The current study examined the effects of cardiorespiratory fitness, identified with a continuous graded cycle ergometry, and aerobic exercise on cognitive functioning and entropy of the electroencephalogram (EEG) in 30 adolescents between the ages of 13 and 14 years. Higher and lower fit participants performed an executive function task after a bout of acute exercise and after rest while watching a film. EEG entropy, using the sample entropy measure, was repeatedly measured during the 1500ms post-stimulus interval to evaluate changes in (...) entropy over time. Analysis of the behavioural data for lower and higher fit groups revealed an interaction between fitness levels and acute physical exercise. Notably, lower fit, but not higher fit, participants had higher error rates for NoGo relative to Go trials in the rest condition, whereas in the acute exercise condition there were no differences in error rates between groups; higher fit participants also had significantly faster reaction times in the exercise condition in comparison with the rest condition. Analysis of EEG data revealed that higher fit participants demonstrated lower entropy post-stimulus than lower fit participants in the left frontal hemisphere, possibly indicating increased efficiency of early stage stimulus processing and more efficient allocation of cognitive resources to the task demands. The results suggest that EEG entropy is sensitive to stimulus processing demands and varies as a function of physical fitness levels, but not acute exercise. Physical fitness, in turn, may enhance cognition in adolescence by facilitating higher functionality of the attentional system in the context of lower levels of frontal EEG entropy. (shrink)

Liam Shields systematically clarifies and defends the political philosophy of Sufficientarianism, which insists that securing enough of some things, such as food, healthcare and education, is a crucial demand of justice. By engaging in practical debates about critical issues such as child-rearing and global justice, the author sheds light on the potential implications of suffientarianism on the social policies that affect our daily lives.

Is there a limit to the legitimate demands of morality? In particular, is there a limit to people's responsibility to promote the well-being of others, either directly or via social institutions? Utilitarianism admits no such limit, and is for that reason often said to be an unacceptably demanding moral and political view. In this original new study, Murphy argues that the charge of excessive demands amounts to little more than an affirmation of the status quo. The real problem with utilitarianism (...) is that it makes unfair demands on people who comply with it in our world of nonideal compliance. Murphy shows that this unfairness does not arise on a collective understanding of our responsibility for others' well being. Thus, according to Murphy, while there is no general problem to be raised about the extent of moral demands, there is a pressing need to acknowledge the collective nature of the demands of beneficence. (shrink)

Philosophers of science debate the proper role of non-epistemic value judgements in scientific reasoning. Many modern authors oppose the value free ideal, claiming that we should not even try to get scientists to eliminate all such non-epistemic value judgements from their reasoning. W. E. B. Du Bois, on the other hand, has a defence of the value free ideal in science that is rooted in a conception of the proper place of science in a democracy. In particular, Du Bois argues (...) that the value free ideal must be upheld in order to, first, retain public trust in science and, second, ensure that those best placed to make use of scientifically acquired information are able to do so. This latter argument turns out to relate Du Bois’ position on the value free ideal in science to his defence of epistemic democracy. In this essay I elaborate, motivate, and relate to the modern debate, Du Bois’ under-appreciated defence of the value free ideal. (shrink)

Principles of bcnciiccnce require us to promote the good. If we believe that a plausible mom] conception will contain some such principle, we must address the issue of the demands it imposes on agents. Some writers have defended extremely demanding principles, while others have argued that only principles with limited demands are acceptable. In this paper I su ggest that we 100k at the demands 0f beneficencc in a different way; 0ur concern should not just be with the extent of (...) the demands faced by individual agents. Instead, we should consider how the demands imposed Ol'] an agent by a principle of beneiiccncc are affected by the level of compliance with the principle by others. Act—[email protected], for example, in effect requires each complying agent to shoulder her share of the demands of bcncficcnce plus as many of the shares of noncomplying agents as would be optimal. I suggest that we focus OH this feature ofconsequentialism, and not just on the very high demands it can impose Ol'] individual agents. Thus I defend the View that principles of beneiicence should not demand more of agents as expected compliance by othcr agents decreases, and formulate a principle of bencficcnce that meets this condition. This View about beneiicence and compliance is supported by a particular conception 0f beneiiccnce. Rather than as an aim we each have as individuals, benciicence could be understood as a cooperative project, where each of us aims to promote the good together with others. If s0, it would be natural t.. (shrink)

I analyse the political, economic, and cultural circumstances that have given rise to persistent political disputes about race (known colloquially as “the culture war”) among a subset of Americans. I argue that they point to a deep tension between widely held normative aspirations and pervasive and readily observable material facts about our society. The characterological pathologies this gives rise to are discussed, and a normatively preferable path forward for an individual attempting to reconcile themselves to the current social order is (...) suggested. (shrink)

Preferably scientific investigations would promote true rather than false beliefs. The phenomenon of fraud represents a standing challenge to this veritistic ideal. When scientists publish fraudulent results they knowingly enter falsehoods into the information stream of science. Recognition of this challenge has prompted calls for scientists to more consciously adopt the veritistic ideal in their own work. In this paper I argue against such promotion of the veritistic ideal. It turns out that a sincere desire on the part of scientists (...) to see the truth propagated may well promote more fraud rather than less. (shrink)

Principles of sufficiency are widely discussed in debates about distributive ethics. However, critics have argued that sufficiency principles are vulnerable to important objections. This paper seeks to clarify the main claims of sufficiency principles and to examine whether they have something distinctive and plausible to offer. The paper argues that sufficiency principles must claim that we have weighty reasons to secure enough and that once enough is secured the nature of our reasons to secure further benefits shifts. Having characterized sufficientarianism (...) in this way, the paper shows that the main objections to the view can be avoided; that we can examine the plausibility of sufficiency principles by appealing to certain reasons that support a shift; and that we should be optimistic about the prospects for sufficientarianism because many of our strongest reasons seem to be of this sort. This shift, I claim, is the overlooked grain of truth in sufficientarianism. (shrink)

This paper addresses the problem of judgment aggregation in science. How should scientists decide which propositions to assert in a collaborative document? We distinguish the question of what to write in a collaborative document from the question of collective belief. We argue that recent objections to the application of the formal literature on judgment aggregation to the problem of judgment aggregation in science apply to the latter, not the former question. The formal literature has introduced various desiderata for an aggregation (...) procedure. Proposition-wise majority voting emerges as a procedure that satisfies all desiderata which represent norms of science. An interesting consequence is that not all collaborating scientists need to endorse every proposition asserted in a collaborative document. (shrink)

In a capitalist economy, taxes are the most important instrument by which the political system puts into practice a conception of economic and distributive justice. Taxes arouse strong passions, fueled not only by conflicts of economic self-interest, but by conflicting ideas of fairness. Taking as a guiding principle the conventional nature of private property, Murphy and Nagel show how taxes can only be evaluated as part of the overall system of property rights that they help to create. Justice or injustice (...) in taxation, they argue, can only mean justice or injustice in the system of property rights and entitlements that result from a particular regime. Taking up ethical issues about individual liberty, interpersonal obligation, and both collective and personal responsibility, Murphy and Nagel force us to reconsider how our tax policy shapes our system of property rights. (shrink)

In the first sentence of the first section of A Theory of Justice Rawls writes that “justice is the first virtue of social institutions.” He soon elaborates.

This chapter sketches a literary history of writing the colonial interregnum through the comparison of a canonical Dublin text and its filmic adaptation with a canonical Johannesburg text and its filmic adaptation. Njabulo Ndebele’s short story ‘Fools’ (1983) repurposes formal elements from Joyce’s ‘The Dead’ (1914), transposing strategies for representing late colonial Dublin to a Johannesburg township during the height of apartheid in a context of extreme racial domination; beginning with close comparative readings of both stories, my chapter argues that (...) the context in which ‘Fools’ emerges determines the significance of its reappropriation of Joycean formal devices and simultaneously forces a re-reading of Joyce’s flirtation with bourgeois naturalism in ‘The Dead.’ Further, the respective publishing contexts of ‘Fools’ and ‘The Dead’ go on to determine their reception and recirculation, as demonstrated by the diverse histories of the American John Huston’s adaptation of ‘The Dead’ (1984), and Ramadan Suleman’s South African adaptation of ‘Fools’ (1997). In following this circumatlantic history of influence and adaptation from Joyce to Ndebele to Huston to Suleman, across hemispheres and media, I mean to articulate a relationship between modernist form and forms of modernity, particularly as those forms that appear and reappear in the global south over the course of the long twentieth century. Particular attention is paid here to the history of underdevelopment in the global south and how it impinges upon the production and circulation of literary adaptations. (shrink)

This book offers an advanced introduction to central questions in legal philosophy. What factors determine the content of the law in force? What makes a normative system a legal system? How does law beyond the state differ from domestic law? What kind of moral force does law have? The most important existing views are introduced, but the aim is not to survey the existing literature. Rather, this book introduces the subject by stepping back from the fray to sketch the big (...) picture, to show just what is at stake in these old debates. Legal philosophy has become somewhat arid and inward looking. In part this is because the disagreement between the main camps on the important questions is apparently intractable. The main aim of the book is to suggest both a diagnosis and a proper practical response to this situation of intractable disagreement about questions that do matter. (shrink)

Using a decision theoretic model of scientists’ time allocation between potential research projects I explain the fact that on average women scientists publish less research papers than men scientists. If scientists are incentivised to publish as many papers as possible, then it is necessary and sufficient for a productivity gap to arise that women scientists anticipate harsher treatment of their manuscripts than men scientists anticipate for their manuscripts. I present evidence that women do expect harsher treatment and that scientists’ are (...) incentivised to publish as many papers as possible, and discuss some epistemological consequences of this conjecture. (shrink)

Social scientists report difficulties in drawing out testable predictions from the literature on intersectionality theory. We alleviate that difficulty by showing that some characteristic claims of the intersectionality literature can be interpreted causally. The formalism of graphical causal modeling allows claims about the causal effects of occupying intersecting identity categories to be clearly represented and submitted to empirical testing. After outlining this causal interpretation of intersectional theory, we address some concerns that have been expressed in the literature claiming that membership (...) in demographic categories can have causal effects. (shrink)

Sufficientarianism is a position in debates about distributive justice. Sufficientarianism states that whether individuals have secured enough of some goods is a question that is central to determining whether a society is just. In this paper I provide an overview of this work, and highlight what I think are the most interesting recent contributions to it. Towards the end, I describe a way forward for sufficientarians and argue, in stark contrast to Frankfurt, that sufficientarian accounts of distributive justice should be (...) pluralist and are more plausible when they accommodate, rather than reject, other distributive values, such as equality. (shrink)

Since the seventeenth century, mind-body dualism has undergone an evolution, both in its metaphysics and its supporting arguments. In particular, debates in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century England prepared the way for the fall of substance dualism—the view that the human mind is an immaterial substance capable of independent existence—and the rise of a much less radical property dualism. The evolution from the faltering plausibility of substance dualism to the growing appeal of property dualism depended on at least two factors. On the (...) one hand, there was an increasing recognition of the causal and ontological interdependence of mind and body. Important here was a growing appreciation of the dependence of thought and perception on complex activities in the brain. On the other hand, there was a reconceptualization of the nature of matter; no longer inert and passive, matter came to be viewed as active in its own right. The old arguments lost much of their force, opening the door to a new sort of argument. Rather than appealing to the supposed immaterial nature of mental substance and volition, arguments for dualism began to appeal to the subjective nature of conscious experience—and its inexplicable emergence from the brain—as proof of the ontological distinctiveness of conscious properties. Consequently, the nineteenth and twentieth centuries saw the ascent of a more plausible, but still very problematic, property dualism, a position that to this day enjoys significant support. (shrink)

I outline a defence of a naive group-level standpoint epistemology. According to this view then under conditions often met in real situations of oppression, it is the majority view on questions of import to those marginalised by oppression that ought to be treated as deference worthy. I further argue that this view is inspired by and coheres well with various doctrines laid out and defended by W.E.B. Du Bois, making this a recognisably Duboisian vision of standpoint epistemology. The central conceptual (...) move is to relate principles of social epistemology under conditions of oppression that were of great interest to Du Bois with the conditions for group accuracy that have been studied by social-choice theorists working on Condorcet’s Jury Theorem, as well as contemporary epistemological work on group polarisation. I argue that once these elements are brought together a surprisingly cogent case for deference to the simple majority view of the marginalised can often be made. (shrink)

In this paper, I argue that while supervenience accounts of mental causation in general have difficulty avoiding epiphenomenalism, the situation is particularly bad in the case of conscious experiences since the function-realizer relation, arguably present in the case of intentional properties, does not obtain, and thus, the metaphysical link between supervenient and subvenient properties is absent. I contend, however, that the identification of experiential types with their neural correlates dispels the spectre epiphenomenalism, squares nicely both with the phenomenology of embodiment (...) and the subjectivity of experience, and does not conflict with the supposed multiple realizability of consciousness. View HTML Send article to KindleTo send this article to your Kindle, first ensure [email protected] is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about sending to your Kindle. Find out more about sending to your Kindle. Note you can select to send to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be sent to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply. Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.Consciousness, Supervenience, and Identity: Marras and Kim on the Efficacy of Conscious ExperienceVolume 51, Issue 3LIAM P. DEMPSEY DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/S0012217312000662Your Kindle email address Please provide your Kindle [email protected]@kindle.com Available formats PDF Please select a format to send. By using this service, you agree that you will only keep articles for personal use, and will not openly distribute them via Dropbox, Google Drive or other file sharing services. Please confirm that you accept the terms of use. Cancel Send ×Send article to Dropbox To send this article to your Dropbox account, please select one or more formats and confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about sending content to Dropbox. Consciousness, Supervenience, and Identity: Marras and Kim on the Efficacy of Conscious ExperienceVolume 51, Issue 3LIAM P. DEMPSEY DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/S0012217312000662Available formats PDF Please select a format to send. By using this service, you agree that you will only keep articles for personal use, and will not openly distribute them via Dropbox, Google Drive or other file sharing services. Please confirm that you accept the terms of use. Cancel Send ×Send article to Google Drive To send this article to your Google Drive account, please select one or more formats and confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about sending content to Google Drive. Consciousness, Supervenience, and Identity: Marras and Kim on the Efficacy of Conscious ExperienceVolume 51, Issue 3LIAM P. DEMPSEY DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/S0012217312000662Available formats PDF Please select a format to send. By using this service, you agree that you will only keep articles for personal use, and will not openly distribute them via Dropbox, Google Drive or other file sharing services. Please confirm that you accept the terms of use. Cancel Send ×Export citation Request permission. (shrink)

PTEN‐induced kinase 1 (PINK1) is a Parkinson's disease gene that acts as a sensor for mitochondrial damage. Its best understood role involves phosphorylating ubiquitin and the E3 ligase Parkin (PRKN) to trigger a ubiquitylation cascade that results in selective clearance of damaged mitochondria through mitophagy. Here we focus on other physiological roles of PINK1. Some of these also lie upstream of Parkin but others represent autonomous functions, for which alternative substrates have been identified. We argue that PINK1 orchestrates a multi‐arm (...) response to mitochondrial damage that impacts on mitochondrial architecture and biogenesis, calcium handling, transcription and translation. We further discuss a role for PINK1 in immune signalling co‐ordinated at mitochondria and consider the significance of a freely diffusible cleavage product, that is constitutively generated and degraded under basal conditions. (shrink)

This essay explores histories of common salt, sodium chloride, using concepts and methods from media theory. It contributes to research on media and environment and the general ‘material turn’ taken across the Humanities. I conceive of salt as what Peters calls an ‘elemental’ medium so as to show, first, the imbrication of naturally-occurring substances in the operations and supply chains of digital culture. Second, the many lives salt has lived materially, in techniques of survival and exchange, and metaphorically, in cultural (...) expression, complicate conventional understandings of media. In showing how salt performs three functions, processing, storage, and transfer, which Kittler ascribed to technical and symbolic media, I argue for a more expansive use of ‘mediation’ as a bridge concept that speaks to matters of nature and culture, Arts and Science, and to account for deep histories of extraction and economy that shape digital culture and global supply chains. (shrink)

The logical empiricists expressed a consistent attitude to racial categorisation in both the ethical and scientific spheres. Their attitude may be captured in the following slogan: human racial taxonomy is an empirically meaningful mode of classifying persons that we should refrain from deploying. I offer an interpretation of their position that would render coherent their remarks on race with positions they adopted on the scientific status of taxonomy in general, together with their potential moral or political motivations for adopting that (...) position. (shrink)

Should parental rights be allocated to the best available parent? Anca Gheaus has argued that they should and that the interests of those who might rear them are strictly irrelevant to their allocation. This discussion article defends the view that parents’ interests are relevant to parental rights, against this latest argument. I show that the Best Available Parent View, as stated, conflicts with the exclusion of parental interests, on which it allegedly rests. I show that by including parental interests we (...) better explain how parental rights should be distributed and over a wider range of cases. (shrink)

A sketch of my ethical views, or secular moral philosophy. Emphasis is on stating how it all hangs together.

Almost everyone accepts that parents must provide a good enough upbringing in order to retain custodial rights over children, but little has been said about how that level should be set. In this paper, I examine ways of specifying a good enough upbringing. I argue that the two dominant ways of setting this level, the Best Interests and Abuse and Neglect Views, are mistaken. I defend the Dual Comparative View, which holds that an upbringing is good enough when shortfalls from (...) the best alternative upbringing in terms of the child's interests are no more significant than the parents' interest. (shrink)

What differentiates scientific research from non-scientific inquiry? Philosophers addressing this question have typically been inspired by the exalted social place and intellectual achievements of science. They have hence tended to point to some epistemic virtue or methodological feature of science that sets it apart. Our discussion on the other hand is motivated by the case of commercial research, which we argue is distinct from (and often epistemically inferior to) academic research. We consider a deflationary view in which science refers to (...) whatever is regarded as epistemically successful, but find that this does not leave room for the important notion of scientific error and fails to capture distinctive social elements of science. This leads us to the view that a demarcation criterion should be a widely upheld social norm without immediate epistemic connotations. Our tentative answer is the communist norm, which calls on scientists to share their work widely for public scrutiny and evaluation. (shrink)

1. In the Fall Issue of the Harvard Educational Review, Choo’s (2017) ‘Globalizing Literature Pedagogy’ makes the case for ‘applying cosmopolitan ethical criticism to the teaching of literature’. S...

I discuss the peculiar optimism present in an influential strand of analytic philosophy, and compare it with the more morose philosophical anthropology one might naturally pick up from other fields.

When attendant to the agency of models and the general context in which they perform, climate models can be seen as instrumental policy tools that may be evaluated in terms of their adequacy for purpose. In contrast, when analysed independently of their real-world usage for informing decision-making, the tendency can be to prioritise their representative role rather than their instrumental role. This paper takes as a case study the development of the UK Climate Projections 2009 in relation to its probabilistic (...) treatment of uncertainties and the implications of this approach for adaptation decision-making. It is considered that the move towards ensemble-based probabilistic climate projections has the benefit of encouraging organisations to reshape their adaptation strategies and decisions towards a risk-based approach, where they are confronted definitively with climate modelling uncertainties and drawn towards a more nuanced understanding of how climate impacts could affect their operations. This is further illustrated through the example of the built environment sector, where it can be seen that the probabilistic approach may be of limited salience for the urban heat island in the absence of a corresponding effort towards a more place-based analysis of climate vulnerabilities. Therefore, further assessment of the adequacy-for-purpose of climate models might also consider the usability of climate projections at the urban scale. (shrink)

Isaac Newton’s views on the mind–body relation are of interest not only because of their somewhat unique departure from popular early modern conceptions of mind and its relation to body, but also because of their connections with other aspects of Newton’s thought. In this paper I argue that (1) Newton accepted an interesting sort of mind–body monism, one which defies neat categorization, but which clearly departs from Cartesian substance dualism, and (2) Newton took the power by which we move our (...) bodies by thought alone to be a member of the family of forces that includes gravity and electricity. Time and again, Newton draws an analogy between the ultimate cause and nature of the volitional powers of mind and the ultimate cause and nature of these other forces. (shrink)

Theory as History, which was awarded the Deutscher Memorial Prize in 2011, collects together several of Jairus Banaji’s essays published over the course of 30 years. This symposium comprises four essays engaging with different aspects of the powerful and provocative contributions in Theory as History, as well as an essay in response by Banaji. The Editorial Introduction sketches elements of Banaji’s work and highlights some of the main arguments advanced in the symposium.

Addressing the complex and longstanding relationship between universities and security and intelligence agencies, this article provides a tentative, working conceptual framework for research ethics in a global higher education environment. The article does so in the light of intensified threats of international terrorism which have brought this historic relationship to the contemporary foreground of academic life. Seeing higher education environments as part of a broader process of enhanced security in societies worldwide, we use securitization theory to provide an analytical framework (...) specifically for understanding a complex of historical-contemporary relationships between universities and security and intelligence agencies. As the basis for framing the ethical issues which arise for researchers across all disciplines, the intention is to raise awareness of a relationship which by its very, especially historical, nature, has been secret. The article suggests identify a three-fold analytical framework were structural, operational and ethical considerations are interwoven in complex ways. At the structural level we identify three modus operandi ; and four academic ethical principles. While the conceptual framework presented makes no pretence of offering a complete or comprehensive picture of a complex and still evolving relationship, the intention is provide some critical balance and coherence to a contentious not to say often divisive aspect of research ethics in the securitised university. (shrink)

This paper considers Galen Strawson's recent defence of panpsychism. Strawson's account has a number of attractive features: it proffers an unflappable commitment to the reality of conscious experience, adduces a relatively novel and constructive appeal to the explanatory gap, and presents a picture which is in certain respects consistent with Herbert Feigl's version of mind-brain identity theory, what I call twofold-access theory. Strawson is right that the experiential and physical are not irreconcilable, for at least some physical phenomena have an (...) intrinsic, experiential side. However, despite Strawson's suggestion to the contrary, Feigl distinguishes his view from panpsychism. In fact, twofold-access theory, as I construe it, does not so much imply a pan-psychism as a local- or neuropsychism: there are physical phenomena that are experiences, experiences only directly accessible to one when they are events in one's own brain and body. Strawson is also correct that there must be facts about the physical phenomena that constitute an experience that determine that it is the experiences it is -- or indeed any experience at all. Ultimately, however, Strawson fails to make the case that this relation of determination implies that physical ultimates are -- themselves -- subjects of experience. In fact, given what I call the Complex Subject Thesis, physical ultimates are the least likely candidates for being subjects of experience, for experience, I contend, is an embodied phenomenon. (shrink)

A contract theory is an attempt both to make normative sense of contract law as an institutional type and to come up with criteria for the evaluation of the law of any particular place. There is no precise rule telling us how far the prescriptions of a theory can deviate from actually existing contract law and still be a theory of contract — rather than a political proposal to replace contract law with something else. But we can say roughly that (...) contract theory aims to provide normative foundations for the type of legal institution that enforces (some) agreements and unilateral commitments. Having provided an account of the point of having an institution of that general kind, the theory can then be used to evaluate existing examples. (shrink)

Equality of Opportunity is widely thought of as the normative ideal most relevant to the design of educational institutions. One widely discussed interpretation of this ideal is Rawls' principle of Fair Equality of Opportunity. In this paper I argue that theories, like Rawls, that give priority to the achievement of individual autonomy, are committed to giving that same priority to a principle of sufficient opportunity. Thus, the Rawlsian's primary focus when designing educational institutions should be on sufficiency and not equality. (...) The paper then argues this commitment has at least three attractive implications. Firstly, it enables defenders of Fair Equality of Opportunity to overcome Richard Arneson's powerful objections. Secondly, it suggests a revised version of the principle of Fair Equality of Opportunity that is more plausible. Thirdly, it has attractive practical implications for educational provision. (shrink)

The content ranking system of reddit.com, the English language Internet’s most popular social news website, plays a large but often unnoticed role in shaping what users see and how they think. By pairing informational cascade theory with textual analysis, I argue that the “karma” system elevates particular forms of content over others and generates numerical cues that unconsciously guide users’ judgments about said content and about the world. By drawing on Heidegger’s account of modern technology, I argue that the karma (...) system both symptomatizes and engenders an ontological perspective according to which things in general are taken as available, evaluable, and disposable. (shrink)

It's natural to think of scientists as truth seekers, people driven by an intense curiosity to understand the natural world. Yet this picture of scientists and scientific inquiry sits uncomfortably with the reality and prevalence of scientific fraud. If one wants to get at the truth about nature, why lie? Won't that just set inquiry back, as people pursue false leads? To understand why this occurs – and what can be done about it – we need to understand the social (...) structures scientists work within, and how some of the institutions which enable science to be such a successful endeavour all things considered, also abet and encourage fraud. (shrink)

This paper investigates Isaac Newton's rather unique account of God's relation to matter. According to this account, corpuscles depend on a substantially omnipresent God endowing quantities of objective space with the qualities of shape, solidity, the unfaltering tendency to move in accord with certain laws, and—significantly—the power to interact with created minds. I argue that there are important similarities and differences between Newton's account of matter and Berkeley's idealism. And while the role played by the divine will might at first (...) appear to be a species of occasionalism, I conclude that there are, for Newton, genuine causal relations between minds and bodies. Ultimately, to fully appreciate this account of the creation and persistence of matter, we must consider not only Newton's metaphysical writings, but also his sensorium theory of mind-body interaction, his heterodox theological commitments, and the influences of Descartes, More, and Locke. (shrink)