The so-called “disquotational theory of truth” has not previously been developed much beyond the thesis that saying, for example, that ‘Snow is white’ is true amounts only to saying that snow is white. Marian David has set out to see what further sense can be made of the disquotational theory, and to compare its merits with those of correspondence theories of truth. His prognosis is that an intelligible disquotational theory of truth can be developed but will suffer from drastic shortcomings (...) that make it all but unusable. (shrink)

The so-called “disquotational theory of truth” has not previously been developed much beyond the thesis that saying, for example, that ‘Snow is white’ is true amounts only to saying that snow is white. Marian David has set out to see what further sense can be made of the disquotational theory, and to compare its merits with those of correspondence theories of truth. His prognosis is that an intelligible disquotational theory of truth can be developed but will suffer from drastic shortcomings (...) that make it all but unusable. (shrink)

Cette livraison de la revue Langages semble avoir un objectif éditorial officiel, affiché dans son titre, consistant à porter un regard réflexif et critique sur les apports et les limites des (grands) corpus à divers domaines de l’analyse linguistique, et un objectif profond, moins immédiatement perceptible mais sans doute premier dans l’esprit des coordinateurs et particulièrement de Marcel Cori, consistant à remettre à sa juste place la linguistique de corpus accusée d’avoir des ambitions h..

In this paper I discuss the question of what it means to say that a property is socially constructed. I focus on an influential project that many social constructivists are engaged in, namely, arguing against the inevitability of a trait, and I examine several recent characterizations of social construction, with the aim of assessing which one is more suited to the task.

Transhumanism is a “technoprogressive” socio-political and intellectual movement that advocates for the use of technology in order to transform the human organism radically, with the ultimate goal of becoming “posthuman.” To this end, transhumanists focus on and encourage the use of new and emerging technologies, such as genetic engineering and brain-machine interfaces. In support of their vision for humanity, and as a way of reassuring those “bioconservatives” who may balk at the radical nature of that vision, transhumanists claim common ground (...) with a number of esteemed thinkers and traditions, from the ancient philosophy of Plato and Aristotle to the postmodern philosophy of Nietzsche. It is crucially important to give proper scholarly attention to transhumanism now, not only because of its recent and ongoing rise as a cultural and political force, but because of the imminence of major breakthroughs in the kinds of technologies that transhumanism focuses on. Thus, the articles in this issue of The Journal of Medicine and Philosophy are either explicitly about transhumanism or are on topics, such as the ethics of germline engineering and criteria for personhood, that are directly relevant to the debate between transhumanists and bioconservatives. (shrink)

Mobile health (mHealth) apps for self-monitoring increasingly gain relevance for public health. As a mobile technology, they promote individual participation in health monitoring with the aim of disease prevention and the mitigation of health risks. In this paper, I argue that users of mHealth apps must engage in value trade-offs concerning their fundamental dimensions of well-being when using mobile health apps for the self-monitoring of health parameters. I particularly focus on trade-offs regarding the user’s self-determination as well as their capacity (...) to form personal attachments. Depending on the user’s level of advantage or disadvantage, value trade-offs can pose a threat to the users’ sufficient fulfillment of the dimensions of well-being. As such, value trade-offs can entrench existing structural injustices and prevent disadvantaged users to benefit from this technology. I argue that value trade-offs are, to some, a type of injustice that can drive disadvantaged users away from a sufficiency threshold of well-being, risk users to fall below the threshold, or have an accumulative effect on different dimensions of the user’s well-being. (shrink)

Wilson and Kass talked about their book, The ethics of human cloning, which is about the ethical debate over human cloning.

Talk of powers is muddled. Building upon Powers and capacities in philosophy: The new aristotelianism, Routledge, London, 2012a, pp 207–227), I disambiguate four senses of the term: powers construed as activity, as capacity/potentiality, as essence and as necessity, respectively, in an attempt to clarify what it is that realists about causal powers take themselves to be realists about.

An epistemic formalization of arithmetic is constructed in which certain non-trivial metatheoretical inferences about the system itself can be made. These inferences involve the notion of provability in principle, and cannot be made in any consistent extensions of Stewart Shapiro's system of epistemic arithmetic. The system constructed in the paper can be given a modal-structural interpretation.

Kristeller's article ‘The Modern System of the Arts: A Study in the History of Aesthetics’ is a classic statement of the view, now widely adopted but rarely examined, that aesthetics became possible only in the eighteenth-century with the emergence of the fine arts. I wish to contest this view, for three reasons. Firstly, Kristeller's historical account can be questioned; alternative and equally plausible accounts are available. Secondly, ‘the modern system of the arts’ appears to have been neither a system nor (...) an agreed upon entity, but only a historical construct of Kristeller's own making that matches up with no known historical reality. Thirdly, while the concept of the fine arts existed in the eighteenth century, the assumption that it had an impact on the rise of aesthetic theory remains unproven and unnecessary. A more satisfactory account of aesthetic thought in antiquity can be given, once the ‘fine-arts’ objection has been cleared away. (shrink)

Recently two developments have had a major impact on the field of ancient DNA (aDNA). First, new advances in DNA sequencing, in combination with improved capture/enrichment methods, have resulted in the recovery of orders of magnitude more DNA sequence data from ancient animals. Second, there has been an increase in the range of tissue types employed in aDNA. Hair in particular has proven to be very successful as a source of DNA because of its low levels of contamination and high (...) level of ancient endogenous DNA. These developments have resulted in significant advances in our understanding of recently extinct animals: namely their evolutionary relationships, physiology, and even behaviour. Hair has been used to recover the first complete ancient nuclear genome, that of the extinct woolly mammoth, which then facilitated the expression and functional analysis of haemoglobins. Finally, we speculate on the consequences of these developments for the possibility of recreating extinct animals. (shrink)

Are sexual orientations freely chosen? The idea that someone’s sexual orientation is not a choice is very influential in the mainstream LGBT political movement. But do we have good reasons to believe it is not a choice? Going against the orthodoxy, William Wilkerson has recently argued that sexual orientation is partly constituted by our interpretations of our own sexual desires, and we choose these interpretations, so sexual orientation is partly constituted by choice. In this paper I aim to examine the (...) question of whether our interpretations of our own sexual desires are constitutive of our sexual orientations. I will argue that whereas Wilkerson’s argument for the claim that sexual orientations are in part constituted by our chosen interpretations of our sexual desires is not sound, there are good reasons for endorsing a weaker claim, namely, that there are different but equally apt descriptions of the same sexual desires, depending on which concepts we have. (shrink)

In this paper we argue that defenders of Frankfurt-style counterexamples to the Principle of Alternative Possibilities do not need to construct a metaphysically possible scenario in which an agent is morally responsible despite lacking the ability to do otherwise. Rather, there is a weaker (but equally legitimate) sense in which Frankfurt-style counterexamples can succeed. All that's needed is the claim that the ability to do otherwise is no part of what grounds moral responsibility, when the agent is indeed morally responsible.

6. Jürgen Habermas's Critical Hermeneutics Introduction Habermas and Critical Hermeneutics Life and Influences 132 Habermas's Place in Contemporary Thought ...

Proof-theoretic reflection principles have been discussed in proof theory ever since Gödel’s discovery of the incompleteness theorems. But these reflection principles have not received much attention in the philosophical community. The present chapter aims to survey some of the principal meta-mathematical results on the iteration of proof-theoretic reflection principles and investigate these results from a logico-philosophical perspective; we will concentrate on the epistemological significance of these technical results and on the epistemic notions involved in the proofs. In particular, we will (...) focus on the notions of commitment to and acceptance of a theory. Special attention is given to the connection between proof-theoretic reflection and axiomatic truth theories. After distinguishing between different types of proof-theoretic reflection principles, we review some proof-theoretic results concerning extensions of formal theories by (iterated) reflection principles. As basis theories, we concentrate on standard arithmetical and elementary axiomatic truth theories. We then go on to explore the epistemological significance of these results. In this investigation, we aim to show that the epistemic notion of acceptance of (or commitment to) a theory plays a crucial role in the philosophical argumentation for reflection principles and their iteration. (shrink)

Inspired by Kit Fine’s theory of arbitrary objects, we explore some ways in which the generic structure of the natural numbers can be presented. Following a suggestion of Saul Kripke’s, we discuss how basic facts and questions about this generic structure can be expressed in the framework of Carnapian quantified modal logic.

The argument that nurses should be Marxists is made by looking at the primary areas of nursing activity in turn, giving an example of how capitalist economic relations negatively impact upon that activity, and providing a Marxist explanation of the reasons why it has that impact. In relation to the nursing activity of health promotion, it is argued that capitalism's generation of social inequality undermines the health of the population. In relation to curative activities, the focus is on how capitalism's (...) reckless pursuit of profit has subverted the sustainability of bactericidal interventions. The argument in relation to comforting and assistive care is that the ownership and control of health services by capitalist corporations undermines therapeutic relationships. Finally, in relation to supportive care, it is contended that capitalism's requirement for a disciplined workforce can compromise healthcare professionals’ support of employees. It is concluded that if nurses aspire to have some control over their activities, then it is a good idea for them to avail of Marxism's capacity to identify the socio‐economic mechanisms by which capitalism affects nursing care. (shrink)

The Structure of the ' Scienza Nuova ' One of the main reasons for the failure of Vico's Scienza Nuova to establish itself as a widely read philosophical ...

All parts of Heraclitus’ cosmos are simultaneously living and dying. Its constituent stuffs (“biomasses”) cycle endlessly through physical changes in sweeping patterns (“biorhythms”) that are reflected in the dynamic rhythms of Heraclitus’ own thought and language. These natural processes are best examined at a more-than-human level that exceeds individuation, stable identity, rational comprehension, and linguistic capture. B62 (“mortals immortals”), one of Heraclitus’ most perplexing fragments, models these processes in a spectacular fashion: it describes the imbrication not only of humans and (...) gods but of cosmic masses more generally, and its language mimics the natural relations that it names, or rather intimates through its grammatical and syntactical indeterminacy. The remaining fragments amplify the uncertainties and the exhilarations of Heraclitus’ worldview along the same lines. His approach to nature raises urgent questions about how human beings fit into the cosmos, not least by challenging our intuitive conceptions of life and death, our material makeup, and our entanglements with our natural surroundings. In doing so, he provides vital lessons for contemporary ecological awareness, and proves to be an unexpected ally. (shrink)

This paper outlines a framework for the abstract investigation of the concept of canonicity of names and of naming systems. Degrees of canonicity of names and of naming systems are distinguished. The structure of the degrees is investigated, and a notion of relative canonicity is defined. The notions of canonicity are formally expressed within a Carnapian system of second-order modal logic.

This paper examines Aquinas's contention that the virtues are necessarily connected, in such a way that anyone who fully possesses one of them, necessarily possesses them all. It is argued that this claim, as Aquinas develops it in the "Summa Theologiae", is more complex, interesting, and plausible than it is often taken to be. On his view, the cardinal virtues can be said to be connected in two senses, corresponding to the two senses in which certain virtues can be said (...) to be cardinal, namely, as general qualifications of all virtuous action and as particular normative ideals having a specific content. This distinction suggests, in turn, that Aquinas's claim that the virtues are connected should be understood as a psychological thesis about what is characteristic of the virtuous person's distinctive way of acting, as well as a thesis about the interrelationships among the different cardinal virtues considered as discrete normative ideals. So understood, Aquinas's claim that the virtues are connected is seen to be a necessary implication of his metaphysically grounded theory of human action. At the same time, it enables him to offer an interpretation of the complexities of moral discourse that is illuminating and at least prima facie plausible, taken on its own merits. (shrink)

This study sets out to examine the implications of Foucault's work for students and researchers in a wide selection of areas in the social and human sciences.