In The Foundations of Arithmetic, Gottlob Frege contended that the difference between concepts and objects was absolute. He meant that no object could be a concept and no concept an object. Benno Kerry disagreed; he contended that a concept could be an object, and that therefore the difference between concepts and objects was only relative. In this book, Jolley aims to understand the debate between Frege and Kerry. But Jolley's purpose is not so much to champion either side; rather, it (...) is to utilize an understanding of the debate to shed light on the work of Ludwig Wittgenstein-and vice versa. Jolley not only sifts through the debate between Frege and Kerry, but also through subsequent versions of the debate in J. J. Valberg and Wilfred Sellars. Jolley's goal is to show that the central notion of Philosophical Investigations, that of a 'conceptual investigation', is a legacy of the Frege/Kerry debate and also a contribution to it. Jolley concludes that the difference between concepts and objects is as absolute in its way in Philosophical Investigations as it was in The Foundations of Arithmetic and that recognizing the absoluteness of the difference in Philosophical Investigations provides a beginning for a 'resolute' reading of Wittgenstein's book. (shrink)

My essay is framed by Hypatia's first special issue on Motherhood and Sexuality at one end, and by the most recent special issue (as of this writing) on the work of Iris Young, whose work on pregnant embodiment has become canonical, at the other. The questions driving this essay are: When we look back over the last twenty-five years, what has changed in our conceptions of pregnancy and maternity, both in feminist theory and in popular culture? What aspects of feminist (...) debates from the 1970s and 1980s are still relevant today? And, how might what appear to be radical shifts in popular perceptions of pregnancy actually continue traditional values that objectify and “abjectify” the maternal body?Here, I will focus on three central elements of the revaluation of pregnancy and maternity as they show up in feminist philosophy and in popular culture: 1. The relationship between pregnancy and sexuality, both in terms of pregnant sexuality and in terms of the pregnant body as sexual object; 2. The “choice” to become a mother as a “feminist choice”; 3. The temporality of pregnancy and birth as marking something like “women's time.”. (shrink)

What follows is talky—I skitter across a number of difficult topics much too quickly and with little attempt to defend what I say. I may be able to add some defense later in discussion, but I don't promise anything much and certainly nothing fancy. I am still very much in the process of thinking about these topics, and I aim to do no more than to perhaps nudge you to think about them too.By "poetry" in what follows, I typically mean (...) "lyric poetry." There are poems and poems and poems, and the dactyls make a difference, as do many other features internal to poetry. I will also say upfront that I have no working definition of "lyric poetry." I also have no working definition of "philosophy," although I will be... (shrink)

In this article, I argue that the liberal framework-its autonomous individuals with equal rights-allows judges to justify enforcing surrogacy contracts. More importantly, even where judges do not enforce surrogacy contracts, the liberal framework conceals gender and class issues which insure that the surrogate will lose custody of her child. I suggest that Marx's analysis of estranged labor can reveal the class and gender issues which the liberal framework conceals.

ObjectivesTo describe reporting of informed consent in pragmatic trials, justifications for waivers of consent and reporting of alternative approaches to standard written consent. To identify factors associated with (1) not reporting and (2) not obtaining consent.MethodsSurvey of primary trial reports, published 2014–2019, identified using an electronic search filter for pragmatic trials implemented in MEDLINE, and registered in ClinicalTrials.gov.ResultsAmong 1988 trials, 132 (6.6%) did not include a statement about participant consent, 1691 (85.0%) reported consent had been obtained, 139 (7.0%) reported a (...) waiver and 26 (1.3%) reported consent for one aspect (eg, data collection) but a waiver for another (eg, intervention). Of the 165 trials reporting a waiver, 76 (46.1%) provided a justification. Few (53, 2.9%) explicitly reported use of alternative approaches to consent. In multivariable logistic regression analyses, lower journal impact factor (p=0.001) and cluster randomisation (p<0.0001) were significantly associated with not reporting on consent, while trial recency, cluster randomisation, higher-income country settings, health services research and explicit labelling as pragmatic were significantly associated with not obtaining consent (all p<0.0001).DiscussionNot obtaining consent seems to be increasing and is associated with the use of cluster randomisation and pragmatic aims, but neither cluster randomisation nor pragmatism are currently accepted justifications for waivers of consent. Rather than considering either standard written informed consent or waivers of consent, researchers and research ethics committees could consider alternative consent approaches that may facilitate the conduct of pragmatic trials while preserving patient autonomy and the public’s trust in research. (shrink)

In this essay, I respond to A. W. Moore’s instructive chapter on Frege. I respond by asking various questions, and I question particularly Moore’s claim that Frege, in reacting to Benno Kerry, falls into Hegelian excess. I toy with responding to my question by regarding Frege as anticipating a Wittgensteinian-Heideggerian exaction. It remains unclear whether this constitutes (much) progress.

Traditional notions of crime control often position the police against an individual, known or not yet known, who is responsible for the commission of a crime. However, with increasingly sophisticated technology, policing increasingly prioritizes the prevention of crime, making it necessary to ascertain who, or what class of persons, may be the next likely criminal before a crime can be committed, termed predictive policing. This causes a shift from individualized suspicion toward predictive profiling that may sway the expectations of a (...) police patrol. Classically, where a patrol officer forms reasonable suspicion prior to a stop, it is based upon his/her analysis of the situation taken as a whole in context. However, where a predictive profile is employed, information available to the officer accordingly adjusts his/her perception of context and affects the application of the reasonable suspicion standard. This article addresses the way in which new approaches to forming reasonable suspicion affect the due process protection of individuals’ fundamental rights. It argues that while an officer still operates with good faith discretion, using predictive profiling causes reasonable suspicion to be based on an augmented understanding of reality and as a result, due process guarantees are weakened. The rights to non-discrimination and the presumption of innocence are assessed and argued as illustrative of this weakening and shift in policing standards. The article ultimately argues that while predictive policing cannot be categorically labeled as inconsistent with criminal justice, changes as seemingly moderate as the manner in which discretion operates have larger effects on individuals’ rights. (shrink)

Agamben maintains that Heidegger continues the work of the anthropological machine by defining Dasein as uniquely open to the closedness of the animal. Yet, Agamben’s own thinking does not so much open up the concept of animal as it attempts to save humanity from the anthropological machine that always produces the animal as the constitutive outside within the human itself. Agamben’s return to religious metaphors at best displaces the binary man-animal with the binary religion-science, and at worst returns us to (...) a discourse at least as violent as the one from which he is trying to escape. Merleau-Ponty’s reanimation of science provides an alternative. (shrink)

In the dissertation I explore three central issues in Plotinus' philosophical psychology: The fall of the soul, the relationships of soul and body, and the concept of the ego. ;Chapter 1 introduces the issues. Chapter 2 argues for a dual-aspect theory about the soul's fall. Chapter 3 characterizes the relationships between soul and body. Much of the chapter is devoted to distancing Plotinus' dualism from Cartesian dualism. The chapter ends with a discussion of Plotinus on perception. Chapter 4 investigates the (...) concept of the ego, the function of the ego in union with the One, and the relationship between the ego and the other powers of the soul. (shrink)

What is it to read Wittgenstein resolutely? In this essay, I make a suggestion about how to answer that question. I backtrack in time to a debate about Philosophical Investigations between O. K. Bouwsma and Gilbert Ryle. I selectively reconstruct that debate, highlighting features of it that I take to be interesting in their own right and in relation to debates about PI, but also interesting in analogy with debates about resolute and standard readings of Tractatus logico-philosophicus. As will be (...) clear, my sympathies are with Bouwsma against Ryle, and with resolute readers against standard readers. But I do not vindicate Bouwsma; I will, in fact, be critical, carefully or guardedly critical of him.Nor do I vindicate resolute reading of TLP. I suggest a way of seeing resolute reading that makes clearer what it is and how it contrasts with standard reading, and, in so doing, that makes clearer what some of the difficulties of the debate between the readings really are, whether about TLP or about PI. (shrink)

In this essay, we focus primarily on Moore’s “Proof of an External World” and Kant’s “Refutation of Idealism.” We are not exactly commenting on Clarke’s “The Legacy of Skepticism,” interpreting it, although what we do involves us in (some of) that. Instead of directly commenting on it, we do things with Legacy; we read Moore’s Proof and Kant’s Refutation with Clarke in mind. And by way of doing this, we bring onto the stage a post-Legacy Moore, and a post-Legacy Kant. (...) We do not claim to present Moore and Kant per se (to use Clarke’s term); we do not portray Moore and Kant as they are independently of “The Legacy of Skepticism.” We propose instead Moore and Kant as we read them after Legacy, i.e., in light of the pure/plain distinction. (shrink)

In the last half century, oral history has emerged as a historical approach that is being considered by archivists involved with the collection and accessibility of archival collections for researchers and interested members of the public. The approach to ethics by oral historians has emerged from two major fears: the fear of failing as researchers and the fear of failing the narrators and doing harm. Archivists also need to be cognisant of these fears when collecting oral history. Confronting these fears (...) makes it possible to understand the complex questions behind oral historians’ and archivists’ preoccupations and sheds light on how oral history has evolved and expanded as a field. The research objectives of this article are to determine the three principles identified from the Belmont Report that relate and should be applied to the collection of oral histories by archivists and historians from communities and individuals residing and working in and alongside the Kruger National Park. The theoretical framework for this article is the critical race theory to address historical accounts from communities and individuals sidelined by the mainstream media in South Africa. For the purposes of this article, the study was conducted with the Makuleka and Tsonga communities to determine what ethical implications need to be respected when conducting oral history projects with communities.Contribution: This article will contribute to ethics concerning social sciences and specifically the collection of oral history. (shrink)

: I begin to suggest an alternative to the notion of vision based in alienation and hostility put forth by Jean-Paul Sartre, Sigmund Freud, and Jacques Lacan. I diagnose this alienating vision as a result of a particular alienating notion of space presupposed by their theories. I develop Irigaray's comments about light and air to suggest an alternative notion of space that opens up the possibility that vision connects us to others rather than alienates us from them.

Thousands of youth suffering from acquired brain injury or other early-life neurological disease live, mature, and learn with only limited communication and interaction with their world. Such cognitively capable children are ideal candidates for brain-computer interfaces. While BCI systems are rapidly evolving, a fundamental gap exists between technological innovators and the patients and families who stand to benefit. Forays into translating BCI systems to children in recent years have revealed that kids can learn to operate simple BCI with proficiency akin (...) to adults. BCI could bring significant boons to the lives of many children with severe physical impairment, supporting their complex physical and social needs. However, children have been neglected in BCI research and a collaborative BCI research community is required to unite and push pediatric BCI development forward. To this end, the pediatric BCI Canada collaborative network was formed, under a unified goal to cooperatively drive forward pediatric BCI innovation and impact. This article reflects on the topics and discussions raised in the foundational BCI-CAN meeting held in Toronto, ON, Canada in November 2019 and suggests the next steps required to see BCI impact the lives of children with severe neurological disease and their families. (shrink)

There has been increasing use of argument-based approaches in the development of safety-critical systems. Within this approach, a safety case plays a key role in the system development life cycle. The key components in a safety case are safety arguments, which are designated to demonstrate that the system is acceptably safe. Inappropriate reasoning in safety arguments could undermine a system's safety claims which in turn contribute to safety-related failures of the system. The review of safety arguments is therefore a crucial (...) step in the development of safety-critical systems. Reviews are conducted using dialogues where elements of the argument and their relations are proposed and scrutinised. This paper investigates an approach of conducting argument review using dialectical models. After studying five established dialectical models with varying strengths and drawbacks, a new dialectical model specially designed to support persuasion and information-seeking dialogues has been proposed to suit the requir... (shrink)

The ecohumanist/service-learning approach to environmental education provides a bridge between science and public policy on the one hand, and direct civic action on the other. This pedagogy appears to be a promising way to engage students and to extend the reach of environmental education beyond the classroom. This paper surveys the philosophical context for ecohumanities pedagogy, relates the key moments of teaching such a course, describes specific outcomes, and offers practical advice for those who might wish to try a similar (...) approach to environmental education. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Little Hans’s Little SisterKelly OliverIn an important sense, Freud’s metapsychology is built on the back of animal phobias, which he repeatedly trots out whenever he needs to substantiate his theories of the castration complex, anxiety, and even the foundational Oedipal complex.1 From a feminist perspective, it is fascinating that behind the animal phobias that define Freud’s work—Little Hans’s horse, the Rat Man, the Wolf Man—there are consistently fantasies of (...) matricide, self-birth, and womb envy. Perhaps more significantly, there are sisters who both torment and titillate their brothers and thereby contribute to the onset of their phobias. Freud relegates to the background these terrible sisters and their abjected mothers to put the father at the center of animal phobia. In this essay, I will explore the mothers and sisters effaced by the father-animal and the ways in which they “bite back” in Freud’s own analysis of animal phobias.Eat or Be EatenIn the major cases of animal phobia that Freud analyzes and repeatedly invokes throughout his writings, from the “Analysis of Phobia in a Five-Year-Old Boy” (1909a) on, he identifies the threat posed by the animal with the father’s castration threats; the boy-child’s fear of being bitten by the animal in question is interpreted as a fear of castration. For example, in his analysis of Little Hans (the Five Year-Old Boy), Hans is afraid that a horse will bite him. Freud interprets his horse phobia as the substitution of the horse for his father, from whom he fears castration as punishment for his desires for his mother. Hans has ambivalent feelings toward his father, whom he both loves and fears, and “solves” the problem by splitting his father into the good father and the [End Page 9] bad father, the latter represented by the horse. The Rat Man and the Wolf Man both get their names from the animals that they fear will bite or devour them.The Rat Man is named for his famous story of an “Eastern” punishment whereby rats used their teeth to bore into the anus of the victim (Freud 1909b, 166). It doesn’t take long for Freud to discover that one of the imagined victims of this punishment is the patient’s father. The rest of the analysis turns around the patient’s relationship with his father, his father’s disapproval of his sexual relations, and the patient’s imagined punishment associated with sex. The Rat Man’s phobic fantasies involve being devoured by rats, or his father being devoured by rats as a sort of punishment levied for his father’s cruelty and the patient’s own sexual indiscretions. Later in his analysis, Freud links the rat phobia to anal eroticism associated with the patient’s childhood being plagued by worms. The rats come to represent many things, including money, disease, the penis, and children. The association between rats and children involves, among other things, the fact that as a child, the patient liked to bite people.The Wolf Man is also afraid of being devoured by animals. Although the fear of being devoured or bitten by wolves is central to Freud’s analysis, the patient reports other animal phobias—butterflies, caterpillars, swine—some involving similar fears. In the case of the Wolf Man, Freud interprets the dreaded wolf as a father substitute that threatens to devour the patient as he had seen a wolf devour seven little goats in a fairy-tale book that his sister used to torment him with as a child: “Whenever he caught sight of this picture [of a wolf] he began to scream like a lunatic that he was afraid of the wolf coming and eating him up. His sister, however, always succeeded in arranging so that he was obliged to see this picture, and was delighted at his terror” (Freud 1918, 16). Freud surmised that in the cases of the Wolf Man and of Little Hans, their fathers used to pretend to want to gobble them up (Freud 1925, 104). He likens this to another case of a young American whose father read him stories aboutan... (shrink)

This essay examines media images of women in recent conflicts in the Middle East. From the Abu Ghraib prison abuses to protests in Iran, women have become the public face of violence, carried out and suffered. Women’s bodies are figured as sexual and violent, a potent combination that stirs public imagination and feeds into stereotypes of women as femme fatales or “bombshells.”.

The development of the emerging science of ecology influenced the later work of both Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty. Both use zoology, biology, and ecology intheir attempts to navigate between mechanism and vitalism, but their interpretations and use of the life sciences take them on divergent paths and lead them to radically different conclusions regarding the relationship between man and animal. This essay takes up the problematic of kinship with animals in Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty. Beyond the texts of these two thinkers are (...) the more general stakes of the relationships between humans and animals and the question of whether or not animals can be our kin. (shrink)

abstract: This essay explores the connections between speculation, spectacle, and the death penalty, particularly insofar as they bear on what is “proper to man” and on the man–animal distinction. Returning to a scene of death from Derrida's seminar The Beast and the Sovereign, specifically the scene of an elephant's autopsy, we see how what he calls “the globalization of the autopsic model” of sovereignty requires the death of the animal (Derrida 2009, 296). Following Derrida, we see how man's dominion over (...) other animals is built on a model of sovereignty as necropsy that erects itself through the autopsic model of power, which ultimately is built on the scaffolding of death and the death penalty. Following the history of the death penalty, however, we see that it becomes the property of man through its exercise on animals, particularly through the capital punishment of animals, which inaugurated the codification of law in Europe, and Thomas Edison's electrocution of animals, which inaugurated the electric chair as a form of execution in the United States. Moreover, the case of Edison (who invented both the electric chair and the first moving pictures, many of which were images of execution) makes manifest the connection between spectacle, animals, and the death penalty. (shrink)

Often an argument will rely on the hearer’s knowing something obvious or implied. Such knowledge is said to be contained in an unstated or missing premise.

As became clear in the wake of Joseph Brent 's presentation to this Society a year ago, the question of the relevance of biography to philosophy is a point of some controversy.0 On the one hand, the logic books warn us that it is an error either to condemn or praise a system of ideas on the basis of its author's life. In that direction lie the ad hominem, ad populum, and empty arguments from authority. We do well to beware (...) of the genetic fallacy. On the other hand, we believe that philosophical ideas do have consequences for life, and we are right to look to their originators' lives for some indication of the consequences a system of ideas may have. Philosophers cannot stubbornly ignore Heidegger's association with the Nazis, or Jefferson's slaveholding. In such cases, biographical fact properly forces us to ask what a person was really thinking when he or she expressed some idea, or remained silent on a point we feel should obviously have been addressed. The context of signs that can be relevant for interpreting a philosopher's work does not consist only of written texts, as Peirce scholars should perhaps know better than anyone else. (shrink)

This 1945 “Preface” is intended to answer the question “What is phenomenology?” and to justify it as the methodology of the long work of philosophical psychology to follow. Merleau-Ponty approaches this task by first setting out the apparent paradoxes and contradictory claims that have been advanced by phenomenology, in a long and eloquent survey section that is built on a series of “X, but also Y” rhetorical devices. He then surveys four prominent themes of phenomenology. Just as he does in (...) the introductory section of the essay “The Philosopher and His Shadow,” Merleau-Ponty here presents himself as the chief interpreter and champion of Husserl's later philosophy. The first major theme considered is that phenomenology is a matter of describing the field of perception. This sets it in contrast to the prevalent explanatory methodologies of a) scientific empiricism and b) metaphysical idealism. Empirical science (such as mathematical physics) begins with observation, but then abstracts entirely from lived experience to consider idealized schematic cases (such as motion across a frictionless surface) that may reveal universal laws. Such a methodology is obviously fruitful in important respects, but is nonetheless naïve and dishonest in its renunciation of the specifics of observed events. The metaphysical idealism of Kant or Descartes likewise abstracts from the experienced particularity of perception to posit an “inner man” that constitutes the world according to 2 internal, transcendental principles. Merleau-Ponty's criticism is the same, whether these principles are “reason” of Rationalism, “the categories of understanding” of Critical Rationalism, or the rules governing the “association of ideas” posited by Empiricism. Phenomenology indicates that perception is not an act but a fact; the world is not an object but rather the unified setting of perception; and the inner man is a myth, along with his allegedly privileged access to univocal truth. The second theme is the technique of “phenomenological reduction,” the suspension of belief in the assemblage of everyday assumptions known as the “natural attitude.” Husserl's understanding of the reduction long led him to an idealist position: that all particular consciousnesses are united in a transcendental ego.. (shrink)

Sustainable growth is emerging as a normative concept in recent work in economics and environmental philosophy. This paper examines several kinds of growth, seeking to identify a sustainable form which could be adopted as normative for human society. The conceptions of growth expressed in standard economic theory, in the writings of John Dewey, and in population biology, each suggest particular accounts of how the lives of individuals and communities ought to be lived. I argue that, while absolute sustainablity is not (...) possible, the latter two conceptions together suggest a regulative ideal of sustainable growth which is acceptable at the social level, and which encourages the development of genuine community. (shrink)

Background There are intense discussions about the ethical and societal implications of biomedical engineering, but little data to suggest how scientists think about the ethics of their work. The aim of this study is to describe how scientists frame the ethics of their research, with a focus on the field of molecular systems engineering.Methods Semi-structured qualitative interviews were conducted during 2021–2022, as part of a larger study. This analysis includes a broad question about how participants view ethics as related to (...) their work, with follow up probes about the topics they consider most important. Interviews were transcribed, inductively coded by two researchers to consensus, and analyzed thematically.Results Twenty-four scientists participated in the study. Interviewees hold positions as professors, principal investigators, and senior staff researchers in universities or research institutes in the United States and Europe. Among those scientists who reported reflecting on ethical considerations in their work, many equated ethics with research ethics topics (e.g., safety, replicability), or with regulation and guidelines. Participants expressed the view that ethical issues are primarily relevant for clinical trials of bioengineered products, or for those working with animal or human subjects. Scientists described their research as “too early” or “not examining anything living” with regard to ethical reflection. Finally, many felt that ethics is seen as territory for experts and therefore beyond scientists’ competencies.Conclusions Molecular systems engineering scientists currently focus on regulatory aspects as the framework for their ethical analyses. They describe using a framework to define when life arises, as a means to determine when further ethical engagement is warranted. Further research is needed to investigate how scientists relate to the ethics of their scientific work, and build consensus around concepts of life, autonomous behavior, and physiological relevance of bioengineered systems. (shrink)

[1] In _What Computers Can't Do_ (1972), Hubert Dreyfus identified several basic assumptions about the nature of human knowledge which grounded contemporary research in cognitive science. Contemporary artificial intelligence, he argued, relied on an unjustified belief that the mind functions like a digital computer using symbolic manipulations ("the psychological assumption") (Dreyfus 1992: 163ff), or at least that computer programs could be understood as formalizing human thought ("the epistemological assumption") (Dreyfus 1992: 189). In addition, the project depended upon an assumption about (...) the data about the human world which we employ in thought - namely, that it consists of discrete, determinate, and explicit pieces which can be processed heuristically ("the ontological assumption") (Dreyfus 1992: 206). (shrink)