The creditions model is incredibly powerful at explaining both how beliefs are formed and how they influence our perceptions. The model contains several cognitive loops, where beliefs not only influence conscious interpretations of perceptions downstream but are active in the subconscious construction of perceptions out of sensory information upstream. This paper shows how this model is mirrored in the epistemology of two central Buddhist figures, Dignāga and Dharmakı̄rti. In addition to showing these parallels, the paper also demonstrates that by drawing (...) on Dignāga and Dharmakı̄rti's theory, we can extend the explanatory power of the creditions model. Namely, while creditions explain how beliefs influence both the conscious interpretation and subconscious construction of sensory information, Dignāga and Dharmakı̄rti suggest beliefs can even be generative of sensory-like information. I recruit ancient Buddhist texts in conjunction with contemporary cognitive science scholarship to offer a hypothesis for the cognitive mechanisms responsible for this. (shrink)

Tibetan Buddhism, the Gelug school specifically, promotes a deep skepticism about the ability to know others’ minds. Its scripture is rife with cautionary tales allegorizing and extolling this skepticism in adherents, while claiming a buddha, by contrast, has eradicated this skepticism with their omniscience. I describe a buddha’s purported privileged epistemic access to others’ minds as “double-hiddenness.” On this skepticism, not just what a buddha knows, but if they know it is hidden, making their authority irreputable. I use critical theory (...) to investigate the ramifications of this double hiddenness, demonstrating that the resultant subjectivization brought about by this extreme skepticism—although the product of power—is not merely a type of subjugation, as suggested by Foucault, but also constitutes a robust agency. (shrink)

Analogues between the coherentism-foundationalism debate in Western philosophy and Candrakīrti's critique of Dignāga's Pramāṇavāda approach are well attested.1 Many scholars who argue that Candrakīrti advocates a form of coherentism cite the following verse from Clear Words as evidence: Thus, knowledge of worldly objects is determined through the fourfold epistemic instruments. And those are established with respect to each other. When the epistemic instruments are correct, so are their objects, and when the objects to be validated are correct, so are their (...) epistemic instruments. It is not at all the case that the nature of the epistemic instrument or of the epistemic object is... (shrink)

This article argues that the dominant “nonconventionalist” theories of promising cannot account for the moral impact of two basic commercial practices: the transfer of contractual rights and the discharge of contractual debt in bankruptcy. In particular, nonconventionalism’s insensitivity to certain features of social context precludes it from registering the moral significance of these social phenomena. As prelude, I demonstrate that Seana Shiffrin’s influential position concerning the divergence between promise and contract commits her to impugning these features of the modern economy. (...) Finally, I examine the importance of promising for friendship and why we resist the commodification of promissory rights in this domain. (shrink)

This book brings together cutting-edge writing by more than twenty leading authorities on the history of physics from the seventeenth century to the present day. By presenting a wide diversity of studies in a single volume, it provides authoritative introductions to scholarly contributions that have tended to be dispersed in journals and books not easily accessible to the general reader. While the core thread remains the theories and experimental practices of physics, the Handbook contains chapters on other dimensions that have (...) their place in any rounded history. These include the role of lecturing and textbooks in the communication of knowledge, the contribution of instrument-makers and instrument-making companies in providing for the needs of both research and lecture demonstrations, and the growing importance of the many interfaces between academic physics, industry, and the military. (shrink)

In their article, Crutchfield and Redinger (2024) outline the conditions that they have identified as situations in which it is ethically permissible to use chemical restraints, defined as medicati...

This paper offers an original argument for a Humean thesis about promising that generalises to the domain of normative powers. The Humean ‘natural unintelligibility’ thesis – prominently endorsed by Rawls, Hart, and Anscombe, and roundly rejected or forgotten by contemporary writers (conventionalists and non – conventionalists alike) – holds that a rational, suitably informed agent cannot so much as make a promise (much less a morally-binding promise) without exploiting conventional norms that confer promissory significance on act types (e.g., signing on (...) the dotted line) that would not otherwise have such significance. The argument (like Hume’s) is action-theoretic in character; its central premise is the Contribution Condition on acting with an aim: roughly, that doing X in order to (bring about) Y requires that the agent believe that their having X-ed on the occasion might come to fully or partly account for Y’s coming to pass. The argument generalises to the broader domain of exercises of normative powers, i.e., to acts that modify normative properties by ‘fiat’ or ‘stipulation’. This stipulative act has been characterised in three different ways, each of which is given due consideration. Finally, two different ways of accommodating the ‘natural unintelligibility’ thesis are considered, as is the thesis’s normative significance. (shrink)

From one of our most astute art critics, an impassioned and elegant book that questions the demand for art's political relevance or its need to deliver a message, and insists on its power to take us out of the everyday world, and its most important role: to excite, disturb, inspire or unsettle us. As more and more critics and enthusiasts insist that art needs to promote a particular idea or message, be it political or social, as a brand, a means (...) of education or entertainment, Jed Perl wants to remind us that the purpose of art lies not in our ability to define it, to place it in a context, whether a cause, an issue or an ideology. Instead the true power of art lies in its ability to shake our need for definitions, relevance or categories. He reminds us of the inherently uncategorizable nature of the artistic imagination, that a work of art is not merely a statement beamed out into the world, but the result of a dialogue between the artist and the tools and tradition of the medium, and that the fascination of the arts lies in their ability to be both dispassionate and impassioned. Perl explores the practices that are the foundation for the two catalysts of imaginative achievement: authority and freedom. He discusses the sense of vocation that give artists their purpose and focus, and how the interplay between authority and freedom underpin the creative process. (shrink)

Should we try to live in the present? Such is the imperative of modernity, Jed Rubenfeld writes in this important and original work of political theory. Since Jefferson proclaimed that 'the earth belongs to the living', since Freud announced that mental health requires people to 'get free of their past', since Nietzsche declared that the happy man is the man who 'leaps into the moment', modernity has directed its inhabitants to live in the present, as if there alone could they (...) find happiness, authenticity, and above all freedom. But this imperative, Rubenfeld argues, rests on a profoundly inadequate, deforming picture of the relationship between freedom and time. Instead, Rubenfeld suggests, human freedom, indeed human being itself, necessarily extends into both past and future; self-government consists of giving our lives meaning and purpose over time. From this conception of self-government, Rubenfeld derives a new theory of constitutional law's place in democracy. Democracy, he writes, is not a matter of governance by the present 'will of the people'; it is a matter of a nation's laying down and living up to enduring political and legal commitments. Constitutionalism is not coun. (shrink)

"Combining aspects of his acclaimed street work with an innovative approach to portraiture, Chicago-based photographer Jed Fielding has concentrated closely on these children's features and gestures, probing the enigmatic boundaries between surface and interior. Design, composition, and the play of light and shadow are central elements in these photographs, but the images are much more than formal experiments; they confront disability in a way that affirms life. Fielding's sightless subjects project a vitality that seems to extend beyond the limits of (...) self-consciousness. In collaborative, joyful participation with the children, he has made pictures that reveal essential gestures of absorption and the basic expressions of our creatureliness. Fielding's work achieves what only great art, and particularly great portraiture can: it launches and then complicates a process of identification across the barriers that separate us from each other. (shrink)

Cicero is one of the most important and influential thinkers within the history of Western philosophy. For the last thirty years, his reputation as a philosopher has once again been on the rise after close to a century of very low esteem. This Companion introduces readers to 'Cicero the philosopher' and to his philosophical writings. It provides a handy port-of-call for those interested in Cicero's original contributions to a wide variety of topics such as epistemology, the emotions, determinism and responsibility, (...) cosmopolitanism, republicanism, philosophical translation, dialogue, aging, friendship, and more. The international, interdisciplinary team of scholars represented in this volume highlights the historical significance and contemporary relevance of Cicero's writings, and suggests pathways for future scholarship on Cicero's philosophy as we move through the twenty-first century. (shrink)

The “Dead Donor Rule” (DDR) is an important injunction shaping the field of organ retrieval and scholarly assessments of specific retrieval practices’ permissibility (e.g., Pasquerella, Smith, and...

Controlling the movement of potentially infectious bodies has been central to Australian immigration law. Nowhere is this more evident than in relation to tuberculosis, which is named as a ground for refusal of a visa in the Australian context. In this paper, I critically examine the “will to knowledge” that this gives rise to. Drawing on a critical analysis of texts, including interviews with migrants diagnosed with TB and healthcare professionals engaged in their care, I argue that this focus on (...) border policing, rather than resettlement and the broader social determinants of health that drive current rates of TB, paradoxically renders migrants diagnosed with TB as liminal subjects in the post-arrival phase. This raises ethical issues about who “matters,” as well as dilemmas about what constitutes adequate care for the “Other,” both of which go to the heart of the political economy of migration. (shrink)

Academic misconduct runs rampant across higher education institutions in the US and internationally. Ample empirical research has identified myriad student variables that predict AM. However, two variables have been unexamined: the quality of conceptual knowledge university students have on AM and the relation between goals for going to university and reception to intervention on AM. Quantitative content analysis on written responses by 356 first-year university students reported surface-level knowledge of AM, frequent citation of extrinsic goals, and a lack of association (...) between goals and receptiveness to intervention. Results corroborate prior research on university students’ limited understanding of AM. Results suggest that efforts to address AM do not need to tailor intervention components to match students’ goals for attending university. (shrink)

Biomedical research and its translation continue to pose normative questions about the nature of relations between researcher and participant and the role of research involving human subjects in so...

An abrupt break in the prevailing modes of artistic expression, for many, marks the advent of modernism in the early twentieth century, but revisionary attempts to pin down a precise moment of its emergence remain disputed. History of a Shiver proffers a different approach, tracing the first inkling of modernism instead to the nineteenth century's fascination with music.As Jed Rasula deftly shows, melomania--the passion for music--gave rise to concepts like Richard Wagner's "endless melody" and the Gesamtkunstwerk, or total work of (...) art, which in turn infused the arts of the fin de siècle with an aura of expectancy, challenging them to induce musical effects by their own means. With each art aspiring to produce the effects of another artistic medium, a synesthetic yearning ran like a shiver through the body of art that would emerge over the next half century. Rasula traces this pan-arts polyphony from German Romantic theory to early experiments in "visual music," encompassing such diverse phenomena as American fixation on Arcadia, early film theory, and the lure of the fourth dimension. All the while, he keeps focus on the paramount historical consequence in elevating music to a new universal aesthetic standard, arguing that Wagnerism was first among modern "isms."In surveying this momentous interplay among arts, History of a Shiver ranges from literature, music and painting to theatre, cinema, dance, photography, and civic pageantry. It retells the story of modernism by recovering not an idea, but a feeling--the hair-raising potential for each painting, literary text, or musical composition to herald an unprecedented domain of human enterprise. (shrink)

Emily Dickinson's poetry is deeply philosophical. Recognizing that conventional language limited her thought and writing, Dickinson created new poetic forms to pursue the moral and intellectual issues that mattered most to her. This collection situates Dickinson within the rapidly evolving intellectual culture of her time and explores the degree to which her groundbreaking poetry anticipated trends in twentieth-century thought. Essays aim to clarify the ideas at stake in Dickinson's poems by reading them in the context of one or more relevant (...) philosophers, including near-contemporaries such as Nietzsche, Kierkegaard and Hegel, and later philosophers whose methods are implied in her poetry, including Levinas, Sartre and Heidegger. The Dickinson who emerges is a curious, open-minded interpreter of how human beings make sense of the world - one for whom poetry is a component of a lifelong philosophical project. (shrink)

Many normative political theorists have engaged in the systematic collection and/or analysis of empirical data to inform the development of their arguments over the past several decades. Yet, the approach they employ has typically not been treated as a distinctive mode of theorizing. It has been mostly overlooked in surveys of normative political theory methods and methodologies, as well as by those critics who assert that political theory is too abstracted from actual political contestation. Our aim is to unearth this (...) grounded normative theory (GNT) approach – to identify its definitive practices and highlight its potential significance. We detail four overlapping commitments characteristic of GNT. These include commitments to expanding the comprehensiveness of input for normative arguments through original empirical research and/or analysis, recursivity in the development of normative claims, attentiveness to the systematic inclusion of a range of voices and ways of knowing, and accountability to those engaged by the theorist in empirical contexts. We discuss methodological distinctions within GNT, including between more- and less-solidaristic approaches. We discuss how GNT answers calls for theorists to engage more closely with empirical political dynamics and we consider responses to possible critiques. (shrink)

A prolific philosopher who also held Rome's highest political office, Cicero was uniquely qualified to write on political philosophy. In this book Professor Atkins provides a fresh interpretation of Cicero's central political dialogues - the Republic and Laws. Devoting careful attention to form as well as philosophy, Atkins argues that these dialogues together probe the limits of reason in political affairs and explore the resources available to the statesman given these limitations. He shows how Cicero appropriated and transformed Plato's thought (...) to forge original and important works of political philosophy. The book demonstrates that Cicero's Republic and Laws are critical for understanding the history of the concepts of rights, the mixed constitution and natural law. It concludes by comparing Cicero's thought to the modern conservative tradition and argues that Cicero provides a perspective on utopia frequently absent from current philosophical treatments. (shrink)

In perpetuating and exacerbating restricted access to essential medicines, current trade-related intellectual property rules on medicines may violate core human rights to health and medicines. In this light, there should be serious questions about their necessity, and their justification should be critically assessed from the perspective of human rights standards.

ABSTRACTThis paper assesses to what extent the neo-Republican accounts of Quentin Skinner and Philip Pettit adequately capture the nature of political liberty at Rome by focusing on Cicero's analysis of the libera res publica. Cicero's analysis in De Republica suggests that the rule of law and a modest menu of individual citizens’ rights guard against citizens being controlled by a master's arbitrary will, thereby ensuring the status of non-domination that constitutes freedom according to the neo-Republican view. He also shows the (...) difficulty of anchoring an argument for citizens’ full political participation in the value of non-domination. While Cicero believed such full participation was essential for a libera res publica, he, like other elite Romans, argued for participation on the basis of liberty conceived as the space to contend for and enhance one's social status. The sufficiency of the rule of law and citizens’ rights for securing a status of non-domination taken together with their insufficiency for ensuring a libera res publica suggests that neo-Republican accounts of liberty do not fully capture the idea as articulated in Cicero's Republicanism. (shrink)

Some philosophical theories of consciousness imply consciousness in things we would never intuitively think are conscious—most notably, panpsychism implies that consciousness is pervasive, even outside complex brains. Is this a reductio ab absurdum for such theories, or does it show that we should reject our original intuitions? To understand the stakes of this question as clearly as possible, we analyse the structured pattern of intuitions that panpsychism conflicts with. We consider a variety of ways that the tension between this intuition (...) and panpsychism could be resolved, ranging from complete rejection of the theory to complete dismissal of the intuition, but argue in favour of more nuanced approaches which try to reconcile the two. (shrink)

Kirchhoff’s 1882 theory of optical diffraction forms the centerpiece in the long-term development of wave optics, one that commenced in the 1820s when Fresnel produced an empirically successful theory based on a reinterpretation of Huygens’ principle, but without working from a wave equation. Then, in 1856, Stokes demonstrated that the principle was derivable from such an equation albeit without consideration of boundary conditions. Kirchhoff’s work a quarter century later marked a crucial, and widely influential, point for he produced Fresnel’s results (...) by means of Green’s theorem and function under specific boundary conditions. In the late 1880s, Poincaré uncovered an inconsistency between Kirchhoff’s conditions and his solution, one that seemed to imply that waves should not exist at all. Researchers nevertheless continued to use Kirchhoff’s theory—even though Rayleigh, and much later Sommerfeld, developed a different and mathematically consistent formulation that, however, did not match experimental data better than Kirchhoff’s theory. After all, Kirchhoff’s formula worked quite well in a specific approximation regime. Finally, in 1964, Marchand and Wolf employed the transformation of Kirchhoff’s surface integral that had been developed by Maggi and Rubinowicz for other purposes. The result yielded a consistent boundary condition that, while introducing a species of discontinuity, nevertheless rescued the essential structure of Kirchhoff’s original formulation from Poincaré’s paradox. (shrink)

This commentary responds to Samuel Director's article “Dementia and Concurrent Consent to Sexual Relations,” in the May‐June 2023 issue of the Hastings Center Report. In the article, Director sets out a set of conditions for sexual consent after one partner in a committed, long‐term relationship develops dementia. While we share Director's view that dementia patients should not be categorically cut off from sexual intimacy, we caution against the use of his approach as a rigid test for allowing sexual activity. Director's (...) analysis does not address the full range of plausibly permissible sexual relationships, which is unfortunate, as intimacy has consistently been linked to physical and psychological well‐being. Moreover, because decisions about sex often carry moral and emotional overtones, we propose that a dementia patient's prior values should sometimes be considered by caregivers in a measured way. (shrink)

A new wave of global protest movements offers the opportunity to reassess Marcuse’s work in the early twenty-first century. Before engaging with the Occupy movement and its analogs, it is necessary to scrutinize Marcuse’s assumptions about the affluent society. This examination suggests that the conditions of neoliberal accumulation diverge significantly from those Marcuse more or less took for granted as permanently stabilizing capitalist societies in the Global North. While much of what Marcuse offers retains relevance, its appeal to the new (...) movements is not immediate because these can no longer take for granted the prosperity of the earlier era. (shrink)