This essay examines the complex relationship between Christianity and the climate crisis. It first looks at theological convictions found in statements made by church leaders meant to advance Christian engagement. It then examines the now legendary acerbic attacks made by historian Lynn White in the late 1960s, criticizing these same theological convictions for actually disabling environmental engagement. Centrally, it then turns to the progressive, eco-theology of Sallie McFague who, while echoing White’s concerns, offers more recent and thorough criticisms of tradition-based (...) Christian theology, focusing especially on its propagating an outdated anthropology and earth-fleeing spiritualities. Finally, the essay focuses on the tragic immediacy of the climate catastrophe, suggesting that a North American culture of optimism and consumerism is causing millions to respond with indifference and denial, and that an activist-oriented pessimism may be a more mature and constructive response to the dire situation we now face. (shrink)

This paper examines the influences which shape the tone and character of Sallie McFague’s ecotheology, while also suggesting that her theology holds immense socially transformative potential even while departing from many of the basic assumptions of traditional Christian theism. Contrary to the beliefs of majority Christianity, which most often assume the adequacy of supernatural and interventionist images of God, McFague contends that these outdated images seriously debilitate Christian agency and place our planet in peril. Changing Christian habits of thought about (...) God, therefore, may yet prove to be a necessary, though not sufficient, prerequisite to resolve our environmental plight. Ultimately, I suggest that McFague’s reconstructive theology is a significant part of a larger blossoming of immanentalist sensibilities within North American religious culture at large, and in relation to which Christian churches will have to adjust in order to survive. This theological sea change may yet have the effect of moving McFague’s reconstructive proposals from the margins into the mainstream of Christian discourse and practice. (shrink)

This paper compares two alternative explanations of pragmatic encroachment on knowledge (i.e., the claim that whether an agent knows that p can depend on pragmatic factors). After reviewing the evidence for such pragmatic encroachment, we ask how it is best explained, assuming it obtains. Several authors have recently argued that the best explanation is provided by a particular account of belief, which we call pragmatic credal reductivism. On this view, what it is for an agent to believe a proposition is (...) for her credence in this proposition to be above a certain threshold, a threshold that varies depending on pragmatic factors. We show that while this account of belief can provide an elegant explanation of pragmatic encroachment on knowledge, it is not alone in doing so, for an alternative account of belief, which we call the reasoning disposition account, can do so as well. And the latter account, we argue, is far more plausible than pragmatic credal reductivism, since it accords far better with a number of claims about belief that are very hard to deny. (shrink)

Aristotle is often thought of as one of the fathers of essentialism in Western philosophy. Aristotle’s argument for the essence of human beings is, however, much more flexible than this prejudice might suggest. In the passage about the “human function” at Nichomachean Ethics 1.7, Aristotle gives an account of the particular “function” (or “achievement,” ergon) of human beings that does not ask very much of the modern reader—only that she be prepared to analyze human beings as a logical category according (...) to certain rules. While this may trouble the naturalistic reductionist or the post-humanist thinker, it is not clear that Aristotle’s request is unreasonable, especially given what the function argument goes on to offer. It places normative thinking in the constellation of type-property-activity, a narrowing of the search for the human good, but not an overly constrictive one. The second, substantive stage of the argument gives a more narrow interpretation of what the unique property and its corresponding activity are in the case of humans—but even here Aristotle’s apparently “thick” conclusions about the ultimate human good ultimately leave more room for a pluralistic disagreement about ends than might be expected. (shrink)

An early description and illustration of the liquid-in-glass thermometer is found in J. S. Delmedigo's Hebrew work, Ma"yan Ganim . This publication predates by over 20 years the usually accepted date for the invention of this instrument and may in fact constitute its first published description and illustration.

The phenomenon of disagreement has recently been brought into focus by the debate between contextualists and relativist invariantists about epistemic expressions such as ‘might’, ‘probably’, indicative conditionals, and the deontic ‘ought’. Against the orthodox contextualist view, it has been argued that an invariantist account can better explain apparent disagreements across contexts by appeal to the incompatibility of the propositions expressed in those contexts. This paper introduces an important and underappreciated phenomenon associated with epistemic expressions — a phenomenon that we call (...) reversibility. We argue that the invariantist account of disagreement is incompatible with reversibility, and we go on to show that reversible sentences cast doubt on the putative data about disagreement, even without assuming invariantism. Our argument therefore undermines much of the motivation for invariantism, and provides a new source for constraints on the proper explanation of purported data about disagreement. (shrink)

"Jacob Howland's book is an engaging, readable, and extremely suggestive addition to the literature on Plato's magnum opus." --Ancient Philosophy.

This article summarizes some of the results of the BIOMED II project “Basic Ethical Principles in European Bioethics and Biolaw” connected to a research project of the Danish Research Councils “Bioethics and Law”. The BIOMED project was based on cooperation between 22 partners in most EU countries. The aim of the project was to identify the ethical principles of respect for autonomy, dignity, integrity and vulnerability as four important ideas or values for a European bioethics and biolaw. The research concluded (...) that the basic ethical principles cannot be understood as universal everlasting ideas or transcendental truths but they rather function reflective guidelines and important values in European culture. The method of the research was conceptual, philosophical analysis of the cultural background of the four values or normative ideas that people use and find important in their existence. Moreover, this was combined with analysis of empirical legal material and policy documents. Also, a number of qualitative interviews with relevant experts were carried out. Another important result of the BIOMED project was the partner's Policy Proposals to the European Commission, the Barcelona Declaration, unique as a philosophical and political agreement between experts in bioethics and biolaw from many different countries. The Policy Proposals are reprinted here at the end of the article. (shrink)

James Ladyman has recently proposed a view according to which all that exists on the level of microphysics are structures "all the way down". By means of a comparative reading of structuralism in philosophy of mathematics as proposed by Stewart Shapiro, I shall present what I believe structures could not be. I shall argue that, if Ladyman is indeed proposing something as strong as suggested here, then he is committed to solving problems that proponents of structuralism in philosophy of mathematics (...) such as Shapiro are trying to solve. Attempting to do so, however, brings out a tacit tension in Ladyman's position. I shall argue that the upshot of this is that the ontological import that Ladyman attributes to structures is rather epistemological import properly understood. (shrink)

What theory should we accept from the practical point of view, or accept as a basis for guiding our actions, if we don’t know which theory is true, and if there are too many plausible alternative theories for us to take them all into consideration? This question is the theme of the first three parts of this dissertation. I argue that the problem of theory acceptance, so understood, is a problem of practical rationality, and hence that the appropriate grounds for (...) theory acceptance are practical considerations. I argue for a number of principles of theory acceptance, and I explore the implications of these principles for the acceptance both of descriptive theories and evaluative theories. (shrink)

This article diagnoses and critiques pervasive forms of teleological thought about basic structures of political organization in modern and contemporary political thought: arguments that the sovere...

The manifest appearance of function and purpose in living systems is responsible for the prevalence of apparently teleological explanations of organismic structure and behavior in biology. Although the attribution of function and purpose to living systems is an ancient practice, teleological notions are largely considered ineliminable from modern biological sciences, such as evolutionary biology, genetics, medicine, ethology, and psychiatry, because they play an important explanatory role. Historical and recent examples of teleological claims include the following: The chief function of the (...) heart is the transmission and pumping of the blood through the arteries to the extremities of the body. (Harvey 1616 [1928: 49]) The Predator Detection hypothesis remains the strongest candidate for the function of stotting [by gazelles]. (Caro 1986: 663) The geographic range of human malaria is much wider than the range of the sickle-cell gene. As it happens, other antimalarial genes take over the protective function of the sickle-cell gene in … other warm parts. (Diamond 1994: 83) Despite the substantial amount of data we now have on theropod dinosaurs, more information is necessary in order to determine the likelihood that early feathers served an adaptive function in visual display as opposed to other proposed adaptive functions such as thermoregulation. (Dimond et al. 2011: 62) The ubiquity of claims such as these raises the question: how should apparently teleological notions in biology be understood? Most post-Darwinian approaches attempt to naturalize teleology in biology, in opposition to nineteenth-century viewpoints which grounded it theologically. Nevertheless, biologists and philosophers have continued to question the legitimacy of teleological notions in biology. For instance, Ernst Mayr (1988), identified four reasons why teleological notions remain controversial in biology, namely that they are: vitalistic (positing some special ‘life-force’); requiring backwards causation (because goal-directed explanations seem to use future outcomes to explain present traits); incompatible with mechanistic explanation (because of 1 and 2); mentalistic (attributing the action of mind where there is none). A fifth complaint is that they are not empirically testable (Allen & Bekoff 1995). The current philosophical literature offers both Darwinian and non-Darwinian accounts of teleology in biology that aim to avoid these concerns. In this article, we hope to bring some clarity to the contemporary debates over the role of teleological notions in biology by sketching a taxonomy of the various accounts of biological function on offer (see Allen & Bekoff 1995 for a more comprehensive taxonomy that forms the basis of this presentation). We primarily focus on naturalistic accounts of biological function, since this is where we see the most lively and productive current debates (see, e.g., Garson 2016 for an extended survey). We also briefly discuss the notion of goal-directedness in section 2. (shrink)

This volume is a study of the relationship between philosophy and faith in Søren Kierkegaard's Philosophical Fragments. It is also the first book to examine the role of Socrates in this body of writings, illuminating the significance of Socrates for Kierkegaard's thought. Jacob Howland argues that in the Fragments, philosophy and faith are closely related passions. A careful examination of the role of Socrates demonstrates that Socratic, philosophical eros opens up a path to faith. At the same time, the (...) work of faith - which holds the self together with that which transcends it - is essentially erotic in the Socratic sense of the term. Chapters on Kierkegaard's Johannes Climacus and on Plato's Apology shed light on the Socratic character of the pseudonymous author of the Fragments and the role of 'the god' in Socrates' pursuit of wisdom. Howland also analyzes the Concluding Unscientific Postscript and Kierkegaard's reflections on Socrates and Christ. (shrink)

Objective interpretations of probability are usually discussed in two varieties: frequency and propensity accounts. But there is a third, neglected possibility, namely, probabilities as deriving from ranges in suitably structured initial state spaces. Roughly, the probability of an event is the proportion of initial states that lead to this event in the space of all possible initial states, provided that this proportion is approximately the same in any not too small interval of the initial state space. This idea can also (...) be expressed by saying that in the types of situations that give rise to probabilistic phenomena we may expect to find an initial state space such that any "reasonable" density function over this space leads to the same probabilities for the possible outcomes. This "method of arbitrary functions" was introduced by Poincaré, studied and extended by Hopf and more recently by Eduardo Engel, Jan von Plato and Michael Strevens. The natural-range, or method-of-arbitrary-functions approach to probabilities is usually treated as an explanation for the occurrence of probabilistic patterns, whereas I examine its prospects for an objective interpretation of probability, in the sense of providing truth conditions for probability statements that do not depend on our state of mind or information. The main objection to such a proposal is that it is circular, i.e. presupposes the concept of probability, because a measure on the initial state has to be introduced, and density functions over the space are considered. I try to argue that this objection can be successfully met. (shrink)

I argue that Monique Wittig's view that lesbians are not women neglects the complexities involved in the composition of the category "woman." I develop an articulation of the concept "woman" in the contemporary United States, with thirteen distinct defining characteristics, none of which are necessary nor sufficient. I argue that Wittig's emphasis on the material production of "woman" through the political regime of heterosexuality, however, is enormously fruitful for feminist and queer strategizing.

The public discourse surrounding sex and severe disability over the past 40 years has largely focused on protecting vulnerable populations from abuse. However, health professionals and activists are increasingly recognising the inherent sexuality of disabled persons and attempting to find ways to accommodate their intimacy needs. This essay explores several ethical issues arising from such efforts.

Our methods of research, duly elaborated hereafter, would benefit from being applied to the realm of the East. For that matter, the examination of Syriac, Armenian, Coptic or Arabic manuscripts does not differ in the least from that of a Greek or Latin manuscript. The rules developed by classical philologists are just as valid for the study of the Maxims of Phtahhotep and the Precepts of Kagemeni…Alphonse Dain (1975), Les Manuscrits (Paris, Les Belles Lettres)One of the objects of a comparative (...) history of the scholarly practices in the West, the Far East, the Arab world and classical antiquity is the role of libraries in the constitution, transmission and transformations of the great textual corpora. To the institutional and social aspects of the politics of social memory should be added the range of intellectual and technical practices which have as their aim the conservation of this inheritance: material conservation and transmission - copying texts, restoring them, transferring them from one medium, one script and one language to another - but also work on the literal level and the meaning, the content and the form. (shrink)

Publicly-enacted blood extractions (principally blood donation events and petitions or paintings in blood) in mass Indian political contexts (for instance, protest or political memorial events and election rallies) are a noteworthy present-day form of political enunciation in India, for such extractions – made to speak as and on behalf of political subject positions – are intensely communicative. Somewhat akin to the transformative fasts undertaken by Gandhi, such blood extractions seek to persuade from the moral high ground of political asceticism. This (...) essay seeks to shed light on how and why these extractions have become such a means, with a particular focus on blood-based portraiture. What makes such portraits – chiefly of politicians and ‘freedom fighter’ martyrs – interesting from a Strathernian point of view is their immanent persuasive relationality. The insights of Strathern can help us to explicate these objects’ dynamic relational features, while reciprocally, the portraits may help us to illuminate and clarify the very particular and interesting nature of the way Strathern treats (and creates) images. (shrink)

Laura Odwazny and Benjamin Berkman have raised several challenges regarding the new reasonable person standard in the revised Common Rule, which states that in‐ formed consent requires potential research subjects be provided with information a reasonable person would want to know to make an informed decision on whether to participate in a study. Our aim is to offer a response to the challenges Odwazny and Berkman raise, which include the need for a reasonable person standard that can be applied consistently (...) across institutional review boards and that does not stigmatize marginal groups. In response, we argue that the standard ought to be based in an ordinary rather than ideal person conception of reasonable person and that the standard ought to employ what we call a liberal constraint: the reasonability standard must be malleable enough such that a wide variety of individuals with different, unique value systems would endorse it. We conclude by suggesting some of the likely consequences our view would have, if adopted. (shrink)

The National Academy of Science's 1956 study on the Biological Effects of Atomic Radiation was designed to provide an objective analysis to assess conflicting statements by leading geneticists and by officials in the Atomic Energy Commission. Largely because of its status as a detached, non-governmental evaluation by eminent scientists, no studies have had a broader impact on the development of biological thinking in regard to nuclear policies. This paper demonstrates that despite the first BEAR study's reputation as an objective and (...) independent study, it was the product of careful negotiation between Academy scientists, the Atomic Energy Commission, and Britain's Medical Research Council. This paper also reveals the fragility of the consensus that produced the Academy's report, the range of political uses of the report, and the subsequent disaffection of the scientists who took part in it. (shrink)

The essential nature of science is revealed in an amplification of the relation between the arts and science.

In his work, the philosopher John Haugeland (1945–2010) proposed a radical expansion of philosophy's conceptual toolkit, calling for a wider range of resources for understanding the mind, the world, and how they relate. Haugeland argued that “giving a damn” is essential for having a mind—suggesting that traditional approaches to cognitive science mistakenly overlook the relevance of caring to the understanding of mindedness. Haugeland's determination to expand philosophy's array of concepts led him to write on a wide variety of subjects that (...) may seem unrelated—from topics in cognitive science and philosophy of mind to examinations of such figures as Martin Heidegger and Thomas Kuhn. Haugeland's two books with the MIT Press, Artificial Intelligence and Mind Design, show the range of his interests. -/- This book offers a collection of essays in conversation with Haugeland's work. The essays, by prominent scholars, extend Haugeland's work on a range of contemporary topics in philosophy of mind—from questions about intentionality to issues concerning objectivity and truth to the work of Heidegger. Giving a Damn also includes a previously unpublished paper by Haugeland, “Two Dogmas of Rationalism,” as well as critical responses to it. Finally, an appendix offers Haugeland's outline of Kant's "Transcendental Deduction of the Categories.” -/- Contributors Zed Adams, William Blattner, Jacob Browning, Steven Crowell, John Haugeland, Bennett W. Helm, Rebecca Kukla, John Kulvicki, Mark Lance, Danielle Macbeth, Chauncey Maher, John McDowell, Joseph Rouse. (shrink)

In this article, the author makes attempts to demonstrate that, from the educational standpoint, the relationship between philosophy and literature cannot be overlooked. Even the most remote cultures testify their transmission of moral teaching through literary accounts. In this sense, the author promotes this methodology hence argues that the axial concept structured by ethics is the concept of acknowledgment. Secondly, the author explains how the concept of acknowledgment has been present in contemporary ethical discourses and proposes which he considers fundamental (...) on the basis of a theory of knowledge which closely relates understanding and will together. He sustains that fundamental acknowledgment is that which is established by the recognition that the other is a person, a thesis which precedes the acknowledgment of the other as a legitimate interlocutor or a responsible subject. Next, the author aims his effort to explain two ways (among many other possible ones) in which literature applies to education as empathy and as paradigm. With respect to empathy, he argues that the self-recognition the reader can establish with a literary character is essential. In this sense, he considers that the empathy attainable can be only analogical, as it can only be partial. Empathy requires a point in common, which the author places in ?humanity?; thus, a certain form of equality between the empathic subject at the subject he attempts to be relate to, becomes possible. As for paradigms, the author sustains that literature is abundant in models and icons of virtue and vice and that such paradigms turn out to be essential for the ethical-moral upbringing of an individual. He takes up the concept of paradigm as analogical representation, that is, as a model-sign of man, and on these grounds, he reassumes some theses which have become recurrent in contemporary moral philosophy, as is the case with Max Scheler, Karol Wojtyla, Luis Pareyson, and Fernando Salmerón, among others. The author argues that the reader can recognize himself in the character; the later can then exert an aspirational force, which allows a connection to be established, by which the reader tries to approach the paradigm. (shrink)

Essays defending the human claim to have a mind.

In this article, part of a symposium on David Miller's Global Justice and National Responsibility, I first focus on an area of disagreement: Miller‘s attempt to attribute to nations responsibility that I think ought to be generally attributed to states. I then sketch a theory that disregards nations more or less completely, and yet issues in a two-level theory like Miller‘s, sanctioning important differences between intrastate and interstate distribution. It is only like Miller‘s, because the distinction between states and nations (...) is one with a very real difference indeed. Moreover, I think that Miller aims to build up the moral and historical prestige of the nation-state to make it a viable competitor with the claims of universal morality, whereas I will engage in a kind of deflation that teaches us not to expect contingent forms of political organization to instantiate great moral truths. But this results in an account that is perhaps more like his than either is like cosmopolitanism visions, whether egalitarian or libertarian. (shrink)

Parfit argues that a form of rule consequentialism can be derived from the most plausible formulation of the fundamental principle of Kantian ethics. And so he concludes that Kantians should be consequentialists. I argue that we have good reason to reject two of the auxiliary premises that figure in Parfit's derivation of rule consequentialism from Kantianism. 1.

This article discusses recent legal conflicts between state universities and conservative religious students in the United States, focusing on Christian Legal Society v. Martinez. In recent years, several universities have denied recognition to religious student organizations that discriminate on the basis of religion or sexual orientation. I argue that scholars on both sides of the issue have failed to recognize the full scope of the privilege that the universities demand. If the courts accept the universities' demands, then the courts dangerously (...) expand the government's authority to suppress dissenters. No proponent of civil liberties should welcome this change. (shrink)