In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Politics and the Earthly City in Augustine's City of God by Veronica Roberts OgleAaron C. EbertPolitics and the Earthly City in Augustine's City of God by Veronica Roberts Ogle (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021), x + 201 pp.Politics is not a word in Augustine's lexicon—at least, it's not something he speaks of, in the abstract, in his great work of political theology, the City of God. This curious (...) omission from Augustine's late magnum opus et arduum has given rise to many a divergent reading of his political thought. Lacking an express account of the very term in question, his politics can seem to admit of a wide range of interpretations. On one side of the spectrum, it has been described as anticipating the religious neutrality of modern liberalism. On the other side, it has been interpreted as consolidating politics into religion by transposing political philosophy into the key of ecclesiology and making the Church the new realm of politics.1 In her elegantly written and insightful new book, which builds on the work of her 2014 dissertation at the University of Notre Dame and on a few published articles, Veronica Roberts Ogle charts a new interpretive path for reading Augustine on politics. She does this by means of two principal interventions.The first is by elucidating City of God's rhetorical purpose, what Ogle calls its "psychagogic character" (6). Psychagogy, "the art of leading [agô] souls [psychai] to a state of health," was the rhetorical aim and genre of much ancient philosophy (3). It took its cue from the philosopher's perception that his readers were sick with the disease of unhealthy attachment to the things of the world. Philosophers were physicians of the soul: they applied "the medicinal art of contraries" to their sick patients. This meant that their literary curatives often met patients/readers with the bitter taste of a poison (4). But—and this is the crucial point for Ogle—the poison was given for the purpose of health. What this means for Augustine's City of God, Ogle argues, is that we ought not take the work's biting and at-times-venomous rhetoric as evidence that Augustine is trying to poison his reader's vision of politics. Rather, he is trying to cure them of their attachment to the myths and delusions of politics-according-to-Rome and, instead, "to help us see the world, even the political world, anew: as part of a created order that is good, but that points beyond itself all the same" (4). Augustine's descriptions of Rome—indeed his frequent equations of Rome with the civitas [End Page 1426] terrena—are indeed meant to shock. But, so Ogle argues, they are meant to shock us out of destructive attachments so that we can learn to make the right attachments, first to Christ, and then, through Christ, to our earthly communities as pilgrims. City of God's pessimistic rhetoric is not Augustine simply denouncing the natural project of politics. It is a bitter medicine for a people deathly ill with an addiction to earthly glory.The second intervention of Ogle's book lies in its attention to what she calls City of God's "sacramental ethos" (5). This, I would argue, is the book's most important contribution. It is also the insight on which the heart of the book's argument depends. Sacraments, for Augustine, are signs that point us to God. Understood in this broad sense, the whole created order—that is, everything that is not God—has the quality of a sacrament by virtue of its very existence. This is connected closely to Augustine's understanding of evil as privatio boni: all that exists, to the extent that it exists, is good; and all that exists is, by nature, a sign (signum) pointing beyond itself to the Lord.These are not new insights into Augustine's doctrine of creation, but Ogle's application of them to the question of politics and the earthly city is suggestive. For what emerges is a new account of the relationship between politics and the earthly city. The whole created order... (shrink)

Boghossian claims that we can acquire a priori knowledge by means of a certain form of argument, our grasp of whose premises relies on the existence of implicit definitions. I discuss an objection to his ‘analytic theory of the a priori’. The worry is that in order to employ this kind of argument we must already know its conclusion. Boghossian has responded to this type of objection in recent work, but I argue that his responses are unconvincing. Along the way, (...) I resist Ebert’s reasons for thinking that Boghossian’s argument fails to transmit warrant from its premises to its conclusion. (shrink)

Objects appear to fall into different sorts, each with their own criteria for identity. This raises the question of whether sorts overlap. Abstractionists about numbers—those who think natural numbers are objects characterized by abstraction principles—face an acute version of this problem. Many abstraction principles appear to characterize the natural numbers. If each abstraction principle determines its own sort, then there is no single subject-matter of arithmetic—there are too many numbers. That is, unless objects can belong to more than one sort. (...) But if there are multi-sorted objects, there should be cross-sortal identity principles for identifying objects across sorts. The going cross-sortal identity principle, ECIA2 of Cook and Ebert (2005), solves the problem of too many numbers. But, I argue, it does so at a high cost. I therefore propose a novel cross-sortal identity principle, based on embeddings of the induced models of abstracts developed by Walsh (2012). The new criterion matches ECIA2’s success, but offers interestingly different answers to the more controversial identifications made by ECIA2. (shrink)

Review of Basic Laws of Arithmetic, ed. and trans. by P. Ebert and M. Rossberg (Oxford 2013).

L'étude de la nature et du rapport entre la doxa et l' épistèmé a retenu depuis quelques décennies l'attention des platonisants allemands. Déjà en 1877, O. Ihm publiait une dissertation doctorale sous le titre: Uber den Begriff der Platonischen Doxa und deren Verhältniss zum Wissen der Ideen. Plus récemment J. Sprute publiait également sa dissertation doctorale sous le titre: Der Begriff der Doxa in der Platonischen Philosophie. Quelques années plus tard, E. Tielsch faisait paraître un volumineux ouvrage portant le titre: (...) Die Platonischen Versionen der griechischen Doxalehre. C'est le dernier en date de ces ouvrages sur la doxa-épistémè qui retiendra ici notre attention. II s'agit de l'ouvrage de Th. Ebert qui a été publié en 1974 sous le titre: Meinung und Wissen in der Philosophic Platons. Cet ouvrage a été accueilli avec une certaine réticence par la critique tant pour sa méthode de lecture des dialogues platoniciens que pour son interprétation générale du platonisme. Nous aimerions done ici l'analyser à ce double point de vue de la méthode de lecture et de son interprétation du platonisme. Mais auparavant il nous faut dire un motsur la thèse centrale que défend l'auteur, pour être mieux en mesure de juger de la profondeur des changements que l'auteur nous suggère d'opérer dans notre compréhension des dialogues de Platon et, d'une façon plus générale, de la tradition platonicienne. (shrink)

Philosophers and ethicists have long neglected moral questions that arise from our interaction with non-human animals. Most assumed that human beings have a higher moral status than other animals, and that it is therefore morally permissible to use non-human animals as a source of food, clothing, and entertainment, and for scientific purposes. In recent decades, however, that assumption has been challenged, and the moral status of non-human animals is now the subject of a lively and controversial academic debate.Advances in sciences, (...) particularly the advent of evolutionary theory, made us realize that human beings and other animals are more similar than different, and force us to rethink our place in nature. We are no longer justified in thinking of ourselves as the crown of creation. We now understand that we are just one species among others, and we must ask ourselves anew – with an open and critical mind and without bias – which values and principles should guide our interaction with non-human animals, and how we should weigh our interests against those of other animals.Recognizing this important trend in moral thinking, the Bangladesh Journal of Bioethics invited me to edit a special issue on animal ethics. The interest was so great that one issue became two, of which this is the first. I am grateful to Professor Shamima Parvin Lasker and Ms. Tahera Ahmed for giving me the opportunity to serve as a guest editor, and for their assistance during the editing process. I also thank our contributors for choosing this journal to publish their excellent work, and the reviewers for their insightful comments and suggestions.This, the first special issue on animal ethics contains the following five articles:Robin Attfield and Rebekah Humphreys (“Justice and Non-Human Animals”) challenge the widely held belief that non-human animals are not included within the scope of the principles of justice, and suggest that the interests of non-human animals sometimes take precedence over the interests of human beings. The implications of their argument for our interaction with other animals are profound: E.g., it is a matter of justice and fairness to prevent avoidable and unnecessary animal suffering, rather than a mere matter of compassion.Eric X. Qi (“Special Relations, Special Obligations, and Speciesism”) develops an account of the moral significance of special relations, and uses it to argue for a modest form of speciesism that steers a middle ground between anti-speciesism and crude speciesism. Unlike anti-speciesists, he maintains that species co-membership grounds special moral obligations among the members of the same species. In contrast to crude speciesists, however, he holds that our special obligations to fellow human beings do not warrant that we always attach more weight to their interests than to the comparable interests of non-human animals.Yamikani Ndasaukaand Grivas M. Kayange (“Existence and Needs: A case for the equal moral considerability of non-human animals”) argue that the existentialist view that human beings have a higher moral status than other animals rests on a weak foundation. They consider a number of arguments that have been made in support of this view and conclude that none of them holds up to critical scrutiny. They then suggest that human beings and other animals in fact deserve equal moral consideration, and – drawing from Martin Heidegger and Abraham Maslow – ground that claim in two important commonalities between them.Sreetama Chakraborty (“Animal Ethics: Beyond Neutrality, Universality, and Consistency”) explains how the postmodern approach to animal ethics departs from the traditional approach, particularly its emphasis on the principles of neutrality, universality, and consistency, and draws attention to the pernicious hierarchy of domination that separates human beings from other animals. Building on the insights of postmodernism, she takes first steps towards a new, non-anthropocentric paradigm, in the hope to achieve a sustainable balance between human interests and the interests of non-human animals.Gabriel Vidal Quiñones (“Singerian Vegetarianism and the Limits of Utilitarianism: A path towards a Meaning Ethics”) takes a critical look at Peter Singer’s utilitarian argument for vegetarianism, and argues that the conceptual resources of utilitarianism only allow for an incomplete moral understanding of our relationship with other animals. What is lacking, he suggests, is an ethical vision. He argues that, without an ethical vision, human action threatens to degenerate into mere automatism without meaning. He proposes a “meaning ethics” that he thinks is better equipped to help us decide how we ought to treat other animals.I hope you, dear reader, will enjoy reading through this remarkable collection of articles as much as I enjoyed putting it together. Maybe you will even be inspired to do some thinking of your own about issues of animal ethics and put your thoughts down on paper. If so, I sincerely hope that you will choose the Bangladesh Journal of Bioethics to publish your article.Warm regards and best wishes for the new year. (shrink)

This is the first complete English translation of Gottlob Frege's Grundgesetze der Arithmetik, with introduction and annotation. The importance of Frege's ideas within contemporary philosophy would be hard to exaggerate. He was, to all intents and purposes, the inventor of mathematical logic, and the influence exerted on modern philosophy of language and logic, and indeed on general epistemology, by the philosophical framework.

Mountaineering is a dangerous activity. For many mountaineers, part of its very attraction is the risk, the thrill of danger. Yet mountaineers are often regarded as reckless or even irresponsible for risking their lives. In this paper, we offer a defence of risk-taking in mountaineering. Our discussion is organised around the fact that mountaineers and non-mountaineers often disagree about how risky mountaineering really is. We hope to cast some light on the nature of this disagreement – and to argue that (...) mountaineering may actually be worthwhile because of the risks it involves. Section 1 introduces the disagreement and, in doing so, separates out several different notions of risk. Sections 2–4 then consider some explanations of the disagreement, showing how a variety of phenomena can skew people's risk judgements. Section 5 then surveys some recent statistics, to see whether these illuminate how risky mountaineering is. In light of these considerations, however, we suggest that the disagreement is best framed not simply in terms of how risky mountaineering is but whether the risks it does involve are justified. The remainder of the paper, sections 6–9, argues that risk-taking in mountaineering often is justified – and, moreover, that mountaineering can itself be justified (in part) by and because of the risks it involves. (shrink)

Abstractionism, which is a development of Frege's original Logicism, is a recent and much debated position in the philosophy of mathematics. This volume contains 16 original papers by leading scholars on the philosophical and mathematical aspects of Abstractionism. After an extensive editors' introduction to the topic of abstractionism, the volume is split into 4 sections. The contributions within these sections explore the semantics and meta-ontology of Abstractionism, abstractionist epistemology, the mathematics of Abstractionis, and finally, Frege's application constraint within an abstractionist (...) setting. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: What is Self‐Sufficiency? The Value of Self‐Sufficiency Objections Concluding Remarks Notes.

A history of divining rods Content Type Journal Article Category Book Review Pages 1-3 DOI 10.1007/s11016-011-9565-x Authors Martina Kölbl-Ebert, Jura-Museum, Burgstrasse 19, 85072 Eichstätt, Germany Journal Metascience Online ISSN 1467-9981 Print ISSN 0815-0796.

Since the 1970’s there has been a major increase in adventure sports participation but it seems that engagement in such sports comes with a stigma: adventure sports participants are often regarded as reckless ‘daredevils’. We approach the questions about people’s perception of risk and recklessness in adventure sports by combining empirical research with philosophical analysis. First, we provide empirical evidence that suggests that laypeople tend to assess the danger of adventure sports as greater than more mundane sports and judge adventure (...) sports participants as more reckless than participants in non-adventure sports. We contextualise these findings within existing psychological risk perception paradigms and outline new philosophical explanations of the identified pattern in laypeople’s risk perception. (shrink)

This is an introductory survey article to the philosophy of mathematics. I provide a detailed account of what Benacerraf’s problem is and then discuss in general terms four different approaches to ….

What is the relation between ‘full’ or ‘outright’ belief and the various levels of confidence that agents can have in the propositions that concern them? This paper argues for a new answer to this question. Decision theory implies that in making decisions, rational agents must treat certain propositions as though they were completely certain; but on most forms of decision theory, these propositions are not ones for which any finite agent could have maximal justification – the agent will clearly have (...) less justification for these propositions than for elementary logical truths. Thus, every adequate model of a finite rational agent's belief‐system must involve two set of credences – theoretical credences and practical credences . A full or outright belief in p can be defined as the state of being stably disposed to assign a practical credence of 1 to p, for all normal practical purposes. This definition allows for a kind of reconciliation between the pragmatist and intellectualist approaches in epistemology. (shrink)

A co-authored article with Roy T. Cook forthcoming in a special edition on the Caesar Problem of the journal Dialectica. We argue against the appeal to equivalence classes in resolving the Caesar Problem.

While examples of bacteria benefiting eukaryotes are increasingly documented, studies examining effects of eukaryote hosts on microbial fitness are rare. Beneficial bacteria are often called “mutualistic” even if mutual reciprocity of benefits has not been demonstrated and despite the plausibility of other explanations for these microbes' beneficial effects on host fitness. Furthermore, beneficial bacteria often occur in diverse communities, making mutualism both empirically and conceptually difficult to demonstrate. We suggest reserving the terms “mutualism” and “parasitism” for pairwise interactions where the (...) relationship is largely independent of other species and can be verified by measuring the fitness effect experienced by both partners. In hosts with diverse microbial communities, we propose re‐formulating some of the essential questions of symbiosis research – e.g. concerning specificity, transmission mode, and common evolutionary fates – as questions of community ecology and ecosystem function, allowing important biological interactions to be investigated without making assumptions about reciprocity. Understanding the fitness of host‐associated bacteria is a crucial component of investigations into the role of microbes in eukaryote evolution. (shrink)

“Probably Peirce’s best-known works are the first two articles in a series of six that originally were collectively entitled Illustrations of the Logic of Science and published in Popular Science Monthly from November 1877 through August 1878. The first is entitled ‘The Fixation of Belief’ and the second is entitled ‘How to Make Our Ideas Clear.’ In the first of these papers Peirce defended, in a manner consistent with not accepting naive realism, the superiority of the scientific method over other (...) methods of overcoming doubt and ‘fixing belief.’” — Robert Burch, “Charles Sanders Peirce,” entry in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (2021 revision) -/- “Pragmatist epistemologies often explore how we can carry out inquiries in a self-controlled and fruitful way. (Where much analytic epistemology centres around the concept of knowledge, considered as an idealised end-point of human thought, pragmatist epistemology centres around the concept of inquiry, considered as the process of knowledge-seeking and how we can improve it.) So pragmatists often provide rich accounts of the capacities or virtues that we must possess in order to inquire well, and the rules or guiding principles that we should adopt. A canonical account is Peirce’s classic early paper ‘The Fixation of Belief‘. Here Peirce states that inquiry is a struggle to replace doubt with “settled belief“, and that the only method of inquiry that can make sense of the fact that at least some of us are disturbed by inconsistent beliefs, and will subsequently reflect upon which methods of fixing belief are correct is the Method of Science, which draws on the Pragmatic Maxim described above. This contrasts with three other methods of fixing belief: i) refusing to consider evidence contrary to one’s favored beliefs (the Method of Tenacity), ii) accepting an institution’s dictates (the Method of Authority), iii) developing the most rationally coherent or elegant-seeming belief-set (the A Priori Method).“ — Catherine Legg, “Pragmatism,” entry in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (2021 revision). (shrink)

According to most accounts of trust, you can only trust other people (or groups of people). To trust is to think that another has goodwill, or something to that effect. I sketch a different form of trust: the unquestioning attitude. What it is to trust, in this sense, is to settle one’s mind about something, to stop questioning it. To trust is to rely on a resource while suspending deliberation over its reliability. Trust lowers the barrier of monitoring, challenging, checking, (...) and questioning. Trust sets up open pipelines between yourself and parts of the external world. Trust permits external resources to have a similar relationship to one as one’s internal cognitive faculties. This creates efficiency, but at the price of exquisite vulnerability. We must trust in this way because we are cognitively limited beings in a cognitively overwhelming world. Crucially, we can hold the unquestioning attitude towards objects and technologies. When I trust my climbing rope, I stop worrying about its reliability. When I trust my online calendaring system, I simply go to the events indicated, without question. But, one might worry, how could one ever hold such a normatively loaded attitude as trust towards mere objects? How could it ever make sense to feel betrayed by an object? Trust is our engine for expanding and outsourcing our agency — for binding external processes into our practical selves. Thus, we can be betrayed by our smartphones in the same way that we can be betrayed by our memory. When we trust, we try to make something a part of our agency, and we are betrayed when our part lets us down. To unquestioningly trust something is to let it in—to attempt to bring it inside one’s practical functioning. This suggests a new form of gullibility: agential gullibility, which occurs when agents too hastily and carelessly integrate external resources into their own agency. (shrink)

In 1885, Georg Cantor published his review of Gottlob Frege's Grundlagen der Arithmetik . In this essay, we provide its first English translation together with an introductory note. We also provide a translation of a note by Ernst Zermelo on Cantor's review, and a new translation of Frege's brief response to Cantor. In recent years, it has become philosophical folklore that Cantor's 1885 review of Frege's Grundlagen already contained a warning to Frege. This warning is said to concern the defectiveness (...) of Frege's notion of extension. The exact scope of such speculations varies and sometimes extends as far as crediting Cantor with an early hunch of the paradoxical nature of Frege's notion of extension. William Tait goes even further and deems Frege 'reckless' for having missed Cantor's explicit warning regarding the notion of extension. As such, Cantor's purported inkling would have predated the discovery of the Russell-Zermelo paradox by almost two decades. In our introductory essay, we discuss this alleged implicit (or even explicit) warning, separating two issues: first, whether the most natural reading of Cantor's criticism provides an indication that the notion of extension is defective; second, whether there are other ways of understanding Cantor that support such an interpretation and can serve as a precisification of Cantor's presumed warning. (shrink)

In this paper, we present a formal recipe that Frege followed in his magnum opus “Grundgesetze der Arithmetik” when formulating his definitions. This recipe is not explicitly mentioned as such by Frege, but we will offer strong reasons to believe that Frege applied it in developing the formal material of Grundgesetze. We then show that a version of Basic Law V plays a fundamental role in Frege’s recipe and, in what follows, we will explicate what exactly this role is and (...) explain how it differs from the role played by extensions in his earlier book “Die Grundlagen der Arithmetik”. Lastly, we will demonstrate that this hitherto neglected yet foundational aspect of Frege’s use of Basic Law V helps to resolve a number of important interpretative challenges in recent Frege scholarship, while also shedding light on some important differences between Frege’s logicism and recent neo-logicist approaches to the foundations of mathematics. (shrink)

Value capture occurs when an agent’s values are rich and subtle; they enter a social environment that presents simplified — typically quantified — versions of those values; and those simplified articulations come to dominate their practical reasoning. Examples include becoming motivated by FitBit’s step counts, Twitter Likes and Re-tweets, citation rates, ranked lists of best schools, and Grade Point Averages. We are vulnerable to value capture because of the competitive advantage that such crisp and clear expressions of value have in (...) our private reasoning and our public justification. There is, however, a price. In value capture, we take a central component of our autonomy — our ongoing deliberation over the exact articulation of our values — and we outsource it. And the metrics to which we outsource usually engineered for the interests of some external force, like a large-scale institution’s interest in cross-contextual comprehensibility and quick aggregability. That outsourcing cuts off one of the key benefits to personal deliberation. In value capture, we no longer adjust our values and their articulations in light of own rich experience of the world. Our values should often be carefully tailored to our particular selves or our small-scale communities, but in value capture, we buy our values off the rack. In some cases – like decreasing CO2 emissions – the costs of non-tailored values are outweighed by the benefit of precise collective coordination. In other cases, like in our aesthetic lives, they are not. This suggests that we should want different values suited to different scales. We should want value federalism. Some values are perhaps best pursued at the largest-scale level, others at smaller scales. The problem occurs when we exhibit an excess preference for the largest-scale values – when we consistently let the universal metrics swamp our quieter interests. (shrink)

Responsible business conduct (RBC)—the corporate activities and initiatives that proactively address corporate involvement in human rights, environmental, and governance threats—has become an increasingly used means to counteract and prevent adverse effects of global businesses. Unlike other business sectors whose adverse impacts and RBC efforts (or lack thereof) are well documented, a comprehensive understanding of the state of commodity trading (CT), has been missing. In response, this paper uses a multidisciplinary literature review to provide an integrative understanding of the current state (...) of research on the relationship between CT and RBC. Based on a review of 131 articles, we advance a granular understanding of the current and prospective role of commodity traders in RBC by grouping extant research into three overarching themes: (1) industry self-regulation and co-regulatory initiatives, (2) government-led regulatory initiatives and policy responses, and (3) company-level management strategies impacting RBC practices. In addition to illustrating the themes through existing research and identifying gaps along the overarching themes, we use our literature review to suggest avenues for future research. The paper’s overarching contribution is, first, to synthesize previously fragmented findings into a coherent framework of CT and RBC. And second, to offer guidance on how scholarship in this important domain can be developed into a more mature, legitimate and practical stream of research. (shrink)

This paper introduces and evaluates two contemporary approaches of neo-logicism. Our aim is to highlight the differences between these two neo-logicist programmes and clarify what each projects attempts to achieve. To this end, we first introduce the programme of the Scottish school – as defended by Bob Hale and Crispin Wright1 which we believe to be a..

"Der vorliegende Band vereinigt die Beitrèage des Symposiums zur Logik der Stoiker und ihrer Vorlèaufer, das vom 1.-7.9.1991 in Bamberg stattfand"--P. [7].

Uchiyama et al. present a dual inheritance framework for conceptualizing how behavioural genetics and cultural evolution interact and affect heritability. We posit that to achieve a holistic and nuanced representation of the cultural environment and evolution against which genetic effects should be evaluated, it is imperative to consider the multiple geographic cultural layers impacting individuals and genetic heritability.

Recent conversation has blurred two very different social epistemic phenomena: echo chambers and epistemic bubbles. Members of epistemic bubbles merely lack exposure to relevant information and arguments. Members of echo chambers, on the other hand, have been brought to systematically distrust all outside sources. In epistemic bubbles, other voices are not heard; in echo chambers, other voices are actively undermined. It is crucial to keep these phenomena distinct. First, echo chambers can explain the post-truth phenomena in a way that epistemic (...) bubbles cannot. Second, each type of structure requires a distinct intervention. Mere exposure to evidence can shatter an epistemic bubble, but may actually reinforce an echo chamber. Finally, echo chambers are much harder to escape. Once in their grip, an agent may act with epistemic virtue, but social context will pervert those actions. Escape from an echo chamber may require a radical rebooting of one's belief system. (shrink)