This paper gives a framework for understanding causal counterpossibles, counterfactuals imbued with causal content whose antecedents appeal to metaphysically impossible worlds. Such statements are generated by omissive causal claims that appeal to metaphysically impossible events, such as “If the mathematician had not failed to prove that 2+2=5, the math textbooks would not have remained intact.” After providing an account of impossible omissions, the paper argues for three claims: (i) impossible omissions play a causal role in the actual world, (ii) causal (...) counterpossibles have broad applications in philosophy, and (iii) the truth of causal counterpossibles provides evidence for the nonvacuity of counterpossibles more generally. (shrink)

At present, there is an enormous gulf between the visibility of evil and the paucity of our intellectual resources for coming to grips with it. We have been flooded with images of death camps, terrorist attacks and horrendous human suffering. Yet when we ask what we mean by radical evil and how we are to account for it, we seem to be at a loss for proper responses. Bernstein seeks to discover what we can learn about the meaning of (...) evil and human responsibility. He turns to philosophers such as Kant, who coined the expression 'radical evil', as well as to Hegel and Schelling. He also examines more recent explorations of evil, namely the thinking of Freud and Nietzsche on the moral psychology of evil. Finally, he looks at the way in which three post-Holocaust thinkers - Emmanuel Levinas, Hans Jonas, and Hannah Arendt - have sought to come to grips with evil "after Auschwitz." Bernstein's primary concern throughout this challenging book is to enrich and deepen our understanding of evil in the contemporary world, and to emphasize the vigilance and personal responsibility required for combating it. Radical Evil will be essential reading for students and scholars of philosophy, social and political theory, and religious studies. (shrink)

The social categories to which we belong—Latino, disabled, American, woman— causally influence our lives in deep and unavoidable ways. One might be pulled over by police because one is Latino, or one might receive a COVID vaccine sooner because one is American. Membership in these social categories most often falls outside of our control. This paper argues that membership in social categories constitutes a restriction on human agency, creating a situation of non-ideal agency for many human individuals. -/- However, there (...) are ways to resist the causal influence of social categories, and certain socially marginalized groups can be understood as attempting to do just this. I discuss two instances of social category resistance: gender pronouns and the rights of trans individuals. I suggest that the intentional declaration of gender pronouns (“she/her” or “they/them”) can be understood as an attempt to resist the causal powers of nonconsensual social categorization. Similarly, one among many reasons to support the rights of trans individuals is that their self-declarations of gender identity can be viewed as a reclamation of agency in the face of causal constraints imposed by socially defined and imposed gender categories. This lesson can be generalized to people belonging to a broad range of marginalized groups. (shrink)

A reforma trabalhista vem sendo normalmente apresentada como uma ruptura neoliberal com a tradição de protecionismo da Justiça do Trabalho e da legislação referente ao tema. Existe, todavia, um elemento de continuidade, que é a persistência na promessa da paz perpétua. A CLT apresenta a fraternidade entre as classes como imposição cristã. A Reforma Trabalhista insiste na superação dos conflitos como imposição da democracia, uma vez removida a intervenção estatal representada pela justiça do trabalho. Trata-se de uma utopia, uma vez (...) que as classes antagonistas disputam recursos limitados na luta pela sobrevivência. (shrink)

This chapter argues that Mary Astell’s Christian Religion as Profess’d by a Daughter of the Church of England was central to her feminist ideas, rather than limiting them—a position taken by most scholars, and especially by those who term her a conservative. Astell was totally devoted to the importance of reason and its link to faith and religious belief. Her primary motivation was reason’s guarantee of an independent and thoughtful Christianity for women. This acceptance of the centrality of reason and (...) its links to faith seems to contradict her dedication to a scripturally-directed religion, and one under the control of political and religious governors. But in many ways it allowed her to develop a feminism not found in others. She stressed equality and independence, granting little standing to men to direct women’s religion and only granted authority to God’s anointed leaders of church and state. Such an analysis allowed her to adopt a conservative political stance while assuming a quite radical one as regarding women’s relationship to men. And in this work, which primarily addressed proper Christian principles, she introduced views compatible with her more central feminist texts, namely the Serious Proposal and Reflections upon Marriage. By focusing on the mind, individual agency, and unjust patriarchal values, she was able to pursue both a strong critique of the status quo and to hone in precisely on the status of women, in ways not before accomplished. (shrink)

Examines the processes of scientific creativity and discovery, and proposes a model of scientific development.

Proponents of grounding often describe the notion as "metaphysical causation" involving determination and production relations similar to causation. This paper argues that the similarities between grounding and causation are merely superficial. I show that there are several sorts of causation that have no analogue in grounding; that the type of "bringing into existence" that both involve is extremely different; and that the synchronicity of ground and the diachronicity of causation make them too different to be explanatorily intertwined.

We are continually trying to make sense of our world through the stories we tell and are told, but in our search for coherence, we often sacrifice our freedom and the rich randomness of life. In this passionate and lucid book, Michael André Bernstein challenges our practice of "foreshadowing," in which we see our lives as moving toward a predetermined goal or as controlled by fate. Foreshadowing, he argues, demeans the variety and openness that exist in even the most (...) ordinary moments of life. And it is precisely ordinary life, with its random, haphazard, and contradictory choices, that Bernstein celebrates in his call for "sideshadowing"—an alternative practice that reminds us that every present is dense with possible futures. Bernstein sees the Holocaust as the prime example of how our tendency to "foreshadow" and "backshadow" misrepresents history. He argues eloquently against politicians and theologians who posit the Holocaust as foreordained and who depict its victims as somehow complicit with a fate that they should have been able to foresee. Instead, Bernstein proposes a radically new understanding of the relationship between the Holocaust and earlier Jewish experience, transforming how we read and write both individual and communal history. Foregone Conclusions is an extraordinarily wide-ranging book, both in its scope and in its broader intellectual and moral implications. From the latest biographies of Kafka to the peace accords between Israel and the PLO, from the role of cultural diversity in universities to the Crown Heights riots, Bernstein warns us against passively accepting our identities as being shaped primarily by historical or personal victimization. His book liberates us from stereotyped patterns of understanding the relationship between our lives as individuals and as members of racial, sexual, and historic/ethnic communities. Berstein ultimately opens a powerful new way to understand the principles governing how we read and write narratives--whether historical, personal, or literary. In striking original juxtapositions and critical evaluations of Marcel Proust, Robert Musil, and Aharon Appelfeld, Bernstein sugests the need for a new literary model based on the prosaics of daily life. Bernstein speaks directly and persuasively to many of the most pressing issues in Jewish history, Holocaust studies, literary criticism, and cultural history. Foregone Conclusions is a provocative and poignant attempt to find coherence in our world without accepting either ineluctable destiny of pure coincidence. (shrink)

The principle of gratuitous suffering -- The value of humans and the value of animals -- The holocaust of factory farming -- Hunting -- Animal experimentation -- The law and animals -- Women and animals.

O artigo tem por objetivo examinar a relação intrínseca entre o teatro e a filosofia a partir do estudo do verbo théorein, revelador de instigantes elementos constitutivos da arte dramática e da maestria especulativa. Cuida-se de um aprendizado do olhar que, no teatro e na filosofia, irá encontrar as condições propícias para o seu pleno exercício nas manifestações artísticas e filosóficas do século V a.C. em Atenas. A invenção do olhar representa um traço peculiar e profícuo da cultura grega, que (...) escreverá uma história artística e filosófica paradigmática para a civilização ocidental. Analisa a querela suscitada com a expulsão dos poetas e tragediógrafos da República de Platão. Destaca-se a importância da interdisciplinaridade como apreensão do humano e desenvolvimento de uma consciência crítica dos problemas artísticos e filosóficos. (shrink)

In 2016, the Atlanta Community Food Bank launched the Stabilizing Lives project to develop programs and policies that could better address clients’ needs as well as including clientele as part of the planning process. The ACFB partnered with a research team at the University of Georgia to conduct a participatory research project aimed at developing deeper insights into the factors contributing to both instability and stability in the lives of pantry clientele. This article describes the outcomes this research, offering both (...) a substantive contribution to scholarship on food insecurity and emergency food systems and a methodological innovation through a staged mixed-method participatory research project. Through use of a culture-centered approach, this project created discursive spaces within which to outline emergency food models that support informal networks of care. We used a range of methods, including photo elicitation, concept mapping, individual interviews, and focus groups, to facilitate conversation among agency staff, volunteers, and clientele about the effectiveness of current program models and potential new ideas. Specifically, we suggest that through such practices, food pantries and local agencies may help inform new program models that contribute to household stability, and push back against the sometimes alienating and atomizing paradigm found in current emergency food programs. (shrink)

Leading philosophers and social thinkers, including Richard Rorty, Jacques Derrida, and Jurgen Habermas, pay tribute to the influential American philosopher Richard J. Bernstein.

BackgroundAn editorial expression of concern (EEoC) is issued by editors or publishers to draw attention to potential problems in a publication, without itself constituting a retraction or correction.MethodsWe searched PubMed, PubMed Central (PMC), and Google Scholar to identify EEoCs issued for publications in PubMed and PMC up to 22 August 2016. We also searched the archives of the Retraction Watch blog, some journal and publisher websites, and studies of EEoCs. In addition, we searched for retractions of EEoCs and affected articles (...) in PubMed up to 8 December 2016. We analyzed overall historical trends, as well as reported reasons and subsequent editorial actions related to EEoCs issued between August 2014 and August 2016.ResultsAfter screening 5076 records, we identified 230 EEoCs that affect 300 publications indexed in PubMed, the earliest issued in 1985. Half of the primary EEoCs were issued between 2014 and 2016 (52%). We found evidence of some EEoCs that had been removed by the publisher without leaving a record, and some were not submitted for PubMed or PMC indexing. A minority of publications affected by EEoCs had been retracted by early December 2016 (25%). For the subset of 92 EEoCs issued between August 2014 and August 2016, affecting 99 publications, the rate of retraction was similar (29%). The majority of EEoCs were issued because of concerns with validity of data, methods, or interpretation of the publication (68%), and 31% of cases remained open. Issues with images were raised in 40% of affected publications. Ongoing monitoring after the study identified another 17 EEoCs to year’s end in 2016, increasing the number of EEoCs to 247 and publications in PubMed known to be affected by EEoCs to 320 at the end of 2016.ConclusionsEEoCs have been rare publishing events in the biomedical literature, but their use has been increasing. Most have not led to retractions, and many remain unresolved. Lack of prominence and inconsistencies in management of EEoCs reduce the ability of these notices to alert the scientific community to potentially serious problems in publications. EEoCs will be made identifiable in PubMed in 2017. (shrink)

Pauline Kleingeld and Marcus Willaschek, in a co-authored article, declare that their purportedly new interpretation of Immanuel Kant’s writings on autonomy reveals that his moral philosophy is neither realist nor constructivist. However, as I explain here, John Rawls already occupies the area of intellectual territory to which Kleingeld and Willaschek attempt to lay claim: Rawls interprets Kant’s moral philosophy as neither realist, as Kleingeld and Willaschek evidently construe this term, nor constructivist, as they evidently construe this term. Contra Kleingeld and (...) Willaschek, the moral constructivism attributed to Kant by Rawls is not voluntarist, and Rawls’s account of Kant’s concept of autonomy is not paradoxical. In order to understand autonomy, it is necessary to understand Kant’s complex conception of the will, which structures his moral philosophy (as Rawls, unlike Kleingeld and Willaschek, explains). Rawls, like Kant, but unlike Kleingeld and Willaschek, clearly distinguishes between certain importantly different questions about normativity and obligation. Kant’s moral philosophy, according to Rawls’s insightful interpretation, is a form of objective moral constructivism. (shrink)

Free will, if such there be, involves free choosing: the ability to mentally choose an outcome, where the outcome is 'free' in being, in some substantive sense, up to the agent of the choice. As such, it is clear that the questions of how to understand free will and mental causation are connected, for events of seemingly free choosing are mental events that appear to be efficacious vis-a-vis other mental events as well as physical events. Nonetheless, the free will and (...) mental causation debates have proceeded largely independently of each other. Here we aim to make progress in determining how the free will and mental causation debates bear on one another. We first argue that the problems of free will and of mental causation can be seen as special cases of a more general problem, concerning whether and how mental events of a given type may be efficacious, qua the types of event they are---qualitative, intentional, freely deliberative---given their apparent causal irrelevancy for effects of the type in question; here we generalize what Horgan 1989 identifies as "the problem of mental quausation" (S1). We then build on this result to identify fruitful parallels between hard determinism and eliminative physicalism (S2) and soft determinism and non-reductive physicalism (S3). (shrink)

Discutir aspectos teórico-metodológicos que subsidie a análise dos dados na pesquisa científica é atividade complexa, pois toda produção científica está relacionada às escolhas teóricas e metodológicas do pesquisador. Este texto busca responder à seguinte questão: como podemos organizar a proposta geral do plano de análise na pesquisa científica qualitativa? Essa inquietação tem como base a condição de ser e estar professora da disciplina de Pesquisa em Educação no ensino superior, de atuar em Programa de Pós-Graduação e de integrar o Grupo (...) de Pesquisa FORMAR que pressupõe a unidade pesquisar-formar em contexto de investigação científica. Essas circunstâncias possibilitaram dialogar com a dialética existencial em Vieira Pinto (1979), entre outras literaturas. O propósito deste trabalho é apresentar sugestões que possam auxiliar na elaboração do plano de análise e gerar uma proposta que possa nortear o processo de orientação e interpretação dos dados produzidos na pesquisa científica. Os dados trazem as seguintes evidências: formação do pesquisador com consciência crítica; análise norteada pelos objetivos específicos ou perguntas norteadoras; apropriação da teoria; descrição, explicação e interpretação na mobilização do geral, do particular e do singular do objeto de estudo; o plano de análise deve ser inteligível, interpretável, compreensível e aplicável, consoante as escolhas teórico-metodológicas. Palavras-chave: Pesquisa qualitativa; Plano de análise; Formação e pesquisa; Práxis. How to prepare a data analysis plan in qualitative research: description, explanation or interpretation? Abstract: Discussing theoretical-methodological aspects that support the analysis of data in scientific research is a complex activity, as all scientific production is related to the theoretical and methodological choices of the researcher. This text seeks to answer the following question: how can we organize the general proposal of the analysis plan in qualitative scientific research? This concern is based on the condition of being and being a professor of the Research in Education discipline in higher education, of working in the Graduate Program and of being part of the FORMAR Research Group, which presupposes the research-training unit in the context of scientific investigation. These circumstances made it possible to dialogue with the existential dialectic in Vieira Pinto (1979), among other literatures. The purpose of this work is to present suggestions that can help in the elaboration of the analysis plan and generate a proposal that can guide the process of orientation and interpretation of the data produced in the scientific research. The data bring the following evidences: formation of the researcher with critical awareness; analysis guided by specific objectives or guiding questions; theory appropriation; description, explanation and interpretation in the mobilization of the general, the particular and the singular of the object of study and; the analysis plan must be intelligible, interpretable, understandable and applicable, depending on the theoretical-methodological choices. Key-words: Qualitative research; Analysis plan; Training and research; Praxis. ¿Cómo elaborar un plan de análisis de datos en investigación cualitativa: descripción, explicación o interpretación? Resumen: Discutir aspectos teórico-metodológicos que sustentan el análisis de datos en la investigación científica es una actividad compleja, ya que toda producción científica está relacionada con las elecciones teóricas y metodológicas del investigador. Este texto busca responder a la siguiente pregunta: ¿cómo podemos organizar la propuesta general del plan de análisis en la investigación científica cualitativa? Esta preocupación se fundamenta en la condición de ser y ser docente de la disciplina Investigación en Educación en la educación superior, de laborar en el Programa de Posgrado y de formar parte del Grupo de Investigación FORMAR, lo que presupone la unidad de investigación-formación en el contexto de investigación científica. Estas circunstancias permitieron dialogar con la dialéctica existencial en Vieira Pinto (1979), entre otras literaturas. El propósito de este trabajo es presentar sugerencias que puedan auxiliar en la elaboración del plan de análisis y generar una propuesta que pueda orientar el proceso de orientación e interpretación de los datos producidos en la investigación científica. Los datos traen las siguientes evidencias: formación del investigador con conciencia crítica; análisis guiado por objetivos específicos o preguntas orientadoras; apropiación de la teoría; descripción, explicación e interpretación en la movilización de lo general, lo particular y lo singular del objeto de estudio y; el plan de análisis debe ser inteligible, interpretable, comprensible y aplicable, en función de las elecciones teórico-metodológicas. Palabras-clave: Investigación cualitativa; Plan de análisis; Formación e investigación; Práctica Data de registro: 04/04/2022 Data de aceite: 17/05/2022. (shrink)

This article aims to analyze the constitution of a subject of right capable of respect and esteem through the concept of capacity elaborated by Paul Ricœur. It intends to evaluate the capable, emancipated human being, the self that has an ethical and moral dimension and that is susceptible of ethical and juridical imputation, as it is explained in “Who is the Subject of Rights?” in The Just . There is an erratum for this article located here .  .

Theodor W. Adorno is best known for his contributions to aesthetics and social theory. Critics have always complained about the lack of a practical, political or ethical dimension to Adorno's philosophy. In this highly original contribution to the literature on Adorno, J. M. Bernstein offers the first attempt in any language to provide an account of the ethical theory latent in Adorno's writings. Bernstein relates Adorno's ethics to major trends in contemporary moral philosophy. He analyses the full range (...) of Adorno's major works, with a special focus on Dialectic of Enlightenment, Minima Moralia and Negative Dialectics. In developing his account Bernstein lays particular stress on Adorno's contention that the event of Auschwitz demands a new categorical imperative. This book will be widely acknowledged as the standard work on Adorno's ethics and as such will interest professionals and students of philosophy, political theory, sociology, history of ideas, art history and music. (shrink)

A gunman intends to shoot and kill Victim. He shoots and misses his target, but the gunshot startles a group of water buffalo, causing them to trample the victim to death. The gunman brings about the intended effect, Victim’s death, but in a “deviant” way rather than the one planned. This paper argues that such causal structures, deviant causal chains, pose serious problems for several key legal concepts. -/- I show that deviant causal chains pose problems for the legal distinction (...) between attempts and completed crimes, and also for the distinction between attempts and mere preparations. I then suggest that cases of deviant causation undermine notions of legal liability for completed crimes in terms of actus reus and mens rea, and argue that natural accounts of negligence misclassify some cases involving deviant causal chains. After diagnosing several conceptual vulnerabilities in the law revealed by deviant causal chains, I show that natural strategies for shoring up legal theories in the face of these examples are unpromising. (shrink)

In the last chapter of In the beginning was the deed: realism and moralism in political argument, Williams raised the question of truthfulness in politics and warned that the media, particularly, television, and the market of communication in general, work in ways contrary to truthfulness -understood as the combination of the virtues of sincerity and accuracy. In this paper we would like to carry on Williams’ line of thinking in connection with the impact of the new social media platforms on (...) politics. Where Williams focused on television, we will consider the impact of the internet public sphere. After reviewing how the digital social media encourages motivated reasoning in general, we propose to focus on two main phenomena derived from it: the rise of conspiracy theories and the moralization of politics. Conspiracy theories epitomize the risk of self-deception Williams was concerned to signal. On the other hand, the process of moralization of politics triggers sectarianism and hate for the “others”, the outgroup. Both phenomena are not exclusive of the internet sphere, but both are boosted by it, and entail a lack of interest in truth and truthfulness, and in this way they threaten the value of truth for democracy. (shrink)