We wish to extend the concepts in Ray and Cooper’s (2024) article entitled “The Bioethics of Environmental Injustice: Ethical, Legal, and Clinical Implications of Unhealthy Environments” to palliat...

In this article, the relationship between second-order comprehension and unrestricted mereological fusion (over atoms) is clarified. An extension PAF of Peano arithmetic with a new binary mereological notion of “fusion”, and a scheme of unrestricted fusion, is introduced. It is shown that PAF interprets full second-order arithmetic, Z_2.

This study aims at contributing to literature by investigating characteristics of Generation Z's social media uses and gratifications and the moderation effect of economic capital. Specifically, we employed online survey as the main research method to examine the connections between the young generation cohort's online motivations, social media practices, and economic capital. A total of 221 Chinese Generation Z social media users were recruited in the survey. Results indicated that Generation Zs have different social media engagements depending on whether they (...) were connected for daily routine alternatives or socialization; the young cohorts from upper-mid-income families demonstrated a more instrumental-rational habitus to use social media more frequently as a communicative tool than those from low-income families; and motivations and family income interacted to influence Generation Z's social media practices. Findings here provide empirical reference to deepened understandings of the interactions between social media and digital generations, and their connections with digital social inequalities. (shrink)

Der Aufsatz wurde zum Anlass des 25. Todestages von Hermann Buddensieg geschrieben. Es wird bestrebt an, die Gestalt dieses Übersetzers, Dichters, Literaturforschers, Philosophen und Publizisten zu erinnern. Es ist ein Versuch, die bisherigen Forschungsergebnisse zu sammeln und unser Wissen über die Aktivität eines Menschen zu ordnen, der in der Geschichte der Aufnahme der polnischen Literatur und Kultur in Deutschland eine Sonderstellung hat. Eine besondere Bedeutung wird seiner kongenialen Übertragung von Pan Tadeusz, seinem Vorsitz bei dem Mickiewicz-Gremium und der Redaktion der (...) „Mickiewicz-Blätter” zu geschrieben. (shrink)

Wydaje się, że filozofia rzadko miała związek z muzyką - Rousseau, Nietzsche czy Adorno to wyjątki. A jednak w mitologii i tradycji greckiej związki takie były bardzo wyraźne: koźlonogi Pan, który zdradził Apollinowi tajemnicę wieszczenia, był muzycznym wirtuozem; ucieleśniający mądrość Sylen uczył Dionizosa śpiewu i tańca; Apollo, stanąwszy na czele korowodu szalonych muz, uczynił je przewodniczkami poetów; sami zaś poeci posiadali umiejętność rozumienia ludzkiej natury oraz dar przepowiadania przyszłości i uosabiali natchnioną mądrość. Przynajmniej więc w pewnym stopniu filozofia wywodzi się (...) z muzyki. Koneksje te zaś potwierdza osoba Gilles’a Deleuze’a, którego nomadologia oraz takie kategorie, jak „kłącze”, „refren”, „powtórzenie” czy „deterytorializacja”, stały się istotnymi wyznacznikami dla współczesnej eksperymentalnej muzyki elektronicznej. (shrink)

Profesor Andrzej Walicki, born in 1930, is a historian of philosophy and social thought connected with the so called „Warsaw School of the History of Ideas" prevalent during the 1960s. His field of specialization is the history of Russian and Polish thought and also that of Marxist philosophy. Until 1981, he was professor at the Institute of Philosophy and Sociology PAN. During the time of martial law, Walicki was in Australia as a visiting professor of the Australian National University of (...) Canberra. In 1986, he started working at the University of Notre Dame in the USA as chief of the chair of the history of ideas, where he continued to work until 1999, the vear of his retirement. (shrink)

Profesor Andrzej Walicki, born in 1930, is a historian of philosophy and social thought connected with the so called „Warsaw School of the History of Ideas" prevalent during the 1960s. His field of specialization is the history of Russian and Polish thought and also that of Marxist philosophy. Until 1981, he was professor at the Institute of Philosophy and Sociology PAN. During the time of martial law, Walicki was in Australia as a visiting professor of the Australian National University of (...) Canberra. In 1986, he started working at the University of Notre Dame in the USA as chief of the chair of the history of ideas, where he continued to work until 1999, the vear of his retirement. (shrink)

Przełomowym okresem rozwoju filozofii europejskiej jest epoka nowożytna, zaowocowała ona bowiem wieloma przełomowymi wydarzenia w historii filozofii i cywilizacji Starego Kontynentu, kształtujących także naszą współczesność. Jednym z nich jest zagadnienie ewolucji metafizyki w kierunku nowożytnej ontologii, które jest omawiane w pracy Bogusława Pazia. Recenzowana monografia została napisana przez znanego badacza historii filozofii nowożytnej, który swoją kompetencję i rzetelność w eksploracji zagadnień związanych z tym okresem rozwoju myśli filozoficznej potwierdził wieloma publikacjami.. Autor określa zasadniczy przedmiot swojej pracy jako „właśnie ów proces, (...) a celem – poddanie tematyzacji jego zasadniczych faz, w szczególności ich głównych przesłanek i czynników dynamizujących przemiany rozumienia przedmiotu metafizyki”. Proces wyłaniania się ontologii z metafizyki został przez niego podzielony na cztery etapy, co przekłada się na cztery części rozprawy. (shrink)

Jeff Speaks twierdzi, że teiści bytu doskonałego powinno powstrzymać się od przypisywania Bogu atrybutów i przyjąć agnostycyzm w kwestii natury Boga. Powodem, dla którego mieliby dokonać takiego ograniczenia, jest problem ukrytych atrybutów. Nawet jeśli teista bytu doskonałego zdoła przypisać Bogu taki zestaw atrybutów, który nie będzie przejawiał żadnych niespójności, to i tak – zdaniem Speaksa – najrozsądniejszym wyborem w sprawie natury Boga będzie agnostycyzm. Speaks przekonuje, że choć możliwa jest sytuacja, w której teista proponuje spójny zestaw atrybutów Boga, to (...) nie może zagwarantować, że między owym zestawem a ukrytymi atrybutami Boga (tymi, które są dla człowieka poznawczo niedostępne) nie dojdzie do konfliktu. Wobec poglądu Speaksa formułuję trzy zarzuty: zarzut z niemożliwości wykazania niespójności, zarzut z częściowej ukrytości atrybutów oraz zarzut z alternatywnego ujęcia transcendencji. Pierwszy zarzut polega na wskazaniu, że niemożliwe jest stwierdzenie zachodzenia faktycznej niespójności między atrybutami jawnymi a ukrytymi. Teista bytu doskonałego może podkreślać, że sama możliwość niespójności między atrybutami to nie to samo, co jej faktyczne zachodzenie. Jeśli tak, to nie widać mocnego powodu, aby teista bytu doskonałego był zmuszony do opowiedzenia się za agnostycyzmem w sprawie natury Boga. Drugi zarzut zawiera się w uwadze, że stanowisko Speaksa odwołuje się do pojęcia atrybutów ukrytych absolutnie. Można jednak zachować pojęcie atrybutów ukrytych, jednocześnie nieco je osłabiając przez mówienie o częściowej ukrytości atrybutów. Owo słabsze pojęcie atrybutów ukrytych nie wymusza na teiście przyjęcia agnostycyzmu, gdyż jeżeli przypisuje on Bogu atrybuty ukryte częściowo, to jednak posiada pewną wiedzę na temat Boga. Trzeci zarzut podkreśla, że zmieniając koncepcję transcendencji, można zrezygnować z pojęcia ukrytych atrybutów, jakie proponuje Speaks. Teista ma więc przynajmniej trzy sposoby uniknięcia agnostycyzmu w kwestii natury Boga. (shrink)

W tekście omawiam tę część internetowej dyskusji, przeprowadzonej w listopadzie 2012 r. na stronie Polskiego Towarzystwa Bioetycznego, która dotyczyła niepewności na temat moralnego statusu embrionów ludzkich. W trakcie dyskusji PTB na temat Stanowiska Komitetu Bioetyki przy Prezydium PAN w sprawie preimplantacyjnej diagnostyki genetycznej (PDG) pojawił się następujący argument: skoro spór o moralny status embrionu jest nierozstrzygalny, to powinniśmy opowiedzieć się przeciwko moralnej dopuszczalności wykonywania PDG na embrionach, a także przeciwko prawnej dopuszczalności tego rodzaju diagnostyki. W tekście omawiam tezy Stanowiska i (...) zdań odrębnych, które wywołały tę część dyskusji, a potem koncentruję się na następujących problemach: (I) dopuszczalność stosowania narzędzi teorii decyzji w debatach etycznych; (II) procedura podejmowania decyzji przez ciała doradcze w sytuacji niepewności moralnej; (III) znaczenie osiągnięć nauk biologicznych przy ustaleniu statusu moralnego embrionu; (IV) możliwość kompromisu w sytuacji pluralizmu wartości; (V) znaczenie statusu moralnego embrionów dla oceny moralnej i prawnej dopuszczalności PDG. (shrink)

In "Assertion," Geach identified failure to attend to the distinction between meaning and speech act as a source of philosophical errors. I argue that failure to attend to this distinction, along with the parallel distinction between attitude and content, has been behind the idea that meaning and content are, in some sense, normative. By an argument parallel to Geach's argument against performative analyses of "good" we can show that the phenomena identified by theorists of the normativity of content are properties (...) in the first instance of speech act and propositional attitude types, rather than content as such. (shrink)

One of Kripke's fundamental objections to descriptivism was that the theory misclassifies certain _a posteriori_ propositions expressed by sentences involving names as _a priori_. Though nowadays very few philosophers would endorse a descriptivism of the sort that Kripke criticized, many find two-dimensional semantics attractive as a kind of successor theory. Because two-dimensionalism needn't be a form of descriptivism, it is not open to the epistemic argument as formulated by Kripke; but the most promising versions of two-dimensionalism are open to a (...) close relative of that argument. (shrink)

Responding to Michael Luntley's article, ‘Learning, Empowerment and Judgement’, the author shows he cannot successfully make the following three moves: (1) dissolve the analytic distinction between learning by training and learning by reasoning, while advocating the latter; (2) diminish the role of training in Wittgenstein's philosophy, nor attribute to him a rationalist model of learning; and (3) turn to empirical research as a way of solving the philosophical problems he addresses through Wittgenstein. Drawing on José Medina's analysis of the fundamental (...) role of training in Wittgenstein's later philosophy, the paper offers a tour of key passages in the Investigations and other works to develop an understanding of what Wittgenstein meant by ‘mastery of techniques’. In opposition to Luntley's liberal‐individual, or his subject as rational agent, the author explores Wittgenstein's non‐foundationalist, forms of life approach to how we act with agreement. More effort must be given to differentiating Wittgenstein's view from that of the analytic school, which Luntley appears to echo despite his criticism of the analytic divide. (shrink)

John Duns Scotus recognizes complexity in God both at the level of God’s being and at the level of God’s attributes. Using the formal distinction and the notion of “unitive containment,” he argues for real plurality in God, but in a way that permits him to affirm the doctrine of divine simplicity. We argue that his allegiance to the doctrine of divine simplicity is purely verbal, that he flatly denies traditional aspects of the doctrine as he had received it from (...) Augustine, Anselm, and Aquinas, and that his denial of the doctrine allows him to escape certain counterintuitive consequences of the doctrine without falling afoul of the worries that motivated the doctrine in the first place. We note also an important consequence of Scotus’s approach to simplicity for the correct interpretation of his view of the foundation of morality. (shrink)

According to liberal egalitarian morality, all human beings are one another's moral equals. Nonhuman animals, by contrast, are not considered to be our moral equals. This essay considers two challenges to the liberal egalitarian view. One is the ``separation problem,'' which is the challenge to identify a morally significant intrinsic difference between all human beings and all nonhuman animals. The other is the “equality problem,” which is to explain how all human beings can be morally equal when there are some (...) human beings whose psychological capacities are no higher than those of certain nonhuman animals. The focus throughout is on the ethics of killing but the arguments are of broader relevance. The essay reaches a skeptical conclusion about our ability to meet these challenges. (shrink)

For more than a quarter of a century, Hubert L. Dreyfus has been the leading voice in American philosophy for the continuing relevance of phenomenology, particularly as developed by Edmund Husserl, Martin Heidegger, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty. Dreyfus has influenced a generation of students and a wide range of colleagues, and these volumes are an excellent representation of the extent and depth of that influence.In keeping with Dreyfus's openness to others' ideas, many of the essays in this volume take the form (...) of arguments with various of his positions. The essays focus on the dialogue with the continental philosophical tradition, in particular the work of Heidegger, that has played a foundational role in Dreyfus's thinking. The sections are Philosophy and Authenticity; Modernity, Self, and the World; and Heideggerian Encounters. The book concludes with Dreyfus's responses to the essays.Contributors : William D. Blattner, Taylor Carman, David R. Cerbone, Dagfinn Føllesdal, Charles Guignon, Michel Haar, Beatrice Han, Alastair Hannay, John Haugeland, Randall Havas, Jeff Malpas, Mark Okrent, Richard Rorty, Julian Young, Michael E. Zimmerman. (shrink)

Journal of Philosophy of Education, EarlyView.

Drawing on a range of sources in philosophy and literature, but with particular reference to the work of Heidegger, makes a compelling case for the importance of place in philosophical discourse.

The main objection to human embryonic stem cell research is that it involves killing human embryos, which are essentially beings of the same sort that you and I are. This objection presupposes that we once existed as early embryos and that we had the same moral status then that we have now. This essay challenges both those presuppositions, but focuses primarily on the first. I argue first that these presuppositions are incompatible with widely accepted beliefs about both assisted conception and (...) monozygotic twinning. I then argue that we never existed as embryos. If this last claim is right, killing an embryo does not kill someone like you or me but merely prevents one of us from existing. (shrink)

Discussions of the morality of the Gulf War have tended to embrace the traditional theory of the just war uncritically and to apply its tenets in a mechanical and unimaginative fashion. We believe, by contrast, that careful reflection of the Gulf War reveals that certain principles of the traditional theory are oversimplifications that require considerable refinement. Our aims, therefore, are both practical and theoretical. We hope to contribute to a better understanding of the ethics both of war in general and (...) of the Gulf War in particular. (shrink)

I argue that utilitarianism requires us to tolerate intrapersonal disagreement for the same reasons that it requires us to tolerate interpersonal disagreement. I begin by arguing that multiplicity has the same costs and benefits as multiculturalism: It causes conflict, but it also allows us to perform experiments in living, adopt a division of labour, compartmentalize harm and learn from ourselves. I then argue that, in light of these costs and benefits, utilitarianism requires us to adopt a liberal system of individual (...) self-government, according to which we should not try to impose a unified set of beliefs and values on ourselves. Finally, I argue that we should apply this policy of liberal toleration to intrapersonal disagreement about utilitarianism too. If we want to maximize utility, then we should tolerate inner conflict not only about how to maximize utility but also about whether we should be maximizing utility in the first place. (shrink)

Moral agents sometimes have to act on the basis of beliefs that are reasonable in the context but are in fact false. In these circumstances, agents often act in ways that would be right if their beliefs were true but that they would recognize as wrong if they could see that their beliefs were false. Sometimes our tendency is to think that what these agents do is justified – for example, in the case discussed by Ferzan in which one person, (...) Defender, kills another, Threatener, who has loaded one bullet into a revolver, spun the chambers, pointed the gun at Defender’s head, and started to squeeze the trigger.1 We think that Defender was justified in killing even if we discover that the chamber was in fact empty. (Let us refer to this as the ‘‘Roulette case.’’) We accept, however, that if Apparent Defender had known with certainty that the chamber was empty and that Apparent Threatener would (or could) have pulled the trigger only once, it would have been pointless and therefore wrong to kill her. (shrink)

Offering a cautionary tale about the abuses of paradigm‐shift rhetoric in secondary school reforms, the paper shows potential misuses and ethical effects of the relativistic language‐game in post‐compulsory education. Those initiating the shift often shelter their reform from the criticism of non‐adepts, marginalizing expert teachers that adhere to ‘antiquated’ or ‘folk’ pedagogies. The rhetoric herds educators uncritically into the citadel of new discourses and policies that often lack practical foundations; consequently, teachers often dissimulate compliance to the reform in order to (...) evade surveillance within such disciplinary apparatuses as teacher training and regimes of inspection. Turning to Foucault, the author views education reforms in terms of power relations within a form of governance: ‘games of truth’, or political and veridical discourses in which dividing practices for sorting out ‘sound’ and ‘unsound’ teaching practices become institutionalised. Wittgenstein's attention to initiate training in practices points to an alternative to naïve forms of relativism; educators must incorporate the new techniques they gradually master and adapt within a viable, shared form of life. Instead of teachers’ normalization and subjugation in what Foucault refers to as education ‘blocks’, new pedagogic practices are better adopted ‘freely’ as arts of self‐transformation. With Hacking, Foucault and Wittgenstein's accounts of the true‐and‐false are blended into an ‘historical ontology’ of present and emergent paradigms: a critique of the limits set down within education reforms that sanction or legitimize certain conduct. Sympathetic to the journal call, this kind of philosophical investigation and genealogical critique of teaching practices gives us a perspicuous view of the local, contingent and at times arbitrary nature of change initiatives. Critical awareness of how our pictures of education can captivate us heightens respect for professional eclecticism. Without ignoring the mandates and official scripts of public education reforms, experienced educators need to be able to conserve their tried and warranted ‘best practices’, while negotiating ranges of tolerance for alternative means. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: The Concept of Brain Death and its Appeal A Critique of Brain Death What Kind of Entity Are We? Persistent Vegetative State References Further Reading.

A talk about two-dimensionalism considered as a semantic hypothesis.

While most commentators believe that the print book will survive the advent of the ebook, it is at the same time hard not to think that the fundamental technological changes ushered in by the digital revolution will fail to have profound effects on the forms of the book. Arguing that literary forms have always depended on the “material conditions of their enunciation,” the French author François Bon uses historical examples to suggest the book will undergo major, if yet unforeseen, transformations. (...) He maintains that it is urgent for writers to experiment with the possibilities brought about by the digital revolution, lest the actual developments be decided by the commercial interests of large technology entities. In his own experiments with the form of the book in the digital environment -- in his “novel” Tumulte, which consists of daily blog posts that mix fiction, memoir, criticism, and other genres, and in a series of digital remediations of his early novel, Limite -- Bon imaginatively explores the limits of the concept of the book. Yet while these experiments are suggestive, it is less clear that they represent viable avenues for the book’s development, since their main appeal is arguably for scholars and theoreticians. Focusing on the means of organization and delivery, and the ontological ambiguities arising from the multiple versions of the same text, Bon’s experiments skirt the core power of the book: the sustained arrangement of words that has been the principle means whereby books have conveyed content and sustained intellectual culture. (shrink)

Ethical non-naturalists posit a sui generis realm of moral and evaluative properties, while ethical naturalists identify moral and evaluative properties with natural or descriptive properties. First, I explore the standard arguments in favor of an ethical non-naturalist account of goodness, specifically the open-question argument. Then, I examine Philippa Foot’s criticism of the open-question argument and her alternative neo-Aristotelian theory of goodness. Foot’s account, I argue, is vulnerable to a revised version of the open-question argument. Finally, I suggest two ways that (...) Foot can escape the revised open-question argument: Either via a classical naturalist account, inspired by Thomas Aquinas, that identifies goodness with the fulfillment of a thing’s function, or by characterizing her account as a version of non-reductive naturalism akin to non-reductive physicalism in philosophy of mind. In either case, I argue that Foot’s neo-Aristotelian naturalism is preferable to ethical non-naturalism concerning the property of goodness. (shrink)

Can on-line ‘place-based learning’ be more than a facsimile or ritual? Using a phenomenology of my pandemic practice, I investigate the meaning of ‘place-based learning:’ entertaining Aristotle’s seminal thought on place as a container to venture into contemporary phenomenological inquiries where places and things are not only conceptually implicated by each other, but immanent and potentially powerful elements in learning experiences. Bonnett’s (2021) ecologizing of education shows that authentic forms must be embodied and emplaced in order to open learners to (...) the more in situ, deeply-contextualized and yet ‘transcendental’ and ‘ecstatic’ reception of the more-than-human realm of nature (as what comes-forth, phusis). But this Heideggerian narrative with which I resonate poses challenges for students and place-based educators. Wittgenstein’s philosophical approach, itself modelled on place-based investigation of language (our ‘home city’), draws me back from metaphysical inclinations to dwell constructively on ordinary discourses rooted in educational practices. (shrink)