Biblical discourses of divine law -- Greco-Roman discourses of law -- Bridging the gap: divine law in Hellenistic and Second temple Jewish sources -- Minding the gap: Paul -- The "truth" about Torah -- The (ir)rationality of Torah -- The flexibility of Torah -- Natural law in Rabbinic sources?

Food security scholarship and policy tends to embrace the nutrition status of individual men, women and children as the end-goal of food security efforts. While there has been much value in investigating and trying to ensure sufficient nutrition for struggling households around the world, this overriding emphasis on nutrition status has reduced our understandings of what constitutes food adequacy. While token attention has been paid to more qualitative ideas like “cultural appropriateness,” food security scholars and policy makers have been unable (...) to understand the broader value of food, which exceeds its caloric and nutrient counts. Drawing on empirical work from Medellín, Colombia, the paper argues that having adequate food means much more than simply sufficient nutrient intake, perhaps especially among marginalized groups. Exploring the case of food insecure women from Colombia who were forcibly displaced from rural to urban, we demonstrate how understandings of food adequacy must consider the social and environmental imaginaries of marginalized groups. (shrink)

Spirituality is a universal human experience. Within the process of development, the role of spirituality as a developmental asset is understudied in general and especially within majority world contexts. In this article, we frame advances in spirituality research and practice with youth around three pillars: (a) theory, (b) measurement, and (c) research about and evaluations of positive youth development (PYD) programs in low- and middle-income countries. We place PYD programs as associated with dynamic, relational developmental systems (RDS)-based models of human (...) development, describe spirituality and the “Big Three” features of effective PYD programs as aligning to promote thriving, and discuss spirituality as a strength, as a key asset, in the lives of youth. We discuss advances in developmental methods and measures for describing, explaining, and promoting spirituality and PYD and offer a case study that responds to a United States Agency for International Development call for action and evaluations of spirituality within the context of a PYD program in the majority world. Considerations for future research about spirituality and youth development are discussed. (shrink)

This paper focuses on some of the ethical issues which may arise when conducting research in the context of homelessness. These issues are considered from the viewpoints of researchers, research coordinators and interviewers, drawing from their extensive real world experience. In addition to negotiating the complex context of homelessness, community-based homelessness researchers need to address a number of ethical issues in research conception, design, implementation and dissemination. Although these issues are commonly considered in community-engaged research, research with people who are (...) homeless may raise exceptional challenges. Such challenges include determining the nature of informed consent; protecting research participants and researchers, and determining appropriate compensation for participation. Understanding the context of homelessness to conduct ethical research will require sharing information and joint decision-making, processes that must include members of communities within which the research participants live. Furthermore, researchers should be sensitive to the changing context of homelessness, and vigilant for new ethical challenges. (shrink)

En el presente escrito pretendo analizar las acciones humanas; partiendo de la pregunta ¿cómo podemos dar cuenta de las razones de las acciones humanas? Y si es que, se ha desarrollado una teoría que ayude a dar cuenta de por qué actuamos como lo hacemos. Por lo que, para responder a esta cuestión, recurrí a la teoría de la explicación causal; esta teoría nos dice que las razones pueden ser las causas de las acciones, por lo que para poder argumentar (...) en favor de esta teoría hay algunos puntos a analizar y explicar con el fin de que se pueda argumentar en su favor. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is twofold. In the first instance it is an attempt to offer a new perspective from which to reflect on the meaning and philosophical presuppositions of Friedrich Schlegel’s defence and use of (romantic) irony, as well other related notions: humour, wit, and other comic devices. I propose to situate this perspective within a revaluation of pleasure and joy. To do this in a new way (although not in opposition to authors such as Manfred Frank, (...) class='Hi'>Elizabeth Millan-Zaibert, or Gary Handwerk), I refer to one of Schlegel’s earliest texts devoted to The Aesthetic Value of Greek Comedy from 1794. In addition, this paper questions the extent to which Schlegel’s position is tenable in the aftermath of the ‘death of God’. For this, I reflect briefly on the ways in which Nietzsche’s writings and notion of life-affirmation respond to Schlegel’s vindication of romantic irony. (shrink)

More than forty years have passed since Congress, in response to the Civil Rights Movement, enacted sweeping antidiscrimination laws in the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting Rights Act of 1965, and the Fair Housing Act of 1968. As a signal achievement of that legacy, in 2008, Americans elected their first African American president. Some would argue that we have finally arrived at a postracial America, butThe Imperative of Integration indicates otherwise. Elizabeth Anderson demonstrates that, despite progress toward (...) racial equality, African Americans remain disadvantaged on virtually all measures of well-being. Segregation remains a key cause of these problems, and Anderson skillfully shows why racial integration is needed to address these issues. Weaving together extensive social science findings--in economics, sociology, and psychology--with political theory, this book provides a compelling argument for reviving the ideal of racial integration to overcome injustice and inequality, and to build a better democracy. -/- Considering the effects of segregation and integration across multiple social arenas, Anderson exposes the deficiencies of racial views on both the right and the left. She reveals the limitations of conservative explanations for black disadvantage in terms of cultural pathology within the black community and explains why color blindness is morally misguided. Multicultural celebrations of group differences are also not enough to solve our racial problems. Anderson provides a distinctive rationale for affirmative action as a tool for promoting integration, and explores how integration can be practiced beyond affirmative action. -/- Offering an expansive model for practicing political philosophy in close collaboration with the social sciences, this book is a trenchant examination of how racial integration can lead to a more robust and responsive democracy. (shrink)

Feminist epistemology and philosophy of science studies the ways in which gender does and ought to influence our conceptions of knowledge, the knowing subject, and practices of inquiry and justification. It identifies ways in which dominant conceptions and practices of knowledge attribution, acquisition, and justification systematically disadvantage women and other subordinated groups, and strives to reform these conceptions and practices so that they serve the interests of these groups. Various practitioners of feminist epistemology and philosophy of science argue that dominant (...) knowledge practices disadvantage women by (1) excluding them from inquiry, (2) denying them epistemic authority, (3) denigrating their “feminine” cognitive styles and modes of knowledge, (4) producing theories of women that represent them as inferior, deviant, or significant only in the ways they serve male interests, (5) producing theories of social phenomena that render women's activities and interests, or gendered power relations, invisible, and (6) producing knowledge (science and technology) that is not useful for people in subordinate positions, or that reinforces gender and other social hierarchies. Feminist epistemologists trace these failures to flawed conceptions of knowledge, knowers, objectivity, and scientific methodology. They offer diverse accounts of how to overcome these failures. They also aim to (1) explain why the entry of women and feminist scholars into different academic disciplines, especially in biology and the social sciences, has generated new questions, theories, and methods, (2) show how gender has played a.. (shrink)

We citizens of the 21st century live in a world where division of epistemic labour rules. Most of what we know we learned from the spoken or written word of others, and we depend in endless practical ways on the technological fruits of the dispersed knowledge of others—of which we often know almost nothing—in virtually every moment of our lives. Interest has been growing in recent years amongst philosophers, in the issues in epistemology raised by this fact. One issue concerns (...) the depth and extent of our epistemic dependence on testimony, as we may label this broad epistemic source: Do we have any knowledge at all that is free of epistemic dependence on what we have learned from others? A related question is whether our entitlement to believe what we have learned from others can be explained without invoking any epistemic principles special to testimony. These questions concern, as it were, the macro-epistemology of testimony. In the present discussion I shall focus instead on the micro foundations. Testimony, in our broad sense, can occur through an extensive range of types of spoken and written means of purportedly factual communication, including telephone calls, e-mails and personal letters, lectures and radio broadcasts, newspapers, textbooks and encyclopaedias, personal diaries, and public records of all kinds. But the central paradigm—what started the whole communication thing off—is surely that of face-to-face spoken encounter, when one person tells something to another, thereby intending and hoping to share her knowledge with her audience. I begin by describing the speech act of telling, identifying what takes place in a felicitous act of telling. From the nature of the speech act of telling, we see precisely how it is that knowledge is, when all goes as it should, acquired from teller by trusting hearer, in such an act, and in acts of testimony more broadly. (shrink)

Permissivism is the thesis that, for some body of evidence and a proposition p, there is more than one rational doxastic attitude any agent with that evidence can take toward p. Proponents of uniqueness deny permissivism, maintaining that every body of evidence always determines a single rational doxastic attitude. In this paper, we explore the debate between permissivism and uniqueness about evidence, outlining some of the major arguments on each side. We then consider how permissivism can be understood as an (...) underdetermination thesis, and show how this moves the debate forward in fruitful ways: in distinguishing between different types of permissivism, in dispelling classic objections to permissivism, and in shedding light on the relationship between permissivism and evidentialism. (shrink)

: In recent literature supporting a hybrid view between metaethical cognitivism and noncognitivist expressivism, much has been made of an analogy between moral terms and pejoratives. The analogy is based on the plausible idea that pejorative slurs are used to express both a descriptive belief and a negative attitude. The analogy looks promising insofar as it encourages the kinds of features we should want from a hybrid expressivist view for moral language. But the analogy between moral terms and pejorative slurs (...) is also problematic. In this paper, I argue for two main ways in which we should distinguish between two different types of pejorative terms: slurs, on the one hand, and what I call general pejorative terms, on the other. I examine the problems with the analogy between slurs and moral terms and conclude that general pejorative terms like ‘jerk’ are a better candidate on which to model the potential dual-use behavior of moral terms. So if hybrid theorists are looking for a dual-use model for moral language, they should be careful to base their analogies on general pejoratives, rather than slurs. (shrink)

Traditional theistic arguments conclude that God exists. Pragmatic theistic arguments, by contrast, conclude that you ought to believe in God. The two most famous pragmatic theistic arguments are put forth by Blaise Pascal (1662) and William James (1896). Pragmatic arguments for theism can be summarized as follows: believing in God has significant benefits, and these benefits aren’t available for the unbeliever. Thus, you should believe in, or ‘wager on’, God. This article distinguishes between various kinds of theistic wagers, including finite (...) vs. infinite wagers, premortem vs. postmortem wagers, and doxastic vs. acceptance wagers. Then, we’ll turn to the epistemic-pragmatic distinction, and discusses the nuances of James’ argument, and how views like epistemic permissivism and epistemic consequentialism provide unique “hybrid” wagers. Finally, we’ll cover outstanding objections and responses. (shrink)

Recent defenses of same-sex marriage and polygamy have invoked the liberal doctrines of neutrality and public reason. Such reasoning is generally sound but does not go far enough. This paper traces the full implications of political liberalism for marriage. I argue that the constraints of public reason, applied to marriage law, entail ‘minimal marriage’, the most extensive set of state-determined restrictions on marriage compatible with political liberalism. Minimal marriage sets no principled restrictions on the sex or number of spouses and (...) the nature and purpose of their caring relationships, nor on which marital rights are exchanged, and whether they are exchanged reciprocally or asymmetrically. Minimal marriage supports adult care networks, urban tribes, friendships, and other forms of relationships as well as ‘traditional’ marriages. I provide a publically justifiable rationale for a legal framework supporting non-dependent caring relationships between adults. The argument is that caring relationships are primary goods, and that liberal justice accordingly requires legal frameworks supporting caring relationships. Minimal marriage is one such framework. (shrink)

In this project I am concerned with the extent to which conceptual engineering happens in domains outside of philosophy, and if so, what that might look like. Specifically, I’ll argue that...

A new resolution of the mind-body problem that reconciles materialism and idealism.

On a rainy day in May 1988, a lowland gorilla named Willie B. stepped outdoors for the first time in twenty-seven years, into a new landscape immersion exhibit. Born in Africa, Willie B. had been captured by an animal collector and sold to a zoo. During the decades he spent in a cage, zoos stopped collecting animals from the wild and Americans changed the ways they wished to view animals in the zoo. Zoos developed new displays to simulate landscapes like (...) the Amazon River basin and African forests. Exhibits similar to animals' natural habitats began to replace old-fashioned animal houses. But such displays are only the most recent effort of zoos to present their audiences with an authentic experience of nature. Since the first zoological park opened in the United States in Philadelphia in 1874, zoos have promised their visitors a journey into the natural world. And for more than a century they have been popular places for education and recreation: every year more than 130 million Americans go to zoos to look at the animals and enjoy a day outdoors. The first book-length history of American zoos, Animal Attractions examines the meaning of nature in the city by looking at the ways zoos have assembled and displayed their animal collections. Situated literally and culturally in the American middle landscape, zoos are concrete expressions of longstanding tensions between wildness and civilization, science and popular culture, education and entertainment. In their efforts to promote nature appreciation, they reveal much about how our culture envisions the natural world and the human place in it and how these ideas have changed. (shrink)

This chapter defends the account of metaphysical indeterminacy of Barnes and Williams against Eklund's objections.

On the phenomenal view of evidence, seemings are evidence. More precisely, if it seems to S that p, S has evidence for p. Here, I raise a worry for this view of evidence; namely, that it has the counterintuitive consequence that two people who disagree would rarely, if ever, share evidence. This is because almost all differences in beliefs would involve differences in seemings. However, many literatures in epistemology, including the disagreement literature and the permissivism literature, presuppose that people who (...) disagree often do share evidence. I conclude that this is a reason to question the phenomenal view of evidence. (shrink)

Die Reihe Monographien und Texte zur Nietzsche-Forschung (MTNF) setzt seit mehreren Jahrzehnten die Agenda in der sich stetig verändernden Nietzsche-Forschung. Die Bände sind interdisziplinär und international ausgerichtet und spiegeln das gesamte Spektrum der Nietzsche-Forschung wider, von der Philosophie über die Literaturwissenschaft bis zur politischen Theorie. Die Reihe veröffentlicht Monographien und Sammelbände, die einem strengen Peer-Review-Verfahren unterliegen. Die Buchreihe wird von einem internationalen Redaktionsteam geleitet.

This chapter contains sections titled: Rosen's Argument Objections to Rosen's Argument The Significance of the Narrower Conclusion My Proposed View Objections to the Proposed View Understanding My Disagreement with Rosen Conclusion.

In this article, we advance the perspective that distinct emotions amplify different moral judgments, based on the emotion’s core appraisals. This theorizing yields four insights into the way emotions shape moral judgment. We submit that there are two kinds of specificity in the impact of emotion upon moral judgment: domain specificity and emotion specificity. We further contend that the unique embodied aspects of an emotion, such as nonverbal expressions and physiological responses, contribute to an emotion’s impact on moral judgment. Finally, (...) emotions play a key role in determining which issues acquire moral significance in a society over time, in a process known as moralization (Rozin, 1999). The implications of these four observations for future research on emotion and morality are discussed. (shrink)

This paper defends the avowal view of self-deception, according to which the self-deceived agent has been led by the evidence to believe that ¬p and yet is sincere in asserting that p. I argue that the agent qualifies as sincere in asserting the contrary of what they in the most basic sense believe in virtue of asserting what they are committed to believing. It is only by recognizing such commitments and distinguishing them from the more basic beliefs whose rational regulation (...) is automatic that the tension between the self-deceived agent’s actions and assertions can be explained in a core subset of cases of self-deception. (shrink)

What is faith? How is faith different than belief and hope? Is faith irrational? If not, how can faith go beyond the evidence? This chapter introduces the reader to philosophical questions involving faith and reason. First, we explore a four-part definition of faith. Then, we consider the question of how faith could be rational yet go beyond the evidence.

As algorithms have become ubiquitous in consequential domains, societal concerns about the potential for discriminatory outcomes have prompted urgent calls to address algorithmic bias. In response, a rich literature across computer science, law, and ethics is rapidly proliferating to advance approaches to designing fair algorithms. Yet computer scientists, legal scholars, and ethicists are often not speaking the same language when using the term ‘bias.’ Debates concerning whether society can or should tackle the problem of algorithmic bias are hampered by conflations (...) of various understandings of bias, ranging from neutral deviations from a standard to morally problematic instances of injustice due to prejudice, discrimination, and disparate treatment. This terminological confusion impedes efforts to address clear cases of discrimination. -/- In this paper, we examine the promises and challenges of different approaches to disambiguating bias and designing for justice. While both approaches aid in understanding and addressing clear algorithmic harms, we argue that they also risk being leveraged in ways that ultimately deflect accountability from those building and deploying these systems. Applying this analysis to recent examples of generative AI, our argument highlights unseen dangers in current methods of evaluating algorithmic bias and points to ways to redirect approaches to addressing bias in generative AI at its early stages in ways that can more robustly meet the demands of justice. (shrink)

Credences are similar to levels of confidence, represented as a value on the [0,1] interval. This chapter sheds light on questions about credence, including its relationship to full belief, with an eye toward the empirical relevance of credence. First, I’ll provide a brief epistemological history of credence and lay out some of the main theories of the nature of credence. Then, I’ll provide an overview of the main views on how credences relate to full beliefs. Finally, I’ll turn to the (...) empirical, and suggest some ways that cognitive science does and could answer questions about credence, such as what credences one has, how credences relate to beliefs, and the extent to which we can control our credences. (shrink)

Epistemic paternalism is the practice of interfering with someone’s inquiry, without their consent, for their own epistemic good. In this chapter, I explore the relationship between epistemic paternalism and two other epistemological theses: epistemic permissivism and standpoint epistemology. I argue that examining this relationship is fruitful because it sheds light on a series of cases in which epistemic paternalism is unjustified and brings out notable similarities between epistemic permissivism and standpoint epistemology.

This chapter discusses the features of a hybrid expressivist view that has the resources to straightforwardly address issues about logical embedding and the connection between moral judgment and motivation. Following Mark Schroeder’s work in assessing the merits of current hybrid views and proposals made by Dan Boisvert, Michael Ridge, and David Copp, it briefly reviews why the hybrid expressivist may be optimistic about “having it both ways.” However, it argues that the current set of assumptions that lead to optimism also (...) lead to a kind of entangling problem. This arises from assumptions about the generalized structure of the mental states associated with moral thought and language. In response it proposes that agents can possess generalized noncognitive attitudes toward types rather than propositions involving universals. The chapter suggests that this modified hybrid expressivism can explain the connection between morality and motivation without being committed to the strongest forms of internalism. (shrink)

When should we listen to our guts and when should we ignore them? What makes disgust and other related emotions morally relevant in some situations but not others? In this paper, I argue that emotions are morally relevant only when they are backed up by reasons and arguments.

The Philosophy of Love and Sex offers a wide range of diverse perspectives to challenge students to think beyond established concepts within the philosophies of love and sex.