Il tema sviluppato nel presente intervento è il rapporto tra narrazione e costruzione storica. Si prenderà in esame l’accezione di narrativa correntemente utilizzata nel mondo storiografico facendola dialogare con il paradigma dei _global middle ages_, espressione coniata nel 2018 dalle storiche Catherine Holmes e Naomi Standen. Per meglio mettere in risalto tali dinamiche un caso di studio sarà offerto dalla vicenda di Federico II, con particolare enfasi alla costruzione biografica e dei miti nel rapporto con le culture altre. Il fine (...) sarà di superare le due tradizionali macro interpretazioni dell’idea di Medioevo, analizzate da Tommaso di Carpegna Falconieri e David Matthews: Medioevo arretrato regno di oscurità e Medioevo vagheggiato come luce del mattino, all’origine di molte identità politiche contemporanee – non ultima quella dell’Unione Europea. _The topic we intend to develop in this essay is the relationship between narration and historical construction. We will examine the meaning behind the current concept of narrative in historiography, with a dialectical approach towards the paradigm of _global Middle Ages_, an expression firstly used by historians Catherine Holmes and Naomi Standen in 2018. To perform an in depth analysis of the abovementioned relationship, we will use as a case study the figure of Frederick II. A significant emphasis will be put on the biographical construction and myths, especially in the relationship with other cultures. The aim of our essay is to provide a framework within it would be easier to overcome the two traditional macro interpretations of Middle Ages, studied by Tommaso di Carpegna Falconieri and David Matthews: Middle Ages as a backward reign of darkness and Middle Ages as the morning light, at the origin of many contemporary political identities – not least that of the European Union_. (shrink)

Just War scholarship has adapted to contemporary crises and situations. But its adaptation has spurned debate and conversation--a method and means of pushing its thinking forward. Now the Just War tradition risks becoming marginalized. This concern may seem out of place as Just War literature is proliferating, yet this literature remains welded to traditional conceptualizations of Just War. Caron E. Gentry and Amy E. Eckert argue that the tradition needs to be updated to deal with substate actors within the realm (...) of legitimate authority, private military companies, and the questionable moral difference between the use of conventional and nuclear weapons. Additionally, as recent policy makers and scholars have tried to make the Just War criteria legalistic, they have weakened the tradition's ability to draw from and adjust to its contemporaneous setting. The essays in The Future of Just War seek to reorient the tradition around its core concerns of preventing the unjust use of force by states and limiting the harm inflicted on vulnerable populations such as civilian noncombatants. The pursuit of these challenges involves both a reclaiming of traditional Just War principles from those who would push it toward greater permissiveness with respect to war, as well as the application of Just War principles to emerging issues, such as the growing use of robotics in war or the privatization of force. These essays share a commitment to the idea that the tradition is more about a rigorous application of Just War principles than the satisfaction of a checklist of criteria to be met before waging "just" war in the service of national interest. (shrink)

Certains en possèdent déjà : les animaux de compagnie, les espèces protégées et les animaux d'élevage. Mais les droits que nous leur avons consentis sont minimaux et incohérents. Nous traitons différemment les chiens, que nous considérons comme des membres de la famille, et les cochons, réduits au rang d'objets produits en masse et abattus dans d'indignes conditions. Pourtant cochons et chiens présentent une sensibilité et une intelligence similaires. Comment en sommes-nous venus à les classer dans des catégories si différentes? C'est (...) que nous sommes spécistes. Le terme, peu connu en France, fera bientôt partie de notre vocabulaire. A l'instar du racisme et du sexisme, dont il poursuit la logique. Le spécisme consiste à traiter différemment, et sans la moindre raison valable, deux espèces qui présentent les mêmes caractéristiques. Tout comme nous avons longtemps dénié aux femmes les mêmes droits que les hommes. L'affirmation de l'antispécisme sera celle de l'animalisme, un mouvement philosophique qui promeut la nécessité d'accorder des droits à tous les animaux, en raison de leur capacité à souffrir. Loin d'être anecdotique, l'animalisme incarne le mouvement idéologique le plus révolutionnaire ; pour la première fois depuis 2000 ans, il entend sortir nos systèmes de pensée occidentaux de leur logique anthropocentriste et reconnaître que nous, qui sommes des animaux, avons des obligations morales à l'égard de nos cousins. Surtout, l'animalisme s'inscrit dans une logique d'écologie politique, éloignée de celle incarnée dans les élections. Non plus une écologie superficielle, qui se soucie seulement de préserver les écosystèmes, les ressources et quelques espèces en péril, mais une écologie profonde, qui repense complètement la place de l'homme dans le monde. Pour que ce dernier ne vive plus en parasite, mais en symbiose avec toutes les formes de vivant. Cela oblige à une refonte de nos institutions et à briser la vision à court-terme du temps politique. Cela nous oblige aussi à une réforme intellectuelle qui remette en question la notion de " profit ". Le capitalisme, le socialisme, le communisme, le néo-libéralisme sont aujourd'hui discrédités, si ce n'est dépassés. (shrink)

À la manière de Machiavel dans Le prince, le philosophe s'interroge sur l'utilité de la dictature en 2020. S'appuyant sur les exemples de C. de Gaulle, A. Lincoln, V. Poutine, Lee Kuan Yew ou N. Nazarbaïev, il montre que la concentration du pouvoir dans les mains d'un seul homme peut apparaître comme une solution pour sauver une société menacée d'implosion ou en établir une nouvelle.0.

When we take a look back at the way Western states have fought terrorist organizations in the last 20 years, it is difficult not to think that these alternatives to war might have been more ethical than the decisions to invade Afghanistan and Iraq in 2001 and in 2003. These cases speak for themselves as they have both led to the death of hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians, which is highly paradoxical in light of the logic that supported these (...) interventions. There is a need to think of alternatives to war that will imply the legitimization of proactive sets of measures that would allow states to effectively prevent terrorist attacks through the use of kinetic force in a limited extent as a way to avoid the terrible and unpredictable effects of wars. Violent Alternatives to War: Justifying Actions Against Contemporary Terrorism engages in a moral discussion of the challenges associated with violent alternatives to war when confronting terrorism and suggests a comprehensive approach to how this form of violence can be legitimized and how it ought to be used against this contemporary threat. (shrink)

Tandis qu'Homo Sapiens a entrepris de détruire tout ce qui vit sur cette planète, la défense du vivant s'impose en ce début de XXIe siècle comme la priorité politique et philosophique absolue. Mais pour respecter le vivant, il faut d'abord le comprendre. Comment classer les différentes formes de vie? Pourquoi la conscience existe-t-elle? Les plantes éprouvent-elles la souffrance? Et les poissons? Qui sont les viandales? Les bouchers sont-ils des assassins? Pourquoi faut-il parler de génocide animal? Existe-t-il des formes de vie (...) que l'on peut combattre ou sacrifier? Pourquoi la nature bonne est-elle une illusion? Qu'est-ce que l'existence pour un humain? Comment s'assurer d'avoir été vivant avant de mourir? Notre court passage sur cette planète peut-il avoir un sens? En convoquant la biologie et la philosophie, Vivant retrace l'histoire de la vie sur Terre, depuis les premières bactéries apparues il y a près de 4 milliards d'années jusqu'à l'émergence de l'intelligence artificielle. En prolongeant une prophétie de Darwin, ce livre annonce la naissance d'une nouvelle espèce humaine, qui remplacera la nôtre : Homo ethicus, l'homme moral. Ce sera lui, ou la fin de l'humanité. (shrink)

In A Philosophy of Luxury Lambert Wiesing offre una trattazione originale del concetto di lusso in una prospettiva meramente estetica. Avendo escluso ogni relazione con concetti sociali, quali prestigio, ostentazione, status, Wiesing dichiara che per lusso si deve intendere un’esperienza estetica di tipo particolare. Poiché solo l’uomo indulge nel lusso, ciò che va analizzato è la relazione che intercorre tra un soggetto e un dato oggetto, prescindendo dalle qualità estetiche proprie di quest...

Depuis le choeur ou chante notre irrefutabilite, jetons a la douloureuse figure des moribonds un apogee de zutisme mystique et d'irreverence raisonnee. MAXENCE.

We analyze the axiomatic strength of the following theorem due to Rival and Sands [28] in the style of reverse mathematics. Every infinite partial order P of finite width contains an infinite chain C such that every element of P is either comparable with no element of C or with infinitely many elements of C. Our main results are the following. The Rival–Sands theorem for infinite partial orders of arbitrary finite width is equivalent to $\mathsf {I}\Sigma ^0_{2} + \mathsf {ADS}$ (...) over $\mathsf {RCA}_0$. For each fixed $k \geq 3$, the Rival–Sands theorem for infinite partial orders of width $\leq \!k$ is equivalent to $\mathsf {ADS}$ over $\mathsf {RCA}_0$. The Rival–Sands theorem for infinite partial orders that are decomposable into the union of two chains is equivalent to $\mathsf {SADS}$ over $\mathsf {RCA}_0$. Here $\mathsf {RCA}_0$ denotes the recursive comprehension axiomatic system, $\mathsf {I}\Sigma ^0_{2}$ denotes the $\Sigma ^0_2$ induction scheme, $\mathsf {ADS}$ denotes the ascending/descending sequence principle, and $\mathsf {SADS}$ denotes the stable ascending/descending sequence principle. To the best of our knowledge, these versions of the Rival–Sands theorem for partial orders are the first examples of theorems from the general mathematics literature whose strength is exactly characterized by $\mathsf {I}\Sigma ^0_{2} + \mathsf {ADS}$, by $\mathsf {ADS}$, and by $\mathsf {SADS}$. Furthermore, we give a new purely combinatorial result by extending the Rival–Sands theorem to infinite partial orders that do not have infinite antichains, and we show that this extension is equivalent to arithmetical comprehension over $\mathsf {RCA}_0$. (shrink)

IntroductionInformation and communication technologies are becoming an integral part of medical practice, research and administration and their use will grow as telemedicine and electronic medical record use become part of routine practice. Security in maintaining patient data is important and there is a statuary obligation to do so, but few health professionals have been trained on how to achieve this. There is no information on the use of computers and email by doctors and nurses in South Africa in the workplace (...) and at home, and whether their current computer practices meets legal and ethical requirements. The aims of this study were to determine the use of computers by healthcare practitioners in the workplace and home; the use and approach to data storage, encryption and security of patient data and patient email; and the use of informed consent to transmit data by email.MethodsA self-administered questionnaire was administered to 400 health care providers from the state and private health care sectors. The questionnaire covered computer use in the workplace and at home, sharing of computers, data encryption and storage, email use, encryption of emails and storage, and the use of informed consent for email communication.Results193 doctors and 207 nurses in the private and public sectors completed the questionnaire. Forty (10%) of participants do not use a computer. A third of health professionals were the only users of computers at work or at home. One hundred and ninety-eight respondents (55%) did not know if the data on the computers were encrypted, 132 (36.7%) knew that the data were not encrypted and 30 (8.3%) individuals knew that the data on the computers they were using were encrypted. Few doctors, 58 (16%), received emails from patients, with doctors more likely to receive emails from patients than nurses (p = 0.0025). Thirty-one percent of individuals did not respond to the emails. Emails were saved by 40 (69%) recipients but only 5 (12.5%) doctors encrypted the messages, 19 (47.5%) individuals knowingly did not encrypt and 16 (40.0%) did not know if they encrypted the data. While 20% of health professionals have emailed patient data, but only 41.7% gained consent to do so.ConclusionsMost health professionals as sampled in South Africa are not compliant with the National Health Act or the Electronic Communications Transactions Act of South Africa or guidelines from regulatory bodies when managing patient data on computers. Many appear ignorant or lack the ability to comply with simple data security procedures. (shrink)

David Hume's Enquiry concerning Human Understanding is the definitive statement of the greatest philosopher in the English language. His arguments in support of reasoning from experience, and against the "sophistry and illusion"of religiously inspired philosophical fantasies, caused controversy in the eighteenth century and are strikingly relevant today, when faith and science continue to clash. The Enquiry considers the origin and processes of human thought, reaching the stark conclusion that we can have no ultimate understanding of the physical world, or indeed (...) our own minds. In either sphere we must depend on instinctive learning from experience, recognizing our animal nature and the limits of reason. Hume's calm and open-minded skepticism thus aims to provide a new basis for science, liberating us from the "superstition" of false metaphysics and religion. His Enquiry remains one of the best introductions to the study of philosophy, and his edition places it in its historical and philosophical context. (shrink)

A leading political theorist’s groundbreaking defense of ideal conceptions of justice in political philosophy Throughout the history of political philosophy and politics, there has been continual debate about the roles of idealism versus realism. For contemporary political philosophy, this debate manifests in notions of ideal theory versus nonideal theory. Nonideal thinkers shift their focus from theorizing about full social justice, asking instead which feasible institutional and political changes would make a society more just. Ideal thinkers, on the other hand, question (...) whether full justice is a standard that any society is likely ever to satisfy. And, if social justice is unrealistic, are attempts to understand it without value or importance, and merely utopian? Utopophobia argues against thinking that justice must be realistic, or that understanding justice is only valuable if it can be realized. David Estlund does not offer a particular theory of justice, nor does he assert that justice is indeed unrealizable—only that it could be, and this possibility upsets common ways of proceeding in political thought. Estlund engages critically with important strands in traditional and contemporary political philosophy that assume a sound theory of justice has the overriding, defining task of contributing practical guidance toward greater social justice. Along the way, he counters several tempting perspectives, including the view that inquiry in political philosophy could have significant value only as a guide to practical political action, and that understanding true justice would necessarily have practical value, at least as an ideal arrangement to be approximated. Demonstrating that unrealistic standards of justice can be both sound and valuable to understand, Utopophobia stands as a trenchant defense of ideal theory in political philosophy. (shrink)

The zetetic turn in epistemology raises three questions about epistemic and zetetic norms. First, there is the relationship question: what is the relationship between epistemic and zetetic norms? Are some epistemic norms zetetic norms, or are epistemic and zetetic norms distinct? Second, there is the tension question: are traditional epistemic norms in tension with plausible zetetic norms? Third, there is the reaction question: how should theorists react to a tension between epistemic and zetetic norms? Drawing on an analogy to practical (...) philosophy, I develop a focal point view to resolve these motivating questions. On the focal point view, traditional epistemic norms and zetetic norms answer different types of normative questions. There is nevertheless a familiar type of evaluative tension between traditional epistemic norms and zetetic norms, but this tension is an unavoidable feature of the normative landscape and not a sign that traditional epistemic norms need revision. But if traditional epistemic norms are not zetetic norms, then in what sense is zetetic epistemology a project for epistemologists? I conclude by articulating a sense in which some nontraditional epistemic norms are zetetic norms, and in which zetetic epistemology is an important part of the study of theoretical rationality. (shrink)

One of the enduring concerns of moral philosophy is deciding who or what is deserving of ethical consideration. Much recent attention has been devoted to the "animal question" -- consideration of the moral status of nonhuman animals. In this book, David Gunkel takes up the "machine question": whether and to what extent intelligent and autonomous machines of our own making can be considered to have legitimate moral responsibilities and any legitimate claim to moral consideration. The machine question poses a fundamental (...) challenge to moral thinking, questioning the traditional philosophical conceptualization of technology as a tool or instrument to be used by human agents. Gunkel begins by addressing the question of machine moral agency: whether a machine might be considered a legitimate moral agent that could be held responsible for decisions and actions. He then approaches the machine question from the other side, considering whether a machine might be a moral patient due legitimate moral consideration. Finally, Gunkel considers some recent innovations in moral philosophy and critical theory that complicate the machine question, deconstructing the binary agent--patient opposition itself. Technological advances may prompt us to wonder if the science fiction of computers and robots whose actions affect their human companions could become science fact. Gunkel's argument promises to influence future considerations of ethics, ourselves, and the other entities who inhabit this world. (shrink)

This book is an attempt to get to the bottom of an acute and perennial tension between our best scientific pictures of the fundamental physical structure of the world and our everyday empirical experience of it. The trouble is about the direction of time. The situation (very briefly) is that it is a consequence of almost every one of those fundamental scientific pictures--and that it is at the same time radically at odds with our common sense--that whatever can happen can (...) just as naturally happen backwards. Albert provides an unprecedentedly clear, lively, and systematic new account--in the context of a Newtonian-Mechanical picture of the world--of the ultimate origins of the statistical regularities we see around us, of the temporal irreversibility of the Second Law of Thermodynamics, of the asymmetries in our epistemic access to the past and the future, and of our conviction that by acting now we can affect the future but not the past. Then, in the final section of the book, he generalizes the Newtonian picture to the quantum-mechanical case and (most interestingly) suggests a very deep potential connection between the problem of the direction of time and the quantum-mechanical measurement problem. The book aims to be both an original contribution to the present scientific and philosophical understanding of these matters at the most advanced level, and something in the nature of an elementary textbook on the subject accessible to interested high-school students. Table of Contents: Preface 1. Time-Reversal Invariance 2. Thermodynamics 3. Statistical Mechanics 4. The Reversibility Objections and the Past-Hypothesis 5. The Scope of Thermodynamics 6. The Asymmetries of Knowledge and Intervention 7. Quantum Mechanics Appendix: Gedankenexperiments with Heat Engines Index Reviews of this book: The foundations of statistical mechanisms are often presented in physics textbooks in a rather obscure and confused way. By challenging common ways of thinking about this subject, Time and Chance can do quite a lot to improve this situation. --Jean Bricmont, Science Albert is perfecting a style of foundational analysis that is uniquely his own...It has a surgical precision...and it is ruthless with pretensions. The foundations of thermodynamics is a topic that has accumulated a good deal of dead wood; this is a fire that will burn and burn. --Simon W. Saunders, Oxford University As usual with Albert's work, the exposition is brisk and to the point, and exceptionally clear...The book will be an extremely valuable contribution to the literature on the subject of philosophical issues in thermodynamics and statistical mechanics, a literature which has been thin on the ground but is now growing as it deserves to. --Lawrence Sklar, University of Michigan. (shrink)

By means of an example, shows the possibility of beliefs that are separately rational whilst together inconsistent.

Estimation and evaluation of individualized treatment rules have been studied extensively, but real-world treatment resource constraints have received limited attention in existing methods. We investigate a setting in which treatment is intervened upon based on covariates to optimize the mean counterfactual outcome under treatment cost constraints when the treatment cost is random. In a particularly interesting special case, an instrumental variable corresponding to encouragement to treatment is intervened upon with constraints on the proportion receiving treatment. For such settings, we first (...) develop a method to estimate optimal individualized treatment rules. We further construct an asymptotically efficient plug-in estimator of the corresponding average treatment effect relative to a given reference rule. (shrink)

How should one react when one has a belief, but knows that other people—who have roughly the same evidence as one has, and seem roughly as likely to react to it correctly—disagree? This paper argues that the disagreement of other competent inquirers often requires one to be much less confident in one’s opinions than one would otherwise be.

Looking back at the "War on Terror" and its policies, actions, and the violence that followed, this book analyzes the resulting changes in international power structures and the relationship between citizens and their representatives. It defines our shortcomings in opposing this type of violence by demonstrating how the notion of legitimate violence has been broadened. -/- The impact of the "War on Terror" on the public view of Liberalism is explored, as well as its effects on the role of state (...) authorities in our lives. Thus, this book names the lessons we ought to learn from the actions taken against terrorist organizations. (shrink)

I attempt to get as clear as possible on the chain of reasoning by which irreversible macrodynamics is derivable from time-reversible microphysics, and in particular to clarify just what kinds of assumptions about the initial state of the universe, and about the nature of the microdynamics, are needed in these derivations. I conclude that while a “Past Hypothesis” about the early Universe does seem necessary to carry out such derivations, that Hypothesis is not correctly understood as a constraint on the (...) early Universe’s entropy. (shrink)

Understanding Animal Welfare, 2nd Edition is revised and expanded to incorporate new research and developments in animal welfare. Updated with greater accessibility in mind, the reader is guided through animal welfare in its cultural and historical context, methods of study, and applications in practice and policy. Drawing examples from farm, companion, laboratory and zoo animals, the text provides an up-to-date overview of research and its applications, while also tracing how concepts and methods have evolved over time. Originally intended for scientists (...) and professionals, Understanding Animal Welfare has also found a home in undergraduate classrooms. It is now the essential text for students, practitioners, veterinarians, and researchers in animal welfare and related fields. (shrink)

We start by presenting three different views that jointly imply that every person has many conscious beings in their immediate vicinity, and that the number greatly varies from person to person. We then present and assess an argument to the conclusion that how confident someone should be in these views should sensitively depend on how massive they happen to be. According to the argument, sometimes irreducibly de se observations can be powerful evidence for or against believing in metaphysical theories.

Unprecedented advances in medicine, genetic engineering, and demographic forecasting raise new questions that strain the categories and assumptions of traditional ethical theories. Heyd's approach resolves many paradoxes in intergenerational justice, while offering a major test case for the profound problems of the limits of ethics and the nature of value. This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and (...) impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1992. (shrink)

Worries about mental causation are prominent in contemporary discussions of the mind and human agency. Originally, the problem of mental causation was that of understanding how a mental substance (thought to be immaterial) could interact with a material substance, a body. Most philosophers nowadays repudiate immaterial minds, but the problem of mental causation has not gone away. Instead, focus has shifted to mental properties. How could mental properties be causally relevant to bodily behavior? How could something mental qua mental cause (...) what it does? After looking at the traditional Problem of Interaction, we survey various versions of the property-based problem and look at proposed solutions to them. (shrink)

Film is an art form with a language and an aesthetic all its own. Since 1979, David Bordwell and Kristin Thompson's Film Art has been the best-selling and widely respected introduction to the analysis of cinema. Taking a skills-centered approach supported by a wide range of examples from various periods and countries, the authors strive to help students develop a core set of analytical skills that will deepen their understanding of any film, in any genre. Frame enlargements throughout the text (...) enable students to view images taken directly from completed films, while an optional, text-specific tutorial CD-ROM helps clarify and reinforce specific concepts addressed in the text with the use of film clips. Building on these strengths, the ninth edition adds coverage of new technologies, updated examples, and references to the authors' acclaimed weblog to provide unparalleled currency and connect students with the world of cinema today. (shrink)

Our aim in this entry is to articulate the state of the art in the moral psychology of personal identity. We begin by discussing the major philosophical theories of personal identity, including their shortcomings. We then turn to recent psychological work on personal identity and the self, investigations that often illuminate our person-related normative concerns. We conclude by discussing the implications of this psychological work for some contemporary philosophical theories and suggesting fruitful areas for future work on personal identity.

Perceptualists say that having a pain in a body part consists in perceiving the part as instantiating some property. I argue that perceptualism makes better sense of the connections between pain location and the experiences undergone by people in pain than three alternative accounts that dispense with perception. Turning to fellow perceptualists, I also reject ways in which David Armstrong and Michael Tye understand and motivate perceptualism, and I propose an alternative interpretation, one that vitiates a pair of objections—due to (...) John Hyman—concerning the meaning of ‘Amy has a pain in her foot’ and the idea of bodily sensitivity. Perceptualism, I conclude, remains our best account of the location of pains. (shrink)

Dark matter is a fundamental component of the standard cosmological model, but in spite of four decades of increasingly sensitive searches, no-one has yet detected a single dark-matter particle in the laboratory. An alternative cosmological paradigm exists: MOND (Modified Newtonian Dynamics). Observations explained in the standard model by postulating dark matter are explained in MOND by proposing a modification of Newton's laws of motion. Both MOND and the standard model have had successes and failures – but only MOND has repeatedly (...) predicted observational facts in advance of their discovery. In this volume, David Merritt outlines why such predictions are considered by many philosophers of science to be the 'gold standard' when it comes to judging a theory's validity. In a world where the standard model receives most attention, the author applies criteria from the philosophy of science to assess, in a systematic way, the viability of this alternative cosmological paradigm. (shrink)

Epistemic Evaluation aims to explore and apply a particular methodology in epistemology. The methodology is to consider the point or purpose of our epistemic evaluations, and to pursue epistemological theory in light of such matters. Call this purposeful epistemology. The idea is that considerations about the point and purpose of epistemic evaluation might fruitfully constrain epistemological theory and yield insights for epistemological reflection. Several contributions to this volume explicitly address this general methodology, or some version of it. Others focus on (...) advancing some application of the methodology rather than on theorizing about it. The papers go on to explore the idea that purposes allow one to understand the conceptual demands on knowing, examine how purposeful epistemology might shed light on the debate between internalist and externalist epistemologies, and further develop the idea of purposeful epistemology. (shrink)

Derek Parfit (1942-2017) is the most famous philosopher you've likely never heard of. In 1984, Parfit published what was, and is still, hailed by many philosophers as a work of genius - one of the most cited works of philosophy since World War II, Reasons and Persons. At its core, he argued that we should be concerned less with our own interests and more with the common good. His book brims with brilliant argumentative detail and stunningly inventive thought experiments that (...) challenged contemporary views about what it means to be a person, why one should forego concern for oneself as an identity that persists over time, what it means to act on the basis of reasons, and what we owe to future generations. Parfit also - unfashionably at the time - believed in a kind of grand unified theory of morality, what he called theory x, a non-religious ethical theory wherein all the major moral theories were converging from different sides on the same mountaintop. Parfit has had an enormous influence not only on philosophy, but also beyond, particularly amongst those in the fields of climate ethics, poverty relief, and charitable giving. In this book, the first-full scale biography of Parfit, Dave Edmonds tells the story of the thinker that many philosophers consider the most important moral philosopher of the last century. Edmonds' rendering of the man in full skilfully illuminates the person behind the acclaimed philosopher. Despite Parfit's extraordinary mind, outward appearances suggest his was also an extraordinarily uneventful life - one largely spent in cloistered institutions from Eton to Oxford and one seemingly monomaniacally devoted to ideas. Edmonds' aim is to show how this son and grandson of missionaries went from a genial and outgoing history student to a captivating, yet monkish philosopher singularly devoted to saving morality. In doing so, Edmonds makes Parfit's profound, but often impenetrable, ideas accessible to a broad audience and gives life and body to the thoughts of a seemingly pure thinker that captured the imagination of a generation of philosophers. (shrink)

Food is a challenging subject. There is little consensus about how and what we should produce and consume. It is not even clear what food is or whether people have similar experiences of it. On one hand, food is recognized as a basic need, if not a basic right. On the other hand, it is hard to generalize about it given the wide range of practices and cuisines, and the even wider range of tastes. This book is an introduction to (...) the philosophical dimensions of food. David M. Kaplan examines the nature and meaning of food, how we experience it, the social role it plays, its moral and political dimensions, and how we judge it to be delicious or awful. He shows how the different branches of philosophy contribute to a broader understanding of food: what food is (metaphysics), how we experience food (epistemology), what taste in food is (aesthetics), how we should make and eat food (ethics), how governments should regulate food (political philosophy), and why food matters to us (existentialism). Kaplan embarks on a series of philosophical investigations, considering topics such as culinary identity and authenticity, tasting and food criticism, appetite and disgust, meat eating and techno-foods, and consumerism and conformity. He emphasizes how different narratives help us navigate the complex world of food -- yet we all have responsibilities to ourselves, to others, and to animals. An original treatment of a timely subject, Food Philosophy is suitable for undergraduates while making a significant contribution to scholarly debates. (shrink)

Since the 1990s the so-called transparency of experience has played a crucial role in core debates in philosophy of mind. However, recent developments in the literature have made transparency itself quite opaque. The very idea of transparent experience has become quite fuzzy, due to the articulation of many different notions of transparency and transparency theses. Absent a unified logical space where these notions and theses can be mapped and confronted, we are left with an overall impression of conceptual chaos. This (...) is a problem, given the constant and ubiquitous references to transparency in the literature and its prominent position in the contemporary philosophy of mind. My goal in this paper is to restore clarity through proper analysis of the mutual relations between the different transparency theses. This allows me to uncover a unitary multidimensional logical space where existing (as well as possible) views can be properly singled out and located. (shrink)

We become ill in ways our parents and grandparents did not, with diseases unheard of and treatments undreamed of generations ago. This text tells the story of the modern experience of illness, linking ideas of illness, health, and postmodernism.

Although a great deal has been written on Plato's ethics, his cosmology has not received so much attention in recent times and its importance for his ethical thought has remained underexplored. By offering accounts of Timaeus, Philebus, Politicus and Laws X, the book reveals a strongly symbiotic relation between the cosmic and human sphere. It is argued that in his late period Plato presents a picture of an organic universe, endowed with structure and intrinsic value, which both urges our respect (...) and calls for our responsible intervention. Humans are thus seen as citizens of a university that can provide a context for their flourishing even in the absence of good political institutions. The book sheds light on many intricate metaphysical issues in late Plato and brings out the close connections between his cosmology and the development of his ethics. (shrink)

A familiar interpretation of quantum mechanics (one of a number of views sometimes labeled the "Copenhagen interpretation'"), takes its empirical apparatus at face value, holding that the quantum wave function evolves by the Schrödinger equation except on certain occasions of measurement, when it collapses into a new state according to the Born rule. This interpretation is widely rejected, primarily because it faces the measurement problem: "measurement" is too imprecise for use in a fundamental physical theory. We argue that this is (...) a weak objection, as there may be many ways of making "measurement" precise. However, measurement-collapse interpretations face a more serious objection: a dilemma tied to the quantum Zeno effect. Is measurement itself an observable that can enter superpositions? If yes, then the standard measurement-collapse dynamics is ill-defined. If no, then (at least if measurement is an observable), measurements can never start or finish. The best way out is to deny that measurement is an observable, but this leads to strong and revisionary consequences. This reinforces the view that there is no nonrevisionary interpretation of quantum mechanics. (shrink)