The notion of science as a stratified system is clearly manifested in the markedly uneven distribution of productivity, rewards, resources, and recognition. Although previous studies have shown that institutional environments for conducting research differ significantly between national science systems, disciplines, and subfields, it remains to be shown whether any systematic variations and patterns in inequalities exist among researchers in different national and domain specific settings. This study investigates the positioning of citation elites as opposed to ‘ordinary’ researchers by way of (...) examining three dimensions of concentration (accumulation of publications and citations, specialisation, and institutional concentration) in biology, economics and physics in Denmark and the UK. Across all three dimensions, we put Richard Whitley’s bipartite theory to the test, suggesting a nexus between the intellectual structure of a discipline and the configuration of its elite. The study draws on a dataset of researchers who published most of their publications in either physics, biology, or economics over the 1980–2018 period and with at least one publication in 2017–2018 while affiliated to either a British or a Danish university. We find higher degrees of concentration in the UK compared to Denmark, and that physics and biology respectively display the greatest and lowest degree of concentration. Similar patterns in disciplinary differences are observed in both countries, suggesting that concentration patterns are largely rooted in disciplinary cultures and merely amplified by the national context. (shrink)

The readiness potential (RP) is one of the most controversial topics in neuroscience and philosophy due to its perceived relevance to the role of conscious willing in action. Libet and colleagues reported that RP onset precedes both volitional movement and conscious awareness of willing that movement, suggesting that the experience of conscious will may not cause volitional movement (Libet, Gleason, Wright, & Pearl, 1983). Rather, they suggested that the RP indexes unconscious processes that may actually cause both volitional movement and (...) the accompanying conscious feeling of will (Libet et al., 1983; pg. 640). Here, we demonstrate that volitional movement can occur without an accompanying feeling of will. We additionally show that the neural processes indexed by RPs are insufficient to cause the experience of conscious willing. Specifically, RPs still occur when subjects make self-timed, endogenously-initiated movements due to a post-hypnotic suggestion, without a conscious feeling of having willed those movements. (shrink)

This paper explicates two notions of emergencewhich are based on two ways of distinguishinglevels of properties for dynamical systems.Once the levels are defined, the strategies ofcharacterizing the relation of higher level to lower levelproperties as diachronic and synchronic emergenceare the same. In each case, the higher level properties aresaid to be emergent if they are novel or irreducible with respect to the lower level properties. Novelty andirreducibility are given precise meanings in terms of the effectsthat the change of a bifurcation (...) or perturbation parameterin the system has. (The same strategy can be applied to otherways of separating levels of properties, like themicro/macro distinction.)The notions of emergence developed here are notions of emergencein a weak sense: the higher level emergent properties wecapture are always structural properties (or are realized insuch properties), that is, they are defined in terms of the lowerlevel properties and their relations. Diachronic and synchronicemergent properties are distinctions within thecategory of structural properties. (shrink)

One powerful argument for dualism is provided by Chalmers: the ‘zombie’ or conceivability argument. This paper aims to establish that if one adopts the ‘Powerful Qualities’ account of properties developed by Martin and Heil, this argument can be resisted at the first premise: the claim that zombies are conceivable is, by the lights of Chalmers’ own account of conceivability, false. The Powerful Qualities account is outlined. Chalmers’ argument, and several distinctions which underlie it, are explained. It is argued that to (...) make sense of the claim that zombies are conceivable, some account of properties must be given. The paper’s central claim is presented and defended from potential responses: given the Powerful Qualities view, zombies are in fact inconceivable. Finally, an error theory is presented, which offers an explanation of why so many have taken the conceivability of zombies to be unproblematic, and the view is briefly contrasted with Russellian monism. (shrink)

Hate speech law can be found throughout the world. But it is also the subject of numerous principled arguments, both for and against. These principles invoke a host of morally relevant features and practical considerations . The book develops and then critically examines these various principled arguments. It also attempts to de-homogenize hate speech law into different clusters of laws/regulations/codes that constrain uses of hate speech, so as to facilitate a more nuanced examination of the principled arguments. Finally, it argues (...) that it is morally fitting for judicial and legislative judgments about the overall warrant of hate speech law to reflect principled compromise. Principled compromise is characterized not merely by compromise over matters of principled concern but also by compromise which is itself governed by ideals of moral duty or civic virtue. (shrink)

Do the same epistemic standards govern scientific and religious belief? Or should science and religion operate in completely independent epistemic spheres? Commentators have recently been divided on William James’s answer to this question. One side depicts “The Will to Believe” as offering a separate-spheres defense of religious belief in the manner of Galileo. The other contends that “The Will to Believe” seeks to loosen the usual epistemic standards so that religious and scientific beliefs can both be justified by a unitary (...) set of evidentiary rules. I argue that James did build a unitary epistemology but not by loosening cognitive standards. In his psychological research, he had adopted the Comtian view that hypotheses and regulative assumptions play a crucial role in the context of discovery even though they must be provisionally adopted before they can be supported by evidence. “The Will to Believe” relies on this methodological point to achieve a therapeutic goal—to convince despairing Victorians that religious faith can be reconciled with a scientific epistemology. James argues that the prospective theist is in the same epistemic situation with respect to the “religious hypothesis” as the scientist working in the context of discovery. (shrink)

Non-reductive physicalists have made a number of attempts to provide the relation of supervenience between levels of properties with enough bite to analyze interesting cases without at the same time losing the relation's acceptability for the physicalist. I criticize some of these proposals and suggest an alternative supplementation of the supervenience relation by imposing a requirement of robustness which is motivated by the notion of structural stability familiar from dynamical systems theory. Robust supervenience, I argue, captures what the non-reductive physicalist (...) wants from supervenience; most importantly, it provides a natural background for reconstructing the notion of (diachronic) property emergence in a way acceptable to physicalists. (shrink)

As the USA contends with another surge in COVID-19 cases, hospitals may soon need to answer the unresolved question of who lives and dies when ventilator demand exceeds supply. Although most triage policies in the USA have seemingly converged on the use of clinical need and benefit as primary criteria for prioritisation, significant differences exist between institutions in how to assign priority to patients with identical medical prognoses: the so-called ‘tie-breaker’ situations. In particular, one’s status as a frontline healthcare worker (...) has been a proposed criterion for prioritisation in the event of a tie. This article outlines two major grounds for reconsidering HCW prioritisation. The first recognises trust as an indispensable element of clinical care and mistrust as a hindrance to any public health strategy against the virus, thus raising concerns about the outward appearance of favouritism. The second considers the ways in which proponents of HCW prioritisation deviate from the very ‘ethics frameworks’ that often preface triage policies and serve to guide resource allocation—a rhetorical strategy that may undermine the very ethical foundations on which triage policies stand. By appealing to trust and consistency, we re-examine existing arguments in favour of HCW prioritisation and provide a more tenable justification for adjudicating on tie-breaker events during crisis standards of care. (shrink)

To understand the future of informed consent, we should pay attention to two ethical-legal sources in addition to the revised Common Rule. Physicians acting as investigators and patients serving as research subjects bring to that relationship a long history regarding consent to treatment, and everyone dealing with research ethics needs to be aware of the Nuremberg Code and other human-rights documents. These three streams make separate and distinctly different contributions to informed consent doctrine.

Despite its centrality and its familiarity, W. V. Quine's dispute with Rudolf Carnap over the analytic/synthetic distinction has lacked a satisfactory analysis. The impasse is usually explained either by judging that Quine's arguments are in reality quite weak, or by concluding instead that Carnap was incapable of appreciating their strength. This is unsatisfactory, as is the fact that on these readings it is usually unclear why Quine's own position is not subject to some of the very same arguments. A satisfying (...) and surprising account is here presented that stiches together the puzzling pieces of this important philosophical exchange and that in turn leads to an explanation of why it is so difficult to say whether anything of substance is at stake. (shrink)

The ‘adjustment strategy’ currently seems to be the most common approach to incorporating objective elements into one's theory of well‐being. These theories face a certain problem, however, which can be avoided by a different approach – namely, that employed by ‘partially objective multi‐component theories.’ Several such theories have recently been proposed, but the question of how to understand their mathematical structure has not been adequately addressed. I argue that the most mathematically simple of these multi‐component theories fails, so I proceed (...) to investigate more sophisticated ways to formulate such a theory. I conclude that one of these – the Discount/Inflation Theory – is particularly promising. (shrink)

Despite the ever-changing field of artificial intelligence (AI) and its preponderance of pre-print articles, Cohen offers a timely, nuanced, and self-aware overview of ChatGPT and the world of Larg...

_Laruelle_ is one of the first books in English to undertake in an extended critical survey of the work of the idiosyncratic French thinker François Laruelle, the promulgator of non-standard philosophy. Laruelle, who was born in 1937, has recently gained widespread recognition, and Alexander R. Galloway suggests that readers may benefit from colliding Laruelle’s concept of the One with its binary counterpart, the Zero, to explore more fully the relationship between philosophy and the digital. In _Laruelle_, Galloway argues that (...) the digital is a philosophical concept and not simply a technical one, employing a detailed analysis of Laruelle to build this case while referencing other thinkers in the French and Continental traditions, including Alain Badiou, Gilles Deleuze, Martin Heidegger, and Immanuel Kant. In order to explain clearly Laruelle’s concepts such as the philosophical decision and the principle of sufficient philosophy, Galloway lays a broad foundation with his discussions of “the One” as it has developed in continental philosophy, the standard model of philosophy, and how philosophers view “the digital.” Digital machines dominate today’s world, while so-called digital thinking—that is, binary thinking such as presence and absence or self and world—is often synonymous with what it means to think at all. In examining Laruelle and digitality together, Galloway shows how Laruelle remains a profoundly non-digital thinker—perhaps the only non-digital thinker today—and engages in an extensive discussion on the interconnections between media, philosophy, and technology. (shrink)

The growing support for voluntary active euthanasia is evident in the recently approved Dutch Law on Termination of Life on Request. Indeed, the debate over legalized VAE has increased in European countries, the United States, and many other nations over the last several years. The proponents of VAE argue that when a patient judges that the burdens of living outweigh the benefits, euthanasia can be justified. If some adults suffer to such an extent that VAE is justified, then one may (...) conclude that some children suffer to this extent as well. In an attempt to alleviate the suffering of extremely ill neonates, the University Medical Center Groningen developed a protocol for neonatal euthanasia. In this article, I first present the ethical justifications for VAE and discuss how these arguments relate to euthanizing ill neonates. I then argue that, even if one accepts the justification for VAE in adults, neonatal euthanasia cannot be supported, primarily because physicians and parents can never accurately assess the suffering of children. I argue that without the testament of the patient herself as to the nature and magnitude of her suffering, physicians can never accurately weigh the benefits and burdens of a child’s life, and therefore any such system would condemn to death some children whose suffering is not unbearable. I conclude that because the primary duty of physicians is to never harm their patients, neonatal euthanasia cannot be supported. (shrink)

Scotland has played an immense role in European high culture through the centuries, and among its cultural links none have been greater than those with France. This book shows that the links with France stretch back deep into the Middle Ages, and continue without a break into the 18th century, the Age of Enlightenment.

Locke's definition of miracles in “A Discourse of Miracles” is widely cited by scholars as evidence of his subjectivism on the matter. According to this interpretation, Locke held it to be sufficient that an event seems to be a violation of the laws of nature for it to count as a miracle. Nothing supernatural need actually occur. The principal aim of this article is to argue that Locke can and ought to be read as an objectivist about miracles. A subjectivist (...) reading falls short in two crucial respects: It undermines the function of miracles as evidence for divine revelation, so central to his account, and is at odds with his consistent and explicitly objective use of the term, as an event that necessarily involves a violation of the laws of nature. Indeed, it is from their objective nature that Locke thinks miracles derive their evidential force. A key part of my argument lies in distinguishing between ontological and epistemological issues concerning miracles and demonstrating how this distinction is present throughout his work on the matter. Ultimately, I conclude that what is often interpreted as Locke's subjectivism about miracles is his privileging of these epistemic issues. (shrink)

The article responds to an overlooked objection put by Allen Buchanan to John Rawls’s theory of justice: that implementing the Difference Principle over time may require gross and frequent disruptions of people’s framing and execution of long-term plans. Having strengthened Buchanan’s objection to resolve significant weaknesses in his main counterexample, I argue that the best response to this objection draws on the concept of the rule of law, specifically, the legal doctrine of legitimate expectations, which can be found in English, (...) French, and European Union administrative law. I also explore the suitability of incorporating this doctrine into Justice as Fairness given its absence in United States constitutional and administrative law. Finally, I turn to consider the question of what the government owes to agents in whom legitimate expectations are induced and then frustrated. Here I introduce the Precept of Administrative Liability. (shrink)

§1. I will start with a quick definition of descriptive set theory: It is the study of the structure of definable sets and functions in separable completely metrizable spaces. Such spaces are usually called Polish spaces. Typical examples are ℝn, ℂn, Hilbert space and more generally all separable Banach spaces, the Cantor space 2ℕ, the Baire space ℕℕ, the infinite symmetric group S∞, the unitary group, the group of measure preserving transformations of the unit interval, etc.In this theory sets are (...) classified in hierarchies according to the complexity of their definitions and the structure of sets in each level of these hierarchies is systematically analyzed. In the beginning we have the Borel sets in Polish spaces, obtained by starting with the open sets and closing under the operations of complementation and countable unions, and the corresponding Borel hierarchy. After this come the projective sets, obtained by starting with the Borel sets and closing under the operations of complementation and projection, and the corresponding projective hierarchy.There are also transfinite extensions of the projective hierarchy and even much more complex definable sets studied in descriptive set theory, but I will restrict myself here to Borel and projective sets, in fact just those at the first level of the projective hierarchy, i.e., the Borel (), analytic () and coanalytic () sets. (shrink)

Introduction -- What is personal responsibility? -- Ordinary language -- Common conceptions -- What do philosophers mean by responsibility? -- Personally responsible for what? -- What do philosophers think? part I -- Causes -- Capacity -- Control -- Choice versus brute luck -- Second-order attitudes -- Equality of opportunity -- Deservingness -- Reasonableness -- Reciprocity -- Equal shares -- Combining criteria -- What do philosophers think? part II -- Utility -- Self-respect -- Autonomy -- Human flourishing -- Natural duties and (...) special obligations -- A matter of perspectives -- Combining values -- What do politicians think? -- A brief typology -- International comparisons -- Welfare reform -- Healthcare reform -- Rights and responsibilities -- On the responsibilities of politicians -- What do ordinary people think? -- Why ask? -- Attitudes to welfare claimants -- When push comes to shove -- Perceptions and reality -- Further international comparisons -- The trouble with opinion surveys -- Four contemporary issues in focus -- Unemployment -- Health -- Drug abuse -- Personal debt and financial rewards -- So how do we decide? -- Getting the public involved -- Citizens juries -- Answering some potential criticisms. (shrink)

This is the first book that integrates nonmonotonic reasoning and belief change into a single framework from an artificial intelligence logic point-of-view.

One recently popular way to characterise strong emergence is to say that emergent entities possess novel causal powers. However, there is little agreement concerning the nature of powers. One controversy involves whether powers are single- or multi-track; that is, whether each power has only one manifestation type, or whether a single power can be directed towards a number of distinct manifestations. Another concerns how powers operate: whether a lone power manifests when triggered by the presence of a suitable stimulus, or (...) whether powers operate mutually such that several powers must ‘work together’ to bring about a particular manifestation. This paper examines how these distinctions—which can be cross-combined to frame four distinct accounts of the nature of powers—bear on the debate between emergentists and reductionists. (shrink)

The history of the theory of general relativity presents unique features. After its discovery, the theory was immediately confirmed and rapidly changed established notions of space and time. The further implications of general relativity, however, remained largely unexplored until the mid 1950s, when it came into focus as a physical theory and gradually returned to the mainstream of physics. This essay presents a historiographical framework for assessing the history of general relativity by taking into account in an integrated narrative intellectual (...) developments, epistemological problems, and technological advances; the characteristics of post–World War II and Cold War science; and newly emerging institutional settings. It argues that such a framework can help us understand this renaissance of general relativity as a result of two main factors: the recognition of the untapped potential of general relativity and an explicit effort at community building, which allowed this formerly disparate and dispersed field to benefit from the postwar changes in the scientific landscape. (shrink)

The paper critically examines a series of objections to luck egalitarianism raised by Elizabeth Anderson in her essay “What is the Point of Equality?” According to Anderson, current egalitarian writing has come to be dominated by the distinction between choice and brute luck and that strict adherence to this distinction will mean treating some people in ways we have other egalitarian reasons not to want to treat them.A case is made for moving the debate on by adopting a pluralistic view (...) of the fundamental egalitarian impulse that combines concerns about the influence on people’s lives of brute luck with more traditional egalitarian concerns. It is perfectly consistent with pluralistic egalitarianism to say that someone who faces social oppression or lacks effective access to valued functionings should receive public assistance even if not qua the victim of brute luck. (shrink)

ABSTRACT Individual responsibility is now very much on the political agenda. Even those who believe that its importance has been exaggerated by the political right — either because the appropriate conditions for assigning responsibility to individuals are rarely satisfied or because not enough is done to protect individuals from the more harmful consequences of their past choices and gambles — accept that individual responsibility is at least one of the values against which a society and its institutions ought to be (...) evaluated. One might be forgiven for assuming, then, that we know exactly why individual responsibility is important. The truth is otherwise. Surprisingly little philosophical work has been undertaken to analyse and separate out the different rationales that might be in play. Several possible reasons are examined here including: utility, the social bases of self‐respect, autonomy, human flourishing and fairness. However, once we adopt a pluralistic view of the value of individual responsibility we open up the possibility of value conflict, which conflict can make it harder to arrive at definitive prescriptions about which social policies best advance our concerns for individual responsibility. It is nevertheless possible to draw at least some conclusions about which policies we should favour. One important conclusion is that sometimes it is better not to hold individuals responsible for their past choices by denying them aid now, so that they might be better able to assume individual responsibility at a later date. (shrink)

Philosophy was at the core of the eighteenth century movement known as the Scottish Enlightenment. The movement included major figures, such as Francis Hutcheson, David Hume, Adam Smith, Thomas Reid and Adam Ferguson, and also many others who produced notable works, such as Gershom Carmichael, George Turnbull, George Campbell, James Beattie, Alexander Gerard, Henry Home (Lord Kames) and Dugald Stewart. I discuss some of the leading ideas of these thinkers, though paying less attention than I otherwise would to Hume, (...) Smith and Reid, who have separate Encyclopedia entries. Amongst the topics covered in this entry are aesthetics (particularly Hutcheson's), Moral philosophy (particularly Hutcheson's and Smith's), Turnbull's providential naturalism, Kames's doctrines on divine goodness and human freedom, Campbell's criticism of the Humean account of miracles, the philosophy of rhetoric, Ferguson's criticism of the idea of a state of nature, and finally the concept of conjectural history, a concept especially associated with Dugald Stewart. (shrink)

Introduction The chief aim of this book is to give an account of two great periods in the history of Scottish culture. One is, inevitably, that of the ...

That government agencies and public bodies can be liable for damages when they induce and then frustrate people’s legitimate expectations is an important and distinctive feature of administrative law in Europe. This article sets out to establish a set of moral principles and ideals that might justify this legal institution. The notion of security of expectations found in the work of utilitarian writers provides a starting point. Having examined the strengths and weaknesses of this approach, I then turn to consider (...) an alternative argument based on finding a solution to the problem of credible commitments. Finally, I look for suitable moral arguments in the liberal and Kantian political theorising of John Rawls. I argue that if we see the function of the rule of law as not merely to maximise aggregate utility and to make policymakers’ decisions seem credible but also to ensure Justice as Fairness for individuals, then this provides a more robust and satisfactory way to justify the liability of public bodies for legitimate expectations they induce and then frustrate. (shrink)

Name der Zeitschrift: Archiv für Geschichte der Philosophie Jahrgang: 98 Heft: 3 Seiten: 239-271.

This book explores a range of traditional and contemporary metaphysical themes that figure in the writings of E. J. Lowe, whose powerful and influential work was still developing at the time of his death in 2015. Leading philosophers present new essays on topics to do with ontology, necessity, existence, and mental causation.

The article shows that Kuhn's concept of incommensurability emphasizes mainly the objective dimension of communication. To the thesis about the incommensurability of the meanings of scientific concepts in competing paradigms, we oppose the idea of a three-dimensional space of communicative dimensions. We supplement the objective dimension of communication, within which the environmental evolutionary selection of the best knowledge is carried out, with equal social and temporal horizons.

This thesis examines philosophical controversies surrounding the evaluation of medical treatments, with a focus on the evidential roles of randomised trials and mechanisms in Evidence-Based Medicine. Current 'best practice' usually involves excluding non-randomised trial evidence from systematic reviews in cases where randomised trials are available for inclusion in the reviews. The first paper challenges this practice and evaluates whether adding of evidence from non-randomised trials might improve the quality and precision of some systematic reviews. The second paper compares the alleged (...) methodological benefits of randomised trials over observational studies for investigating treatment benefits. It suggests that claims about the superiority of well-conducted randomised controlled trials over well-conducted observational studies are justified, especially when results from the two methods are contradictory. The third paper argues that postulating the unpredictability paradox in systematic reviews when no detectable empirical differences can be found requires further justification. The fourth paper examines the problem of absence causation in the context of explaining causal mechanisms and argues that a recent solution is incomplete and requires further justification. Solving the problem by describing absences as causes of 'mechanism failure' fails to take into account the effects of absences that lead to vacillating levels of mechanism functionality. The fifth paper criticises literature that has emphasised functioning versus 'broken' or 'non-functioning' mechanisms emphasising that many diseases result from increased or decreased mechanism function, rather than complete loss of function. Mechanistic explanations must account for differences in the effectiveness of performed functions, yet current philosophical mechanistic explanations do not achieve this. The last paper argues that the standard of evidence embodied in the ICE theory of technological function is too permissive for evaluating whether the proposed functions of medical technologies have been adequately assessed and correctly ascribed. It argues that high-quality evidence from clinical studies is necessary to justify functional ascriptions to health care technologies. (shrink)

Many potential therapeutic agents are discarded before they are tested in humans. These are not quack medications. They are drugs and other interventions that have been developed by responsible scientists in respectable companies or universities and are often backed up by publications in peer-reviewed journals. These possible treatments might ease suffering and prolong the lives of innumerable patients, yet they have been put aside. In this paper, we outline a novel mechanism—the Plutocratic Proposal—to revive such neglected research and fund early (...) phase clinical trials. The central idea of the Proposal is that any patient who rescues a potential therapeutic agent from neglect by funding early phase clinical trials should be offered a place on the trial. (shrink)

Sextus Empiricus ascribes to Epicurus a curious account of truth and falsehood, according to which these characteristics belong to things in the world about which one speaks, not to what one says about them. I propose an interpretation that takes this account seriously and explains the connection between truth and existence that the Epicureans also seem to recognise. I then examine a second Epicurean account of truth and falsehood and show how it is related to the first.

Norwegian School of Economics and Business Administration and Chr. Michelsen Institute, Norway, bertil.tungodden{at}nhh.no ' + u + '@' + d + ' '//--> Liberal egalitarian theories of justice argue that inequalities arising from non-responsibility factors should be eliminated, but that inequalities arising from responsibility factors should be accepted. This article discusses how the fairness argument for redistribution within a liberal egalitarian framework is affected by a relocation of the cut between responsibility and non-responsibility factors. The article also discusses the claim (...) that equalization of some non-responsibility factors will reduce the ideal level of redistribution. Key Words: responsibility • liberal egalitarianism • redistribution. (shrink)

Background: Continuous viewing of ambiguous patterns is characterized by wavering perception that alternates between two or more equally valid visual solutions. However, when such patterns are viewed intermittently, either by repetitive presentation or by periodic closing of the eyes, perception can become locked or "frozen" in one configuration for several minutes at a time. One aspect of this stabilization is the possible existence of a perceptual memory that persists during periods in which the ambiguous stimulus is absent. Here, we use (...) a novel paradgim of temporally interleaved ambiguous stimuli to explore the nature of this memory, with particular regard to its potential impact on perceptual organization. Results: We found that the persistence of a perceptual configuration was robust to interposed visual patterns and, further, that at least three ambiguous patterns, when interleaved in time, could undergo parallel, stable time courses. Then, using an interleaved presentation paradigm, we established that the occasional reversal in one pattern could be coupled with that of its interleaved counterpart, and that this coupling was a function of the structural similarity between the patterns. Conclusions: We postulate that the stabilization observed with repetitive presentation of ambiguous patterns can be at least partially accounted for by processes that retain a recent perceptual interpretation, and we speculate that such memory may be important in natural vision. We further propose tha the interleaved paradigm introduced here may be of great value to gauge aspects of stimulus similarity that appeal to particular mechanisms of perceptual organization. (shrink)