Between the 1930s and the mid 1970s, it was commonly believed that in 1880 Karl Marx had proposed to dedicate to Charles Darwin a volume or translation of Capital but that Darwin had refused. The detail was often interpreted by scholars as having larger significance for the question of the relationship between Darwinian evolutionary biology and Marxist political economy. In 1973–4, two scholars working independently—Lewis Feuer, professor of sociology at Toronto, and Margaret Fay, a graduate student at Berkeley—determined simultaneously that (...) the traditional story of the proposed dedication was untrue, being based on a long-standing misinterpretation of the relevant correspondence. Between the two, and among several other scholars who became their respective allies, there developed a contest of authority and priority over the discovery. From 1975 to 1982, the controversy generated a considerable volume of spilled ink in both scholarly and popular publications. Drawing on previously unexamined archival resources, this article revisits the ‘case’ of the so-called ‘Darwin–Marx correspondence’ as an instance of the phenomenon of ‘multiple discovery’. A familiar occurrence in the natural sciences, multiple discovery is rarer in the humanities and social sciences. The present case of a priority dispute in the history of ideas followed patterns familiar from such disputes in the natural sciences, while also diverging from them in ways that shed light on the significance of disciplinary norms and research infrastructures. (shrink)

In his Masterly Study of the Presocratic philosophers, Jonathan Barnes considers the refinements made by the early Greek sophists to the related concepts of cause and responsibility. Barnes judges Gorgias's Helen to have treated "in philosophical depth the issue of responsibility," in apparent contrast to Antiphon's second tetralogy, which, presumably, does not.1 The tetralogy itself comprises four speeches, two each by an imaginary plaintiff and a fictitious defendant. Certain facts are undisputed. In the course of an athletic contest (...) among youths of training age, the defendant threw his javelin with the intention of hitting the prescribed target. Instead, the javelin hit a young man charged with picking up .. (shrink)

A full account of the philosophy of the Greek and Roman worlds from the last days of Aristotle until 100 BC. Hellenistic philosophy, for long relatively neglected and unappreciated, has over the last decade been the object of a considerable amount of scholarly attention. Now available in paperback, this 1999 volume is a general reference work which pulls the subject together and presents an overview. The History is organised by subject, rather than chronologically or by philosophical school, with sections on (...) logic, epistemology, physics and metaphysics, ethics and politics. It has been written by specialists but is intended to be a source of reference for any student of ancient philosophy, for students of classical antiquity and for students of the philosophy of later periods. Greek and Latin are used sparingly and always translated in the main text. (shrink)

A defense of amorality as both philosophically justified and practicably livable. While in synch with their underlying aim of grounding human existence in a naturalistic metaphysics, this book takes both the new atheism and the mainstream of modern ethical philosophy to task for maintaining a complacent embrace of morality. It advocates instead replacing the language of morality with a language of desire. The book begins with an analysis of what morality is and then argues that the concept is not instantiated (...) in reality. Following this, the question of belief in morality is addressed: How would human life be affected if we accepted that morality does not exist? The book argues that at the very least, a moralist would have little to complain about in an amoral world, and at best we might hope for a world that was more to our liking overall. An extended look at the human encounter with nonhuman animals serves as an illustration of amorality’s potential to make both theoretical and practical headway in resolving heretofore intractable ethical problems. (shrink)

Does natural selection explain why individual organisms have the traits that they do? According to "the Negative View," natural selection does not explain why any individual organism has the traits that it does. According to "the Positive View," natural selection at least sometimes does explain why an individual organism has the traits that it does. In this paper, I argue that recent arguments for the Positive View fail in virtue of running afoul of the doctrine of origin essentialism and I (...) demonstrate that other recent defenses of the Negative View depend upon my own for their plausibility. (shrink)

Conversation analysts have noted that, in psychotherapy, formulations of the client's talk can be a vehicle for offering a psychological interpretation of the client's circumstances. But we notice that not all formulations in psychotherapy offer interpretations. We offer an analysis of formulations that are diagnostic: that is, used by the professional to sharpen, clarify or refine the client's account and make it better able to provide what the professional needs to know about the client's history and symptoms. In doing so, (...) these formulations also have the effect of shepherding the client's account towards subsequent therapeutic interpretation. In a coda, we notice that sometimes the formulations are designed discreetly. We examine one such discreet formulation in detail, and show how its very ambiguity can lead to its failure as a diagnostic probe. (shrink)

In this paper, we take moral agency to be that context in which a particular agent can, appropriately, be held responsible for her actions and their consequences. In order to understand moral agency, we will discuss what it would take for an artifact to be a moral agent. For reasons that will become clear over the course of the paper, we take the artifactual question to be a useful way into discussion but ultimately misleading. We set out a number of (...) conceptual pre-conditions for being a moral agent and then outline how one should — and should not — go about attributing moral agency. In place of a litmus test for such an agency — such as Allen et al.'s Moral Turing Test — we suggest some tools from the conceptual spaces theory and the unified conceptual space theory for mapping out the nature and extent of that agency. (shrink)

THE PROTAGONISTS David Sedley The primary object of this historical introduction1 is to enable a reader encountering Hellenistic philosophy for the first ...

We present several generalizations of the well-known Kunen inconsistency that there is no nontrivial elementary embedding from the set-theoretic universe V to itself. For example, there is no elementary embedding from the universe V to a set-forcing extension V[G], or conversely from V[G] to V, or more generally from one set-forcing ground model of the universe to another, or between any two models that are eventually stationary correct, or from V to HOD, or conversely from HOD to V, or indeed (...) from any definable class to V, among many other possibilities we consider, including generic embeddings, definable embeddings and results not requiring the axiom of choice. We have aimed in this article for a unified presentation that weaves together some previously known unpublished or folklore results, several due to Woodin and others, along with our new contributions. (shrink)

Highly concentrated intensive confinement systems have become the norm in agriculture concerning nonhuman animals. These systems have provoked a lively debate from an animal welfare perspective. Sociologists can contribute to this debate by drawing parallels between the institutional regulation of human beings and of animals under confinement. Results of research on the transformation of Canadian hog production from the 1950s to the present—based on the evolution of plans for sow housing produced by the Canada Plan Service—showed a much tighter compression (...) of hog bodies and reproduction in space and time. The prevalence of behavioral stereotypes, however, indicates imperfect animal socialization and reconfiguration. The concept of discipline is a useful perspective that could bridge the gap between the regulations of humans in industrial societies and of pigs in intensive confinement. This concept derived from elements of labor process and Foucauldian and post-humanist theories. (shrink)

The Gap Forcing Theorem, a key contribution of this paper, implies essentially that after any reverse Easton iteration of closed forcing, such as the Laver preparation, every supercompactness measure on a supercompact cardinal extends a measure from the ground model. Thus, such forcing can create no new supercompact cardinals, and, if the GCH holds, neither can it increase the degree of supercompactness of any cardinal; in particular, it can create no new measurable cardinals. In a crescendo of what I call (...) exact preservation theorems, I use this new technology to perform a kind of partial Laver preparation, and thereby finely control the class of posets which preserve a supercompact cardinal. Eventually, I prove the ‘As You Like It’ Theorem, which asserts that the class of κ -directed closed posets which preserve a supercompact cardinal κ can be made by forcing to conform with any pre-selected local definition which respects the equivalence of forcing. Along the way I separate completely the levels of the superdestructibility hierarchy, and, in an epilogue, prove that the notions of fragility and superdestructibility are orthogonal — all four combinations are possible. (shrink)

A phylogeny that allows for lateral gene transfer (LGT) can be thought of as a strictly branching tree (all of whose branches are vertical) to which lateral branches have been added. Given that the goal of phylogenetics is to depict evolutionary history, we should look for the best supported phylogenetic network and not restrict ourselves to considering trees. However, the obvious extensions of popular tree-based methods such as maximum parsimony and maximum likelihood face a serious problem—if we judge networks by (...) fit to data alone, networks that have lateral branches will always fit the data at least as well as any network that restricts itself to vertical branches. This is analogous to the well-studied problem of overfitting data in the curve-fitting problem. Analogous problems often have analogous solutions and we propose to treat network inference as a case of model selection and use the Akaike Information Criterion (AIC). Strictly tree-like networks are more parsimonious than those that postulate lateral as well as vertical branches. This leads to the conclusion that we should not always infer LGT events whenever it would improve our fit-to-data, but should do so only when the improved fit is larger than the penalty for adding extra lateral branches. (shrink)

We examined effects of exposure to unreportable images of spiders on approach towards a tarantula. Pretests revealed awareness of the stimuli was at chance. Participants high or low on fear of spiders were randomly assigned to receive computer-generated exposure to unreportable pictures of spiders or outdoor scenes. They then engaged in a Behavioral Approach Task with a live tarantula. Non-fearful participants completed more BAT items than spider-fearful individuals. Additionally, as predicted, a significant interaction = 5.12, p < .03) between fear (...) of spiders and stimulus demonstrated that spider-fearful participants exposed to spiders completed more BAT items than spider-fearful participants exposed to control stimuli . The findings support the hypothesis that exposure to unreportable feared stimuli promotes approach towards the feared object. Future research and clinical implications were discussed. (shrink)

The use of other animals for human purposes is as contentious an issue as one is likely to find in ethics. And this is so not only because there are both passionate defenders and opponents of such use, but also because even among the latter there are adamant and diametric differences about the bases of their opposition. In both disputes, the approach taken tends to be that of applied ethics, by which a position on the issue is derived from a (...) fundamental moral commitment. This commitment in turn depends on normative ethics, which investigates the various moral theories for the best fit to our moral intuitions. Thus it is that the use of animals in biomedical research is typically defended by appeal to a utilitarian theory, which legitimates harm to some for the greater good of others; while the opposition condemns that use either by appeal to the same theory, but disagreeing about the actual efficacy of animal experimentation, or by appeal to an alternative theory, such as the right of all sentient beings not to be exploited. Unfortunately, the normative issue seems likely never to be resolved, hence leaving the applied issue in limbo. The present essay seeks to circumvent this impasse by dispensing altogether with any moral claim or argument, thereby cutting the Gordian knot of animal ethics with a meta-ethical sword. The alternative schema defended is simply to advance relevant considerations, whereupon “there is nothing left but to feel.” In a word, motivation replaces justification. (shrink)

The Necessary Maximality Principle for c. c. c. forcing with real parameters is equiconsistent with the existence of a weakly compact cardinal. (© 2005 WILEY‐VCH Verlag GmbH & Co. KGaA, Weinheim).

If the Wholeness Axiom wa $_0$ is itself consistent, then it is consistent with v=hod. A consequence of the proof is that the various Wholeness Axioms are not all equivalent. Additionally, the theory zfc+wa $_0$ is finitely axiomatizable.

This paper draws a distinction between two possible understandings of the DEEDS (Dynamical, Embodied, Extended, Distributed and Situated) approach to cognition. On the one hand, the DEEDS approach may be interpreted as making a metaphysical claim about the nature and location of cognitive processes. On the other hand, the DEEDS approach may be read as providing a methodological prescription about how we ought to conduct cognitive scientific research. I argue that the latter, methodological, reading shows that the DEEDS approach is (...) pursuitworthy independently of an assessment of the truth of the metaphysical claim. Understood in this way, the DEEDS approach may avoid some of the objections that have been levelled against it. (shrink)

The experimental laboratory can be a horror house for rats, monkeys, and other nonhuman animals. Yet their use in this setting is usually reported in a routine manner in publications that discuss the results. These contentions are illustrated with an analysis of the way animal evidence is presented in David J. Linden’s recent book, The Accidental Mind: How Brain Evolution Has Given Us Love, Memory, Dreams, and God (Harvard University Press, 2007). The article concludes with a call to science authors (...) to acknowledge formally in their written work the ethical significance of such use of nonhuman animals. (shrink)

Moderate rationalism is the view a person's having a rational intuition that p prima facie justifies them in believing that p. It has recently been argued that moderate rationalism requires empirical support and, furthermore, that suitable empirical support would suffice to convince empiricists to abandon their opposition to rationalism. According to one argument, the causal requirement argument, empirical evidence is necessary in order to justify the claim that any actual token belief is based on rational intuition and moderate rationalism requires (...) such a claim for its justification. According to a second argument, the reliability argument, empirical evidence is necessary in order to justify the claim that a putative source of evidence is reliable and moderate rationalism requires such a claim for its justification. According to a third argument, the empirical case argument, certain sorts of empirical evidence would be dialectically sufficient to resolve the traditional dispute between empiricists and rationalists in the rationalists' favor. Against the causal requirement argument, I maintain that the core doctrines of moderate rationalism are not hostage to causal claims and that such causal claims as may be plausibly part of other recognizably rationalist doctrines can be justified on broadly non-empirical grounds. Against the reliability argument, I show that no empirical evidence is required to justify belief in the reliability of rational intuition. Against the empirical case argument, I argue that the envisioned empirical support for moderate rationalism should not convince any traditional empiricist. (shrink)

Rereading Renée C. Fox's “A Sociological Perspective on Organ Transplantation and Hemodialysis,” published in 1970, one is likely to be struck more by continuity than by change. The most pressing of the social, policy, and ethical concerns that Fox raised remain problematic fifty years later. We still struggle with scientific and clinical uncertainty, with the boundary between experimentation and therapy, and with the cost of organ replacement therapies and disparities in how they are allocated. We still have an imperfect understanding (...) of transplant immune responses. We still debate when a potential donor “actually” dies, and we still seem to think better empirical criteria could harmonize the diverse religious, cultural, and socioeconomic values of patients, providers, third‐party payers, and policy‐makers. Organ transplantation was for Fox both a particular case unfolding in time and an entryway for discussing the difficult moral questions presented by many new medical technologies in a context of high demand and limited resources. (shrink)

Previous papers on ethics consultation in medicine have taken a positivistic approach and lack critical scrutiny of the psychosocial, political, and moral contexts in which consultations occur. This paper discusses some of the contextual factors that require more careful research. We need to know more about what prompts and inhibits consultation, especially what factors effectively prevent house officers and nonphysicians from requesting consultation despite perceived moral conflict in cases. The attitudes and institutional power of attending medical staff seem important, especially (...) where innovative interventions raise ethical questions. Ethics consultants also need to address the thorny problems of the origin(s) of the consultant's authority, whistleblowing, conflicts of interest that affect the consultant, persistently poor communications in hospitals, systemic inequity in the availability or quality of services for some, and the standing of the consultant's recommendations, including their appearance in the patient's medical record. (shrink)

The distinction between taxonomic plant geography and ecological plant geography was never absolute: it would be historically inaccurate to portray them as totally divergent. Taxonomists occasionally borrowed ecological concepts, and ecologists never completely repudiated taxonomy. Indeed, some botanists pursued the two types of geographic study. The American taxonomist Henry Allan Gleason (1882–1975), for one, made noteworthy contributions to both. Most of Gleason's research appeared in short articles, however. He never published a major synthetic work comparable in scope or influence to (...) the ecological texts of Clements, Schimper, and Warming.Despite exceptions such as Gleason, most plant geographers throughout the twentieth century have emphasized the distinction between ecological and taxonomic plant geographies. Why have these distinct traditions developed? In his book Geographical Ecology, Robert MacArthur has suggested a psychological explanation for the dichotomy: “Unraveling the history of a phenemenon has always appealed to some people and describing the machinery of the phenomenon to others... The ecologist and physical scientist tend to be machinery oriented, whereas paleontologists and most biogeographers tend to be history oriented.”46Without necessarily rejecting MacArthur's explanation, my study suggests a more complex relationship between taxonomic and ecological plant geographies. At the turn of the century a group of botanists self-consciously defined a new area of botanical research. These ecologists defined their new discipline in opposition to what they believed was a moribund, nineteenth-century, natural-history tradition. They turned from historically oriented, descriptive, taxonomic plant geography to experimental physiology. The new ecological plant geography was to focus on communities rather than on species, on proximate environmental causes rather than on historical explanations, and on physiological experiments rather than on morphological descriptions.As we look back, much of the “revolt from morphology” was rhetorical. Ecologists never completely replaced species as units of distribution, nor did they set geography on an explicitly physiological basis. Indeed, much of early ecological research was, quite simply, descriptive. Plant communities were defined in terms of dominant species, representative life forms, or general physiognomy. The underlying physiological basis for community characteristics was more often assumed than demonstrated by experiments.Despite the fact that ecological plant geography was not a truly physiological specialty, it was significantly different from more traditional taxonomic plant geography. First, ecologists were less explicitly evolutionary in their approach than were taxonomists. Following Darwin, most taxonomic plant geographers viewed distribution in historical terms. In contrast, early ecologists tended to ignore the traditional geographic problems. Most ecologists were skeptical of historical explanations, emphasizing instead the proximate, environmental causes of distribution. While some nineteenth-century biogeographers had studied the correlation between climate and vegetation, twentieth-century ecologists focused much more sharply on the interactions between plant and environment. Plant ecologists did not place biogeography on a physiological basis, but by emphasizing physiology they laid the foundation for a more detailed understanding of adaption. This emphasis on physiology and environmental causation was a second distinguishing characteristic of ecological plant geography. Finally, the idea of the plant community, articulated by Eugenius Warming in 1895, provided ecologists with a unique perspective on the distribution of plants. For early ecologists, the community was more than an assemblage of species; it was an integrated unit. The distribution of these units became the major focus of ecological plant geography. Communities never completely replaced species as geographic units, and the distinction between flora and vegetation was often blurred. Nonetheless, ecologists were innovative in studying the distribution of structurally and functionally integrated groups of plants.In the twentieth century plant geography has occupied an anomalous position in biology. It has not developed into an autonomous discipline, nor has it been incorporated into the developing discipline of ecology. Ecologists and taxonomists have pursued fairly distinct styles of geographic research, with the result that two relatively independent approaches to the study of plant distribution have persisted. (shrink)

The transition from the traditional to the representational theory of measurement around the turn of the century was accompanied by little sustained criticism of the former. The most forceful critique was Bertrand Russell''s 1897 Mind paper, On the relations of number and quantity. The traditional theory has it that real numbers unfold from the concept of continuous quantity. Russell''s critique identified two serious problems for this theory: (1) can magnitudes of a continuous quantity be defined without infinite regress; and (2) (...) can additive relations between such magnitudes exist if magnitudes are not divisible? The present paper shows how the traditional theory answers these questions and compares the traditional and representational theories as contributions to our understanding of the logic of application. (shrink)

Why should we care about religious liberty? Leading commentators, United Kingdom courts, and the European Court of Human Rights have de-emphasised the special importance of religious liberty. They frequently contend it falls within a more general concern for personal autonomy. In this liberal egalitarian account, religious liberty claims are often rejected when faced with competing individual interests – the neutral secular state must protect us against the liberty-constraining acts of religions. Joel Harrison challenges this account. He argues that it (...) is rooted in a theologically derived narrative of secularisation: rather than being neutral, it rests on a specific construction of 'secular' and 'religious' spheres. This challenge makes space for an alternative theological, political, and legal vision. Drawing from Christian thought, from St Augustine to John Milbank, Harrison develops a post-liberal focus on association. Religious liberty, he argues, facilitates creating communities seeking solidarity, fraternity, and charity – goals that are central to our common good. (shrink)

The content of Christian spirituality that made waves since the inception of the early church soon took on different contours as the faith got adapted to different gentile contexts. The expression of this faith, along with its liturgical symbolism and sacramental observances, is still gaining momentum in African Christianity. The emerging practice of the use of ‘anointing oil’ in its religious expression is receiving more attention than the Christ of the Gospel. In this article, we argue that against its primitive (...) intent, the use of the ‘anointing oil’ by the African Church is a mere display of fetish ancestral religion that expresses its unique African traditional religious root rather than a true expression of Christian spirituality. Our thesis is framed on the basis that the manner in which some African churches apply the purported ‘anointing oil’ is discriminatory vis-à-vis its ancient understanding and purpose. In our attempt to address this damaging practice to true Christian spirituality, also standing as a huge challenge for pastoral theology, we undertook a careful historical–theological analysis of the extant biblical data and its contextual interpretation vis-à-vis its distortion today. We concluded that what pastoral theologians have to deal with within the Christian community in Africa is offering the right biblical perspective against the distorted mode of the application of the contemporary purported ‘anointing oil’ that is falsely projecting the Christian faith and belief in a bad light. Contribution: The application of the anointing oil in contemporary Christian religion in Africa is, to say the least, not an inherent textually prescribed requisite criterion for Christian spirituality, but merely an outburst of fetish ancestral religious worldview that stands contra the hermeneutics of the biblical text and its ancient tradition. That no Old Testament prophet, not even Jesus nor Paul, mentioned the subject, makes its contemporary application textually and theologically suspect, and therefore, heretically infectious for the spiritual health of the community of faith. These insights sit quite well with the textual hermeneutics within the mainline transdisciplinary religious and multidisplinary theological perspective of this journal. (shrink)

Animal size is a relevant and unappreciated consideration in moral evaluations of killing animals for food, especially for utilitarians, who must weigh the gustatory satisfaction of eating meat-the quantity of which varies greatly throughout the animal kingdom-against animal suffering in utilitarian calculations. I argue that animal size can drastically alter not only the extent but even the valence of such calculations. Then I show how the business ethics literature on vegetarianism is deficient for not taking animal size into account. Last, (...) I argue that market conditions are also relevant in moral assessments of vegetarianism. (shrink)

Horgan and Mahtani (Erkenntnis 78: 333–351, 2013) present a new argument for the 1/3 answer to the Sleeping Beauty problem resting on a principle for updating probabilities which they call “generalized conditionalization.” They allege that this new argument is immune to two attacks which have been recently leveled at other arguments for thirdism. I argue that their new argument rests on a probability distribution which is (a) no more justified than an alternative distribution favoring a different answer to the problem, (...) and (b) ultimately unjustified. I go on to show that generalized conditionalization cannot be applied in the manner suggested, given the cogency of the aforementioned attacks on thirder arguments. Hence, the new argument fails to advance the case for the 1/3 answer. (shrink)

Brandom denies animals implicit reasoning by emphasizing their inability to make inferences explicit, and in so doing, denigrates animals by likening their behavior to that of machines and artifacts. With disturbing regularity and ease, Brandom equates pigeons and parrots to machines and thermostats in their inability to express implicit/explicit inferences: neither the pigeon nor the machine can “provid[e] reasons for making other moves in the language game.” I contest, however, that animals are paradigmatically more than any similarity or analogy to (...) mechanical processing, just as humans are paradigmatically more than any reductive analogy to animals. The human/animal distinction need not come at the cost of ignoring the difference between animals and artifacts, and I believe we can largely subscribe to Brandom’s differentiation of the human in terms of expressionism if we allow that animals can make implicit inferences without making them explicit. (shrink)