There is an old and powerful argument for the claim that divine foreknowledge is incompatible with the freedom to do otherwise. A recent response to this argument, sometimes called the “dependence response,” centers around the claim that God’s relevant past beliefs depend on the relevant agent’s current or future behavior in a certain way. This paper offers a new argument for the dependence response, one that revolves around different cases of time travel. Somewhat serendipitously, the argument also paves the way (...) for a new reply to a compelling objection to the dependence response, the challenge from prepunishment. But perhaps not so serendipitously, the argument also renders the dependence response incompatible with certain views of providence. (shrink)

Do we have free will? In this interview, Helen Steward explains part of her very distinctive approach to the philosophical puzzle concerning free will vs determinism. Steward rejects determinism, but not because she denies that we are not material beings (because, for example, we have Cartesian, immaterial souls that have physical effects). Her reasons for rejecting determinism are very different.

Assume that, even with a time machine, Tim does not have the ability to travel to the past and kill Grandfather. Why would that be? And what are the implications for traditional debates about freedom? We argue that there are at least two satisfactory explanations for why Tim cannot kill Grandfather. First, if an agent’s behavior at time _t_ is causally dependent on fact _F_, then the agent cannot perform an action (at _t_) that would require _F_ to have not (...) obtained. Second, if an agent’s behavior at time _t_ is causally dependent on fact _F_, then the agent cannot perform an action (at _t_) that would prevent _F_ from obtaining. These two explanations have distinct upshots for more traditional debates over freedom. The first implies that causal determinism is incompatible with the ability to do otherwise and also raises questions about the traditional arguments for the incompatibility of divine foreknowledge and the ability to do otherwise; the second does neither. However, both explanations imply that the Molinist account of divine providence renders agents unable to do otherwise, at least in certain circumstances. (shrink)

Law journals permit submission of scholarly manuscripts to multiple journals concurrently, but biomedical journals strictly forbid submission of manuscripts to more than one journal at a time. Law journals may then compete for the publication of manuscripts. This article examines whether the single-submission requirement of biomedical journals may constitute restraint of trade in violation of Section 1 of the Sherman Antitrust Act.

Women are drastically underrepresented in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics and this underrepresentation has been linked to gender stereotypes and ability related beliefs. One way to remedy this may be to challenge male bias gender stereotypes around STEM by cultivating equitable beliefs that both female and male can excel in STEM. The present study implemented a growth mindset intervention to promote children’s incremental ability beliefs and investigate the relation between the intervention and children’s gender stereotypes in an informal science learning (...) site. Participants were visitors to a science museum who took part in an interactive space science show. Participants who were exposed to a growth mindset intervention, compared to the participants in the control condition, reported significantly less gender stereotyping around STEM by reporting equitably in the stereotype awareness measure. Relatedly, participants in the control condition reported male bias gender stereotype in the stereotype awareness measure. Further, children between 5 and 8-years-old reported greater male bias stereotypes awareness and stereotype flexibility in space science compared to children between 9 and 12-years-old. Lastly, children demonstrated in-group bias in STEM ability. Male participants reported gender bias favoring males’ ability in stereotype flexibility and awareness measures, while female participants reported bias toward females’ ability in stereotype flexibility and awareness measures. These findings document the importance of a growth mindset intervention in buffering against STEM gender stereotyping amongst children, as well as the significant role a growth mindset intervention can play within an informal science learning site. (shrink)

The year is 2100. Geena is the proud new owner of Emit, a state-of-the-art robot. She has just unwrapped him, the packaging strewn across the dining room floor. Emit is designed to replicate the outward behaviour of a human being down to the last detail . Emit responds to questions in much the same way humans do. Ask him how he feels and he will say he has had a tough day, has a slight headache, is sorry he broke that (...) vase, and so on. Geena flips the switch at the back of Emit's neck to ‘on’. Emit springs to life. (shrink)

Thinking Tools is a regular feature that introduces pointers on thinking clearly and rigorously.

A dialogue investigating whether the usual religious defences of belief in God are really up to the job.

Thinking tools is a regular feature that offers tips and pointers on thinking clearly and rigorously.

Thinking tools is a regular feature that offers tips and pointers on thinking clearly and rigorously.

Journal Name: Semiotica Issue: Ahead of print.

Thinking tools is a regular feature that offers tips and pointers on thinking clearly and rigorously.

Thinking Tools is a regular feature that introduces pointers on thinking clearly and rigorously.

Thinking Tools is a regular feature that introduces tips and pointers on thinking clearly and rigorously.

Thinking Tools is a regular feature that introduces tips and pointers on thinking clearly and rigorously. Here we get to grips with two everyday reasoning errors.

Thinking Tools is a regular feature that introduces pointers on thinking clearly and rigorously. Here I tell a cautionary tale about flying saucers and take a brief look at the virtues of ‘open-mindedness’.

Thinking Tools is a regular feature that introduces pointers on thinking clearly and rigorously. Here we get to grips with two everyday reasoning errors.

Thinking Tools is a regular feature that introduces pointers on thinking clearly and rigorously. Here l explain some of the techniques commonly used by ‘gurus’ to dupe people into thinking they have something profound to say.

Thinking Tools is a regular feature that introduces pointers on thinking clearly and rigorously. In this installment, we focus, not on faulty reasoning per se, but on an example of how we can be led astray or manipulated without our even realizing what is going on. Our critical faculties are entirely sidestepped!

Thinking Tools is a regular feature that introduces pointers on thinking clearly and rigorously.

Thinking Tools is a regular feature that introduces pointers on thinking clearly and rigorously. Here we get to grips with an everyday reasoning error: the gambler's fallacy.

Thinking Tools is a regular feature that introduces tips and pointers on thinking clearly and rigorously.

Thinking Tools is a regular feature that introduces tips and pointers on thinking clearly and rigorously.

Evidence suggests that the incidence of research misconduct is not in decline despite efforts to improve awareness, education and governance mechanisms. Two responses to this problem are favoured: first, the promotion of an agent-centred ethics approach to enhance researchers’ personal responsibility and accountability, and second, a change in research culture to relieve perceived pressures to engage in misconduct. This article discusses the challenges for both responses and explains how normative coherence through values alignment might assist. We argue that research integrity (...) and research ethics convey mixed messages, which are likely to contribute to a form of normative confusion. For the successful adoption of an agent-centred approach, normative coherence is needed between the two. To facilitate normative coherence, we propose that research ethics and research integrity be underpinned by a shared set of moral values that can be enacted via codes and guidelines and imbue research environments. Furthermore, to facilitate culture change, the same normative coherence is necessary at all levels of an institution. Only via values alignment between institutional aims, management, institutional practices and researchers can an ethical culture become truly embedded in research institutions. (shrink)

Law's article begins by restating the classical ANT position that objects do not exist `in themselves' but are the effect of a performative stabilization of relational networks. In addition, these material enactments inevitably have a spatial dimension; they simultaneously establish spatial conditions for objectual identity, continuity, and difference. Space must not be reified as a natural, pre-existing container of the social and the material, but is itself a performance. Moreover, there are multiple forms of spatiality beyond the Euclidean space of (...) regions, and objects may exist and achieve homeomorphism within several different spatial systems. Technologies such as the Zimbabwe Bush Pump present a fluid object which is able to exist and cohere without the presence of fixed boundaries or the permanence of a particular functional definition. The network logic, however, which gravitates towards stability and functionality, tends to exclude and silence this spatial Other. An alternative political ontology is needed which goes beyond the reification of network space in order to give voice to the fluid objects which escape its unidimensional functionality. (shrink)

This paper develops a challenge to theism. The challenge is to explain why the hypothesis that there exists an omnipotent, omniscient and all-good god should be considered significantly more reasonable than the hypothesis that there exists an omnipotent, omniscient and all-evil god. Theists typically dismiss the evil-god hypothesis out of hand because of the problem of good–there is surely too much good in the world for it to be the creation of such a being. But then why doesn't the problem (...) of evil provide equally good grounds for dismissing belief in a good god? I develop this evil-god challenge in detail, anticipate several replies, and correct errors made in earlier discussions of the problem of good. (shrink)

Duty of care is the core ethical responsibility of healthcare workers. Getting the workforce vaccinated will provide safety to the public, protect the vulnerable population and provide a safe working environment. While most agree that healthcare workers should be prioritised in the vaccination programme, mandatory vaccination remains a complicated and contentious issue with political, legal and ethical dimensions. This study aims to determine the ethical considerations associated with mandatory vaccinations among healthcare workers. A total of 152 abstracts were identified of (...) which, 142 were excluded based on abstracts because they did not meet the inclusion criteria. The remaining ten articles were further evaluated with three articles that fit the inclusion criteria specifically discussing mandatory vaccination among healthcare workers and the ethical issues. Benefits, risks, effectiveness, equity and justice, autonomy, reciprocity and trust were used as a framework to discuss the ethical considerations which resonated both directly from the included papers, as well as more generally from the other literature associated with this search. There is limited literature on the topic of ethical considerations associated with COVID-19 mandatory vaccination of healthcare workers, as a systematic review identified only 3 papers. Benefits, risks, effectiveness, equity and justice, autonomy, reciprocity and trust were among the seven ethical considerations identified and discussed. (shrink)

We all know that we have and are our bodies. But might it be possible to leave this common place? In the present article we try to do this by attending to the way we do our bodies. The site where we look for such action is that of handling the hypoglycaemias that sometimes happen to people with diabetes. In this site it appears that the body, active in measuring, feeling and countering hypoglycaemias is not a bounded whole: its boundaries (...) leak. Bits and pieces of the outside get incorporated within the active body; while the centre of some bodily activities is beyond the skin. The body thus enacted is not self-evidently coherent either. There are tensions between the body’s organs; between the control under which we put our bodies and the erratic character of their behaviour; and between the various needs and desires single bodies somehow try to combine. Thus to say that a body is a whole, or so we conclude, skips over a lot of work. One does not hang together as a matter of course: keeping oneself together is something the embodied person needs to do. The person who fails to do so dies. (shrink)

There is an old but powerful argument for the claim that exhaustive divine foreknowledge is incompatible with the freedom to do otherwise. A crucial ingredient in this argument is the principle of the “Fixity of the Past”. A seemingly new response to this argument has emerged, the so-called “dependence response,” which involves, among other things, abandoning FP for an alternative principle, the principle of the “Fixity of the Independent”. This paper presents three arguments for the claim that FI ought to (...) be preferred to FP. (shrink)

Over the centuries, many philosophers have written about injustice. More recently, attention has turned to a previously little-recognized form of injustice – epistemic injustice. The philosopher Miranda Fricker coined the phrase ‘epistemic injustice’ – an example being when your credibility as a source of knowledge is unjustly downgraded (perhaps because you are ‘just a woman’ of the ‘wrong’ race). This interview with Miranda explores what epistemic injustice is, and why it is important.

Statistical learning enables humans to involuntarily process and utilize different kinds of patterns from the environment. However, the cognitive mechanisms underlying the simultaneous acquisition of multiple regularities from different perceptual modalities remain unclear. A novel multidimensional serial reaction time task was developed to test 40 participants’ ability to learn simple first‐order and complex second‐order relations between uni‐modal visual and cross‐modal audio‐visual stimuli. Using the difference in reaction times between sequenced and random stimuli as the index of domain‐general statistical learning, a (...) significant difference and dissociation of learning occurred between the initial and final learning phases. Furthermore, we used a negative and positive occurrence‐frequency‐and‐reaction‐time correlation to indicate implicit and explicit learning, respectively, and found that learning simple uni‐modal patterns involved an implicit‐to‐explicit segue, while acquiring complex cross‐modal patterns required an explicit‐to‐implicit segue, resulting in a X‐shape crossing of regularity learning. Thus, we propose an X‐way hypothesis to elucidate the dynamic interplay between the implicit and explicit systems at two distinct stages when acquiring various regularities in a multidimensional probability space. (shrink)

Let (leeway) incompatibilism be the thesis that causal determinism is incompatible with the freedom to do otherwise. Several prominent authors have claimed that incompatibilism alone can capture, or at least best captures, the intuitive appeal behind Jorge Luis Borges's famous “Garden of Forking Paths” metaphor. The thought, briefly, is this: the “single path” leading up to one's present decision represents the past; the forking paths that one must decide between represent those possible futures consistent with the past and the laws (...) of nature. But if determinism is true, there is only one possible future consistent with the past and the laws and, hence, only one path to choose from. That is, if determinism is true, then we are not free to do otherwise. In this paper, I argue that this understanding of the Garden of Forking Paths faces a number of problems and ought to be rejected even by incompatibilists. I then present an alternative understanding that not only avoids these problems but still supports incompatibilism. Finally, I consider how various versions of (leeway) compatibilism fit with the Garden of Forking Paths as well as the broader question of whether metaphors, however intuitive, have any dialectical force in the debates over freedom. (shrink)

Suppose Molinism is true and God placed Adam in the garden because God knew Adam would freely eat of the fruit. Suppose further that, had it not been true that Adam would freely eat of the fruit, were he placed in the garden, God would have placed someone else there instead. When Adam freely eats of the fruit, is he free to do otherwise? This paper argues that there is a strong case for both a positive and a negative answer. (...) Assuming such cases are possible under Molinism, we are left with a puzzling question: if Molinism is true, what can you do? (shrink)

The work named Fusûlü'l-İmadî, which belongs to Ebü'l-Feth Zeynüddîn el-İmadî, the grandson of Burhaneddin el-Mergînânî, the owner of the famous Hidaye, which includes the subjects of Fürû-i Fiqh and the law of trial, has been one of the main works that has been applied by influencing many mufti, kadi and jurists, especially the Ottoman sheikhs. The work is also important in terms of being a source for many fatawa and fürû-i fiqh works. The fact that the work written in the (...) Fergana region is one of the main sources referenced both in the Ottoman geography and in other Muslim geographies also shows that the work is valuable. In this study, by pointing out the importance and value of the work, it was tried to determine the contribution of the work to the Ottoman period fetâvâ mecmuas and Hanafi fiqh literature. In the study, the life of Ebü'l-Feth Zeynüddîn el-İmadî was mentioned, and his work Fusûlü'l-İmadî was examined in detail. The contribution of the Ottoman Fetvâhâne, which uses Fusûlü'l-İmadî as a source, to some of the fetâva works, which are accepted as one of the most respected fetâva journals, is discussed and some quotations from the work are included with their examples. In addition, the contribution of the work to the Hanafi fiqh literature was examined on the basis of some fürû-i fiqh works of the Ottoman period and the work called Mir'ât-ı Mecelle. Thus, by pointing out the importance of Fusûlü'l-İmadî and his contribution to the literature of fiqh and fatwa, this work was drawn attention to new studies. (shrink)

Human rights discourse has been likened to a global lingua franca, and in more ways than one, the analogy seems apt. Human rights discourse is a language that is used by all yet belongs uniquely to no particular place. It crosses not only the borders between nation-states, but also the divide between national law and international law: it appears in national constitutions and international treaties alike. But is it possible to conceive of human rights as a global language or lingua (...) franca not just in a figurative or metaphorical sense, but in a literal or linguistic sense as a legal dialect defined by distinctive patterns of word choice and usage? Does there exist a global language of human rights that transcends not only national borders, but also the divide between domestic and international law? Empirical analysis suggests that the answer is yes, but this global language comes in at least two variants or dialects. New techniques for performing automated content analysis enable us to analyze the bulk of all national constitutions over the last two centuries, together with the world’s leading regional and international human rights instruments, for patterns of linguistic similarity and to evaluate how much language, if any, they share in common. Specifically, we employ a technique known as topic modeling that disassembles texts into recurring verbal patterns. The results highlight the existence of two species or dialects of rights talk—the universalist dialect and the positive-rights dialect—both of which are global in reach and rising in popularity. The universalist dialect is generic in content and draws heavily on the type of language found in international and regional human rights instruments. It appears in particularly large doses in the constitutions of transitional states, developing states, and states that have been heavily exposed to the influence of the international community. The positive-rights dialect, by contrast, is characterized by its substantive emphasis on positive rights of a social or economic variety, and by its prevalence in lengthier constitutions and constitutions from outside the common law world, especially those of the Spanish-speaking world. Both dialects of rights talk are truly transnational, in the sense that they appear simultaneously in national, regional, and international legal instruments and transcend the distinction between domestic and international law. Their existence attests to the blurring of the boundary between constitutional law and international law. (shrink)