The plan of this book -- The problem of animal pain -- The Bayesian argument from animal pain -- Is there really a problem? the challenge of neo-cartesianism -- There is a problem. the defeat of neo-cartesianism -- The saint-making theodicy I:Negative phase -- The saint-making theodicy II:Positive phase -- Animal saints -- Animal afterlife.

Abstract In this paper I suggest a way that an already promising view on ethical art criticism can account for the value of mediocre artworks which endorse morally commendable perspectives. In order for the view I call prescriptive ethicism to deal with such cases of critical ambivalence, it must take account of the interaction between moral content and form in art. Such interaction is seen in the way the aesthetic features of an artwork partly determine its moral value, or success (...) in providing ethical insight. I argue that if a work lacks the kind of moral value which is determined by the interaction between form and content, then we have little reason to engage with that work. When a work expresses an otherwise commendable moral attitude in a clumsy or trite manner, while it is clearly compromised aesthetically, it is also compromised ethically. For such a work forfeits the ability to reveal new aspects of ethical life. (shrink)

Gatekeeping, or determining membership of your group, is crucial to science: the moniker ‘scientific’ is a stamp of epistemic quality or even authority. But gatekeeping in science is fraught with dangers. Gatekeepers must exclude bad science, science fraud and pseudoscience, while including the disagreeing viewpoints on which science thrives. This is a difficult tightrope, not least because gatekeeping is a human matter and can be influenced by biases such as groupthink. After spelling out these general tensions around gatekeeping in science, (...) we shed light on them with a case study from psychology. This concerns whether academic psychologists rightly or wrongly classify the applied-psychology framework of NLP (‘neuro-linguistic programming’) as unscientific and even pseudoscientific. This example of gatekeeping is particularly instructive because both the NLP community and the psychology community, we argue, make legitimate but also illegitimate moves. This case gives rise to several general insights about gatekeeping in science more generally. (shrink)

Accessible and elegant teachings from a well-loved and revered woman Zen teacher. “The truth and joy of this life is that we cannot change things as they are.” The import of those words can be found beautifully expressed in the work of the woman who spoke them, Katherine Thanas (1927–2012)—in her art, in her writing, and especially in her Zen teaching. Fearlessly direct and endlessly curious, Katherine’s understanding of Zen was inseparable from her affinity for the arts. She (...) was an MFA student studying painting with Richard Diebenkorn, the preeminent Californian abstract painter, when she met Shunryu Suzuki, author of Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind, in the sixties. Soon thereafter she decided to drop painting to dedicate herself to Zen, which she did for the last forty years of her life. In these essential teachings taken from her dharma talks—which make up her only book—her love of art and literature shine through in her elegant prose and her vast references, from poets William Stafford and Naomi Shihab Nye to the Zen teachings of Dogen and Robert Aitken. Ranging on subjects from the practice of zazen to the meaning of life, Katherine urges us to “develop an insatiable appetite for inner awareness, to become proficient with this mind.” This slim volume is an important contribution by a well-loved and revered teacher. (shrink)

Learn to be responsible with Grover and your Sesame Street friends! Young readers will discover how to be a good helper to both themselves and those around them. Now in Spanish!

Critical Notice on Organizations as Wrongdoers By Stephanie Collins Oxford University Press, 2023. -/- Extract: What, if any, role does metaphysics have to play in addressing moral questions? When answering questions about moral responsibility, many theories rely on answers to questions about the nature of agency and agents, the persistence of persons and the existence and nature of free will. In recent work in social ontology, philosophers have argued for views of social categories or identities that take ethical and social–political (...) desiderata into consideration in several ways. Some argue for views of gender identities that depend on epistemic and ethical considerations (Bettcher, 2009). Others develop views of gender categories in ways they take to be metaphysically realist, tracking robust explanatory patterns in the world. For instance, Barnes (2017) argues for this interpretation of Haslanger’s views of racial and gender categories. Others argue that injustice and oppression are reflected in the nature of social categories. For instance, while it ought not to be this way, some gender categories are, for instance, trans-exclusionary (Ásta 2018). Indeed, one might even argue that social categories can involve a distinctively metaphysical form of oppression (Jenkins 2020, 2023). It is clear that many philosophers argue in ways that draw close connections between metaphysical and moral theorizing. ... (shrink)

Altruism is a well-studied phenomenon in the social sciences, but online altruism has received relatively little attention. In this article, we examine several cases of online altruism, and analyse the key characteristics of the phenomenon, in particular comparing and contrasting it against models of traditional donor behaviour. We suggest a novel definition of online altruism, and provide an in-depth, mixed-method study of a significant case, represented by the r/Assistance subreddit. We argue that online altruism can be characterized by its differing (...) experiences compared to traditional giving, from a giver’s point of view, and unique mechanisms and actions made possible by the internet. These findings explain why people give to anonymous strangers online and provide a new perspective on altruism that is important in building a more altruistic internet and society. (shrink)

We articulate a view of natural kinds as complex universals. We do not attempt to argue for the existence of universals. Instead, we argue that, given the existence of universals, and of natural kinds, the latter can be understood in terms of the former, and that this provides a rich, flexible framework within which to discuss issues of indeterminacy, essentialism, induction, and reduction. Along the way, we develop a 'problem of the many' for universals.

This is a short response to Aaron Cotnoir's 'Composition as General Identity', in which I suggest some further applications of his ideas, and try to press the question of why we should think of his 'general identity relation' as a genuine identity relation.

In this article, we examine in detail the New Atheists' most serious argument for the conclusion that God does not exist, namely, Richard Dawkins's Ultimate 747 Gambit. Dawkins relies upon a strong explanatory principle involving simplicity. We systematically inspect the various kinds of simplicity that Dawkins may invoke. Finding his crucial premises false on any common conception of simplicity, we conclude that Dawkins has not given good reason to think God does not exist.

In this chapter I outline some metaphysical views about time, and about persistence, and discuss how they can help us clarify our thinking about life and death.

The main goal of publicly funded biomedical research is to generate social value through the creation and application of knowledge that can improve the well-being of current and future people. Prioritising research with the greatest potential social value is crucial for good stewardship of limited public resources and ensuring ethical involvement of research participants. At the National Institutes of Health (NIH), peer reviewers hold the expertise and responsibility for social value assessment and resulting prioritisation at the project level. However, previous (...) research has shown that peer reviewers place more emphasis on a study’s methods (‘Approach’) than on its potential social value (best approximated by the criterion of ‘Significance’). Lower weighting of Significance may be due to reviewers’ views on the relative importance of social value, their belief that social value is evaluated at other stages of the research priority-setting process or the lack of guidance on how to approach the challenging task of assessing expected social value. The NIH is currently revising its review criteria and how these criteria contribute to overall scores. To elevate the role of social value in priority setting, the agency should support empirical research on how peer reviewers approach the assessment of social value, provide more specific guidance for reviewing social value and experiment with alternative reviewer assignment strategies. These recommendations would help ensure that funding priorities align with the NIH’s mission and the obligation of taxpayer-funded research to contribute to the public good. (shrink)

This is a very introductory introduction to some ways in which the special and general theories of relativity may bear upon metaphysical questions about the nature of time and space, and the persistence of objects.

Dialogue, as a philosophical form, enables the exploration of the conditions, limits, and consequences of understanding arguments. Two philosophers who undertook to write dialogues—Plato and Heidegger—feature moments in philosophical conversation in which understanding, on its own, fails to convince an interlocutor of an argument. In this article, I examine the philosophical stakes of the collisions which unfold in Plato’s Gorgias, between Socrates and Callicles, and in Heidegger’s “Triadic Conversation,” between the Guide and the Scientist. Plato’s Socrates is ostensibly unsuccessful in (...) persuading Callicles to adopt his position while Heidegger’s Guide is able to support the Scientist in learning a new way of thinking. I argue that it is Heidegger’s attention to feeling as a philosophically significant phenomenon which can overcome trans-rational resistance which may persist even after truth has been determined. (shrink)

The essays in Object-Oriented Feminism explore OOF: a feminist intervention into recent philosophical discourses--like speculative realism, object-oriented ontology (OOO), and new materialism--that take objects, things, stuff, and matter as primary. Object-oriented feminism approaches all objects from the inside-out position of being an object too, with all of its accompanying political and ethical potentials. This volume places OOF thought in a long history of ongoing feminist work in multiple disciplines. In particular, object-oriented feminism foregrounds three significant aspects of feminist thinking in (...) the philosophy of things: politics, engaging with histories of treating certain humans (women, people of color, and the poor) as objects; erotics, employing humor to foment unseemly entanglements between things; and ethics, refusing to make grand philosophical truth claims, instead staking a modest ethical position that arrives at being "in the right" by being "wrong." Seeking not to define object-oriented feminism but rather to enact it, the volume is interdisciplinary in approach, with contributors from a variety of fields, including sociology, anthropology, English, art, and philosophy. Topics are frequently provocative, engaging a wide range of theorists from Heidegger and Levinas to Irigaray and Haraway, and an intriguing diverse array of objects, including the female body as fetish object in Lolita subculture; birds made queer by endocrine disruptors; and truth claims arising in material relations in indigenous fiction and film. Intentionally, each essay can be seen as an "object" in relation to others in this collection. Contributors: Irina Aristarkhova, University of Michigan; Karen Gregory, University of Edinburgh; Marina Gržinic, Slovenian Academy of Science and Arts; Frenchy Lunning, Minneapolis College of Art and Design; Timothy Morton, Rice University; Anne Pollock, Georgia Tech; Elizabeth A. Povinelli, Columbia University; R. Joshua Scannell, CUNY Graduate Center; Adam Zaretsky, VASTAL. (shrink)

Unlike most fiction writers, Proust was trained in philosophy. In fact, he even considered writing a philosophical treatise instead of the novel we know so well. This hesitation about what form his writing should take still haunts his final choice of a novel, which is both philosophical, and yet, not philosophy. Take your pick of philosophers, from Plato to Nietzsche, and you can easily find an essay or even a book arguing that this particular philosopher most applies to Proust. But (...) as one plunges into the narrative that he finally wrote, one is struck by the fact that In Search of Lost Time feels nothing like what we often call a philosophical novel, or even, a novel of ideas. Instead, philosophical reflection lies in the shadows of his fictional world, a sort of parallel life that can be found in the underweave. (shrink)

The lifeworld of the classroom -- Getting deep : the integrative biology of teaching and learning -- Preparation for teaching : "what can they experience in class?" -- Teaching as improvisational jazz : "to go somewhere to answer a big question" -- Free to learn : a radical aspect of our approach -- Student experiences of other students : "all together in this space" -- Transcending the classroom : student reports of personal and professional change -- Messing up and messing (...) about : student needs and teachers' adaptation of our phenomenological approach -- The contribution of our existential phenomenological approach to higher education pedagogy : implications for theory, research, and practice. (shrink)

Over the past two decades, stories of world-ending catastrophe have featured prominently in film and television. Zombie apocalypses, climate disasters, alien invasions, global pandemics and dystopian world orders fill our screens-typically with a singular figure or tenacious group tasked with saving or salvaging the world. Why are stories of End Times crisis so popular with audiences? And why is the hero so often a white man who overcomes personal struggles and incredible obstacles to lead humanity toward a restored future? This (...) book examines the familiar trope of the hero and the recasting of contemporary anxieties in narratives like The Walking Dead, Snowpiercer and Mad Max: Fury Road. Some have familiar roots in Western cultural traditions yet many question popular assumptions about heroes and heroism to tell new and fascinating stories about race, gender and society and the power of individuals to change the world. (shrink)

How do things persist? Are material objects spread out through time just as they are spread out through space? Or is temporal persistence quite different from spatial extension? This key question lies at the heart of any metaphysical exploration of the material world, and it plays a crucial part in debates about personal identity and survival. This book explores and compares three theories of persistence — endurance, perdurance, and stage theories — investigating the ways in which they attempt to account (...) for the world around us. Having provided valuable clarification of its two main rivals, the book concludes by advocating stage theory. Such a basic issue about the nature of the physical world naturally has close ties with other central philosophical problems. This book includes discussions of change and parthood, of how we refer to material objects at different times, of the doctrine of Humean supervenience, and of the modal features of material things. In particular, it contains new accounts of the nature of worldly vagueness, and of what binds material things together over time, distinguishing the career of a natural object from an arbitrary sequence of events. Each chapter concludes with a reflection about the impact of these metaphysical debates upon questions about our personal identity and survival. (shrink)

Stereotypes sometimes lead us to make poor judgements of other people, but they also have the potential to facilitate quick, efficient, and accurate judgements. How can we discern whether any individual act of stereotyping will have the positive or negative effect? How Stereotypes Deceive Us addresses this question. It identifies various factors that determine whether or not the application of a stereotype to an individual in a specific context will facilitate or impede correct judgements and perceptions of the individual. It (...) challenges the thought that stereotyping only and always impedes correct judgement when the stereotypes that are applied are inaccurate, failing to reflect social realities. It argues instead that stereotypes that reflect social realities can lead to misperceptions and misjudgements, and that inaccurate but egalitarian social attitudes can therefore facilitate correct judgements and accurate perceptions. The arguments presented in this book have important implications for those who might engage in stereotyping and those who are at risk of being stereotyped. They have implications for those who work in healthcare and those who have mental health conditions. How Stereotypes Deceive Us provides a new conceptual framework-evaluative dispositionalism-that captures the epistemic faults of stereotypes and stereotyping, providing conceptual resources that can be used to improve our own thinking by avoiding the pitfalls of stereotyping, and to challenge other people's stereotyping where it is likely to lead to misperception and misjudgement. (shrink)

Your perspective on life can be your power or your prison. It can serve your anxiety, your stress, and your depression, or it can support your peace, your courage, and your growth. Trent Shelton, one of the most groundbreaking and dynamic teachers of our time, wants to help you chart your path to a new perspective. Protect Your Peace offers tools to reshape your mindset and redefine the meaning you find in your life-tools that he knows can work for (...) you, because he has used them himself to transform his own life. In these pages, Trent outlines nine essential principles to help you: · Protect your energy from the things that drain it · Protect your mind from the things that distract you · Protect your soul from the things that don't fulfill you You'll learn simple strategies for setting clear boundaries, disconnecting from negativity, honing your vision and your focus, and bringing your life into alignment with your true power and purpose-with Trent as your straight-talking, profoundly inspiring guide who's with you every step of the way. Trent lets you know in no uncertain terms that there is a war on-a war for your worth. The toughest battle in it is the one you're fighting within yourself. And Protect Your Peace gives you a road map to victory. (shrink)

Although the principle of fair subject selection is a widely recognized requirement of ethical clinical research, it often yields conflicting imperatives, thus raising major ethical dilemmas regarding participant selection. In this paper, we diagnose the source of this problem, arguing that the principle of fair subject selection is best understood as a bundle of four distinct sub-principles, each with normative force and each yielding distinct imperatives: (1) fair inclusion; (2) fair burden sharing; (3) fair opportunity; and (4) fair distribution of (...) third-party risks. We first map out these distinct sub-principles, and then identify the ways in which they yield conflicting imperatives for the design of inclusion and exclusion criteria, and the recruitment of participants. We then offer guidance for how decision makers should navigate these conflicting imperatives to ensure that participants are selected fairly. (shrink)

This chapter contains section titled: The ‘Essence’ of a Philosophical Prejudice One Philosophical Task or Two? Techniques for Ridding People of Philosophical Prejudices.

Social groups—like teams, committees, gender groups, and racial groups—play a central role in our lives and in philosophical inquiry. Here I develop and motivate a structuralist ontology of social groups centered on social structures (i.e., networks of relations that are constitutively dependent on social factors). The view delivers a picture that encompasses a diverse range of social groups, while maintaining important metaphysical and normative distinctions between groups of different kinds. It also meets the constraint that not every arbitrary collection of (...) people is a social group. In addition, the framework provides resources for developing a broader structuralist view in social ontology. (shrink)

Social groups, including racial and gender groups and teams and committees, seem to play an important role in our world. This article examines key metaphysical questions regarding groups. I examine answers to the question ‘Do groups exist?’ I argue that worries about puzzles of composition, motivations to accept methodological individualism, and a rejection of Racialism support a negative answer to the question. An affirmative answer is supported by arguments that groups are efficacious, indispensible to our best theories, and accepted given (...) common sense. Then, I turn to an examination of the features of social groups. I argue that social groups can be divided into two sorts. Groups of Type 1 are organized social groups like courts and clubs. Groups of Type 2 are groups like Blacks, women, and lesbians. While groups of both sorts have some features in common, they also have marked differences in features. Finally, I turn to views of the nature of social groups. I argue that the difference in features provides evidence that social groups do not have a uniform nature. Teams and committees are structured wholes, while race and gender groups are social kinds. (shrink)

It has been argued that humans can face an ethical/epistemic dilemma over the automatic stereotyping involved in implicit bias: ethical demands require that we consistently treat people equally, as equally likely to possess certain traits, but if our aim is knowledge or understanding our responses should reflect social inequalities meaning that members of certain social groups are statistically more likely than others to possess particular features. I use psychological research to argue that often the best choice from the epistemic perspective (...) is the same as the best choice from the ethical perspective: to avoid automatic stereotyping even when this involves failing to reflect social realities in our judgements. This argument has an important implication: it shows that it is not possible to successfully defend an act of automatic stereotyping simply on the basis that the stereotype reflects an aspect of social reality. An act of automatic stereotyping can be poor from an epistemic perspective even if the stereotype that is activated reflects reality. (shrink)

In this paper I argue for a view of groups, things like teams, committees, clubs and courts. I begin by examining features all groups seem to share. I formulate a list of six features of groups that serve as criteria any adequate theory of groups must capture. Next, I examine four of the most prominent views of groups currently on offer—that groups are non-singular pluralities, fusions, aggregates and sets. I argue that each fails to capture one or more of the (...) criteria. Last, I develop a view of groups as realizations of structures. The view has two components. First, groups are entities with structure. Second, since groups are concreta, they exist only when a group structure is realized. A structure is realized when each of its functionally defined nodes or places are occupied. I show how such a view captures the six criteria for groups, which no other view of groups adequately does, while offering a substantive answer to the question, “What are groups?”. (shrink)

This paper illustrates the relevance of Foucault’s analysis of neoliberal governance for a critical understanding of recent transformations in individual and social life in the United States, particularly in terms of how the realms of the public and the private and the personal and the political are understood and practiced. The central aim of neoliberal governmentality (“the conduct of conduct”) is the strategic creation of social conditions that encourage and necessitate the production of Homo economicus, a historically specific form of (...) subjectivity constituted as a free and autonomous “atom” of self-interest. The neoliberal subject is an individual who is morally responsible for navigating the social realm using rational choice and cost-benefit calculations grounded on market-based principles to the exclusion of all other ethical values and social interests. While the more traditional forms of domination and exploitation characteristic of sovereign and disciplinary forms of power remain evident in our ”globalized” world, the effects of subjectification produced at the level of everyday life through the neoliberal “conduct of conduct” recommend that we recognize and invent new forms of critique and ethical subjectivation that constitute resistance to its specific dangers. (shrink)

Findings from the cognitive sciences suggest that the cognitive mechanisms responsible for some memory errors are adaptive, bringing benefits to the organism. In this paper we argue that the same cognitive mechanisms also bring a suite of significant epistemic benefits, increasing the chance of an agent obtaining epistemic goods like true belief and knowledge. This result provides a significant challenge to the folk conception of memory beliefs that are false, according to which they are a sign of cognitive frailty, indicating (...) that a person is less reliable than others or their former self. Evidence of memory errors can undermine a person’s view of themselves as a competent epistemic agent, but we show that false memory beliefs can be the result of the ordinary operation of cognitive mechanisms found across the species, which bring substantial epistemic benefits. This challenge to the folk conception is not adequately captured by existing epistemological theories. However, it can be captured by the notion of epistemic innocence, which has previously been deployed to highlight how beliefs which have epistemic costs can also bring significant epistemic benefits. We therefore argue that the notion of epistemic innocence should be expanded so that it applies not just to beliefs but also to cognitive mechanisms. (shrink)

Scenario-based training brings to life ethical dilemmas for employees and helps to embed ethical values into company culture and behaviour. This practical guide provides advice on developing and choosing different types of scenarios and facilitating scenario-based training.

In the late first and early second millennia, mainland Southeast Asians created sophisticated techniques to accurately and efficiently render Pali into local vernaculars, including Burmese, Khmer, Khün, Lanna, Lao, Lü, Mon, and Siamese. These techniques for vernacular reading, parallel to approaches for reading Latin in medieval Europe and Literary Sinitic in Japan, Korea, and Vietnam, led to the development of bitexts that contained a mix of Pali and vernacular material. Such bitexts, arranged in both interlinear and interphrasal formats, gradually allowed (...) second-millennium Southeast Asian writers to sprout a vernacular literature from the established branches of Pali genres. Bitexts themselves formed the basis for a new literary style that stemmed from the techniques of vernacular reading, a style that set the standard for belles-lettres until the early twentieth century. The spread of Pali-vernacular bitexts in Southeast Asia allowed for the literary elevation of the vernacular without renouncing the cosmopolitan idiom of Pali. To support these arguments, this article draws on some of the earliest examples of bitexts in Central Thailand and Northern Thailand. These include a hitherto undeciphered form of manuscript annotation in seventeenth- to nineteenth-century Siam; two of the oldest palm-leaf documents surviving in any Tai language, from sixteenth-century Lanna; and the oldest known Pali-Siamese literary work, thought to be composed in 1482. These bitexts provide detailed evidence for vernacular reading and the emergence of vernacular literature in mainland Southeast Asian in general and Thailand in particular. (shrink)

Few concepts have been considered as essential to the theory of knowledge and rational belief as that of evidence. The simplest theory which accounts for this is evidentialism, the view that epistemic justification for belief--the kind of justification typically taken to be required for knowledge--is determined solely by considerations pertaining to one's evidence. In this ground-breaking book, leading epistemologists from across the spectrum challenge and refine evidentialism, sometimes suggesting that it needs to be expanded in quite surprising directions. Following this, (...) the twin pillars of contemporary evidentialism--Earl Conee and Richard Feldman--respond to each essay. This engaging debate covers a vast number of issues, and will illuminate and inform. (shrink)

Recently several philosophers have argued that racial, gender, and other social generic generalizations should be avoided given their propensity to promote essentialist thinking, obscure the social nature of categories, and contribute to oppression. Here I argue that a general prohibition against social generics goes too far. Given that the truth of many generics require regularities or systematic rather than mere accidental correlations, they are our best means for describing structural forms of violence and discrimination. Moreover, their accuracy, their persistence in (...) the face of counterexamples, and features of the contemporary socio-political context make generics useful linguistic tools in social justice projects. (shrink)