Proof-theoretic reflection principles are schemas which attempt to express the soundness of arithmetical theories within their own language, e.g., ${\mathtt{{Prov}_{\mathsf {PA}} \rightarrow \varphi }}$ can be understood to assert that any statement provable in Peano arithmetic is true. It has been repeatedly suggested that justification for such principles follows directly from acceptance of an arithmetical theory $\mathsf {T}$ or indirectly in virtue of their derivability in certain truth-theoretic extensions thereof. This paper challenges this consensus by exploring relationships between reflection principles (...) and principles of mathematical and transfinite induction as well as the status of the latter with respect to various foundational characterizations of number theory. (shrink)

This paper explores the relationship borne by the traditional paradoxes of set theory and semantics to formal incompleteness phenomena. A central tool is the application of the Arithmetized Completeness Theorem to systems of second-order arithmetic and set theory in which various “paradoxical notions” for first-order languages can be formalized. I will first discuss the setting in which this result was originally presented by Hilbert & Bernays (1939) and also how it was later adapted by Kreisel (1950) and Wang (1955) in (...) order to obtain formal undecidability results. A generalization of this method will then be presented whereby Russell’s paradox, a variant of Mirimanoff’s paradox, the Liar, and the Grelling–Nelson paradox may be uniformly transformed into incompleteness theorems. Some additional observations are then framed relating these results to the unification of the set theoretic and semantic paradoxes, the intensionality of arithmetization (in the sense of Feferman, 1960), and axiomatic theories of truth. (shrink)

State and civil society -- Empire without state -- Politics of life -- Saint Foucault -- Blood-dried codes -- The state of immanence -- Virtual state-making -- When society prevails -- Political and economic theology -- Foucault's apologia of neoliberalism.

The authors examine the nature of the relationship between social science and philosophy and address the sort of work social science should do, and the role and sorts of claims that an accompanying philosophy should engage in. In particular, the authors reintroduce the question of ontology, an area long overlooked by philosophers of social science, and present a cricital engagement with the work of Roy Bhaskar. The book argues against the excesses of philosophising and commits itself to a philosophical approach (...) more deeply grounded in the social sciences. (shrink)

This paper presents a systematic study of the prehistory of the traditional subsystems of second-order arithmetic that feature prominently in the reverse mathematics program of Friedman and Simpson. We look in particular at: (i) the long arc from Poincar\'e to Feferman as concerns arithmetic definability and provability, (ii) the interplay between finitism and the formalization of analysis in the lecture notes and publications of Hilbert and Bernays, (iii) the uncertainty as to the constructive status of principles equivalent to Weak K\"onig's (...) Lemma, and (iv) the large-scale intellectual backdrop to arithmetical transfinite recursion in descriptive set theory and its effectivization by Borel, Lusin, Addison, and others. (shrink)

One formulation of the Categorical Imperative tells us to treat humanity as an end in itself. It has become common to think that ‘humanity’ (die Menschheit) here refers to some minimal power of rationality that is necessarily possessed by any rational agent, but I argue that this common reading is misguided. Instead, ‘humanity’ refers to a good will, the will of a being who is committed to moral principles. This good will reading of ‘humanity’ is not only suggested by passages (...) in which Kant specifically discusses humanity, but also is more consistent with the main ideas of Kant's ethics. (shrink)

In an effort to address healthcare disparities in lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer populations, many hospitals and clinics institute diversity training meant to increase providers’ awareness of and sensitivity to this patient population. Despite these efforts, many healthcare spaces remain inhospitable to LGBTQ patients and their loved ones. Even in the absence of overt forms of discrimination, LGBTQ patients report feeling anxious, unwelcome, ashamed, and distrustful in healthcare encounters. We argue that these negative experiences are produced by a variety (...) of subtle, ostensibly insignificant features of healthcare spaces and interpersonal interactions called microaggressions. Healthcare spaces and providers often convey heteronormative microaggressions, which communicate to LGBTQ—and, we suggest, intersex and asexual —people that their identities, experiences, and relationships are abnormal, pathological, unexpected, unwelcome, or shameful. We identify heteronormative microaggressions common to healthcare settings and specify how they negatively impact LGBTQIA patients. We argue that standard diversity training cannot sufficiently address heteronormative microaggressions. Despite these challenges, healthcare institutions and providers must take responsibility for heteronormative microaggressions and take steps to reduce their frequency and mitigate their effects on LGBTQIA care. We conclude by offering strategies for problem-solving at the level of medical education, institutional culture and policy, and individual awareness. (shrink)

This paper contends that eating shapes the self; that is, our practices and understandings of eating can cultivate, reinforce, or diminish important aspects of the self, including agency, values, capacities, affects, and self-understandings. I argue that these self-shaping effects should be included in our ethical analyses and evaluations of eating. I make a case for this claim through an analysis and critique of the hypothesis that young women’s vegetarianism is a risk, sign, or “cover” for eating disorders or disordered eating. (...) After outlining the relevant empirical literature, I suggest that the evidence for this hypothesis is inconclusive. Given this uncertainty, we should consider the risks of making a mistake when accepting or rejecting this understanding of young women’s eating. I argue that these risks importantly include negative effects on the self, such as damage to moral and epistemic agency. Along with other potential consequences of mistakenly accepting the hypothesis, these effects give us reason to reject it pending more conclusive research. Overall, this paper offers a philosophical intervention into the debate over the relationship between vegetarianism and eating disorders while illustrating the ethical importance and relevance of eating as a self-shaping activity. (shrink)

This article details day-to-day ethics issues facing MBAs who occupy entry-level and mid-level management positions and offers defined examples of the stressors these managers face. The study includes lower-level managers, essentially excluded from extant literature, and focuses on workplace behaviors both undertaken and observed. Results indicate that pressures from internal organization sources, and ambiguity in letter versus spirit of rules, account for over a third of the most frequent unethical situations encountered, and that most managers did not expect to face (...) those issues. Various contextual factors accounted for 32% of the organizational factors that affected decisions. We discuss implications for the workplace, especially the unique ethics challenges for newer managers. (shrink)

This article approaches social media from the theory of the religio-political practice of acclamation revived by Agamben and following twentieth-century social and political thought and theology (of Weber, Peterson, Schmitt, Kantorowicz). It supplements that theory by more recent political-theoretical, historical and sociological investigations and regards acclamation as a ‘social institution’ following Mauss. Acclamation is a practice that forms publics, whether as the direct presence of the ‘people’, mass-mediated ‘public opinion’, or a ‘public mood’ decipherable through countless social media postings. The (...) article surveys issues of differential geographies of access, weighting of posts, value-creation, orality and gesture, algorithmic governmentality, and Big Data and knowledge production. It argues that social media constitute a public from a mass of individualized, private postings. It concludes that they make possible forms of political calculability and action, yet are continuous with ritual and liturgical elements of political life. This study contributes to an analytics of publicity. (shrink)

Countering claims of its impossibility, this paper argues for economic theology as an intelligible figure of contemporary political rationality and organization, and a distinctive analytical strategy in relation to forms of liberal and neoliberal governmentality and the contemporary management of social life. As an analytical strategy, it has two arms: an institutional one, drawing upon Michel Foucault’s work on the pastorate; and a conceptual one, following from Giorgio Agamben on oikonomia, order and providence. Economic theology was the arcana of 20th-century (...) debates on both political theology and governmentality and a condition for their emergence. It formed the horizon of Carl Schmitt’s intervention of a political theology in response to Max Weber, and, as the pastorate, it was for Foucault the historical background of the emergence of the liberal arts of government. While appearing as a new paradigm, it thus has a measure of priority over our more established ones. Furthermore, to the extent that economic theology comes to occupy the place of political rationality in contemporary liberal-democratic societies, the political becomes less a rational public sphere and more a form of public liturgy. (shrink)

This paper argues that common social narratives about unhealthy eaters can cause significant damage to agency. I identify and analyze a narrative that combines a “control model” of eating agency with the healthist assumption that health is the ultimate end of eating. I argue that this narrative produces and enables four types of damage to the agency of those identified as unhealthy eaters. Due to uncertainty about what counts as healthy eating and various forms of prejudice, the unhealthy eater label (...) and its harms to agency are more likely to stick to some people than others and may reinforce patterns of oppression. I argue that fat people are especially vulnerable to this identification and the damage it can do. I then consider possible “counterstories” about unhealthy eaters, alternative narratives that might be less damaging to agency than the control narrative. I identify one promising counterstory but suggest that it may be limited when it comes to repairing damage to the agency of fat people. Overall, this paper illustrates some of the complex ways that healthism about eating affects agency, and emphasizes the ethical importance of the ways we think about and discuss eating and eaters. (shrink)

The goal of this paper is to explore the significance of Montague’s paradox—that is, any arithmetical theory $T\supseteq Q$ over a language containing a predicate $P$ satisfying $P\rightarrow \varphi $ and $T\vdash \varphi \,\therefore\,T\vdash P$ is inconsistent—as a limitative result pertaining to the notions of formal, informal, and constructive provability, in their respective historical contexts. To this end, the paradox is reconstructed in a quantified extension $\mathcal {QLP}$ of Artemov’s logic of proofs. $\mathcal {QLP}$ contains both explicit modalities $t:\varphi $ (...) and also proof quantifiers $x:\varphi $. In this system, the basis for the rule NEC is decomposed into a number of distinct principles governing how various modes of reasoning about proofs and provability can be internalized within the system itself. A conceptually motivated resolution to the paradox is proposed in the form of an argument for rejecting the unrestricted rule NEC on the basis of its subsumption of an intuitively invalid principle pertaining to the interaction of proof quantifiers and the proof-theorem relation expressed by explicit modalities. (shrink)

Respect is one of the central concepts in contemporary moral thought. It plays a prominent role in everyday, pre-philosophical moral thinking, as well as in recent moral theory and applied ethics. Yet basic questions about the concept and role of respect have received less attention than might be expected. This volume takes up some of these basic questions. The book is not meant to be a comprehensive handbook that covers all aspects of the topic of respect, nor is the focus (...) of the book mainly historical. Rather, the aim is to give leading experts in the field a chance to present their latest ideas and point the research on respect in new directions. Following an introductory historical essay, Part I addresses questions of what respect is, its nature and basis. Part II examines questions in moral theory, for example what exactly ought to be respected, what role respect plays in morality, and which different types of respect are appropriate and morally significant. Part III deals with the practical application of requirements of respect. The essays in this volume will be of interest both to scholars and students working on issues of respect and to anyone interested in this central moral notion. (shrink)

This study presents scientific theories about the female body in Greece of the 5th and 4th centuries BC. It demonstrates the influence of cultural preconceptions on such theories, and of scientific theories on cultural attitudes.

The claim that everyone ought to be treated with respect is a familiar and widely accepted prescription in recent moral philosophy, often expressed as a principle of ‘respect for persons.’ I argue that this principle need not be justified by a claim that every person possesses some feature – dignity, autonomy, value, or the like – that makes her worthy of respect. There is abundant conceptual space within many approaches to moral philosophy, including a Kantian approach, to affirm a duty (...) of respect for all persons, while denying that the duty is justified by the respect-worthiness of every person. (shrink)

Richard Rorty does have something ‘to say to [Black Americans]’ and to their racially conscious nonblack allies in the sense that his understanding of liberalism, his prophecies about the future and his urgent appeals to the American Left all paint a picture of a white middle class fully prepared to make life increasingly miserable for Black Americans unless it is ‘protected from catastrophe’. Rorty hopes that this group will undergo a moral transformation that enables it to see past its narrow (...) group interests, but doubts that it will. He, nevertheless, prescribes a politics of hope and appeasement as a hedge against both despair and backsliding. In so doing, he fails to appreciate the availability and the suitability of an alternative ‘racial realist’ (and tragicomic) posture vis-à-vis American liberalism inspired by thinkers like Ralph Ellison, James Baldwin and Derrick Bell. This alternative enables racially conscious Americans to respond to the intransigence of (certain) white Americans with cunning rather than by escaping into fantasies of a ‘dream country’ unmarked by the damage caused by racism and its long-lingering effects. I uncover and explore this alternative through Rorty’s warnings regarding the white middle class, a somewhat surprising consistency between Rorty’s brand of class politics and Bell’s understanding of ‘racial fortuity’, and, finally, through a development of Bell’s ‘racial realist’ posture combined with Baldwin’s ‘uses of the blues’ resulting in a ‘hard-eyed’ tragicomic sensibility sufficient to effectively pair continued struggle with creative consolation and resilience. (shrink)

Although risky decision-making has been posited to contribute to the maladaptive behavior of individuals with psychopathic tendencies, the performance of psychopathic groups on a common task of risky decision-making, the Iowa Gambling Task (IGT; Bechara, Damasio, Damasio, & Anderson, 1994), has been equivocal. Different aspects of psychopathy (personality traits, antisocial deviance) and/or moderating variables may help to explain these inconsistent findings. In a sample of college students (N = 129, age 18–27), we examined the relationship between primary and secondary psychopathic (...) features and IGT performance. A measure of impulsivity was included to investigate its potential as a moderator. In a joint model including main effects and interactions between primary psychopathy, secondary psychopathy and impulsivity, only secondary psychopathy was significantly related to risky IGT performance, and this effect was not moderated by the other variables. This finding supports the growing literature suggesting that secondary psychopathy is a better predictor of decision-making problems than the primary psychopathic personality traits of lack of empathy and remorselessness. (shrink)

This paper engages the question ‘Does the consistency of a set of axioms entail the existence of a model in which they are satisfied?’ within the frame of the Frege-Hilbert controversy. The question is related historically to the formulation, proof and reception of Gödel’s Completeness Theorem. Tools from mathematical logic are then used to argue that there are precise senses in which Frege was correct to maintain that demonstrating consistency is as difficult as it can be, but also in which (...) Hilbert was correct to maintain that demonstrating existence given consistency is as easy as it can be. (shrink)

There seems to be something wrong with passing moralistic judgments on others’ moral character. Immanuel Kant’s ethics provides insight into an underexplored way in which moralistic judgments are problematic, namely, that they are both a sign of fundamentally poor character in the moralistic person herself and an obstacle to that person’s own moral self-improvement. Kant’s positions on these issues provide a basically compelling argument against moralistic judgment of others, an argument that can be detached from the most controversial elements of (...) Kantian ethics to stand as plausible and instructive in its own right. (shrink)

In the UK, many have argued that the past five years or so have seen an increase in the radicalism and visibility of feminist activism, jarring somewhat with the strong emphasis on loss in much recent scholarship – as well as media commentary – on feminist politics. Against this backdrop, this article asks how, and to what extent, this resurgence of feminist activism has unsettled the centrality of loss within the affective economies of contemporary British feminism, by examining a range (...) of recent texts produced within academic, activist, publishing and media spheres. After arguing that attachments to loss remain remarkably intransigent, the latter part of the article draws on Sara Ahmed’s account of ‘sticky affects’ to provide a theoretical account of why notions such as ‘young women are not feminist’ and ‘feminist activism is a thing of the past’ continue to yield such force despite empirical evidence to the contrary. (shrink)

It is commonly held that the natural numbers sequence 0, 1, 2,... possesses a unique structure. Yet by a well known model theoretic argument, there exist non-standard models of the formal theory which is generally taken to axiomatize all of our practices and intentions pertaining to use of the term “natural number.” Despite the structural similarity of this argument to the influential set theoretic indeterminacy argument based on the downward L ̈owenheim-Skolem theorem, most theorists agree that the number theoretic version (...) does not have skeptical consequences about the reference of “natural number” analogous to the ‘relativity’ Skolem claimed pertains to notions such as “uncountable” and “cardinal.” In this paper I argue that recent proposals by Shapiro, Lavine, McGee and Field which aim to distinguish the number and set theoretic indeterminacy arguments by locating extra-mathematical constraints on the interpretation of our number theoretic vocabulary are inadequate. I then suggest that if we consider the manner in which the natural numbers figure in our computational practices – e.g. in characterizing how we compute sums and products or determine prime factorizations – it follows that our application of computational terms such as “computable function” and “tractable computational problem” indirectly uniquely determines their structure. (shrink)

Many UK public companies invest considerable resources in charitable donations and community involvement. Using semi‐structured interviews with public company officers, the author sought to investigate the motivations behind this activity. Was it undertaken because of an expectation of commercial benefit, out of a sense of obligation, or for other reasons? It appeared that public companies were increasingly anxious to make connections between corporate activity in the community and business activities. Public companies linked with local communities clearly felt a sense of (...) connection with them. Corporate officers were constantly dealing with the management of reputation, which was seen as a valuable business asset, and community links made this task easier. (shrink)

This piece looks at the implications of Zizek's work on cyberspace for understanding the ideology of communicative capitalism. Emphasizing the role of the decline of symbolic efficiency in theorizing virtuality, the author extends the analysis into the field of practices known as Web 2.0. She argues that Zizek's work on drive opens up the internet as Real and employs it in a critique of Kittler and Hansen.

This paper offers a defense of the practice of mindless eating. Popular accounts of the practice suggest that it is non-autonomous and to blame for many of society’s food related problems, including the so-called obesity epidemic and the prevalence of diet related illnesses like diabetes. I use Maureen Sie’s “traffic participation” account of agency to argue that some mindless eating is autonomous, or more specifically, agential. Insofar as we value autonomous eating, then, it should be valued. I also argue that (...) mindless eating can be substantively good: it can help us achieve valuable ends, like creating and maintaining community. Acknowledging the agency and value in mindless eating has both practical and ethical benefits. I contend that it can help us preserve the value in mindless eating while suggesting more effective ways to change it, and, by offering a new narrative about mindless eaters, may be less damaging to agency than popular narratives. (shrink)

In order to define ‘radical humanism’ the paper builds on two strands of thinking: first, that human needs must be understood in relation to the constitutive characteristics of the human species; s...

Computational complexity theory is a subfield of computer science originating in computability theory and the study of algorithms for solving practical mathematical problems. Amongst its aims is classifying problems by their degree of difficulty — i.e., how hard they are to solve computationally. This paper highlights the significance of complexity theory relative to questions traditionally asked by philosophers of mathematics while also attempting to isolate some new ones — e.g., about the notion of feasibility in mathematics, the $\mathbf{P} \neq \mathbf{NP}$ (...) problem and why it has proven hard to resolve, and the role of non-classical modes of computation and proof. (shrink)

We likely do not need to convince readers of this journal that “obesity” is a topic of great contemporary importance.1 Claims about the “rapidly growing” prevalence of overweight and obese people worldwide (World Health Organization (WHO) Consultation on Obesity 2000), the threat that obesity poses to individuals’ and especially children’s health (Mauro et al. 2008, 173; Centers for Disease Control and Prevention 2014a; World Health Organization (WHO) Consultation on Obesity 2000; World Health Organization 2014; Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (...) 2014c), and the “enormous economic burden” that overweight and obese people place on healthcare systems and governments (Mauro et al. 2008, 173; Centers for .. (shrink)