British Journal for the History of Philosophy, Volume 19, Issue 6, Page 1223-1226, December 2011.

When causal decision theory was created in the 1970s, access to Howard Sobel’s contribution was available only in a narrowly circulated mimeographed manuscript. After some time, he allowed his ideas to appear in the form of articles. Here we finally have a book length exposition on Sobel’s causal Bayesian point of view consisting of collected, revised, and amplified papers spanning a period of twenty years.

The Democratic Republic of Congo has vast natural resources, many of which are regularly exploited by the electronics industry. Unfortunately, in addition to these resources, there are widespread human rights abuses committed by armed groups entrenched in the eastern part of the Democratic Republic of Congo. These armed groups are using profits from these minerals as a source of funding. Their human rights abuses have led to a growing humanitarian interest in the region and prompted the international community to action. (...) This paper explores the conflicts in the Democratic Republic of Congo, provides an understanding of the link between human rights abuses and conflict minerals, and interprets and critiques the legal actions of the international community. (shrink)

A topic ignored in mainstream scientific inquiry for decades, wisdom is beginning to return to the place of reverence that it held in ancient schools of intellectual study. A Handbook of Wisdom, first published in 2005, explores wisdom's promise for helping scholars and lay people to understand the apex of human thought and behavior. At a time when poor choices are being made by notably intelligent and powerful individuals, this book presents analysis and review on a form of reasoning and (...) decision-making that is not only productive and prudent, but also serves a beneficial purpose for society. A Handbook of Wisdom is a collection of chapters from some of the most prominent scholars in the field of wisdom research. Written from multiple perspectives, including psychology, philosophy, and religion, this book gives the reader an in-depth understanding of wisdom's past, present, and possible future direction within literature, science, and society. (shrink)

Diese Festschrift versammelt Texte zu den vielfältigen Forschungsinteressen von Alfred Schmidt, emeritierter Professor für Philosophie und Soziologie an der Universität Frankfurt am Main. Die philosophiehistorischen Betrachtungen versuchen jeweils, das Konzept eines realen Humanismus ins Bewusstsein gegenwärtiger praktischer Philosophie zu rufen. Verbindendes Motiv der Beiträge ist dabei ein kritisch verstandener Materialismus, der ohne weltanschauliche Versicherungen auskommt und den leibhaftigen Menschen in den Fokus der Betrachtung rückt. So verstandene Gesellschaftskritik orientiert sich an Gewährsmännern Kritischer Theorie wie etwa Hegel und Marx sowie Schopenhauer, (...) Nietzsche und Freud. Charakteristisch für die hier versammelten Texte ist unter anderem, dass sie eine subjektgerechte Einrichtung der Welt einfordern. (shrink)

ABSTRACTPrevious studies have identified two powerful ways to regulate emotional responses to a stressor: experiencing incidental positive emotions and using cognitive reappraisal to reframe the stressor. Several cognitive and motivational theories of positive emotion support the formulation that incidental positive emotions may facilitate cognitive reappraisal. To test the separate and interacting effects of positive emotions and cognitive reappraisal, we first adapted an established picture-based reappraisal paradigm by interspersing blocks of positive emotion inducing and neutral pictures. Across two pre-registered studies, reappraisal (...) effectively decreased self-reported negative emotions and increased self-reported positive emotions; however, experiencing incidental positive emotions did not facilitate reappraisal success. In another preregistered study, we employed a more powerful positive emotion induction via virtual reality, used a social stress anticipation task, and... (shrink)

1. Sexual Brains and Body Politics 2. Hormones and Hardwiring 3. Making Sense of Brain Organization Studies 4. Thirteen Ways of Looking at Brain Organization 5. Working Backward from “Distinct‘ Groups 6. Masculine and Feminine Sexuality 7. Sexual Orienteering 8. Sex-Typed Interests 9. Taking Context Seriously 10. Trading Essence for Potential.

This Element examines Kant's innovative account of labour in his political philosophy and develops an intersectional analysis of Kant. By demonstrating that Kant's analysis of slavery, citizenship, and sex developed in inter-linked ways over several decades, culminating in his development of a 'trichotomy' of Right, the author shows that Kant's normative account of independence is configured through his theory of labour, and is continuous with his anthropological accounts of race and gender, providing a systemic justification for the dependency of women (...) and non-whites embedded in his philosophy of right. By examining Kant's arguments about slavery as intertwined with his account of domestic labour, the author argues that his ultimate rejection of slavery may owe more to his changing conceptualization of labour than to his theory of race, and that his final arguments against slavery rehearse strategies for embedding intersectional patterns of domestic dependence in his account of the rightful state. (shrink)

Moral extremists argue for highly demanding duties of beneficence on the ground that accepting a more moderate position commits us to denying the common-sense moral intuition elicited by easy rescue cases. I argue that a moderate duty of beneficence is consistent with this intuition in light of what I call aggregationism, the view that the large aggregate cost of performing many low-cost acts of beneficence is relevant to what moral agents may do in cases where they face multiple low-cost occasions (...) to rescue. After demonstrating how the debate between moderates and extremists turns on the truth of aggregationism, I defend aggregationism against the challenge that it is inconsistent with respecting the separateness of persons. (shrink)

The ‘black box problem’ is a long-standing talking point in debates about artificial intelligence. This is a significant point of tension between ethicists, programmers, clinicians and anyone else working on developing AI for healthcare applications. However, the precise definition of these systems are often left undefined, vague, unclear or are assumed to be standardised within AI circles. This leads to situations where individuals working on AI talk over each other and has been invoked in numerous debates between opaque and explainable (...) systems. This paper proposes a coherent and clear definition for the black box problem to assist in future discussions about AI in healthcare. This is accomplished by synthesising various definitions in the literature and examining several criteria that can be extrapolated from these definitions. There are no data in this work. (shrink)

Chemical kinds are generally treated as having timelessly fixed identities. Biological kinds are generally treated as evolved and/or evolving entities. So what kind of kind is a biochemical kind? This article defends the thesis that biochemical molecules are clustered chemical kinds, some of which—namely, evolutionarily conserved units—are also biological kinds. On this thesis, a number of difficulties that have recently occupied philosophers concerned with proteins and kinds are shown to be either resolved or dissolved. 1 Introduction2 Conflicting Intuitions about Kinds (...) of Proteins3 Against Permissive Pluralism4 Against Nominalism, Toward a Duality of Kinds5 Biological Kinds, Chemical Kinds, and Their Relations6 Implications for Biological Individuals7 Implications for Monism and Scientific Practice. (shrink)

This paper formulates a response to standard accounts of Kantian sexual morality, by first clarifying why sex should be understood as a case of using a person as a thing, rather than merely as a means. The author argues that Kant’s remedy to this problem is not sexual consent, but a model of setting and sharing sexual ends. Kant’s account of sexual morality, read in this way, is a critical framework for contemporary moves to think beyond consent, and to grapple (...) with concerns about sexual violation and “bad sex” that have gained uptake in the wake of the MeToo movement. The author defends an account of sex as a process of setting and sharing sexual ends in a Kantian key, which provides us with resources for thinking about the robust ongoing project of making our sexual selves in nonideal conditions, as well as for identifying the wrongs of both “bad” sex and sexual harassment. In doing so, they offer a critical middle ground between contemporary accounts of sexual morality that center questions of individual agency or autonomy, and those that foreground the intersubjective nature of sex. (shrink)

Philip Reed argues that laws that grant people access to euthanasia on the basis of terminal illness are discriminatory. In support of this claim, he offers an argument by analogy: it would be discriminatory to offer a person access to euthanasia because they are women or because they are disabled, as such restricted access would send the message ‘that life as a woman or as a disabled person is (very often) not worth living’.1 And so it must also be discriminatory (...) to offer people access to euthanasia because they are terminally ill. Arguments by analogies are only as good as the analogies on which they are built. Having a terminal illness, I’m going to suggest, is not relevantly similar enough to either being disabled or being a member of an oppressed social group to make Reed’s claim compelling. Let’s explore each branch of the analogy in turn. Why think that terminal illness is relevantly unlike disability, in a way that makes offering access to euthanasia in the latter case discriminatory, but not the former? For one thing, terminal illness is necessarily time-limited. When my father was dying, he found himself in constant …. (shrink)

What does everyone in the modern world need to know? Renowned psychologist Jordan B. Peterson's answer to this most difficult of questions uniquely combines the hard-won truths of ancient tradition with the stunning revelations of cutting-edge scientific research. Humorous, surprising and informative, Dr. Peterson tells us why skateboarding boys and girls must be left alone, what terrible fate awaits those who criticize too easily, and why you should always pet a cat when you meet one on the street. What (...) does the nervous system of the lowly lobster have to tell us about standing up straight (with our shoulders back) and about success in life? Why did ancient Egyptians worship the capacity to pay careful attention as the highest of gods? What dreadful paths do people tread when they become resentful, arrogant and vengeful? Dr. Peterson journeys broadly, discussing discipline, freedom, adventure and responsibility, distilling the world's wisdom into 12 practical and profound rules for life. [This book] shatters the modern commonplaces of science, faith and human nature, while transforming and ennobling the mind and spirit of its readers. (shrink)

This is a wide-ranging 2004 book about arguments for and against beliefs in God. The arguments for the belief are analysed in the first six chapters and include ontological arguments from Anselm to Gödel, the cosmological arguments of Aquinas and Leibniz, and arguments from evidence for design and miracles. The next two chapters consider arguments against belief. The last chapter examines Pascalian arguments for and against belief in God. There are discussions of Cantorian problems for omniscience, of challenges to divine (...) omnipotence, and of the compatibility of everlasting complete knowledge of the world with free-will. There are appendices that present formal proofs in a system for quantified modal logic, a theory of possible worlds, notes on Cantorian set theory, and remarks concerning non-standard hyperreal numbers. This book will be a valuable resource for philosophers of religion and theologians and will interest logicians and mathematicians as well. (shrink)

When our nearest and dearest experience medical crises, we may need to step into caregiving roles. But in doing so, we may find that our new caregiving relationship is actually in tension with the loving relationship that motivated us towards care. What we owe and are entitled to as friends, spouses, and family members, can be different from what we owe and are entitled to as caregivers. For this reason, caregiving carries with it the risk of a type of moral (...) distress that I call “role conflict distress.” Rather than view role conflict distress as a sign that we are falling short, I suggest that it actually speaks to the commitment that we have to the loving relationship that grounds our duty of care. (shrink)

To systematically answer the generalized Kretschmann objection, I propose a mean to make operational a criterion widely recognized as allowing one to decide whether the gauge symmetry of a theory is artificial or substantial. My proposition is based on the dressing field method of gauge symmetry reduction, a new simple tool from mathematical physics. This general scheme allows one in particular to straightforwardly argue that the notion of spontaneous symmetry breaking is superfluous to the empirical success of the electroweak theory. (...) Important questions regarding the context of justification of the theory then arise. (shrink)

J. Howard Sobel has long been recognized as an important figure in philosophical discussions of rational decision. He has done much to help formulate the concept of causal decision theory. In this volume of essays Sobel explores the Bayesian idea that rational actions maximize expected values, where an action's expected value is a weighted average of its agent's values for its possible total outcomes. Newcomb's Problem and The Prisoner's Dilemma are discussed, and Allais-type puzzles are viewed from the perspective of (...) causal world Bayesianism. The author establishes principles for distinguishing options in decision problems, and studies ways in which perfectly rational causal maximizers can be capable of resolute choices. Sobel also views critically Gauthier's revisionist ideas about maximizing rationality. This collection will be a desideratum for anyone working in the field of rational choice theory, whether in philosophy, economics, political science, psychology or statistics. Howard Sobel's work in decision theory is certainly among the most important, interesting and challenging that is being done by philosophers. (shrink)

Chemical kinds (e.g. gold) are generally treated as having timelessly fixed identities. Biological kinds (e.g. goldfinches) are generally treated as evolved and/or evolving entities. So what kind of kind is a biochemical kind? This paper defends the thesis that biochemical molecules are clustered chemical kinds, some of which–namely, evolutionarily conserved units–are also biological kinds.On this thesis, a number of difficulties that have recently occupied philosophers concerned with proteins and kinds are shown to be resolved or dissolved.

The present study investigated how knowledge-gaps, measured by feeling-of-knowing, and individual differences in epistemic curiosity contribute to the arousal of state curiosity and exploratory behaviour for 265 (210 women, 55 men) university students. Participants read 12 general knowledge questions, reported the answer was either known (“I Know”), on the tip-of-the-tongue (“TOT”), or unknown (“Don't Know”), and indicated how curious they were to see each answer, after which they could view any answers they wanted. Participants also responded to the Epistemic Curiosity (...) (EC) and Curiosity as a Feeling-of-Deprivation (CFD) scales. “TOT” was associated with the smallest knowledge-gap, most curiosity and exploration, and feelings of uncertainty and tension as measured by the CFD scale. “Don't Know” corresponded with the largest knowledge-gap, less curiosity and exploration, and positive feelings of interest as measured by the EC scale. “I Know” states, which reflected the absence of a knowledge-gap, involved the least curiosity and exploration. (shrink)

Human trafficking is associated with a variety of adverse health and mental health consequences, which should be accurately addressed and documented in electronic health records.

Readers of fiction tend to have better abilities of empathy and theory of mind. We present a study designed to replicate this finding, rule out one possible explanation, and extend the assessment of social outcomes. In order to rule out the role of personality, we first identified Openness as the most consistent correlate. This trait was then statistically controlled for, along with two other important individual differences: the tendency to be drawn into stories and gender. Even after accounting for these (...) variables, fiction exposure still predicted performance on an empathy task. Extending these results, we also found that exposure to fiction was positively correlated with social support. Exposure to nonfiction, in contrast, was associated with loneliness, and negatively related to social support. (shrink)

I argue that the best available parent view, in its present formulation, struggles to accommodate for our very weighty duty not to perpetuate historical injustices. I offer an alternative view that reconciles this tension.

While Theodor Adorno is known for his philosophical reconstruction of aesthetic modernism, he also analyzes—and is critical of—the demotion of natural beauty in the hierarchy of aesthetic concerns following Kant. Recent scholars have acknowledged that natural beauty is important in Adornian aesthetics, but many do so in a manner that repeats the subordination of natural beauty and the aesthetic experience of nature to that of art. Against this tendency, in this article I demonstrate that not only does Adorno contest the (...) inferiority of the aesthetic experience of nature but his unconventional description and theoretical articulation of natural beauty is especially pertinent for our time of climate crisis. By unpacking his endorsement of Walter Benjamin's casting both nature and history in terms of transience, I argue that Adorno proposes an experience of natural beauty that is expressive of social historical content, offers a vision of a different relationship with nature, and discloses ethical claims on us to act in this world. (shrink)