathers together for the first time are all the key texts in a crucial debate in modern philosophy, centered on Leibniz's famous 1695 essay, the "New System of the Nature of Substances and their Communication," in which he introduced his strikingly original theory of metaphysics. His "system" became increasingly famous and drew him into discussion and development of these ideas, both in public and in private, with a variety of thinkers, most notably the great French philosopher Pierre (...) Bayle. Woolhouse's and Francks's new English edition gives the only full representation of this debate, and will therefore be essential reading for anyone who wishes to gain a proper understanding of Leibniz's philosophy and its intelletual context. All the texts are newly translated and extensively annotated; many appear in English for the first time. (shrink)

If philosophical moral reflection improves moral behavior, one might expect ethics professors to behave morally better than socially similar non-ethicists. Under the assumption that forms of political engagement such as voting have moral worth, we looked at the rate at which a sample of professional ethicists—and political philosophers as a subgroup of ethicists—voted in eight years’ worth of elections. We compared ethicists’ and political philosophers’ voting rates with the voting rates of three other groups: philosophers not specializing in ethics, political (...) scientists, and a comparison group of professors specializing in neither philosophy nor political science. All groups voted at about the same rate, except for the political scientists, who voted about 10–15% more often. On the face of it, this finding conflicts with the expectation that ethicists will behave more responsibly than non-ethicists. (shrink)

Like every major new technology, genetic engineering is affecting the hopes and fears of many people. The risks involved are perceived differently by different groups. One group regards genetic engineering as a simple extension of older techniques with no special risks, e.g. traditional breeding. This conservative denial of special risks is confronted with a different kind of conservatism from a group which, in the name of the preservation of nature, opposes any kind of genetic engineering. A third group, rooted in (...) the liberal tradition, is prepared to accept the risks of genetic engineering as long as they are outweighed by prospective benefits. The liberal as well as the two conservative approaches, however, face serious difficulties in trying to develop a sound ethical argument concerning genetic engineering. In order to avoid these difficulties, an ethical approach focused on paradigmatic examples of good and evil is proposed. Such examples constitute rules of moral description, much as standards of measurement constitute rules of physical description. These rules are elaborated and interpreted in processes of social learning. In the present state of development of genetic engineering, such social learning requires appropriate institutional procedures. (shrink)

Technical artifacts do not seem particularly continuous with institutional statuses. If statuses are defined in terms of their constitutive rules, as Searle maintains, then disassociation is always possible – someone or something can satisfy those rules without being able to realize the functional effects that are associated with that status. The gap between technical artifacts and Searlean statuses suggests the possibility of an additional social kind, which I call, following Muhammad Ali Khalidi, a ‘real social kind’. However, the placement of (...) real social kinds between technical artifacts and statuses recommends a reconfiguration of Khalidi’s most abstract characterization of the notion. This reconfiguration also lends support to his surprising claim that money is a real social kind. (shrink)

Plato's dialogues frequently criticize traditional Greek myth, yet Plato also integrates myth with his writing. Daniel S. Werner confronts this paradox through an in-depth analysis of the Phaedrus, Plato's most mythical dialogue. Werner argues that the myths of the Phaedrus serve several complex functions: they bring nonphilosophers into the philosophical life; they offer a starting point for philosophical inquiry; they unify the dialogue as a literary and dramatic whole; they draw attention to the limits of language and the limits of (...) knowledge; and they allow Plato to co-opt cultural authority as a way of defining and legitimating the practice of philosophy. Platonic myth, as a species of traditional tale, is thus both distinct from philosophical dialectic and similar to it. Ultimately, the most powerful effect of Platonic myth is the way in which it leads readers to participate in Plato's dialogues and to engage in a process of self-examination. (shrink)

While developments of a shared intellectual tradition, the enactivist approach and the organizational account proffer importantly different accounts of organismic normativity. Where enactivists tend to follow Hans Jonas, Andres Weber, and Francisco Varela in grounding intrinsic affordance norms in existential concern, organizational theorists such as Alvaro Moreno, Matteo Mossio, and Leonardo Bich seek a more deflationary account of these normative phenomena. Critiques directed at both of these accounts of organismic normativity motivate the introduction of the precedential account of organismic normativity, (...) which I nevertheless locate within the enactivist approach, broadly construed. After detailing empirical evidence that would seem to vindicate the precedential account, I explore some of its implications. (shrink)

Short description: The conception of world-history is rooted in Christianity.

This article examines sexual identity formation among 346 lesbian-identified and 60 bisexual-identified women. On average, bisexuals come out at later ages and exhibit less “stable” identity histories. However, variations in identity history among lesbians and bisexuals overshadow the differences between them and demonstrate that coming out is not a linear, goal-oriented, developmental process. Sexual identity formation must be reconceptualized as a process of describing one's social location within a changing social context. Changes in sexual identity are, therefore, expected of mature (...) individuals as they maintain an accurate description of their position vis-à-vis other individuals, groups, and institutions. (shrink)

There is much in The Sensory Order that recommends the oft-made claim that Hayek anticipated connectionist theories of mind. To the extent that this is so, contemporary arguments against and for connectionism, as advanced by Jerry Fodor, Zenon Pylyshyn, and John Searle, are shown as applicable to theoretical psychology. However, the final section of this chapter highlights an important disanalogy between theoretical psychology and connectionist theories of mind.

Book Reviews Joshua Rust, Economics and Philosophy, FirstView Article.

Book Reviews Joshua Rust, Economics and Philosophy, FirstView Article.