In 1976 Raymond Williams commented, ‘Culture is one of the two or three most complicated words in the English language.’ Such implied difficulty has not prevented Bloomsbury Academic, since the 2000s, from publishing around forty series of their well-produced and generously illustrated Cultural Histories, with, according to their website, a further fifty in progress. Each series contains six volumes, each book covering, in theory, the same chronological period (antiquity, the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, the age of empire and (...) the modern age), though there is some variation depending on precise topic. The idea is that one can use these books not only to read ‘horizontally’ about a subject across time, but also ‘vertically’ through different subjects in the same period – a idea made easier by the e-texts of the series on Bloomsbury's website. (shrink)

There is no phenomenal consciousness; there is nothing 'that it is like' to be me. To believe in phenomenal consciousness or 'what-it's-like-ness' or 'for-me-ness' is to succumb to a pernicious form of the Myth of the Given. I argue that there are no good arguments for the existence of such a kind of consciousness and draw on arguments from Buddhist philosophy of mind to show that the sense that there is such a kind of consciousness is an instance of cognitive (...) illusion. (shrink)

Business Ethics, the Environment &Responsibility, EarlyView.

Drawing chiefly on recent sources, in Part One I sketch an untraditional way of articulating what I claim to be central elements of traditional Catholic morality, treating it as based in virtues, focused on the recipients (“patients”) of our attention and concern, and centered in certain person-to-person role-relationships. I show the limited and derivative places of “natural law,” and therefore of sin, within that framework. I also sketch out some possible implications for medical ethics of this approach to moral theory, (...) and briefly contrast these with the influential alternative offered by the “principlism” of Beauchamp and Childress. In Part Two, I turn to a Catholic understanding of the nature and meaning of human suffering, drawing especially on writings and addresses of the late Pope John Paul II. He reminds us that physical and mental suffering can provide an opportunity to share in Christ's salvific sacrifice, better to see the nature of our earthly vocation, and to reflect on the dependence that inheres in human existence. At various places, and especially in my conclusion, I suggest a few ways in which this can inform bioethical reflection on morally appropriate responses to those afflicted by physical or mental pain, disability, mental impairment, disease, illness, and poor health prospects. My general point is that mercy must be informed by appreciation of the person's dignity and status. Throughout, my approach is philosophical rather than theological. (shrink)

In this paper the authors provide an epistemological view on the old controversial random-necessity. It has been considered that either one or the other form part of the structure of reality. Chance and indeterminism are nothing but a disorderly efficiency of contingency in the production of events, phenomena, processes, i.e., in its causality, in the broadest sense of the word. Such production may be observed in natural and artificial processes or in human social processes (in history, economics, society, politics, etc.). (...) Here we touch the object par excellence of all scientific research whether natural or human. In this work, is presented a hypothesis whose practical result satisfies the Hegelian dialectic, with the consequent implication of their mutual reciprocal integration_._ Producing abstractions, without which, there is no thought or knowledge of any kind, from the concrete, that is, the real problem, which in this case is a given Ontological System or Reality. (shrink)

In this paper we study the variety of order Hilbert algebras, which is the equivalent algebraic semantics of the order implicational calculus of Bull.

Contrasting loving our neighbors with utilitarians’ demand to maximize good reveals important metatheoretic structures and dynamics that I call virtues- basing, input drive, role centering, and patient focus. First, love (good will) is a virtue; such virtues are foundational to both moral obligations and the impersonally valuable. Second, part of loving is acting lovingly. Whether and how I act lovingly, and how loving it is, is a matter of motivation; this input-driven account contrasts with highlighting actions’ outcome. Third, in regarding (...) someone as our neighbor we view her in relation to ourselves; a role-centered perspective shows that a wide range of person-to-person role-relationships constitute moral life. Fourth, if our moral task is loving each person, the moral question is how we respond to each person’s relevant welfare and needs, focusing on those toward someone acts (moral patients), not on maximizing good across persons or producing an optimal world. (shrink)

This paper addresses two related questions. First, what is involved in giving a distinctively realist and naturalist construal of an area of discourse, that is, in so much as stating a distinctively realist and naturalist position about, for example, content or value? I defend a condition that guarantees the realism and naturalism of any position satisfying it, at least in the case of positions on content, but perhaps in other cases as well. Second, what sorts of considerations render a distinctively (...) realist and naturalist position more plausible than its irrealist and non-naturalist rivals? The answer here focuses again on theories of content and is wholly negative. I argue that the standard array of arguments offered in support of realist and naturalist theories in fact provide equal support for a host of irrealist and non-naturalist ones. Taken together, these considerations reveal an important gap in the recent philosophical literature on content. The challenge to proponents of putatively realist and naturalist theories is to insure that those theories so much as state distinctively realist and naturalist positions and then to identify arguments that support what is distinctively realist and naturalist about them. (shrink)

. New insights about a variety of epistemological topics including skepticism, peer disagreement, and the nature of knowledge emerge when we give the right sort of attention to our epistemic immaturity at the species level. This large-scale developmentalist concern illustrates a new way of doing epistemology, here called big epistemology.

As the most famous woman scientist of the twentieth century, there has been no shortage of books and articles on the life and career of Marie Curie . Her role as a director of a laboratory-based research school in the new scientific field of radioactivity, a field which embraced both chemistry and physics, however, has never been examined. In recent years, there has been a growing interest in the question of research schools, and Morrell, Ravetz, Geison, and Klosterman, amongst others, (...) have written on this subject. Using, in part, the methodology of Morrell, this paper investigates the role of Marie Curie as a school director in the Paris Faculty in the years 1907–14, examining the work and characteristics of her school and assessing her effectiveness as a director. (shrink)

Over the last fifteen years, linguists and philosophers of language have reexamined the canonical, Kratzerian semantics for modal expressions, with special attention paid to their epistemic and deontic uses. This article is an overview of the literature on deontic modal expressions. Section 1 provides an overview of the canonical semantics, noting some of its main advantages. Section 2 introduces a set of desiderata that have achieved the status of fixed points in the debates about whether the canonical semantics is correct. (...) These include the observations that deontic modal sentences have both deliberative and evaluative readings and both information-sensitive and -insensitive readings. Adequate resolutions of certain puzzles in deontic logic and resolving the Frege-Geach problem for Expressivism have also achieved this status. The third section provides an opinionated overview of some of the main extant rivals to the canonical semantics, including Cariani, Kaufmann, and Kaufmann’s (2013) complex contextualism , Yalcin’s (2012) Expressivism, Willer’s (2014) dynamic semantics, and Starr’s (2016) dynamic Expressivism. Section 4 provides an assessment of each of the views discussed in terms of the desiderata introduced in section 2. Section 5 is an overview of remaining issues that require more attention in the literature. (shrink)

Central question of this essay is, whether it is possible to relate specific aspects of the organization of sensorimotor systems to specific aspects of the behaviour. The role of the auditory system as part of a system for vocalization or as part of a system for prey localization and the different roles of the trigeminal system in the feeding behaviour of different birds are considered. The ascending sensory systems seem to possess a comparable organization in the various species. Also the (...) descending motor pathways from archistriatum and paleostriatal complex seem to be basically similar. Behavioural specialization may be expressed particularly in the organization of the intratelencephalic circuits and thus in the involvement of specific regions of neostriatum and hyperstriatum ventrale. In discussions on cerebralisation it will be necessary to take such differences in intratelencephalic organization into account. (shrink)

This paper raises serious problems for the commonly held claim that races are socially constructed. The first section sketches out an approach to our construction of institutional phenomena that, taking Searle’s general approach, restricts social construction proper to cases where we adopt rules that bind relevant parties to treat things of a type in certain ways, thus constituting important roles in, and parts of, our social lives. I argue this conception, construction-by-rules, helps distinguish genuine construction from other activities and relations (...) and also solves a problem raised against simplistic conceptions. The second shows why and how Sally Haslanger, Linda Alcoff, and Glenn Loury have explained race as a social construct. The next points out problems for their and other accounts, including circularity, difficulties arising from conceptual and linguistic history, and non sequiturs. After returning to Haslanger in more detail, I proceed critically to engage work by Ian Hacking, Lawrence Blum, Luc Faucher and Edouard Machery, and Charles Mills. The following sections move from specific accounts in the literature to offer general arguments that viewing races as products of social construction threatens to mislead in numerous ways. At the end, I discuss the significance of the issue and challenge whether social constructionist accounts are genuinely liberating. (shrink)