The host actin nucleation machinery is subverted by many bacterial pathogens to facilitate their entry, motility, replication, and survival. The majority of research conducted in the past primarily focused on exploitation of a host actin nucleator, the Arp2/3 complex, by bacterial pathogens. Recently, new studies have begun to explore the role of formins, another family of host actin nucleators, in bacterial pathogenesis. This review provides an overview of recent advances in the study of the exploitation of the Arp2/3 complex and (...) formins by bacterial pathogens. Secreted bacterial effector proteins seem to manipulate the regulation of these actin nucleators or functionally mimic them to drive bacterial entry, motility and survival within host cells. An enhanced understanding of how formins are exploited will provide us with greater insight into how a fundamental eurkaryotic cellular process is utilized by bacteria and will also advance our knowledge of host‐pathogen interactions. (shrink)

Presupposing no familiarity with the technical concepts of either philosophy or computing, this clear introduction reviews the progress made in AI since the inception of the field in 1956. Copeland goes on to analyze what those working in AI must achieve before they can claim to have built a thinking machine and appraises their prospects of succeeding. There are clear introductions to connectionism and to the language of thought hypothesis which weave together material from philosophy, artificial intelligence and neuroscience. (...) John Searle's attacks on AI and cognitive science are countered and close attention is given to foundational issues, including the nature of computation, Turing Machines, the Church-Turing Thesis and the difference between classical symbol processing and parallel distributed processing. The book also explores the possibility of machines having free will and consciousness and concludes with a discussion of in what sense the human brain may be a computer. (shrink)

Presupposing no familiarity with the technical concepts of either philosophy or computing, this clear introduction reviews the progress made in AI since the inception of the field in 1956. Copeland goes on to analyze what those working in AI must achieve before they can claim to have built a thinking machine and appraises their prospects of succeeding.There are clear introductions to connectionism and to the language of thought hypothesis which weave together material from philosophy, artificial intelligence and neuroscience. (...) class='Hi'>John Searle's attacks on AI and cognitive science are countered and close attention is given to foundational issues, including the nature of computation, Turing Machines, the Church-Turing Thesis and the difference between classical symbol processing and parallel distributed processing. The book also explores the possibility of machines having free will and consciousness and concludes with a discussion of in what sense the human brain may be a computer. (shrink)

Que serait une exposition qui, au lieu de prendre place dans un musée ou dans une galerie, prendrait place au cinéma? (un projet de Mathieu Copeland, avec Chantal Akerman, Peter Downsbrough, Liam Gillick, John Giorno, Philippe Grandrieux, Isidore Isou, Philippe-Alain Michaud, Meredith Monk, Lee Ranaldo, Susan Stenger, Alan Vega, Jacques Villeglé, Lawrence Weiner, Apichatpong Weerasethakul...).

In this unique volume, some of today's most eminent political philosophers examine the thought of John Rawls, focusing in particular on his most recent work. These original essays explore diverse issues, including the problem of pluralism, the relationship between constitutive commitment and liberal institutions, just treatment of dissident minorities, the constitutional implications of liberalism, international relations, and the structure of international law. The first comprehensive study of Rawls's recent work, The Idea of Political Liberalism will be indispensable for political (...) philosophers and theorists interested in contemporary political thought. (shrink)

It was only a matter of time before the portmanteau term “genethics” would be coined and a whole field within bioethics delineated. The term can be dated back at least to 1984 and the work of James Nagle, who claims credit for inventing the word, which he takes “to incorporate the various ethical implications and dilemmas generated by genetic engineering with the technologies and applications that directly or indirectly affect the human species.” In Nagle’s phrase, “Genethic issues are (...) instances where medical genetics and biotechnology generate ethical problems that warrant societal deliberation.” The great promises and terrific threats of developments in scientific understanding of genetics, and the power to enhance, modify, or profit from the knowledge science breeds, naturally offer a huge range of issues to vex moral philosophers and social theorists. Issues as diverse as embryo selection and the quest for immortality continue to tax analysts, who offer reasons as varied as the matters that might be dubbed “genethical” for or against the morality of things that are actually possible, logically possible, and even just tenuously probable science fiction. (shrink)

Most scholars think not. But in this pioneering book, John H. Zammito challenges that view by revealing a precritical Kant who was immensely more influential than the one philosophers think they know.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Josiah Royce: Pragmatist, Ethicist, Philosopher of Religion ed. by Christoph Seibert and Christian PolkeRobin FriedmanJosiah Royce: Pragmatist, Ethicist, Philosopher of Religion Christoph Seibert and Christian Polke, editors. Mohr Siebeck, 2021.In October 2015, the Warburg Haus, Hamburg, held a conference on the American philosopher Josiah Royce that brought together German and American scholars. The papers given at the conference led to this new book, Josiah Royce: Pragmatist, Ethicist, Philosopher (...) of Religion. Edited by the German scholars Christoph Seibert and Christian Polke, the volume includes eleven essays, nine delivered at the 2015 conference, together with additional contributions by Seibert and Polke, the conference organizers.It is valuable to see contemporary German scholars engaging with Royce and to compare their approach with that of American scholars. Americans tend to approach Royce through the tradition of pragmatism in the company of William James, Charles Peirce, and John Dewey, and to minimize the metaphysics in Royce's thought and its idealistic influences. [End Page 116]The book has the goal of developing Royce's thought to show how its insights and concerns may be valuable for contemporary life, not only for scholars of differing philosophical traditions. In their Introduction, Seibert and Polke describe Royce as a "pragmatist of his own kind" (3) and identify three themes in his philosophy. The first is community, which was central to Royce from the beginning and, following his serious study of Peirce, "became the ultimate principle of both his metaphysics and his philosophy of life" (3). The second theme is religion, which, for Royce, involved the "search for the ultimate meaning of his own life, as well as that of his fellows' lives" (3). The third broad theme in Royce is ethics and a lifelong concern with the nature of the examined life. Royce developed his ethical philosophy from an original critique of moral skepticism to the "never-ending task of building communities within and through mankind by way of a critical spirit of true and mutual loyalty" (3). Among these three, the editors consider religion as the most important. They state: "[R]eligion is a very important theme of Royce's philosophy: one may even assume that it is the central subject, which implies that his philosophy may be properly understood only if it is regarded as a philosophy of religion" (8). The centrality of religion is apparent in the essays. Consideration here must be brief.The book's first section, "Bridging Two Continents: Royce between Pragmatism and Idealism," includes three broad-ranging essays that work toward a synthesis between pragmatism and idealism in the thought of Royce. Ludwig Nagl's contribution, "Toward a Global Philosophical Discourse on Religion," discusses Royce's posthumously published "Lectures on Modern Idealism." Nagl uses this work, together with Royce's adaption of Peirce, to help create a bridge between pragmatism and idealism. He further explores Royce's interest in Eastern religion to suggest how Royce's thought might support a broad philosophical study of religion, not restricted to Christianity. Co-editor Seibert's article, "The Ethical Nucleus of Reality," focuses on Royce's epistemology and his ethics, while touching briefly on religion. The essay shows how Royce combined pragmatic and idealistic threads from his earliest writings, with particular attention to his book The Spirit of Modern Philosophy (SM). Royce's SM is also central to the American philosopher Douglas Anderson's essay "What Philosophy Meant to Josiah Royce." In SM, Royce argues that philosophy constitutes a critical reflection on experience that may be practiced by every person, not only by professional philosophers. Anderson, however, also identifies and criticizes a more elitist, professional aspect in Royce's conception of philosophy. For Anderson, Royce's thought had a pragmatist dimension in that philosophy was a "voluntarily chosen attitude toward conducting our lives" (80). Royce's thought also was idealistic [End Page 117] in its recognition of the finite character of human life and in the search for the whole. Anderson writes that, for Royce, "to understand our experiences and to gain some control of our futures, we must see those experiences in their relations to all of what is—no easy task" (80).The book's second section includes... (shrink)

We are sceptical of concerns over the opacity of algorithmic decision tools. While transparency and explainability are certainly important desiderata in algorithmic governance, we worry that automated decision-making is being held to an unrealistically high standard, possibly owing to an unrealistically high estimate of the degree of transparency attainable from human decision-makers. In this paper, we review evidence demonstrating that much human decision-making is fraught with transparency problems, show in what respects AI fares little worse or better and argue that (...) at least some regulatory proposals for explainable AI could end up setting the bar higher than is necessary or indeed helpful. The demands of practical reason require the justification of action to be pitched at the level of practical reason. Decision tools that support or supplant practical reasoning should not be expected to aim higher than this. We cast this desideratum in terms of Daniel Dennett’s theory of the “intentional stance” and argue that since the justification of action for human purposes takes the form of intentional stance explanation, the justification of algorithmic decisions should take the same form. In practice, this means that the sorts of explanations for algorithmic decisions that are analogous to intentional stance explanations should be preferred over ones that aim at the architectural innards of a decision tool. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:The Scandal of White Complicity in US Hyper-Incarceration: A Nonviolent Spirituality of White Resistance by Alex Mikulich, Laurie Cassidy, and Margaret PfeilNancy M. RourkeThe Scandal of White Complicity in US Hyper-Incarceration: A Nonviolent Spirituality of White Resistance Alex Mikulich, Laurie Cassidy, and Margaret Pfeil new york: palgrave macmillan, 2013. 203 pp. $90.00As a white American Catholic ethicist, I often envy my Protestant counterparts’ legacy of acknowledging and fighting (...) racism. Catholic moral theology lacks Protestantism’s bodies of literature, activism, and bold ecclesial statements addressing racism in the United States. (For more on this, see Bryan Massingale’s Racial Justice and the Catholic Church.) The Scandal of White Complicity in US Hyper-Incarceration demonstrates how Catholicism might approach American racism using several elements of Catholic theology.The book opens with series editor Mary Jo Iozzo’s introduction to the Content and Context in Theological Ethics series, of which this is the fifth book. A personal and reflective foreword by Sr. Helen Prejean follows. Then the book’s argument begins with a description of the United States’ practice of mass incarceration and brief discussions of what is meant by “whiteness” and “complicity.” This book employs a phenomenological understanding of race and of whiteness, taking whiteness as habitus. The literature about this approach to race and to identity is enormous, but familiarity with that literature is not necessary to follow this book’s presentation, argument, or use of the idea.Each of the book’s three authors has written a two-chapter section. Alex Mikulich’s explanation of white habitus speaks on levels of social thought and of the individual’s experience. Laurie Cassidy’s section looks at the culture of hyperincarceration and the development of the “dangerous black man” myth, and Margaret Pfeil’s section on spirituality works from the beatitudes, John of the Cross, and a wide array of other sources to describe a political spirituality of resistance for white Christians.This book would be most useful to masters-level graduate students in theological ethics or anyone preparing to begin teaching in areas of ethics related to racism or criminal justice (particularly in Catholic institutional settings). Rather than drawing exclusively on Catholic social teaching to talk about white participation in racism, these authors more satisfyingly put many Catholic traditions into action. For example, the book demonstrates careful use of the concepts of complicity, responsibility, participation, and intention; it considers specific [End Page 195] actions while maintaining focus on systems’ structures; and it uses a wide range of Catholic thinkers, including Metz, Copeland, Soelle, Gutiérrez, Carmelite Sr. Constance FitzGerald, Lonergan, Day, and John of the Cross.This book assumes and asserts that racism still exists, that whiteness exists and aims to make itself invisible, and that racism is kept alive through social structures that flow from white habitus. However, the book does not assume the reader’s agreement with any of these. Instead, the book first makes the case that these things are true and then takes next steps toward responsive practices of resistance. Rhetorically tinged homiletic shortcuts are not used to bolster this argument. For example, in similar works, the question of moral culpability for racist social structures is sometimes managed only with a discussion of how such structures distribute benefits and harms unequally. In this book, that argument is not used alone but in tandem with a careful look at the intention of one’s participation in such structures.Minor problems exist. The book would have benefited from one more round of editing to eliminate minor punctuation and writing problems, and the Catholic moral concept of “scandal” receives little systematic attention despite its presence in the title. Otherwise, the book demonstrates well what Catholic moral theology could do if applied to American white racism. Here’s hoping that this is just the beginning of more such scholarship.Nancy M. RourkeCanisius CollegeCopyright © 2015 Society of Christian Ethics... (shrink)

This superb collection by the eminent physicist and critic John Ziman, opens with an album of portraits of scientists--Albert Einstein, Freeman Dyson, Lev Landau, Mark Azbel, Andrei Sakharov. Ziman takes readers into the world of the contemporary scientist, showing how discoveries are made and how claims are tested. He then travels into the minds of scientists as they are drawn into competing directions. Here Ziman exposes the path of discovery, which is strewn with complex human needs, governmental restrictions, the (...) desire for profits, and the exercise of technical virtuosity. (shrink)

In this book John Ziman seeks the answers to crucial questions facing scientists who need to change the direction of their careers.

The purpose of this book is to give a coherent account of the different perspectives on science and technology that are normally studied under various disciplinary heads such as philosophy of science, sociology of science and science policy. It is intended for students embarking on courses in these subjects and assumes no special knowledge of any science. It is written in a direct and simple style, and technical language is introduced very sparingly. As various perspectives are sketched out in this (...) book, the reader moves towards a consistent conception of contemporary science as a rapidly changing social institution that has already grown out of its traditional forms and plays a central role in society at large. It will appeal to students in a wide range of scientific disciplines and complement well Professor Ziman's earlier books. (shrink)

Kant’s philosophy of science takes on sharp contour in terms of his interaction with the practicing life scientists of his day, particularly Johann Blumenbach and the latter’s student, Christoph Girtanner, who in 1796 attempted to synthesize the ideas of Kant and Blumenbach. Indeed, Kant’s engagement with the life sciences played a far more substantial role in his transcendental philosophy than has been recognized hitherto. The theory of epigenesis, especially in light of Kant’s famous analogy in the first Critique, posed crucial (...) questions regarding the ‘looseness of fit’ between the constitutive and the regulative in Kant’s theory of empirical law. A detailed examination of Kant’s struggle with epigenesis between 1784 and 1790 demonstrates his grave reservations about its hylozoist implications, leading to his even stronger insistence on the discrimination of constitutive from regulative uses of reason. The continuing relevance of these issues for Kant’s philosophy of science is clear from the work of Buchdahl and its contemporary reception. (shrink)

John Martin Fischer is one of the leading proponents of semi-compatibilism, one of the ideas proposed in the debates on free will and determinism. According to him, even if it is not possible to make a free choice once determinism is accepted, persons can be held morally responsible for their actions. Thus, the ability to choose one of several alternatives, i.e. to act otherwise, is not necessary for moral responsibility. In his translated article Responsibility and Inevitability, Fischer sketches an (...) outline of a theory of moral responsibility that explains how persons are responsible for their actions, for the actions they do not perform (omissions), and for the consequences of their actions or omissions. (shrink)

The danger of human operators devolving responsibility to machines and failing to detect cases where they fail has been recognised for many years by industrial psychologists and engineers studying the human operators of complex machines. We call it “the control problem”, understood as the tendency of the human within a human–machine control loop to become complacent, over-reliant or unduly diffident when faced with the outputs of a reliable autonomous system. While the control problem has been investigated for some time, up (...) to this point its manifestation in machine learning contexts has not received serious attention. This paper aims to fill that gap. We argue that, except in certain special circumstances, algorithmic decision tools should not be used in high-stakes or safety-critical decisions unless the systems concerned are significantly “better than human” in the relevant domain or subdomain of decision-making. More concretely, we recommend three strategies to address the control problem, the most promising of which involves a complementary coupling between highly proficient algorithmic tools and human agents working alongside one another. We also identify six key principles which all such human–machine systems should reflect in their design. These can serve as a framework both for assessing the viability of any such human–machine system as well as guiding the design and implementation of such systems generally. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy after ChristJohn O'CallaghanConsider the words of Justin Martyr written in the middle of the second century after the birth of Christ and after Justin's conversion to Christianity:Philosophy is indeed one's greatest possession, and is most precious in the sight of God, to whom it alone leads us and to whom it unites us, and in truth they who have applied themselves to philosophy are holy men.1In addition to (...) the praise heaped upon the philosophers, among whom Justin had counted himself before his conversion,2 the text is one of the earliest pieces of evidence for the historical reality of Christian intellectual engagement with pagan or secular philosophy. Whether that engagement proved spiritually fruitful or sterile in any particular age or any particular tradition of philosophy, Christian intellectuals have often sought out engagement with philosophy as an inherent task of the intellectual life of the Church, in order to pursue and develop the understanding of Christian revelation and the mode of life informed by it. One lasting result of the impetus represented by Justin is to be found even now in the normative requirement in Catholic education that, at a certain stage of development, anyone who receives a [End Page 49] serious Catholic education must be introduced to serious philosophical reflection on where we came from, what we are, and where we are born to go.In addition, one of the general points John Henry Newman made in The Idea of a University is that the human mind looks for unity in the diversity of intellectual disciplines it pursues. In search of this unity, it seeks a kind of primary discipline that takes into account the truths discovered throughout the other disciplines as it seeks to understand what it can of the whole of reality, not just its parts. But Newman also pointed out that, in the absence of such a unifying discipline, practitioners of each particular discipline will often claim for their particular discipline the prize of being primary—of being the discipline by which all others must be understood and judged.3Take classical and modern physics. A familiar claim of some physicists, but even more so of non-physicist physicalists, is that physics is the fundamental intellectual discipline for understanding what is real. All reality, living reality, historical reality, moral reality, indeed perhaps even literary reality, must be reduced to reality as described by the physicists or rejected as unreal or epiphenomenal, or in a kinder, gentler vein, non-reductively emergent and supervenient. Whichever position is taken, whether reduction, non-reductive emergence, or epiphenomenalism, the thought is that the real work of the really real is done by reality as described by physics, either in its actual contemporary state or, more likely, in an idealized future state always on the horizon of where physics presently is. We are really atoms spinning ceaselessly in the void, mostly empty space, the warp and woof of a four-dimensional space-time manifold, or congeries of strings in an even more bizarre thirteen-dimensional manifold, or whatever was said most recently to surpass what was said before that by the leading physicists in California or Cambridge.However, anyone who has actually practiced physics knows that, even when uttered by a physicist, these are not claims of physics, but about physics. What prompts them is the sense that there is no intellectual discipline other than contemporary physics itself that can both understand the achievements of physics and integrate them into a larger intellectual comprehension of reality as a whole. These claims about physics nicely display Newman's point about the way in which a particular discipline, in the absence of a larger more comprehensive discipline, can take on an importance for its practitioners well beyond its disciplinary limits. [End Page 50]In the case of physics, if a more comprehensive unifying discipline is not to be found, this attitude is not entirely unjustified, for Newman's point is partly Aristotelian. Aristotle had pointed out that, if one cannot show that unchangeable, and thus non-physical beings, exist, then what Aristotle called "first philosophy" would just be physics as he understood it, the science of... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Are There Failed Persons?John O'CallaghanIntroductionAre there failed persons? Yes. However, before explaining what a failed person is, it will be good to consider closely a very significant part of our society to get a sense of what it thinks a failed person is, since my account of what a failed person is is markedly different. It is important to think about the question of failed persons because there (...) are growing movements here and abroad aimed at killing by medical means human beings who are judged in some sense to be failed persons, human beings who do not count as persons according to a common societal notion of persons, a social-psychological notion of persons.The question for anyone who lives within this society with its notion of failed persons is whether one will take part in and support this movement toward killing human beings or avoid it, indeed whether one will push back against it. It is easy enough to fall into a trap of thinking about failed persons the way much of our society does. One's complicity in adopting the social-psychological notion of person contributes to enabling the acceptance of such killing, even if one believes one would never perform the killing act. My effort here is precisely to push back against such killing, by pushing back against the notion of persons that animates it.The killing of human beings by our society is not simply confined to abortion, as it has been legally and widely available here in the United States for almost fifty years now. Recent political discussions in the wake of the Dobbs decision have made it clear that many political leaders think such killing ought to be allowed all the way up until birth, and perhaps after. Relatively [End Page 1123] recently there was an article in a mainstream bioethics journal by Alberto Giubilini and Francesca Minerva arguing that what most people would take to be cases of infanticide should be renamed, per their title, "After-Birth Abortion."1 The article was not about the moral legitimacy of either infanticide or abortion. The moral legitimacy of those acts for various reasons was taken as a given by the authors. In the case of euthanizing infants, they noted the expanding number of arguments for it among philosophers, the desire for guidelines for doing it among members of the medical profession, and the protocols for it established in places like the Netherlands.The authors argued that in the case of newborns, including healthy newborns, killing them should not be considered infanticide or euthanasia.2 They distinguished abortion from both euthanasia and infanticide. Euthanasia involves killing a human person, where a person is understood to be a being that can experience itself as having interests that can be harmed. "We take 'person' to mean an individual who is capable of attributing to her own existence some (at least) basic value such that being deprived of this existence represents a loss to her."3 Euthanasia, when justified, is justified by being in the best "interests" of the person killed. Infanticide involves euthanizing children.However, the authors claim that a newborn is not a person in the sense of "person" specified. So, the authors' term "after-birth abortion" is a terminological distinction based upon denying that a newborn is a child, children being persons. They also assume that infants are children as they understand "child." So not being a child, a newborn cannot be an infant. Not being an infant, killing it cannot be infanticide or euthanasia, again as the authors define those terms.4 Instead, killing the newborns, healthy or not, should be thought of as having the same moral weight as an abortion before birth, and thus rather than being called infanticide or euthanasia, it should be called "after-birth abortion."5Killing a newborn then is "ethically permissible" in just the same circumstances and for the same reasons as abortion is ethically permissible. Among [End Page 1124] the "ethically permissible" circumstances for killing newborns, including perfectly healthy newborns, are that the "well-being of the family is at risk" with respect to "social, psychological, economic" factors,6 but also the fact... (shrink)

The imagery we adopt when recalling the personal past may involve different perspectives. In many cases, we remember the past event from our original point of view. In some cases, however, we remember the past event from an external “observer” perspective and view ourselves in the remembered scene. Are such observer perspective images genuine memories? Are they accurate representations of the personal past? This chapter focuses on such observer perspectives in memory, and outlines and examines proposals about the nature of (...) such imagery. (shrink)

This paperback edition reproduces the complete text of the Essay as prepared by professor Nidditch for The Clarendon Edition of the Works of John Locke. The Register of Formal Variants and the Glossary are omitted and Professor Nidditch has written a new foreword.

The earliest writer who deserves to be called a psychologist is Hobbes; and if we consider the time when he wrote, we cannot fail to be surprised at what I may term his prevision of the most important results which have now been established by science. He was the first clearly to sound the note which has ever since constituted the bass, or fundamental tone, of scientific thought. Let us listen to it through the clear instrumentality of his own language:-.

The leading hypothesis concerning the “reuse” or “recycling” of neural circuits builds on the assumption that evolution might prefer the redeployment of established circuits over the development of new ones. What conception of cognitive architecture can survive the evidence for this hypothesis? In particular, what sorts of “modules” are compatible with this evidence? I argue that the only likely candidates will, in effect, be the columns which Vernon Mountcastle originally hypothesized some 60 years ago, and which form part of the (...) well-known columnar hypothesis in neuroscience—systems that cannot handle gross cognitive functions as distinct from strictly exiguous subfunctions. This is in stark contrast to the modules postulated by much of cognitive psychology, cognitive neuropsychology, and evolutionary psychology. And yet the fate of this revised notion is unclear. The main issue confronting it is the effect of the neural network context on local function. At some point the effects of context are so strong that the degree of specialization required for modularity is not able to be met. Still, despite indications from neuroimaging that peripheral and central systems deploy shared circuitry, some skills clearly do seem to display modularization and autonomy. This article: provides an in-depth analytical and historical review of the fortunes of modular thinking in cognitive science; offers a systematic calibration of brain regions in terms of degrees of functional specificity and robustness; and suggests another way of accounting for the partially encapsulated character of expertise and other highly practiced skills without having to resort to domain-specific modules. (shrink)

The past two decades have witnessed a revival of interest in multiple realization and multiply realized kinds. Bechtel and Mundale’s (1999) illuminating discussion of the subject must no doubt be credited with having generated much of this renewed interest. Among other virtues, their paper expresses what seems to be an important insight about multiple realization: that unless we keep a consistent grain across realized and realizing kinds, claims alleging the multiple realization of psychological kinds are vulnerable to refutation. In this (...) paper I argue that, intuitions notwithstanding, the terms of their recommendation make it impossible to follow, while also misleadingly insinuating that its application virtually guarantees mind-brain identity. Instead of a matching of grains, what multiple realization really requires is a principled method for adjudicating upon differences between tokens. Shapiro’s (2000) work on multiple realization can be understood as an attempt to adumbrate just such a method. While his “causal relevance” criterion can easily be mistaken for Bechtel and Mundale’s grain requirement, my analysis reveals exactly where and why these two tests diverge. (shrink)

What makes ethical accounts natural law ethical is, I argue, commonly misrepresented in teaching within much of the philosophical academy. Yet those immersed in the field of natural law and ethics rarely give definitions/brief characterisations of what makes ethical accounts natural law ethical. I suggest theoretical reasons for the lack. I argue that bringing natural law into ethics is best understood as leading to theoretically unitary accounts, not simply collections of positions detachable from each other: an overlooked and significant point (...) when defending natural law ethical accounts. My arguments throughout rely on the metaethical/normative ethical distinction, which is relatively little used in the natural law literature. I argue that the distinction helps clarify what is distinctive of natural law ethical accounts in general, especially to the secular contemporary philosophical academy, where appreciation of natural law ethical accounts is commonly appreciably lower than in philosophical contexts with a religious ethos. (shrink)

Modularity is a fundamental doctrine in the cognitive sciences. It holds a preeminent position in cognitive psychology and generative linguistics, as well as a long history in neurophysiology, with roots going all the way back to the early nineteenth century. But a mature field of neuroscience is a comparatively recent phenomenon and has challenged orthodox conceptions of the modular mind. One way of accommodating modularity within the new framework suggested by these developments is to go for increasingly soft versions of (...) modularity. One such version, which I call the “system” view, is so soft that it promises to meet practically any challenge neuroscience can throw at it. In this paper, I reconsider afresh what we ought to regard as the sine qua non of modularity and offer a few arguments against the view that an insipid “system” module could be the legitimate successor of the traditional notion. (shrink)

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This essay argues that the book of Ruth's reopening of Israel's history and national mythology functions in such a way as to redeem, as it were, the plight of the subaltern Moabite—a plight begun with the daughters of Lot in Genesis 19. A parallel is then drawn with the 1619 Project, the recent journalistic project which posits the entire historical sweep of African slavery in North America since 1619 as the defining arc of the United States' founding. As theoretical frames, (...) the essay draws on the work of literary critic Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (including her concept of “moral love”) and political philosopher Arash Abizadeh. In so doing, the essay illustrates how a “functionalist” approach to biblical ethics that balances the content of the biblical narrative with attention to how the text functions in its broader context can provide guidance for contemporary ethical application. (shrink)