Despite the swirling tide of controversy surrounding the work of Machery et al. , the cross-cultural differences they observed in semantic intuitions about the reference of proper names have proven to be robust. In the present article, we report cross-cultural and individual differences in semantic intuitions obtained using new experimental materials. In light of the pervasiveness of the Knobe effect and the fact that Machery et al.’s original materials incorporated elements of wrongdoing but did not control for their influence, we (...) also examined the question of whether the moral valence of actions described in experimental materials might affect participants’ responses. Our results suggest that uncontrolled moral valence did not distort participants’ judgments in previous research. Our findings provide further confirmation of the robustness of cross-cultural and intra-cultural differences in semantic intuitions and strengthen the philosophical challenge that they pose. (shrink)

The Ontology for Biomedical Investigations (OBI) is an ontology that provides terms with precisely defined meanings to describe all aspects of how investigations in the biological and medical domains are conducted. OBI re-uses ontologies that provide a representation of biomedical knowledge from the Open Biological and Biomedical Ontologies (OBO) project and adds the ability to describe how this knowledge was derived. We here describe the state of OBI and several applications that are using it, such as adding semantic expressivity to (...) existing databases, building data entry forms, and enabling interoperability between knowledge resources. OBI covers all phases of the investigation process, such as planning, execution and reporting. It represents information and material entities that participate in these processes, as well as roles and functions. Prior to OBI, it was not possible to use a single internally consistent resource that could be applied to multiple types of experiments for these applications. OBI has made this possible by creating terms for entities involved in biological and medical investigations and by importing parts of other biomedical ontologies such as GO, Chemical Entities of Biological Interest (ChEBI) and Phenotype Attribute and Trait Ontology (PATO) without altering their meaning. OBI is being used in a wide range of projects covering genomics, multi-omics, immunology, and catalogs of services. OBI has also spawned other ontologies (Information Artifact Ontology) and methods for importing parts of ontologies (Minimum information to reference an external ontology term (MIREOT)). The OBI project is an open cross-disciplinary collaborative effort, encompassing multiple research communities from around the globe. To date, OBI has created 2366 classes and 40 relations along with textual and formal definitions. The OBI Consortium maintains a web resource providing details on the people, policies, and issues being addressed in association with OBI. (shrink)

fusion theory challenges efforts to see theory as inhibiting by presenting an approach that is innovative, eclectic, and subtle in order to draw out competing and constellating ideas and opinions. This collected volume of essays examines fusion theory and demonstrates how the theory can be applied to the reading of various works of Indian English novelists.

This is a short story about vision, thought, and contradiction and the role they play in the first half of Hegel's Science of Logic. The Logic begins with a descent, in this case, the fall from Being into Nothingness. Later, at nearly the exact middle of each text, there is a certain paradox in which everything is at stake, the category of contradiction. At this exact moment, thinking both fails and is birthed anew in a speculative guise. In this section, (...) we engage some of Analytic philosophy's influential interpretations of Hegel's strange use of contradiction. In order to get there, we turn to a curious art work, James Turrell's Pleiades, as an aesthetic example of that first fall. We will then progress through the text, with thought and vision as our dual guide, at quite a quick pace, not slowing down until we enter Hegel's story of contradiction, where I will show the explosive nature of contradiction. This will allow us to see how Hegel harnesses the power of contradiction in order to generate the second half of the story of the Science of Logic. I begin with the descent of being into nothingness, the moment when darkness. (shrink)

This paper transforms elements of Hegel’s thought into antiracism through the work of James Baldwin in three Acts. Act One offers a Hegelian Account of Honesty that is structurally inspired by “conscience” from his Phenomenology of Spirit. Honesty has two, seemingly paradoxical, dimensions. To address the unacknowledged whiteness in Hegel, we turn to Baldwin in Act Two. Baldwin deepens and problematizes Hegelian Honesty through a conceptual diagnosis of “double misrecognition”: the first is the misrecognition of Blackness as inferior, the (...) second is the misrecognition of whiteness as superior. Act Three articulates how the structure of whiteness forecloses Schuld and shame by connecting this dual foreclosure to the two dimensions of Hegelian honesty and Baldwin’s diagnosis of double misrecognition. We conclude by formulating a sketch of “antiracist idealism” as version of what the Germans call Vergangenheitsaufarbeitung, that is, doing the hard, uncomfortable labor of comprehending how the present is not separate from but completely composed of old scars, wounds, violence, and atrocities. Antiracist idealism enables us to both learn from yet also challenge canonical idealism through contemporary forms of antiracism. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Journal of the History of Philosophy 39.2 (2001) 312-314 [Access article in PDF] Shook, John R. Dewey's Empirical Theory of Knowledge and Reality.The Vanderbilt Library of American Philosophy. Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 2000. Pp. ix + 316. Cloth, $46.00; Paper, $22.95. The current renaissance of American pragmatism, and John Dewey's philosophy in particular, began two decades ago with Richard Rorty's refashioning of Dewey as a postmodernist who renounces the (...) "professional philosophy" of metaphysics and epistemology for the fluidity of conversation in the life and growth of a community. This depiction, though praised for rekindling Dewey's star, has been widely challenged by subsequent commentators. Ralph Sleeper's 1986 The Necessity of Pragmatism persuasively argues that Dewey reconfigures, rather than renounces, the logical and metaphysical grounds of knowledge. Despite an archaic Hegelian vocabulary that misleadingly suggests idealism and antirealism, Sleeper finds Dewey advancing a genuine metaphysics of existence, not merely a conversation about experience: a naturalistic realism of independent existences that enter into and are transformed by human interactions with them.This perspective is shared by most Dewey scholars, including Sandra Rosenthal, Raymond Boisvert, and J. E. Tiles. At least until now. In a profound and provocative exploration of his early philosophy, John R. Shook, presents a compelling case that Dewey's reconstruction of metaphysics and epistemology is deeper than even Sleeper imagined. Dewey did not merely abandon idealism under the influence of William James, as most assume; he transformed it in a original way that, while wholly naturalistic, [End Page 312] is a fusion of idealism and realism that overcomes both the former's "mind-stuff" and the latter's "in-itself reality."Dewey began his philosophical odyssey with the searing desire to eradicate the dualisms of mind versus world, phenomenal versus noumenal, perceptual versus conceptual. Post-Hegelian idealists agreed that this division is ultimately reconciled in the "absolute," though they disagreed about whether the absolute is psychological or cosmological, social or supernatural, knowable or unknowable. From the very beginning, Shook argues, Dewey accepted the psychological path as sketched by James Ward, and also Edward Caird's claim that the absolute must be knowable in some sense. Intriguingly, the missing link between perception and conceptual awareness is Wilhelm Wundt's notion of volition: percepts are neither mechanically attached to concepts nor are they overlaid by Kantian "faculties of mind." Instead, a disruption of perceptual or noncognitive experience generates a desire for reconciliation that calls forth ideas that diagnose the problem and suggest ways to resolve it. Achieved solutions, in turn, forge a background of habitual dispositions that shape interpretations within the noncognitive realm.While still an idealist, then, Shook finds the essential elements of the "method of inquiry" that later anchored Dewey's instrumentalism and pragmatism. Prior to 1890, however, he still construed this as individual "mental activity," and the problem of its relation to God's Absolute Mind remained. Upon relinquishing the supernatural for the social, however, this final obstacle was eliminated. The dispositional background extends beyond the individual to the customs, traditions, and values of a culture—indeed, even the barest notions of "self" and "reality" are inconceivable without reference to such a background. This is Dewey's broad conception of "experience"—a humanistic naturalism with no trace of mind-stuff or subjectivism. In this sense Dewey is a realist, though his affirmation of things-themselves (including things we have not or may never actually discover) avoids the things-in-themselves that is the bane of metaphysical realism. To claim that things exist without an experiential background of how we may find them to exist is at best empty verbiage, and at worst hypnosis by the dervishes of dualism.Scrupulous in research, penetrating in detail, Shook's presentation is so faithful to Dewey that it will undoubtedly draw many of the same criticisms once hurled at the master. Though careful readers will be able to identify "experience" in its broadly social and functional sense, others will be confused by applications as diverse as "mental activity," "soul," "reality," "the history of the... (shrink)

Both the psychology of perception and the philosophy of perception seem to show a new face when the process is considered at its own level, distinct from that of sensation. Unfamiliar conceptions in physics, anatomy, physiology, psychology, and phenomenology are required to clarify the separation and make it plausible. But there have been so many dead ends in the effort to solve the theoretical problems of perception that radical proposals may now be acceptable. Scientists are often more conservative than philosophers (...) of science. I end, therefore, as I began, with a plea for help. (shrink)

An account of the life of Dr P.J. Ryan, Australian Catholic scholastic philosopher and anti-Communist organiser.

Kant's Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason is one of the great modern examinations of religion's meaning, function and impact on human affairs. In this volume, the first complete English-language commentary on the work, James J. DiCenso explains the historical context in which the book appeared, including the importance of Kant's conflict with state censorship. He shows how the Religion addresses crucial Kantian themes such as the relationship between freedom and morality, the human propensity to evil, the status (...) of historical traditions in relation to ethical principles, and the interface between individual ethics and social institutions. The major arguments are clearly and precisely explained, and the themes are highlighted and located within Kant's mature critical philosophy, especially his ethics. The commentary will be valuable for all who are interested in the continuing relevance of religion for contemporary inquiries into ethics, public institutions and religious traditions. (shrink)

This interdisciplinary and ecumenical collection of essays honors the transformative work of Margaret A. Farley, Gilbert L. Stark Professor of Christian Ethics at Yale Divinity School, using it as a starting point for reflection on the contribution of feminist method to theology and ethics. Through a variety of perspectives, contributors show that by resisting classical oppositions between “interpersonal” and “social” ethics and by insisting that social, economic, and political realities be taken seriously in considerations of justice, feminist concerns challenge the (...) very categories of Christian ethics. With essays ranging from sexual ethics to human rights, medical ethics to freedom, _A Just and True Love_ offers a broad perspective on the last twenty-five years of feminist innovation in Christian ethics and a glimpse of its global future, particularly in continents such as Africa. “This book brings together a number of the most prominent thinkers in Christian theology and ethics today in a justly deserved tribute to the work and influence of Margaret Farley. The essays explicitly acknowledge and engage Farley in various degrees; one comes away appreciating both the integrity of her work and its versatility.” —_Darlene Fozard Weaver, Villanova University _ “Inevitably while listening to or reading Margaret Farley, we find her refrain, ‘I want to ask all over again.’ Reexamining, reframing, and rethinking is Farley’s method of engaging anew human experience and relationality. The authors of these essays capture that method as they reconsider feminism and sexuality, love and freedom, justice and truth, contraception and women’s rights. Like her own work, they reset the ethical agenda to recapture a more loving truth. A very successful collection for a most admired colleague. Ryan and Linnane are to be congratulated!” —_James F. Keenan, S.J., Boston College_ “In_ A Just and True Love,_ a host of distinguished scholars consider fundamental themes of feminist theological ethics and their significance for global justice, the meaning of Christian love, creative casuistry, and truthful life in the Church. I can imagine no higher praise than to affirm that these authors have succeeded marvelously in doing exactly what they set out to do: to produce a volume worthy of the theological work and wisdom of Margaret Farley.” —_William Werpehowski, Villanova University_. (shrink)

This volume -- a companion to Thomas Reid: Selected Philosophical Writings (2012) -- makes available material from Thomas Reid's autograph manuscripts and student notes of his lectures. It includes an introductory essay by Nicholas Wolterstorff.

This is a book about how we see: the environment around us (its surfaces, their layout, and their colors and textures); where we are in the environment; whether or not we are moving and, if we are, where we are going; what things are good for; how to do things (to thread a needle or drive an automobile); or why things look as they do.The basic assumption is that vision depends on the eye which is connected to the brain. The (...) author suggests that natural vision depends on the eyes in the head on a body supported by the ground, the brain being only the central organ of a complete visual system. When no constraints are put on the visual system, people look around, walk up to something interesting and move around it so as to see it from all sides, and go from one vista to another. That is natural vision—and what this book is about. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:A Search for Unity in Diversity: The "Permanent Hegelian Deposit" in the Philosophy of John DeweyFrank X. RyanJames A. Good A Search for Unity in Diversity: The "Permanent Hegelian Deposit" in the Philosophy of John Dewey Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2006. xxx + 288 pp.Among the revelations of Dewey's rare moments of autobiographical reflection, none has generated more curiosity and investigative zeal than his 1930 claim to have (...) "drifted" from Hegel in the decade following his move from Michigan to Chicago in 1894. Beginning with Morton White's Origin of Dewey's Instrumentalism (1943), biographers have divided on the question of whether Dewey's later philosophy was more strongly influenced by William James's experimental psychology or F. J. E. Woodbridge's Aristotelian naturalism. Despite their differences, both approaches are essentially empirical and realistic, and thus the majority of sympathetic commentators have agreed that Dewey was a realist, albeit of a decidedly unorthodox stripe. For them the notion that Dewey retained any significant commitment to idealism, given its virtual eradication at the beginning of the twentieth century, would damage his influence and legacy.It has been something of a puzzle, accordingly, that in the same autobiographical essay Dewey alludes to a "permanent Hegelian deposit." For years Richard Rorty has claimed this differentiates a "good" Dewey committed to "social flourishing" from a "bad" Dewey prone to metaphysical dalliance. But the first systematic inquiry into Dewey's enduring Hegelianism is John R. Shook's Dewey's Empirical Theory of Knowledge and Reality (2000). Shook argues convincingly that Dewey never abandoned idealism, but rather transformed it into an experimental naturalism by doing away with both "mind-stuff" and equally noxious "things-in-themselves." In many ways James Good's A Search for Unity in Diversity is a bookend to Shook's project, though Good further differentiates Anglo-American Neo-Hegelianism from Hegel himself. According to Good, Dewey endorsed a Humanistic/Historicist interpretation of Hegel rooted in the reciprocal engagement of individuals and societies, rather than the supernatural and architectonic absolute championed by Neo-Hegelians such as T. H. Green, and F. H. Bradley. With [End Page 216] top-notch scholarship and scrupulous attention to detail, A Search for Unity in Diversity is both an excellent intellectual biography and a penetrating plea for a radical reinterpretation of Dewey's contribution to philosophy. I'll briefly sketch the historical account before addressing the more controversial claims about the "permanent Hegelian deposit."Even readers familiar with the half-dozen book-length treatments of Dewey's development will find this account refreshing and informative. Good's professional credentials as a historian shine as he recreates the rough and bustling Burlington of Dewey's youth. In the 1870s, German idealism was considered the epitome of political liberalism and progressive education, and Dewey's journey toward the "inclusive philosophical idea" of the social began in an environment swirling with the crosscurrents of Kant, Hegel, and Schelling. At the White Street Congregational Church, Lewis Barstow preached a liberal orthodoxy that was essentially "man-building" (102), and Good presents a convincing case for the likelihood that even in boyhood Dewey never viewed God as an aloof law-giver or cosmic architect, but as a process unifying the individual and the social within a natural world of unlimited potential. At the University of Vermont Dewey encountered a struggling rural college transformed into the first bastion of American transcendentalism by James Marsh, who inspired a "Burlington philosophy" that rejected atomistic empiricism for a holistic integrity of knowing and doing, facts and values, and pure and practical reasons (57–59).In noting the influence of the "St. Louis Hegelians" upon Dewey, most biographers have focused on W. T. Harris, the prominent founder of The Journal of Speculative Philosophy who published Dewey's earliest submissions and offered encouragement that led to his pursuit of graduate work at Johns Hopkins. Good augments this familiar tale with fascinating depictions of equally influential yet lesser-known Hegelians such as H. C. Brokmeyer, Denton Snider, and Thomas Davidson. At a time when European Hegelianism was polarized between, on the one hand, reactionary apologists for traditional Christianity and Prussian militarism and, on the other, radical... (shrink)

The alleged threats to human nature are at the root of many concerns about the use of nanotechnology to extend human health and capabilities. Bu the concept of human nature is illusory, selectively deployed, and does not impose any ethical constraint on human enhancement. Human nature is not only a meaningless concept, a product of our imperfect human cognition and a relic of the idea of a "soul," but, as it is deployed today against human enhancement technologies, it is also (...) a morally offensive, racist concept. The "human-racists" who deploy the concept of human nature are more inclusive than their forebears, but the make the same mistake of tying citizenship and value to biology. By setting aside the concept of human nature, we can affirm the value of the myriad aspects of human existence that we wish to preserve and extend using human enhancement technologies, including whatever genetic capacities and limits we may discover. Human enhancement technologies, such as those that may be enabled by nanotechnology and genetic engineering, enable us to define a new and more dynamic set of human capabilities, and to better achieve many moral virtues, regardless of whether they are part of "human nature" or not. (shrink)

In 2000 Bill Joy proposed that the best way to prevent technological apocalypse was to "relinquish" emerging bio-, info- and nanotechnologies. His essay introduced many watchdog groups to the dangers that futurists had been warning of for decades. One such group, ETC, has called for a moratorium on all nanotechnological research until all safety issues can be investigated and social impacts ameliorated. In this essay I discuss the differences and similarities of regulating bio- and nanotechnological innovation to the efforts to (...) regulate nuclear and biological weapons of mass destruction. I then suggest the creation of a global technology regulatory regime to ensure the safe and equitable diffusion of genetic, molecular and information technologies, and point out the principal political obstacles to implementing such a regime. (shrink)

Individuals and businesses make numerous payments every day. They sometimes have choices about what forms of payment to make or accept, and at other times are effectively forced to use a particular form. Often there is an asymmetric power relationship between payer and payee that raises the issue of whether one side unfairly exploits the other. Is it unethical exploitation for an employer to pay employees with a fee-laden payroll card over other more convenient forms of payment? Does the fee (...) structure of payment networks such as Visa and MasterCard unfairly exploit merchants? The bitcoin payment system is an ethical as well as technological evolution as it was designed to be an electronic payment system that does not rely upon trust. Can an entire payment system like bitcoin be “evil,” as charged by Krugman? Payment tools as such are ethically neutral, but can be used in an ethical or unethical manner. (shrink)

The term “biopolitics” has four distinct but overlapping meanings in modern scholarship. According to Lemke’s history of the term (Lemke 2011), political scientists used “biopolitics” in a variety of ways as early as the 1920s, and the Third Reich used it to describe their eugenic plans. But the term really found common usage first among 1960s political scientists interested in the relationship of evolutionary biology and politics (Caldwell 1964). Forming the Association for Politics and the Life Sciences (APLS) in 1981, (...) they defined “biopolitics” as any investigation of the effect of biology on politics, from the primate origins of hierarchy, to infectious disease impacts on warfare, to the influence of the health of leaders on their decision making (Somit and Peterson 1998). (shrink)

A woman's right to know the contents of her own body, and to make a choice about whether to continue her pregnancy or not, should be defended against laws trying to stop prenatal sex selection, either in the developing world or in the developed world. Restrictions on women's reproductive freedom harm the interests of women and girls, and ignore myriad social policy solutions, such as education and income incentives to have girls and universal old age pensions, that provide better answers (...) to the strains of unbalanced sex ratios. The opponents of sex selection trumpet all accounts of increased discrimination against women resulting from unequal sex ratios while ignoring growing evidence of positive cultural change and women's empowerment fromwomen's enhanced marriage prospects. Opponents of sex selection reify a conservative heteronormative model of sexuality, gender roles and family structure, while arguing that unmarried men are social time bombs who can only be controlled by a wife. Eventually the social policy dilemma around sex selection will presumably be made moot since would-be parents will be able to use pre-conceptive technology to determine a conceptus's gender without abortion or in-vitro fertilization. But until the sex selection argument unravels before technological innovation, women's rights to control their bodies must be defended against laws banning - or requiring - prenatal ultrasound and abortion. (shrink)