In this article we argue that the social value of health research should be conceptualized as a function of both the expected benefits of the research and the priority that the beneficiaries deserve. People deserve greater priority the worse off they are. This conception of social value can be applied for at least two important purposes: in health research priority setting when research funders, policy-makers, or researchers decide between alternative research projects; and in evaluating the ethics of proposed research proposals (...) when research ethics committees assess whether the social value of the research is sufficient to justify the risks and burdens to research participants and others. In assessing how far a proposed research project will advance the interests of people who are more disadvantaged, research priority setters and RECs should examine the diseases that the research targets and the type of research. Just as certain diseases impose a greater burden on people who are more disadvantaged, so certain types of intervention and forms of research are more likely to benefit people who are more disadvantaged. We outline which populations are likely to be representative of the global worst off and identify what types of health research, and which disease categories, are priorities for these populations. (shrink)

In the last two decades an increasing number of musicians, musicologists and philosophers in the United States of America have dealt with questions of philosophy of music on a phenomenological basis. F. Joseph Smith certainly deserves mention as one of the first and most innovative of these authors. Sections 1 and 2 of the paper sketch a portrait of Smith against the background of the current situation in America, where there is a strong awareness of the need to overcome (...) the present limits imposed by historical musicology in order to develop a new phenomenological approach. Section 3 expounds Smith 's critique against traditional theory of musical form and his attempt to redefine musical form on the basis of Husserl's treatise on passive synthesis. This, in the author's opinion, is Smith 's most important contribution to a phenomenologically oriented philosophy of music. Finally, section 4 tries to draw some critical conclusions concerning Smith 's work, with special regard to the merits and demerits of his idea of phenomenology as applied to music. (shrink)

This article is a critical investigation of the buildings and writings of Étienne-Joseph Gaboury, a prolific French Canadian architect who, in the 1960s, designed several modern parish churches and engaged with various liturgical documents issued in the context of the Second Vatican Council. How have the various calls of priests and theologians advocating for artistic and liturgical renewal—calls which became increasingly frequent in the North Atlantic world after World War II—been adapted and implemented in specific architectural landmarks by Gaboury, (...) such as his famous Précieux-Sang Church and Blessed Sacrament Church in Manitoba? I argue that Gaboury’s account of the origins of Christianity and his description of religious experience in both embodied and spiritual terms, found in his essay “Design for Worship”, can be understood not simply as an aggiornamento, or bringing the Church “up to date,” but also as echoes, in aesthetic and architectural terms, of some of the key tenets of the “new theology,” which were central to the changes put forth by the Second Vatican Council. I also argue that Gaboury’s interests in materiality and in the evocative power of light need to be read through the rise of phenomenology in postwar North American architecture. By looking at various archival documents, I propose that Vatican II was not a unilateral, top-down paradigm shift, or a rupture with tradition, but rather a complex and ongoing negotiation between the architect, ecclesial authorities and lay people. (shrink)

The following paper argues that issues in paradigmatic proposals for solving the new demarcation problem stem from absolutist assumptions about judgments of value legitimacy. Both the problem of uninformativeness (Larroulet Philippi 2020; Fernandez-Pinto 2014, 2015) and the problem of ambiguous judgments of cases (Hicks 2014; Intemann 2017) are explained by an absolutist pretension contained in one of the main aims of these proposals: providing criteria for differentiating legitimate from illegitimate uses of values, without qualification. After presenting the problems and showing (...) how they stem from that common source, we will sketch a way forward, inspired mainly by Joseph Rouse’s Beyond Epistemic Sovereignty (1996), advancing routes that can allow philosophers of science to evade these pitfalls and engage with scientific practice in a more salutary manner. (shrink)

Evolution (Lucile Hadžihalilović, 2016) offers a vision of Donna J. Haraway's feminist intervention where Haraway posits her neologistic chthulucene to signify the interpenetration of species in response to anthropocene discourse which recuperates the patriarchal narrative of homo faber – the human as maker. The risks and tribulations of cross-species “becoming-with”, as Haraway puts it, are dramatized in Evolution. The ambiguously defined, subaqueous species of the film nurture and care for human boys then impregnate them with squid-like creatures that are incubated (...) in the child's mid-section. The film is marked by images that are difficult to anthropomorphise, eliciting corporeal engagements with tentacular sea creatures that are alienating and confronting. Evolution presents images that are in sympathy with Haraway's chthulucene, in which the subject dissolves into the matter of “humus” or “compost” that ontologically bind the human and nonhuman alike. The film signals a reverse evolution in which humans return to the sea, a temporal backwards turn that Haraway similarly advocates in her book. While Evolution plays out Haraway's chthonic vision in which it shows a subject, Nicolas, embedded in a compost community, the film nonetheless situates this subject as bounded and coherent. Evolution does not, ultimately, forego the human but offers a chance to comprehend the human's transformation in the historical moment of the anthropocene. (shrink)

Expanded reprint of the WIREs Science of Belief paper for Julien Musolino, Joseph Sommer, and Pernille Hemmer's The Science of Beliefs: A Multidisciplinary Approach. Cambridge University Press.

This paper focuses on chronology, structure and purpose of Dirck Canter’s edition of comic fragmentary poets, Aristophanes and Menander in mss. Par. suppl. gr. 1013 and D’Orville 123. It studies the history of the texts and offers unpublished conjectures of Dirck Canter and Joseph Justus Scaliger to the text of the comic poets and Machon’s “Chreiai”.

Around 1716, the French astronomer and academician Joseph-Nicolas Delisle took up a new project: the twinned topics of Chinese chronology and astronomy. Unable to access Chinese sources and not knowing any fellow savants who shared this particular interest, Delisle methodically made extracts and compiled data from the existing European literature. Among Delisle's papers at the Observatoire de Paris still exist the results of this research, including a list of the books he found relevant. This paper (...) develops a close reading of Delisle's notes from this period to stage his journey into a recondite arena of technical and textual analysis, and to examine the scholarly practices and generic conventions through which early modern European savants confronted the Chinese astronomical tradition. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:PostfacePhilippe-Joseph Salazar, Guest Editor"France: Current Writing in Philosophy and Rhetoric" could be a subtitle for this volume. As guest editor I have chosen the genre of the postface rather than that of the preface. I wanted to let writings speak for themselves, unhindered by the added filter of an introduction. Prefaces are either congratulatory or a contribution in disguise—or, worse, a puerile attempt to overshadow the rest. However, (...) by way of a summation, a few, brief remarks are in order.Some thirty years ago it would have been impossible to seek out and secure authors to write on this subject. Since then a sea change has taken place, attracting into the circles of the "rhetorical turn" many a willing partaker. In this new game, two circles gyrate and now and then rotate in unison or collide.One circle, let us call it belletristic, was set in motion by Marc Fumaroli when he released, in 1980, his epoch-making Âge de l'éloquence. It was as if a new chord had been struck, catching most by surprise, heralding the sudden irruption of new thinking about the mainstay of French culture, the "classical age," that is, the seventeenth century, the sacrosanct age of Racine, Descartes, Louis XIV, and Nicolas Poussin. Fumaroli's work in rhetoric, aesthetics, and social commentary went to the heart of French literature and culture: it offered an hermeneutic opportunity to run against the grain of structuralism and Bourdieusian analyses, while it simultaneously brought to [End Page 424] light "rhetorical" layers, both religious and civil, of French culture that militant secularism and social positivism had long cast aside as pernicious or preposterous. It also served as a powerful antidote to "cultural studies." His influence is deep and wide and long lasting. Nancy Struever, who alongside Fumaroli founded the International Society for the History of Rhetoric, draws on her intimate knowledge of the French school to provide here a profound and critical account of his work in which she underscores how Fumaroli transformed, from the standpoint of the history of rhetoric, the study of Western European culture and social life forms—the award of the Balzan Prize to Fumaroli came on the heels of his Histoire de la rhétorique dans l'Europe moderne. He has, for all intents and purposes, created the French school of rhetoric studies, which has nurtured an ever-growing circle of scholars, now in its second generation, with a relief cohort at the ready (Salazar 2007).The other circle took a while longer to gain balance and establish momentum. It concerns itself with the complex relation between philology and philosophy. Indeed, French classical philology had long been resistant to the presence of philosophy and so too philosophy to philology. This uneasy and reciprocal indifference or even distrust can be traced back to the Discourse on Method, in which Descartes invented French philosophical prose, as Pierre Cahné puts it, a situation later aggravated by the spell German metaphysics cast over French philosophy in the nineteenth century. However, it was the enduring presence of Hegel in the 1930s, together with the material and intellectual rescue French philosophers offered Heidegger after 1945, and a sustained interest in Nietzsche and Husserl, that created the conditions for a new dalliance between philology and philosophy. It has been a multifaceted game: some Hellenists, like Nicole Loraux and Marcel Detienne, chose to develop an anthropological meditation on ancient Greece, bringing forth, in the process, rhetorical categories that before them were mere indicators (mètis, epitaphios). On the periphery stood Émile Benveniste with his philological enquiry into Indo European words as mental structures—his Vocabulaire remains a constant source of inspiration. Latinists had a problem of their own: their commonly shared notion that Latin was not a philosophical language, together with their vociferous prejudice against non-Ciceronian Latin, had consigned medieval and Renaissance thinkers and modes of thinking to the bogs of impure language. However, Latin scholars such as Alain Michel sought to unravel the Roman aesthetics inherent in a rhetorical way of life; this school of new Latinists propelled a remarkable revival of Neo-Latinity, which has [End Page 425] had a long-lasting influence on Renaissance studies... (shrink)

1. In June 1737, Jean Jacques Dortous de Mairan (1678–1771) informed Joseph-Nicolas Delisle (1688–1768) about the dispatch from Paris of six pendulum clocks and one seconds counter designed for the...

Présentation du numéro spécial de la revue Philosophiques à la mémoire de Joseph Nicolas Kaufmann (1941-2002).

Jean-Paul Grandjean – devenu de Fouchy en 1743, lorsqu’il est nommé secrétaire perpétuel de l’Académie des sciences – s’est formé à l’astronomie auprès de J.-N. Delisle, avant le départ de ce dernier pour la Russie. Fouchy installe bientôt chez lui un observatoire qu’il équipe d’instruments du constructeur Claude Langlois, et où il mène différentes observations. Le domaine d’intérêt principal de Fouchy concerne les «machines»; il s’agit entre autres d’appareils venant équiper les quarts-de-cercle pour en faciliter l’emploi. Comme secrétaire perpétuel, (...) il demeure en fonction jusqu’en 1776 et, à ce titre, il prononce de nombreux éloges dont une dizaine sont relatifs à des astronomes. (shrink)

This paper demonstrates the central role of the Socratic elenchus in the Sophist. In the first part, I defend the position that the Stranger describes the Socratic elenchus in the sixth division of the Sophist. In the second part, I show that the Socratic elenchus is actually used when the Stranger scrutinizes the accounts of being put forward by his predecessors. In the final part, I explain the function of the Socratic elenchus in the argument of the dialogue. By contrast (...) with standard scholarly interpretations, this way of reading the text provides all the puzzles about being (241c4–251a4) with a definite function in the dialogue. It also reveals that Plato’s methodology includes a plurality of method and is more continuous than what is often believed. (shrink)

Nicolas Weill propose une lecture stimulante de ces textes qui constituent une des découvertes philosophiques les plus importantes de ces dernières années. La publication des "Cahiers" redonne une actualité brûlante à la question qui divise épigones et détracteurs du penseur allemand : comment continuer à philosopher avec Heidegger sans tenir compte d'une éventuelle contamination de cette philosophie par l'idéologie nazie? Par une analyse sans concession des "Cahiers", en se concentrant sur les Réflexions (tenues par Heidegger de 1931 à 1941) (...) mais tout en cherchant à en dégager les éléments proprement philosophiques, cet ouvrage invite à une approche équilibrée, quitte à "penser avec Heidegger, contre Heidegger", comme le suggérait Jürgen Habermas dès le début des années 1950. Il montre notamment comment l'auteur d'Etre et temps, en inventant une nouvelle forme de philosopher, a poursuivi et prolongé dans ces carnets la critique de la modernité telle qu'elle a été formulée par la "révolution conservatrice" allemande et par Oswald Spengler, le théoricien du déclin de l'Occident. (shrink)

The seventh edition of this pragmatic guide to determining right and wrong in the workplace is updated with new case studies and ancillary materials to combine stakeholder perspectives with a deep dive on workplace ethics issues. Using a unique stakeholder-based approach, this book takes business ethics out of the theory realm and provides practical ways to analyze any business decision. Including dozens of cases, Joseph Weiss looks beyond the impacts of ethical lapses on share price and profit to focus (...) on relationships between stakeholders, including individuals, groups, corporations, and governments. The new seventh edition includes seven new cases and ten new Point/Counterpoint exercises, which challenge students to argue both sides of a contemporary issue. It incorporates the latest research as well as updated cases dealing with recent scandals at organizations such as Boeing, Facebook, and Uber. Professors will have access to online support, including teaching notes, PowerPoint slides, and sample tests. The book is equipped with a step-by-step guide to implementing stakeholder analysis, tips to help students apply ethical principles in their personal and professional lives, and comprehensive coverage of employee workplace issues. Addressing relevant topics such as risk management, preferential hiring, and sexual harassment in conjunction with the digital divide, bribery, the environment, and more, Business Ethics, seventh edition explores ethical implications in today's increasingly interconnected global business environment. (shrink)

This book critically assesses arguments for the existence of the God of classical theism, develops an innovative account of objects’ persistence, and defends new arguments against classical theism. The authors engage the following classical theistic proofs: Aquinas’s First Way, Aquinas’s De Ente argument, and Feser’s Aristotelian, Neo-Platonic, Augustinian, Thomistic, and Rationalist proofs. The authors also provide the first systematic treatment of the ‘existential inertia thesis’. By connecting the thesis to relativity theory and recent developments in the philosophy of physics, and (...) by developing a variety of novel existential-inertia-friendly explanations of persistence, they mount a formidable new case against classical theistic proofs. Finally, they defend new arguments against classical theism based on abstract objects and changing divine knowledge. The text appeals to students, researchers, and others interested in classical theistic proofs, the existence and nature of God, and the ultimate explanations of persistence, change, and contingency. (shrink)

This book is the first extensive treatment of Husserl's phenomenology of time-consciousness. Nicolas de Warren uses detailed analysis of texts by Husserl, some only recently published in German, to examine Husserl's treatment of time-consciousness and its significance for his conception of subjectivity. He traces the development of Husserl's thinking on the problem of time from Franz Brentano's descriptive psychology, and situates it in the framework of his transcendental project as a whole. Particular discussions include the significance of time-consciousness for (...) other phenomenological themes: perceptual experience, the imagination, remembrance, self-consciousness, embodiment, and the consciousness of others. The result is an illuminating exploration of how and why Husserl considered the question of time-consciousness to be the most difficult, yet also the most central, of all the challenges facing his unique philosophical enterprise"--Provided by publisher. (shrink)

The Evolutionary Synthesis is often seen as a unification process in evolutionary biology, one which provided this research area with a solid common theoretical foundation. As such, neo-Darwinism is believed to constitute from this time onward a single, coherent, and unified movement offering research guidelines for investigations. While this may be true if evolutionary biology is solely understood as centred around evolutionary mechanisms, an entirely different picture emerges once other aspects of the founding neo-Darwinists’ views are taken into consideration, aspects (...) potentially relevant to the elaboration of an evolutionary worldview: the tree of life, the ontological distinctions of the main cosmic entities , the inherent properties of self-organizing matter, evolutionary ethics, and so on. Profound tensions and inconsistencies are immediately revealed in the neo-Darwinian movement once this broader perspective is adopted. This pluralism is such that it is possible to identify at least three distinct and quasi-incommensurable epistemological/metaphysical frameworks as providing a proper foundation for neo-Darwinism. The analysis of the views of Theodosius Dobzhansky, Bernhard Rensch, and Ernst Mayr will illustrate this untenable pluralism, one which requires us to conceive of the neo-Darwinian research agenda as being conducted in more than one research programme or research tradition at the same time. (shrink)

Traditionally, the field of science and technology studies (STS) considered the scientific laboratory as the central site of knowledge production and technological development. While providing rich analyses of the social construction of scientific knowledge and the role of non-human actors, STS scholars have often neglected the university – the very context in which laboratories themselves are embedded – as a relevant object of research. In this paper, we argue for re-introducing the university as a relevant category and object of analysis (...) by using the notion of epistemic virtues to link epistemic culture – traditionally the focus of STS – and epistemic structure – traditionally the focus of higher education studies. Advancing this line of argumentation, we make three analytical moves. First, we explore academic freedom as a specific version of negative liberty that extends beyond disciplinary boundaries. We suggest that academics continuously negotiate academic freedom considering culturally and socially situated epistemic virtues such as objectivity and neutrality. Second, we introduce the notion of humility to revisit scientific knowledge production more generally and academic freedom in particular. Finally, we argue that practicing humility leads to enacting the university as an infrastructure of becoming otherwise, thereby enriching our understanding of universities as distinct and highly complex social spaces with a logic of their own. (shrink)

The 1920-1960 period saw the creation of the conditions for a unification of disciplines in the area of evolutionary biology under a limited number of theoretical prescriptions: the evolutionary synthesis. Whereas the sociological dimension of this synthesis was fairly successful, it was surprisingly loose when it came to the interpretation of the evolutionary mechanisms per se, and completely lacking at the level of the foundational epistemological and metaphysical commitments. Key figures such as Huxley, Simpson, Dobzhansky, and Rensch only paid lip (...) service to the conceptual dimension of the evolutionary synthesis, as they eventually realized that a number of evolutionary phenomena could not be explained by its narrow theoretical corpus. Apparently, the evolutionary synthesis constituted a premature event in the development of evolutionary biology. Not only are the real achievements of the evolutionary synthesis in need of reevaluation, but this reassessment also has important implications for the historiography of Darwinism and the current debates about the darwinian movement. (shrink)

The term 'implicit bias' has very swiftly been incorporated into philosophical discourse. Our aim in this paper is to scrutinise the phenomena that fall under the rubric of implicit bias. The term is often used in a rather broad sense, to capture a range of implicit social cognitions, and this is useful for some purposes. However, we here articulate some of the important differences between phenomena identified as instances of implicit bias. We caution against ignoring these differences: it is likely (...) they have considerable significance, not least for the sorts of normative recommendations being made concerning how to mitigate the bad effects of implicit bias. (shrink)

In this paper we claim that pragmatist philosophical practice is incompatible with scientistic philosophy. The kind of pragmatism used for making this case follows the spirit and method of philosophical pragmatists such as William James, John Dewey, Richard Rorty, and a related pragmatic tradition, Confucian Philosophy. Pragmatism starts from immediate experience, and refuses to cleave off the reality and salience of what is found in such experience in the process of thinking. Pragmatism also concerns itself with social problems, broadly conceived. (...) In contrast to this focus on immediate experience, the influence of science in much philosophizing involves a kind of scientism through which the relevance, value, and even reality of experience is brought into question. It also concerns itself with a narrowly defined set of so-called philosophical problems. In this regard, pragmatist philosophical practice is fundamentally opposed to scientistic philosophical practice. We will start by modelling the kind of philosophical practice that stems from pragmatism, and the role of immediate experience in it. Subsequently, we will introduce two modes of philosophizing that diminish if not negate the role of experience. One is bald naturalist philosophizing, and the other is a priori scientific philosophizing. In the last section, we will show how main commitments of both of these traditions are incompatible with a pragmatist philosophy that remains committed to the original impulse of pragmatism. (shrink)

What semantics should we attribute to nouns like "wisdom" and "generosity", which are derived from gradable adjectives? We show that, from a morphosyntactic standpoint, these nouns are mass nouns. This leads us to consider and answer the following questions. How are these nouns interpreted in their various uses? What formal representations may one associate with their interpretations? How do these depend on the semantics of the adjective? And where lies the semantic unity of nouns like wisdom and generosity with the (...) more familiar concrete mass nouns, like wine and furniture? (shrink)

While engaging in rich discussion, Conspiracy Theories analyzes current arguments and evidence while providing real-world examples so students can contextualize and visualize the debates. Each chapter addresses important current questions, provides conceptual tools, defines important terms, and introduces the appropriate methods of analysis.

In this article, we discuss how we used institutional ethnography (Institutional ethnography as practice, Rowman & Littlefield, Lanham, MD and 2006) to map out powerful ruling relations that organize nurses’ wound care work. In recent years, the growing number of people living with wounds that heal slowly or not at all has presented substantial challenges for those managing the demands on Canada's publicly insured health‐care system. In efforts to address this burden, Canadian health‐care administrators and policy‐makers rely on scientific evidence (...) about how wounds heal and what treatments are most effective. Advanced wound care exemplifies the growing authorization of particular forms of evidence that change the ways in which nurses come to know about and conduct their work. The focus of this paper's nursing inquiry is a critique of registered nurses’ wound work as it arises within the established uptake of scientific evidence. (shrink)

This text provides an extensive exploration of the relationship between the thought of Otto Neurath and Rudolf Carnap, providing a new argument for the complementarity of their mature philosophies as part of a collaborative metatheory of science. In arguing that both Neurath and Carnap must be interpreted as proponents of epistemological naturalism, and that their naturalisms rest on shared philosophical ground, it is also demonstrated that the boundaries and possibilities for epistemological naturalism are not as restrictive as Quinean orthodoxy has (...) previously suggested. Both building on and challenging the scholarship of the past four decades, this naturalist reading of Carnap also provides a new interpretation of Carnap’s conception of analyticity, allowing for a refutation of the Quinean argument for the incompatibility of naturalism and the analytic/synthetic distinction. In doing so, the relevance and potential importance of their scientific meta-theory for contemporary questions in the philosophy of science is demonstrated. This text appeals to students and researchers working on Logical Empiricism, Quine, the history of analytic philosophy and the history of philosophy of science, as well as proponents of naturalized epistemology. (shrink)

Contrairement à une croyance trop répandue, le darwinisme et son prolongement au XXe siècle — le néo-darwinisme — ne portent pas sur une idée de l'évolution fondée sur la simple notion de « la survie du plus apte ». Si la théorie de la sélection naturelle est partie intégrante du néo-darwinisme, plusieurs de ses fondateurs seront en quête d'une conception beaucoup plus généreuse, pleine et compréhensive de l'évolution. En réalité, la révolution dite darwinienne s'insère au coeur d'une révolution intellectuelle beaucoup (...) plus importante : la révolution transformiste. Avant d'être des darwiniens, de dignes représentants de cette mouvance s'afficheront comme étant des transformistes. Cela signifie que, en plus des mécanismes de l'évolution biologique, d'autres éléments tout aussi cruciaux seront pris en considération`, dans l'élaboration d'une véritable synthèse évolutionniste : les rapports entre l'évolution biologique et l'évolution cosmique ; les interrogations portant sur la question d'une possible direction évolutive ; l'enseignement à tirer pour l'homme de sa place et de son rôle dans la nature. A la croisée de l'histoire, de la philosophie et de la science, cet ouvrage cherche à démontrer, à travers l'analyse des travaux de plusieurs néo-darwiniens de premier plan, que la révolution darwinienne demeurera incomplète aussi longtemps que la révolution transformiste le restera. (shrink)