In this paper, we propose that multiculturalism can serve as an effective public policy tool to enhance a nation’s competitiveness, in an era characterized by financial crises, globalization, immigration, and changing demographics. Specifically, we articulate how multiculturalism and strategic tolerance of differences can promote socioeconomic mobility for individuals, and act as the “glue” that binds immigrants and host country nationals together. We also demonstrate how multiculturalism can attract skilled talents necessary for nation building. Immigrants who retain their ties with their (...) countries of origin can serve as natural trade links for their countries of residence and contribute to a reverse “brain flow” rather than a brain gain/drain for the countries of residence/origin. We conclude by explicating that immigrants can be a source of competitive advantage for countries when a multiculturalism policy is in place. (shrink)

Shavelson et al. (2023) identify an important problem in their Target article: a significant number of terminally ill patients with impaired motor function are wrongfully excluded from receiving ai...

Part of the Elements Philosophy of Religion series, this short book focuses on the spiritual dimensions of life’s meaning as they have been discussed in the recent English and mainly analytic philosophical literature. The overarching philosophical question that this literature has addressed is about the extent to which, and respects in which, spiritual realities such as God or a soul would confer meaning on our lives. There have been four broad answers to the question, namely: God or a soul is (...) necessary for meaning in our lives; they are not necessary for it; one or both would enhance the meaning in our lives; and they would detract from it. These views have been largely advanced in chronological order through the history of Western philosophy, with the view that life would be meaningless without God and a soul having been most prominent in the medieval period, the rejection of this claim having arisen in the modern era, and then sophisticated positions about enhancement or reduction having appeared in earnest only in the past 20 years. This book addresses all four positions, paying particular attention to the more recent views. Beyond familiarizing readers with these positions, it presents prima facie objections to them, points out gaps in research agendas, and suggests argumentative strategies that merit development. (shrink)

Part of a symposium devoted to ‘Prediction, Understanding, and Medicine’, in which Alex Broadbent argues that the nature of medicine is determined by its competences, i.e., which things it can do well. He argues that, although medicine cannot cure well, it can do a good job of enabling people not only to understand states of the human organism and of what has caused them, but also to predict future states of it. From this Broadbent concludes that medicine is (at least (...) in part) essentially a practice of understanding and predicting, not curing. In reply to this bold position, I mount two major criticisms. First, I maintain that the reasons Broadbent gives for doubting that medicine can cure provide comparable reason for doubting that medicine can provide an understanding; roughly, the best explanation of why medicine cannot reliably cure is that we still lack much understanding of health and disease. Second, I object to the claim that a practice is medical only if it facilitates understanding and prediction. Although Broadbent has brought to light certain desirable purposes of medicine that are under-appreciated, my conclusion is that he has not yet provided enough reason to think that understanding and prediction are essential to it. Instead of supposing that medicine has an essence, in fact, I suggest that its nature is best understood in terms of a property cluster. (shrink)

Discussion of whether values and norms are neutral or not has mainly appeared in works on the nature of prudential rationality and morality. Little systematic has yet appeared in the up and coming field of the meaning of life. What are the respects in which the value of meaningfulness is neutral or, in contrast, partial, relational, or ‘biased’? In this article, I focus strictly on answering this question. First, I aim to identify the salient, and perhaps exhaustive, respects in which (...) issues of neutrality arise in the contexts of life’s meaning. In addition to providing a taxonomy of the key points of contention, a second aim is to advance reflection about them by considering the most important arguments that have been marshalled in favour of one side or the other, particularly as they appear in recent neutral positions. I conclude that meaning in life is neutral with respect to time but not any other conditions such as agents and patients, with a third aim being to point out that this makes the value of meaning different from the kinds of non/neutrality encountered in some salient conceptions of prudence and morality. (shrink)

Reprint of an article that initially appeared in _Ethical Theory and Moral Practice_ (2012).

Before I can urge this position, however, I must first dispose of alternative views which might be brought against it from the very start. Let us ask if a theory of Newtonian time or a time ontologically complete in itself renders passage comprehensible. The answer must be that it does not. If there is to be passage, something must pass; that at least is certain, but this something cannot be the moments which comprise an absolute time, a time which does (...) not depend on anything outside itself for its reality. For the moments of an absolute time possess no quality which could differentiate one from another, and consequently it must be nonsense to say that one is before, another after, or even that one is earlier, another later. As moments of an everlasting time all must possess exactly the same status. They are limitations of one entity which contains within itself no reason why one part of it should differ from another. (shrink)

To put one of Jordan's central thoughts briefly, forms or relations through the act become "clots" or plexus, i.e., intertwinings, and thus concrete things. Jordan has several descriptions of the act, the perfect act, the creative act, the cosmic act, the integrative act, the subjective act, and the intelligent act. Of these the integrative act is the most important metaphysically, and has many of the characteristics of the other acts.

We argue that quantum theory does not allow for a generalization of the notion of classical conditional probability by showing that the probability defined by the Lüders rule, standardly interpreted in the literature as the quantum-mechanical conditionalization rule, cannot be interpreted as such.

Well into the 1940s, many French biologists rejected both Mendelian genetics and Darwinism in favour of neo-transformism, the claim that evolution proceeds by the inheritance of acquired characteristics. In 1931 the zoologist Maurice Caullery published Le Problème d’évolution, arguing that, while Lamarckian mechanisms could not be demonstrated in the present, they had nevertheless operated in the past. It was in this context that Raymond Aron expressed anxiety about the relationship between biology, history, and human autonomy in his 1938 Introduction à (...) la philosophie de l’histoire: essai sur les limites de l’objectivité historique, in which he rejected both neo-Kantian and biological accounts of human history. Aron aspired to a philosophy of history that could explain the dual nature of human existence as fundamentally rooted in the biological, and at the same time, as a radical transcendence of natural law. I argue that Aron’s encounter with evolutionary theory at this moment of epistemic crisis in evolutionary theory was crucial to the formation of his philosophy of history, and moreover that this case study demonstrates the importance of moving beyond the methodological divisions between intellectual history and history of science. (shrink)

The first part of a symposium devoted to Alex Broadbent's essay titled ‘Prediction, Understanding and Medicine’, this article notes the under-development of a variety of issues in the philosophy of medicine that transcend bioethics and the long-standing debates about the nature of health/illness and of evidence-based medicine. It also indicates the importance of drawing on non-Western, and particularly African, traditions in addressing these largely metaphysical and epistemological matters.

Neste artigo propomos uma leitura do conto “La exportación de cérebros” (Movimiento perpetuo, 1972), do guatemalteco Augusto Monterroso à luz do conceito de cosmopolitismo do pobre, do ensaísta brasileiro Silviano Santiago. Para isso, é feita uma análise crítica e abrangente do texto, relacionando-o com a realidade dos nossos dias.

This article revisits certain aspects of the discussion originated by dissident Franciscans over the two keys conferred by Christ to Peter, bringing it into connection with the value that Ockham and John XXII accord respectively to knowledge and power in the definition of doctrine. Rather than an extraneous element in the debate, as it has often been perceived, the two-keys argument is pivotal to the proper understanding of Ockham’s ecclesiology and the pope’s own, as it serves to articulate the twin (...) notions they both advance of “authority to inquire” and “authority to determine” on a question of faith. By focusing away from the usual template of the competing claims of infallibility and sovereignty, this article hopes to bring to light the profound similarities in their respective views on doctrinal authority and the value accorded to the theological enterprise. (shrink)

Cognitive Approaches to Early Modern Spanish Literature is the first anthology exploring human cognition and literature in the context of early modern Spanish culture. It includes the leading voices in the field, along with the main themes and directions that this important area of study has been producing. The book begins with an overview of the cognitive literary studies research that has been taking place within early modern Spanish studies over the last fifteen years. Next, it traces the creation of (...) self in the context of the novel, focusing on Cervantes's Don Quixote in relation to the notions of embodiment and autopoiesis as well as the faculties of memory and imagination as understood in early modernity. It continues to explore the concept of embodiment, showing its relevance to delve into the mechanics of the interaction between actors and audience both in the jongleuresque and the comedia traditions. It then centers on cognitive theories of perception, the psychology of immersion in fictional worlds, and early modern and modern-day notions of intentionality to discuss the role of perceiving and understanding others in performance, Don Quixote, and courtly conduct manuals. The last section focuses on the affective dimension of audience-performer interactions in the theatrical space of the Spanish corrales and how emotion and empathy can inform new approaches to presenting Las Casas's work in the literature classroom. The volume closes with an afterword offering strategies to design a course on mind and literature in early modernity. (shrink)

Definitions of terms that are central to a theoretical understanding of the Royal Government of Bhutan's policy of Gross National Happiness.

Translation of 'Are Lives Worth Creating?' into Japanese by Sho Yamaguchi. A critical discussion of Benatar's anti-natalism that originally appeared in Philosophical Papers (2011).

La regulación jurídica de la nacionalidad la instituye como frontera que delimita, más allá de la entrada al territorio, la pertenencia a la comunidad política. La facilitación de la adquisición de la nacionalidad, con el objeto de integrar a quienes comparten un interés común en el futuro de la comunidad, es un instrumento necesario, aunque insuficiente, de democratización, en primer lugar, en cuanto sirve internamente a la expansión potencial del cuerpo político-jurídico, incorporando a los sujetos socialmente ya integrados. Y, en (...) segundo lugar, en cuanto se extiende hacia el exterior con el compromiso del Estado con su función de agente de justicia global. (shrink)

I develop an account of the property in virtue of which actions are wrong that retains the notion of unreasonableness but rejects Scanlon's contractualist framework. Specifically, I maintain (roughly) that the property of treating another unreasonably better explains what makes an act wrong than does the property of it being prohibited by principles that contractors with an ideal motivation could not reasonably reject. One advantage of my alternative is a more straightforward way to capture duties towards animals.

O fio condutor dos argumentos apresentados por J. S. Mill em On Liberty é de que o aperfeiçoamento da humanidade tem como fonte infalível e permanente o espírito da liberdade. Nosso objetivo é mostrar que o conceito de liberdade milliana se equilibra entre a promoção do cultivo da individualidade, na sua mais ampla pluralidade, e o desenvolvimento moral da sociedade.

Offering an original contribution to the field of luxury and fashion studies, this edited collection takes a philosophical perspective, addressing the idea that humans need luxury. From this framework it delves deep into two particular dimensions of luxury, emotions and society, and concludes with cases of brand building in order to illustrate the two dimensions at work. Comparative analysis between countries is brought together with an emphasis on China. Chapters address the ongoing growth in the market, as well as the (...) significant changes in the sector brought about by fast international expansion and an increased focus on ethical supply and sustainability, making the book an insightful read for scholars of fashion business, luxury and branding. (shrink)