The evidence linking tobacco product advertising to adolescent smoking initiation and resulting long-term addiction, premature death, and disability is well established. Each link in the causal chain has been substantiated: children and adolescents are especially vulnerable to advertising; point-of-sale advertising comprises 92.1% of cigarette advertising and marketing expenditures by manufacturers and 71.3% of smokeless tobacco advertising; tobacco companies have targeted youth through advertising; advertising exposure causes adolescents to start and to continue smoking; among adults who become daily smokers, nearly all (...) first use of cigarettes occurs by 18 years of age; adolescents who smoke are at high risk for long-term addiction because their brains are still developing; and long-term addiction results in the tremendous personal, social and financial costs of tobacco-related illnesses. (shrink)

Allies are extremely important to LGBT rights. Though we don’t often enumerate what tasks we expect allies to do, a fairly common conception is that allies “support the LGBT community.” In the first section I introduce three difficulties for this position that collectively suggest it is conceptually insufficient. I then develop a positive account by starting with whom allies are allied to instead of what allies are supposed to do. We might obviously say here that allies are allied to the (...) LGBT community, but I will argue that this community is better thought of as a loose coalition because there are often intersectional issues and conflicting interests that challenge any unified sense of community. I argue that people typically become allies because a friend or family member is experiencing some kind of specific harm; if that harm or discrimination is what causally explains why people become allies, then allies are required to do more than we commonly think. Although allies have a prima facie obligation to honor what members of a subcommunity identify as a harm, this obligation is defeasible if an ally believes fulfilling the obligation would be harmful. I conclude by looking at how we can understand what an ally is in terms of a larger discussion about moral obligations. If people already have these obligations, whatever they are, because morality requires it, then the status “ally” is redundant. I conclude by showing that certain social statuses can not only transform or reprioritize prior moral commitments, but can also introduce new kinds of responsibility that an agent did not have before. (shrink)

In 2015, the FDA revised its indefinite deferral policy towards MSM blood donors. I develop an empirical case for the revised policy and show why rights-based objections fail. I introduce and defend a distinction between “ordinary” and “exact” justification that accounts for the worries in the empirical case. I conclude that the FDA is committed to further revising the policy to let MSM donors with exact justification donate.

Historians of science have proposed many theories to explain why Copernicus rejected the Ptolemaic system and advanced his own heliocentric system. In support of his new cosmological system Copernicus always employed theoretical considerations and never the existence of discrepancies between the positions given in the Tables and those observed. It is shown that the general acceptance of the heliocentric system through the work of the astronomers resulted not so much from empirical considerations but rather from the fact that this system (...) was suited to a comprehensive, general dynamics. (shrink)

Euler ’s wave theory of light developed from a mere description of this notion based on an analogy between sound and light to a more and more mathematical elaboration on that notion. He was very successful in predicting the shape of achromatic lenses based on a new dispersion law that we now know is wrong. Most of his mathematical arguments were, however, guesswork without any solid physical reasoning. Guesswork is not always a bad thing in physics if it leads to (...) new experiments or makes the theory coherent with other theories. And Euler tried to find such experiments. He saw the construction of achromatic lenses, the explanation of colors of thin plates and of the opaque bodies as proof of his theory. When it came to the fundamental issues, the correctness of his dispersion law and the prediction of frequencies of light he was not at all successful. His wave theory degenerated, and it was not until Augustin Fresnel introduced transverse waves and an elaborate notion of interference that the wave theory again progressed. (shrink)

Despite decades of research, we still lack a clear explanation for the emergence and persistence of inequality. Here we propose and evaluate a marginal utility of inequality hypothesis that nominates circumscription and environmental heterogeneity as independent, necessary conditions for the emergence of intragroup material inequality. After coupling the Standard Cross-Cultural Sample with newly generated data from remote sensing, we test predictions derived from this hypothesis using a multivariate generalized additive model that accounts for spatial and historical dependence as well as (...) subsistence mode. Our analyses show that the probability a society will be stratified increases significantly as a function of proxies of environmental heterogeneity and environmental circumscription. This supports the hypothesis that increasing environmental heterogeneity and circumscription drives the emergence and persistence of inequality among documented societies across the globe. We demonstrate how environmental heterogeneity and circumscription produce situations that limit individuals’ options so that some may find it in their best interest to give up some autonomy for material gain, while others may find it in their best interest to give up some material resources for another individual’s time or deference. These results support the marginal utility of inequality framework and enable future explorations of the ecological conditions that facilitate the emergence of intragroup inequality through time and across the globe. (shrink)

The paper lists all the predictions and observations of eclipses of Jupiter's satellites 1668–1678 and compares them with modern computations of the these eclipses by J. H. Lieske. We discuss Roemer's method that led to his discovery of the retardment of light and finally we shall interpret Roemer's calculations.

The uncanny valley—the unnerving nature of humanlike robots—is an intriguing idea, but both its existence and its underlying cause are debated. We propose that humanlike robots are not only unnerving, but are so because their appearance prompts attributions of mind. In particular, we suggest that machines become unnerving when people ascribe to them experience, rather than agency. Experiment 1 examined whether a machine’s humanlike appearance prompts both ascriptions of experience and feelings of unease. Experiment 2 tested whether a machine capable (...) of experience remains unnerving, even without a humanlike appearance. Experiment 3 investigated whether the perceived lack of experience can also help explain the creepiness of unfeeling humans and philosophical zombies. These experiments demonstrate that feelings of uncanniness are tied to perceptions of experience, and also suggest that experience—but not agency—is seen as fundamental to humans, and fundamentally lacking in machines. (shrink)

Anger, disgust, elevation, sympathy, relief. If the subjective experience of each of these emotions is the same whether elicited by moral or nonmoral events, then what makes moral emotions unique? We suggest that the configuration of moral emotions is special—a configuration given by the underlying structure of morality. Research suggests that people divide the moral world along the two dimensions of valence (help/harm) and moral type (agent/patient). The intersection of these two dimensions gives four moral exemplars—heroes, villains, victims and beneficiaries—each (...) of which elicits unique emotions. For example, victims (harm/patient) elicit sympathy and sadness. Dividing moral emotions into these four quadrants provides predictions about which emotions reinforce, oppose and complement each other. (shrink)

In “Understanding Demonstratives”, Gareth Evans bites the bullet regarding Rip van Winkle cases in cognitive dynamics: the fact that Rip sleeps for twenty years and completely loses track of time means he is unable to retain his original belief that “Today is a fine day”. In this paper, the author argues that Evans need not bite this bullet because there are resources in his account of the cognitive dynamics involved in belief retention developed in The Varieties of Reference to successfully (...) confront the challenge posed by the Rip van Winkle case. In particular, when we combine the two central elements of Evans’s cognitive dynamics – the skill of keeping track of one’s spatio-temporal location in addition to memory – it is possible to arrive at the conclusion that it is indeed possible for Rip to retain and re-express his original belief. (shrink)

It is widely held that reflexivity is the defining feature of selfhood: the ability of the self to stand in a certain relation to itself. The question of how exactly to theorize this self-relation, however, has been the source of ongoing debate. In recent years, Kantian and post-Kantian approaches such as Christine Korsgaard’s constitutivism and Richard Moran’s commitment view, have attempted to establish the priority of the agential over the epistemic self-relation, thereby re-orientating the debate away from metaphysics and epistemology (...) towards ethics and moral psychology. Despite the important progress they make towards a de-alienated and reified understanding of the self-relation, however, I argue that the Kantian paradigm is ultimately inadequate because its methodological individualism makes it incapable of accounting for the irreducibly social dimension of the self-relation and, therefore, of successfully making the transition from ethics to social and political philosophy. In other words, an adequate ontology of the self-relation is possible only as a social ontology. In order to motivate this thesis, I appeal to two examples that expose the “social deficit” of the Kantian approach: Frantz Fanon’s phenomenology of race/racism in “The Lived Experience of the Black” and the phenomenon of cultural collapse in Jonathan Lear’s Radical Hope. I then go on to provide a sketch of an alternative approach based on the notion of “self-appropriation”, distinguishing it from Rahel Jaeggi’s use of the term in her recent critique of alienation, in the process. (shrink)

ABSTRACTIn recent work, Maeve Cooke has criticised Jürgen Habermas’s post-metaphysical model in order to motivate an alternative “post-secular” conception of the state, which involves the replacement of the “institutional translation proviso” with the “nonauthoritarian reasoning requirement”. I provide a qualified defence of the Habermasian model by arguing that it does not lead to the kind of negative consequences regarding legitimacy and solidarity Cooke attributes to it. This, in turn, means that Cooke’s proposal for the secular foundation of political authority on (...) a post-secular basis is insufficiently motivated. In the process, I argue that the point of departure for the debate about religion in the public sphere shared by both Habermas and Cooke – the picture of the “total” religious citizen – should be rejected because it presupposes an overly simplistic view of religions and religious identities. (shrink)

Motorcycle helmet laws are perceived to infringe upon individual rights even though they reduce mortality and health care costs. We describe proposed helmet legislation that protects individual rights and provides incentives for helmet use through a differential motorcycle registration fee that requires higher fees for those who wish to ride without a helmet.

This article is concerned with the question of the relative priority between political and social ontology within left-Heideggerianism, a tradition recently reconstructed by Oliver Marchart. Although the title seems to imply that this question is an open and live one within left-Heideggerianism – that the two paths at the crossroads have been clearly delineated when, in fact, the current predicament of left-Heideggerianism resembles more a one-way street – this is somewhat misleading: the identification of left-Heideggerianism with a post-foundationalist political ontology (...) that enjoys systematic priority over the social has contributed to the suppression of the question of the Being of the social and, therefore, prevented a critical re-examination of its relationship to the political. The aim of this article is both modest and ambitious: modest, in that it merely seeks to pose and motivate the question of the social within left-Heideggerianism both at an exegetical and at a systematic level; ambiti... (shrink)

In Another Philosophy of History, J.G. Herder claims that his aim is not to compare and judge different cultures, but merely to describe and explain how each came into being and thus to adopt the standpoint of an impartial observer. I argue, however, that there is a tension between Herder's understanding of his own project—his stated doctrine of historicism and cultural relativism—and the way in which it is actually put into practice. That is, despite Herder's stated aims, he is nevertheless (...) unable to avoid justifying premodern forms of life and making context-transcending evaluative judgments in the process of trying to understand cultures on their own terms and holding them up as exemplars vis à vis the Enlightenment. This tension presents the challenge of accounting for it in the most charitable and illuminating way. I argue that this goal can be achieved by appealing to the resources of the philosophical hermeneutics of Hans-Georg Gadamer, which enables us to disclose two enabling conditions for Herder's project of which he was not explicitly aware, viz., the internal connection between understanding and justification and the enabling character of prejudice as the condition for the possibility of understanding as such. (shrink)

In spite of his status as a highly original thinker whose views were, in many ways, ahead of his time and anticipate those of more famous successors, the work of Johann Gottfried von Herder has not received the attention it deserves in mainstream philosophical discourse. In Herder's Hermeneutics, Kristin Gjesdal successfully addresses this deficit by exploring the enlightenment origins of the hermeneutic tradition through a careful and compelling reconstruction of Herder's theory of interpretation. Breaking with the widespread view of Herder (...) as a contra-Enlightenment thinker, Gjesdal conceives of Herder's hermeneutics as contributing to the enlightenment of the Enlightenment project through an immanent critique of... (shrink)

In spite of his status as a highly original thinker whose views were, in many ways, ahead of his time and anticipate those of more famous successors, the work of Johann Gottfried von Herder has not received the attention it deserves in mainstream philosophical discourse. In Herder's Hermeneutics, Kristin Gjesdal successfully addresses this deficit by exploring the enlightenment origins of the hermeneutic tradition through a careful and compelling reconstruction of Herder's theory of interpretation. Breaking with the widespread view of Herder (...) as a contra-Enlightenment thinker, Gjesdal conceives of Herder's hermeneutics as contributing to the enlightenment of the Enlightenment project through an immanent critique of... (shrink)

What It Contains brings together the newest and most important essays of one of the most eminent and creative twentieth-century social theorists, Kurt H. Wolff. More than simply a collection of essays, this is a unified book with a highly self-reflexive and self-referential commentary running throughout the text. Extending and expanding on some of Wolff's important earlier work, the book covers topics that are of vital importance today: surrrender-and-catch, the ineluctable, man as a mixed phenomenon, and the paradox of (...) socialization. (shrink)

The emerging field of neuroeducation, concerned with the interaction between mind, brain and education, has proved revolutionary in educational research, introducing concepts, methods, and technologies into many advanced institutions around the world. The Educated Brain presents a broad overview of the major topics in this new discipline: Part I examines the historical and epistemological issues related to the mind/brain problem and the scope of neuroeducation; Part II provides a view of basic brain research in education and use of imaging techniques, (...) and the study of brain and cognitive development; and Part III is dedicated to the neural foundations of language and reading in different cultures, and the acquisition of basic mathematical concepts. With contributions from leading researchers in the field, this book features the most recent and advanced research in cognitive neurosciences. (shrink)

From dogs to gods, the science of understanding mysterious minds--including your own. Nothing seems more real than the minds of other people. When you consider what your boss is thinking or whether your spouse is happy, you are admitting them into the "mind club." It's easy to assume other humans can think and feel, but what about a cow, a computer, a corporation? What kinds of mind do they have? Daniel M. Wegner and Kurt Gray are award-winning psychologists who (...) have discovered that minds--while incredibly important--are a matter of perception. Their research opens a trove of new findings, with insights into human behavior that are fascinating, frightening and funny. The Mind Club explains why we love some animals and eat others, why people debate the existence of God so intensely, how good people can be so cruel, and why robots make such poor lovers. By investigating the mind perception of extraordinary targets--animals, machines, comatose people, god--Wegner and Gray explain what it means to have a mind, and why it matters so much. Fusing cutting-edge research and personal anecdotes, The Mind Club explores the moral dimensions of mind perception with wit and compassion, revealing the surprisingly simple basis for what compels us to love and hate, to harm and to protect. (shrink)

When someone steps on your toe on purpose, it seems to hurt more than when the person does the same thing unintentionally. The physical parameters of the harm may not differ—your toe is flattened in both cases—but the psychological experience of pain is changed nonetheless. Intentional harms are premeditated by another person and have the specific purpose of causing pain. In a sense, intended harms are events initiated by one mind to communicate meaning (malice) to another, and this could shape (...) the recipient’s experience. This study examined whether self-reported pain is indeed higher when the events producing the pain are understood as intentionally (as opposed to unintentionally) caused by another person. Although pain was traditionally conceived to be solely physical in nature (Aydede, 2005), its experience varies substantially with psychological context. The placebo analgesia effect, for example, is the reduction of pain without a change in physical stimulation when context, expectations, or sugar pills challenge the interpretation of a sensation as painful (e.g., Fields, 2008). The nocebo effect, in turn, is the experience of pain without any physical stimulation—as when participants report headaches when told that a (nonexistent) electric current is passing through their heads (Schweiger & Parducci, 1981). These variations in pain experience seem to depend on the meaning of the stimulus: A sugar pill is meant to decrease pain, whereas electric current is meant to increase pain. In an interpersonal context, the meaning of an action is derived from the would complete. perceiver’s perceptions of the actor’s intention (Clark, 1996). (shrink)

Believing in God requires not only a leap of faith but also an extension of people’s normal capacity to perceive the minds of others. Usually, people perceive minds of all kinds by trying to understand their conscious experience (what it is like to be them) and their agency (what they can do). Although humans are perceived to have both agency and experience, humans appear to see God as possessing agency, but not experience. God’s unique mind is due, the authors suggest, (...) to the uniquely moral role He occupies. In this article, the authors propose that God is seen as the ultimate moral agent, the entity people blame and praise when they receive anomalous harm and help. Support for this proposition comes from research on mind perception, morality, and moral typecasting. Interestingly, although people perceive God as the author of salvation, suffering seems to evoke even more attributions to the divine. (shrink)

An important component of souls is the capacity for free will, as the origin of agency within an individual. Belief in souls arises in part from the experience of conscious will, a compelling feeling of personal causation that accompanies almost every action we take, and suggests that an immaterial self is in charge of the physical body.

Although torture can establish guilt through confession, how are judgments of guilt made when tortured suspects do not confess? We suggest that perceived guilt is based inappropriately upon how much pain suspects appear to suffer during torture. Two psychological theories provide competing predictions about the link between pain and perceived blame: cognitive dissonance, which links pain to blame, and moral typecasting, which links pain to innocence. We hypothesized that dissonance might characterize the relationship between torture and blame for those close (...) to the torture, while moral typecasting might characterize this relationship for those more distant from it. Accordingly, this experiment placed participants into one of two different roles in which people may be exposed to torture. Participants in the proximal role of prison staffer saw suffering torture victims as relatively more guilty, while participants in the relatively distant role of a radio listener saw suffering victims as more innocent. (shrink)