General discussion of grounding, including its formal features, relations to other notions, and applications. (Originally published 2014; revised 2021).

Given the centrality of arguments from vicious infinite regress to our philosophical reasoning, it is little wonder that they should also appear on the catalogue of arguments offered in defense of theses that pertain to the fundamental structure of reality. In particular, the metaphysical foundationalist will argue that, on pain of vicious infinite regress, there must be something fundamental. But why think that infinite regresses of grounds are vicious? I explore existing proposed accounts of viciousness cast in terms of contradictions, (...) dependence, failed reductive theories and parsimony. I argue that no one of these accounts adequately captures the conditions under which an infinite regress—any infinite regress—is vicious as opposed to benign. In their place, I suggest an account of viciousness in terms of explanatory failure. If this account is correct, infinite grounding regresses are not necessarily vicious; and we must be much more careful employing such arguments to the conclusion that there has to be something fundamental. (shrink)

Fifteen leading philosophers explore metaphysical foundationalism, the idea that reality has an over-arching hierarchical structure ordered by relations of metaphysical dependence, where chains of entities ordered by those dependence relations terminate in something fundamental.

Metaphysicians of a certain stripe are almost unanimously of the view that grounding is necessarily irreflexive, asymmetric, transitive, and well-founded. They deny the possibility of circles of ground and, therewith, the possibility of species of metaphysical coherentism. But what's so bad about circles of ground? One problem for coherentism might be that it ushers in anti-foundationalism: grounding loops give rise to infinite regresses. And this is bad because infinite grounding regresses are vicious. This article argues that circles of ground do (...) not necessarily give rise to infinite regresses, and where they do, those regresses are not necessarily vicious. (shrink)

A common reaction to crises experienced within or brought about by business is to identify a corollary ‘crisis of leadership’ and to call for better (stronger, more thoughtful or, indeed, more ethical and responsible) leaders. This paper supports the idea that there is a crisis of leadership – but interprets it quite differently. Specifically, I argue that the most ethically debilitating crisis is the fact that we look to leadership to solve organisational ethical ills. There is, I argue, a pressing (...) need to conceptualise a business ethics that is not constrained by the straitjacket of official hierarchy – a need to denaturalise ‘leadership’ as the normal or rightful locus of ethical regulation and renewal in business organisation. To this end, I explore a Levinasian ethico-politics of responsibility and proximity as the basis of an alternative, anti-sovereign, ethics of organisation. (shrink)

This paper examines the ethics of the Australian business community’s responses to the phenomenon of modern slavery. Engaging a critical discourse approach, we draw upon a data set of submissions by businesses and business representatives to the Australian government’s Joint Standing Committee on Foreign Affairs, Defence and Trade ‘Parliamentary Inquiry into Establishing a Modern Slavery Act in Australia’—which preceded the signing into law of Australia’s Modern Slavery Act 2018—to examine the business community’s discursive construction in their submissions of the ethical–political (...) concept of freedom. The paper shows how the concept of freedom was employed by Australian business in a manner that privileged their own subject status and advocated for legislation with minimal burden. Relating this contemporary case to a longer historical context, we show how Australian business responses towards modern slavery map onto liberal and neoliberal ethics in which the freedom of the propertied takes precedent over that of the property-less. Further, we show discursive similarities in the arguments presented by modern Australian businesses and certain historical efforts by members of the business community to privilege commercial freedoms in responses to 18th and 19th Century abolitionist movements. Overall, our research makes two important contributions: first, it highlights the value of a critical discourse lens in business ethics research to show how business and other stakeholders in the field construct and shape their own and other’s ethically-laden understanding of reality; and second, it presents a case for considerable scepticism about the motivation of business to employ the freedoms made available to it under neo/liberal discourse to confront a key human rights challenge. (shrink)

Although it is very often taken for granted that there is something fundamental, the literature appears to have developed with little to no careful consideration of what exactly it is that the fundamentalia are supposed to do. If we are to have a good reason to believe that there is something fundamental, we need not only to know what exactly it is that the fundamentalia are invoked for, but why it is that nothing else is available for the task to (...) hand. A good argument in defense of fundamentality, then, will contain an assumption that stipulates an explanatory target; along with a second, crucial, assumption that tells us that no dependent entity is available to do the work that needs to be done. In this paper, I explore both of these assumptions. (shrink)

I examine in this paper deification and demonisation – the social attribution of absolute ‘Good’ and ‘Evil’ to individuals or individual entities. Specifically, I unpack ways that evilness and goodness have become personified in the figure of the chief executive officer in contemporary, particularly US, business culture. Showing both the readily accessible and widely used nature of these religious tropes, I nevertheless argue that both deification and demonisation have ethically and politically disempowering effects for organisational members, the wider citizenry, and (...) for critique within the field of business ethics. (shrink)

I examine in this paper deification and demonisation – the social attribution of absolute ‘Good’ and ‘Evil’ to individuals or individual entities. Specifically, I unpack ways that evilness and goodness have become personified in the figure of the chief executive officer in contemporary, particularly US, business culture. Showing both the readily accessible and widely used nature of these religious tropes, I nevertheless argue that both deification and demonisation have ethically and politically disempowering effects for organisational members, the wider citizenry, and (...) for critique within the field of business ethics. (shrink)

It is widely recognized by proponents of the notion that grounding can be, indeed is, overdetermined. Moreover, it seems safe to suppose that something of a consensus has emerged: grounding is overdetermined and there is nothing about it that we ought to find concerning. Not only is the overdetermination apparently not problematic, metaphysically speaking, but that grounding is overdetermined is not problematic, conceptually speaking, either. From a small sampling of alleged cases, however, no such conclusions can responsibly be drawn. And (...) without an account of when a fact is technically overdetermined, we are unable to reasonably answer questions about the acceptability of that overdetermination either. In this paper, I attempt to understand when a fact is technically metaphysically overdetermined. I argue that such an exploration reveals that nothing as regards the overdetermination of grounding is straightforward, and that the phenomenon is deserving of much more philosophical attention. (shrink)

Philosophical questions regarding the nature and methodology of philosophical inquiry have garnered much attention in recent years. Perhaps nowhere are these discussions more developed than in relation to the field of metaphysics. The Routledge Handbook of Metametaphysics is an outstanding reference source to this growing subject. It comprises thirty-eight chapters written by leading international contributors, and is arranged around five themes: • The history of metametaphysics • Neo-Quineanism (and its objectors) • Alternative conceptions of metaphysics • The epistemology of metaphysics (...) • Science and metaphysics. Essential reading for students and researchers in metaphysics, philosophical methodology, and ontology, The Routledge Handbook of Metametaphysics will also be of interest to those in closely related subjects such as philosophy of language, logic, and philosophy of science. (shrink)

My fundamental argument is that a collective concept of race that presumes that there are, or were at some point in the past, discreet genetic groups that have tracked along continental lines and that those differences are the fundamental basis for our folk and political groupings of white, black, Asian, Native American, and Pacific Islander is a fallacy that will always lead to social inequality. Such an understanding of race currently reverberates through genetic science, but for social and political reasons, (...) and with good intentions. But if we want to move toward a social order that promotes social justice, all of us across the sciences, throughout health policy, and in the wider public will need to reconceptualize race in terms of legacies of discrimination. We will need to shift our focus from molecular differences to social and political differences, especially when we conduct gene‐environment analyses. (shrink)

The Principle of Sufficient Reason is very seldom, if ever, referred to in the works of whom we might think of as the eminent Asian metaphysicians. In spite of this, the big picture metaphysical views available in the thought of philosophers such as Nāgārjuna, Fazang and Nishida appear to share certain structural features with views more familiar to us from our own tradition; views that explicitly accept or reject the Principle of Sufficient Reason. Nāgārjuna looks to develop a kind of (...) metaphysical infinitism, Fazang an extreme form of coherentism, and Nishida a species of foundationalism. These three positions - infinitism, coherentism and foundationalism - are typically thought to exhaust the spread of possibilities by those working within the Western tradition. -/- In spite of their similarities to positions advanced within our own tradition, the cosmologies of many of the giants of Asian philosophy are characterised by their rather striking conclusions. Amongst such conclusions for Nāgārjuna is that everything is empty; for Fazang that everything is identical to everything else; and for Nishida that everything depends on absolute nothingness. If the Principle of Sufficient Reason is playing a role in the derivation of such striking conclusions, then it looks that there are more options regarding the metaphysical structure of the world available to us than our own tradition typically courts. If, on the other hand, these striking cosmological conclusions are arrived at without any consideration of sufficient reason, then there may well be ways of reasoning about the overarching structure of reality that are powerful but unfamiliar to Western thinking. In this contribution, I explore what, if any, role the PSR might be playing in the thought of Nāgārjuna , Fazang and Nishida, and what we might be able to learn from it. (shrink)

Hume offers two ways of reconciling the partiality of people’s feelings with the generality of moral thinking. First, the general point of view in moral evaluation is not that of a disinterested observer, but of another person who has a close relationship with the person to be judged. Here I find something analogous to the idea of Nel Noddings, who attempts to build an ethical theory on the basis of caring relationships. Second, according to Hume, the generality of the rules (...) of justice is also compatible with partial feelings. Such rules allow everyone to pursue his or her goals without fear of violent intervention from others. My idea is that these rules are comparable to those of a competitive game. The idea of fair competition is not necessarily alien to Noddings’ type of ethical theory. As children, human beings normally learn to be fair in competitive games, along with caring for family members and friends. An ethical ideal of fairness may develop through competitions and help people get along with others beyond narrow circles. Taking into account of the competitive elements in relationship between people will be helpful in giving a fuller picture of a broadly Humean, sentimentalist ethical theory. (shrink)

In comparing humans and animals, we may use humans as the standard to measure animals, or conversely, animals as the standard to measure humans. While most philosophers have adopted the former approach, David Hume is among those few who use the comparison with animals as means to throw light on human nature. I focus on Hume’s treatment of human and animal reason. The cognitive processes and states that Hume holds to be common to humans and animals may be called situated, (...) that is, embedded in the process of guiding actions that is actually going on and consequently relative to the agent’s current position in space-time. Hume’s treatment of causal reasoning underlines the centrality of situated cognition in the workings of human, as well as animal minds. Taking situated reasoning and beliefs as the paradigm of human cognition enables us to look from an alternative point of view, at the features supposedly unique to human cognition, like the use of general words and concepts. Thus we can find a confirmation of the practical import of general words and concepts in Hume’s account of the obligation of promises, where words play an essential role in extending our control over objects and actions beyond what is present and particular into what is absent or not yet actualized. This is also a confirmation of how deeply our cognitive abilities in general are rooted in our practical needs. (shrink)

Our aim in this paper is to evaluate Frank Jackson and Philip Pettit’s ‘program explanation’ framework as an account of the autonomy of the special sciences. We argue that this framework can only explain the autonomy of a limited range of special science explanations. The reason for this limitation is that the framework overlooks a distinction between two kinds of properties, which we refer to as ‘higher-level’ and ‘higher-order’ properties. The program explanation framework can account for the autonomy of special (...) science explanations that appeal to higher-level properties but it does not account for the autonomy of most of those explanations that appeal to higher-order properties. (shrink)

We propose that learning has a top-down component, but not in the propositional terms described by Mitchell et al. Specifically, we propose that a host of learning processes, including associative learning, serve to imbue the representation of the conditioned stimulus (CS) with affective meaning.

Picture a young infant sitting in a room staring at two objects occluded by a screen. For the first few trials, the researcher manipulating the objects performs the same action: both sticks move in...

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:34 Feminist Studies 47, no. 1. © 2021 by Feminist Studies, Inc. James Bliss Defense, Redemption, Care: Black Feminist and Queer Studies Literary theory continues to be received by some as if it were an alien or antagonistic presence from whose leaden and reductive grasp it is imperative to keep literature protected. It is rare, however, that it is the literary, as such, that is being protected, rather (...) than a certain comfortable accommodation with it—not irreducible strangeness and surprise, but the security of knowing that one’s expectations will be fulfilled and one’s competence as a reader rewarded. The pleasures of accommodation and immediate assimilation are the first that theory asks us to forego—which may do as much to make it seem forbidding and “inhumane” as anything it actually proposes. —Elizabeth W. Bruss1 I. Theory Not for the first time, we find ourselves building new genres. Pursuing new writings. Not for the first time, the theoretical and the literary envelope, eclipse, and rearticulate one another. What’s more, the theoretical has been a mode of artistic practice for so long that every page is a palimpsest, a sedimentation of sedimentations of conceptual frames— swirled, spiraling genealogies. Fluent in invented tongues, in the idioms 1. Elizabeth W. Bruss, Beautiful Theories: The Spectacle of Discourse in Contemporary Criticism (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982), 483. 35 James Bliss Books Discussed in This Essay Black Feminism Reimagined: After Intersectionality. By Jennifer C. Nash. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2019. None Like Us: Blackness, Belonging, Aesthetic Life. By Stephen Best. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2018. Sensual Excess: Queer Femininity and Brown Jouissance. By Amber Jamilla Musser. New York: NYU Press, 2018. Queer Times, Black Futures. By Kara Keeling. New York: NYU Press, 2019. of invention, in the fluid looseness of disintegrated discourses, our works turn singular. The monograph as signature. The page promises to freeze the text, the object, the artwork, the lifeworld, the performance, and in that stillness to teach us its movements. New moves, secret passageways, lines of escape and gaps in the walls of institutions that die, dissolve, and ossify around and inside us. And here we are. The permanent apocalypse that racial capitalism has been for most life has reached the quadrangles of the college campus. What are we even doing anymore? In the great and dreadful remaking of higher education, as students face permanent indebtedness as the cost of entry into a world without work, what is the ethical impetus for our researches and the systems within which we publish? What are the ethics of critical cultural studies in a debt mine? By what arithmetic do we benefit the students we teach to “steal from the university ” when the university is so much more adroit at stealing from them (and us)? At the same time that the contours of our professional lives are, apparently, unraveling, we find ourselves in (another) new renaissance in Black studies and Black study. We find ourselves within (another) new moment of textual production around the trio of race/gender/sexuality— that is, around Blackness or around Black feminism. 36 James Bliss Or, Black invention—where the Black female, femme, feminine, and maternal operate as synecdochic figures for a species of poiēsis.2 In the 1980s, Jacques Derrida wryly called California the “state of theory” as a function of its tectonic instability.3 In the 2010s, Blackness became the state of theory as a function of its coincidence of death and life, ending and beginning, absence and excess, apocalypse and invention. Blackness, in this instance, is as material as it is metaphor, a projection of meaning across both the great ephemeral skin and the body as flesh. This piece emerges from a sense of the necessity and the hazards of an intellectual history of a moment during which, to take a suggestive phrase from Jared Sexton, “Blackness is theory itself, anti-blackness the resistance to theory.”4 But already language presents an issue. What is the relationship between Sexton’s “theory” and the “theory” found in the epigraph from Elizabeth Bruss? Or, between Sexton’s “theory” and Lewis R. Gordon’s “theory,” as Sexton borrows from Gordon’s “Theory in... (shrink)

In the thirty years since its discovery by Terje Lomo and Tim Bliss, Long Term Potentiation has become one of the most extensively studied topics in contemporary neuroscience. In LTP the strength of synapses between neurons is potentiated following brief but intense activation. LTP is thought to play a central role in learning and memory, though the exact nature of its role is less clear. In spite of years of research, there are many questions about LTP regarding its functional (...) relevance that remain unanswered - for example, is it a model of memory formation, or is the actual neural mechanism used by the brain to store information? This volume presents a state of the art account of LTP. It begins with lively accounts, by the scientists most closely involved, of the discovery of LTP and of the experiments that established its basic properties and induction mechanisms. Later contributions contain reviews and new research that cover the range of molecular, cellular, physiological and behavioural approaches to the study of LTP. Provocative, accessible, and authoritative, this book makes it clear why LTP continues in equal measure to puzzle and beguile neuroscientists today. Advance praise for Long Term Potentiation: 'This book provides a definitive overview of the development of ideas about synaptic plasticity and about the wide range of current research in this fascinating field.' Colin Blakemore, University of OxfordReadership: Neuroscientists from postgraduate level upwards. (shrink)

Maurice Scott, an outstanding economics scholar associated for most of his career with Nuffield College Oxford, was involved in the revolution in economic thought of the 1960s and 1970s. His major work, A New View of Economic Growth, was coolly received. Scott, who wrote an autobiography, My Life, and a philosophical study entitled Peter's Journey: A Search for the True Purpose of Life, was elected Fellow of the British Academy in 1990. Obituary by Christopher Bliss FBA.

BackgroundClinical trials should be as inclusive as possible to facilitate equitable access to research and better reflect the population towards which any intervention is aimed. Informed by the UK’s National Institute for Health and Care Research (NIHR) Innovations in Clinical Trial Design and Delivery for the Under-served (INCLUDE) guidance, we audited oncology trials conducted by the Clinical Trials and Statistics Unit at The Institute of Cancer Research, London (ICR-CTSU) to identify whether essential documents were overtly excluding any groups and whether (...) sufficient data were collected to assess diversity of trial participants from groups suggested by INCLUDE as under-served by research in the UK.MethodsThirty cancer clinical trials managed by ICR-CTSU and approved between 2011–2021 were audited. The first ethics approved version of each trial’s protocol, patient information sheet, and patient completed questionnaire, together with the first case report forms (CRFs) version were reviewed. A range of items aligned with the INCLUDE under-served groups were assessed, including age, sex and gender, socio-economic and health factors. The scope did not cover trial processes in participating hospitals.ResultsData relating to participants’ age, ethnic group and health status were well collected and no upper age limit was specified in any trials’ eligibility criteria. 23/30 (77%) information sheets used at least one gendered term to address patients. Most CRFs did not specify whether they were collecting sex or gender and only included male or female categories. The median reading age for information sheets was 15–16 years (IQR: 14–15 – 16–17). Socio-economic factors were not routinely collected and not commonly mentioned in trial protocols.ConclusionsNo systemic issues were identified in protocols which would explicitly prevent any under-served group from participating. Areas for improvement include reducing use of gendered words and improving readability of patient information. The challenge of fully assessing adequate inclusion of under-served populations remains, as socio-economic factors are not routinely collected because they fall beyond the data generally required for protocol-specified trial endpoint assessments. This audit has highlighted the need to agree and standardise demographic data collection to permit adequate monitoring of the under-served groups identified by the NIHR. (shrink)

.In her Making Things Up, amongst the many other achievements of the volume, Bennett develops a rich account of relative fundamentality. She also defends a kind of deflationism about the notion: relative fundamentality is nothing over and above patterns of building. In this essay, I argue that the best and common competitor of this view – primitivism about relative fundamentality – is in worse shape than Bennett's evaluation would indicate. Deflationism looks to be the best view.

A critical examination of contemporary nursing theory suggests that two distinct discourses coexist within this field. On the one hand, proponents of the ‘knowledge discourse’ argue that nurses should drop the ‘virtue script’ and focus on the scientific and technical aspects of their work. On the other hand, proponents of the ‘caring discourse’ promote a view of nursing that embodies humanistic qualities such as compassion, empathy and mutuality. In view of this, we suggest a way to reconcile both discourses despite (...) the fact that they appear to be at odds theoretically and practically. To that end, we argue that nursing theory must give a prominent role to the Aristotelian conception of virtue, and we offer an account that includes both character and intellectual virtues. This account allows for a focus on moral competence but also accommodates the demands for discipline‐specific knowledge. Our account incorporates the caring discourse by suggesting a way for individuals to cultivate the conditions within themselves that make ‘caring in nursing’ possible, while the knowledge discourse is accommodated via the acquisition of the intellectual virtues. The process for achieving both these ends is the same: an intention to consistently develop, hone and exercise certain character traits over time. (shrink)

Volume 24, Issue 6, September 2019, Page 666-668.

We defend Jaegwon Kim’s ‘causal inheritance’ principle from an objection raised by Jurgen Schröder. The objection is that the principle is inconsistent with a view about mental properties assumed by Kim, namely, that they are second-order properties. We argue that Schröder misconstrues the notion of second-order property. We distinguish three notions of second-order property and highlight their problems and virtues. Finally, we examine the consequence of Kim’s principle and discuss the issue of whether Kim’s ‘supervenience argument’ generalizes to all special (...) sciences or not. (shrink)

We evaluate the scope of Jaegwon Kim's “supervenience argument” for reduction. Does its conclusion apply only to psychology, or does it generalize to all the special sciences? The claim that the supervenience argument generalizes to all the special sciences if it goes through for psychology is often raised as an objection to the supervenience argument. We argue that this objection is ambiguous. We distinguish three readings of it and suggest that some of them make it a plausible claim, whereas other (...) readings make it implausible. We suggest that this ambiguity is the result of picturing the world as being hierarchically organized in levels, with the domain of physics at the bottom and the domains of the social sciences at the top. The plausibility of the objection depends on how we think of this picture. This popular picture, we suggest, involves three different dimensions along which reduction may occur. (shrink)

Volume 25, Issue 5, August 2020, Page 608-609.