Manifeste de la philosophie cartésienne, le Discours de la méthode (1637) est tout à la fois le récit d'un cheminement intellectuel et l'illustration magistrale d'un projet : fonder l'unité des sciences et constituer une science universelle. Foyer d'une oeuvre foisonnante, le Discours revendique les droits de la raison contre toute tradition et toute autorité. C'est pourquoi il assigne à la philosophie une tâche : s'élever à 1a certitude. La présente édition, augmentée d'un dossier, entend mettre en évidence le jeu de (...) résonances qui relie le Discours aux autres textes de Descartes. (shrink)

I argue that the offense generation pattern of slurring terms parallels that of impoliteness behaviors, and is best explained by appeal to similar purely pragmatic mechanisms. In choosing to use a slurring term rather than its neutral counterpart, the speaker signals that she endorses the term. Such an endorsement warrants offense, and consequently slurs generate offense whenever a speaker's use demonstrates a contrastive preference for the slurring term. Since this explanation comes at low theoretical cost and imposes few constraints on (...) an account of the semantics of slurs, this suggests that we should not require semantic accounts to provide an independent explanation of the offense profile. (shrink)

I argue that inferences from highly probabilifying racial generalizations are not solely objectionable because acting on such inferences would be problematic, or they violate a moral norm, but because they violate a distinctively epistemic norm. They involve accepting a proposition when, given the costs of a mistake, one is not adequately justified in doing so. First I sketch an account of the nature of adequate justification—practical adequacy with respect to eliminating the ~p possibilities from one’s epistemic statespace. Second, I argue (...) that inferences based on demographic generalizations tend to disproportionately expose group members to the risks associated with mistakenly assuming stereotypical propositions, and so magnify the wrong involved in relying on such inferences without adequate justification. (shrink)

Several authors have recently suggested that moral factors and norms `encroach' on the epistemic, and because of salient parallels to pragmatic encroachment views in epistemology, these suggestions have been dubbed `moral encroachment views'. This paper distinguishes between variants of the moral encroachment thesis, pointing out how they address different problems, are motivated by different considerations, and are not all subject to the same objections. It also explores how the family of moral encroachment views compare to classical pragmatic encroachment accounts.

À partir de Merleau-Ponty, Henry et Sartre, ce livre montre comment chaque expérience perceptive est susceptible d'accroître ou d'affaiblir la capacité des individus à se laisser affecter en profondeur par leur situation et à l'endurer.

I have always considered that the two questions respecting God and the Soul were the chief of those that ought to be demonstrated by philosophical rather than ...

In addition to protecting agents’ autonomy, consent plays a crucial social role: it enables agents to secure partners in valuable interactions that would be prohibitively morally risk otherwise. To do this, consent must be observable: agents must be able to track the facts about whether they have received a consent-based permission. I argue that this morally justifies a consent-practice on which communicating that one consents is sufficient for consent, but also generates robust constraints on what sorts of behaviors can be (...) taken as consent- communicating. (shrink)

The problem of moral disagreement has been presented as an objection to contextualist semantics for ‘ought’, since it is not clear that contextualism can accommodate or give a convincing gloss of such disagreement. I argue that independently of our semantics, disagreements over ‘ought’ in non-cooperative contexts are best understood as indirect metalinguistic disputes, which is easily accommodated by contextualism. If this is correct, then rather than posing a problem for contextualism, the data from moral disagreements provides some reason to adopt (...) a semantics that allows contextual variance in the meanings of ‘ought’. (shrink)

Some, but not all, of the mistakes a person makes when acting in apparently necessary self-defense are reasonable: we take them not to violate the rights of the apparent aggressor. I argue that this is explained by duties grounded in agents' entitlements to a fair distribution of the risk of suffering unjust harm. I suggest that the content of these duties is filled in by a social signaling norm, and offer some moral constraints on the form such a norm can (...) take. (shrink)

Az ELTE filozófiaoktatójának új könyve, ahogy alcíme világosan állítja a vallás filozófiai alapjainak feltárására vállalkozik. Vagyis a következő alapvető kérdéseket igyekszik megválaszolni: Mi a vallás? Mi a vallási hit; és mi lehet ennek a hitnek a tartalma? (Ez utóbbit nevezi könyvében “vallási reprezentációnak”.) Tömör, de rendkívül intenzív vizsgálódása vérbeli filozófia, fogalmi megismerés és elemzés, amelynek egyik lábát a középkori filozófia beható ismerete, másik lábát pedig a kortárs, ún. angolszász filozófia nyelvfilozófiai alapú módszerei adják, amint a megismeréstudomány és evolúcióbiológia felismerései támogatnak. (...) A végeredmény egy elegáns és világos érvelés, nem apológia és nem bálványdöntés, hanem egy igen eredeti vallásfilozófiai alapozás, amely a vallás, a hit, mint antropológiai jellemző megértéséhez is közelebb visz. A szándékoltan rövid, de jól hasznosítható irodalomjegyzékkel záruló kiadvány filozófiai jártasságot feltételez olvasójáról. (shrink)

Lehet-e filozófiai értelemben beszélni a betegségről? Lényegében ezt a kérdést járja körbe a kolozsvári egyetemi tanár könyve. Király V. István szerint ezt az explicit filozófiai diskurzusban igencsak elhanyagolt témát, nem ellentéte, - a filozófus számára sokkal ismerősebb - egészség viszonyában, hanem önmagában sui generis kell megragadni. A betegség alapvető létmódja a lehetőség, hiszen miden ember és élőlény - lényegénél és léténél fogva - megbetegedhet. Az arisztotelészi lehetőség (dynamis) fogalma pedig a szabadsághoz vezet el, így a betegségről való meditáció - hasonlóan (...) a halálról való elmélkedéshez (a szerzőtől ld.: Halandóan lakozik szabadságában az ember) - az emberi egzisztencia megértéséhez visz közelebb. A kiadvány érdekessége, hogy egy igen bőséges, mintegy ötven oldalra rugó angol összefoglalás kíséri. A heideggeri létfilozófia által inspirált, igen eredeti, de a filozófiában kevéssé járatosak számára is befogadható, gondolatébresztő mű. (shrink)

This article interprets Pam Gems’s play Queen Christina as an avant la lettrethesis on the performance of gender, identifying correspondences between the protagonist’s trajectory and the successive feminist interventions. Focusing on the 17th-century Swedish queen’s transformation from a masculine-identified bastion of patriarchy into an untamed rebel against political and sexual conservatism, Gems, in fact, indirectly shares her views on aspects of western feminist thought. This article’s analysis demonstrates that following Christina’s initial appropriation and subsequent contestation of patriarchal values, she engages (...) with radical feminism before briefly identifying herself as a socialist feminist. In the wake of her unfulfilled attempt at maternity, she moves on to embrace cultural feminism; though, eventually, she decides not to privilege any specific political position and thus echoes Gems’s own ambivalence and reservation towards explicit ideological commitment. (shrink)

Sometimes speakers within a linguistic community use a term that they do not conceptualize as a slur, but which other members of that community do. Sometimes these speakers are ignorant or naïve, but not always. This article explores a puzzle raised when some speakers stubbornly maintain that a contested term t is not derogatory. Because the semantic content of a term depends on the language, to say that their use of t is semantically derogatory despite their claims and intentions, we (...) must individuate languages in a way that counts them as speaking our language L, assigns t a determinately derogatory content in L, and still accommodates the other features of slurs’ linguistic profile. Given the difficulty of doing this, there is some reason to give a non-semantic analysis of the derogatory aspect of slurs. The author suggests that rather than dismissing the stubborn as semantically incompetent, we would do better to appeal to expected uptake as moral reasons for the stubborn to adjust their linguistic practices. (shrink)

Recently, an increasing number of scholars have been showing interest in old-fashioned racism again. While recent studies on old-fashioned racism apparently increase our knowledge of this psychological theory of racism, the studies actually shed light on a different type of racism, namely offensive racism. The aim of this text is to argue that psychological theories of racism, like old-fashioned racism and modern racism, depend on societies’ social norms. I will show that questionnaires are highly sensitive to social norms, and if (...) there is change in social norms, the original measurement object alters. The theory of old-fashioned racism implicitly assumes agents that follow (or conform to) the social norm to behave prejudiced. Today, however, this social norm does not exist in Western societies. If agents express the same prejudices today, they indicate their willingness to breach the social norm to behave unprejudiced. Thereby, classic old-fashioned racism measures reflect a new kind of racism today. (shrink)

We present a mathematical model of a fishery on several sites with a variable price. The model takes into account the evolution during the time of the resource, fish and boat movement between the different sites, fishing effort and price that varies with respect to supply and demand. We suppose that the movements of the boats and resource as well as the variation of the price go on at a fast time scale. We use methods of aggregation of variables in (...) order to reduce the number of variables and we derive a reduced model governing two global variables, respectively the biomass of the resource and the fishing effort of the whole fishery. We look for the existence of equilibria of the aggregated model and perform local stability analysis. Two main cases can occur. The first one corresponds to over-exploitation leading to fish extinction. At extinction, the fishing effort tends to a positive value. The second case corresponds to a durable fishery equilibrium which is globally asymptotically stable. In the later case, we show that there exists a number of fishing sites that optimizes the total catch of the fishery. (shrink)

A regulative norm for permissible defense distinguishes the conditions under which we will hold defenders to be innocent of any wrongdoing from those in which we hold them responsible for assault or manslaughter. The norm must strike a fair balance between defenders' security, on the one hand, and other agents’ legitimate claim to live without fear of suffering mistaken defensive harm, on the other. Since agents must make defensive decisions under high pressure and on only partial information, they will sometimes (...) make mistakes. We have reason to want a norm that considers a mistake permissible when it was highly likely on the evidence that defense was proportionate and necessary to avert a threat. However, adopting an evidentialist norm under non-ideal conditions is treacherous business. I briefly survey empirical data suggesting that the type and extent of bias prevalent in the US renders a straightforward evidentialist norm unjust, and thus since the legal practice in the US relies on such a norm, we must explore avenues for reform. Preferably this will take the form of adopting a modified evidential norm, and I explore some promising options. If this proves impossible, however, then we have to accept a strict regulative norm (which does not consider any mistakes permissible), as the sole just alternative. (shrink)

This Editorial reports an exchange in form of a comment and reply on the article “History and Nature of the Jeffreys–Lindley Paradox” (Arch Hist Exact Sci 77:25, 2023) by Eric-Jan Wagenmakers and Alexander Ly.

A popular informal argument suggests that statistics about the preponderance of criminal involvement among particular demographic groups partially justify others in making defensive mistakes against members of the group. One could worry that evidence-relative accounts of moral rights vindicate this argument. After constructing the strongest form of this objection, I offer several replies: most demographic statistics face an unmet challenge from reference class problems, even those that meet it fail to ground non-negligible conditional probabilities, even if they did, they introduce (...) new costs likely to cancel out any justificatory contribution of the statistic, but even if they didn’t, demographic facts are the wrong sort to make a moral difference to agents’ negative rights. I conclude that the popular argument should be rejected, and evidence-relative theories do not have the worrisome implication. (shrink)

Law-enforcement agencies are increasingly able to leverage crime statistics to make risk predictions for particular individuals, employing a form of inference that some condemn as violating the right to be “treated as an individual.” I suggest that the right encodes agents’ entitlement to a fair distribution of the burdens and benefits of the rule of law. Rather than precluding statistical prediction, it requires that citizens be able to anticipate which variables will be used as predictors and act intentionally to avoid (...) them. Furthermore, it condemns reliance on various indexes of distributive injustice, or unchosen properties, as evidence of law-breaking. (shrink)

Rights to do wrong are not necessary even within the framework of interest-based rights aimed at preserving autonomy. Agents can make morally significant choices and develop their moral character without a right to do wrong, so long as we allow that there can be moral variation within the set of actions that an agent is permitted to perform. Agents can also engage in non-trivial self-constitution in choosing between morally indifferent options, so long as there is adequate non-moral variation among the (...) alternatives. The stubborn intuition that individuals have a right to do wrong in some cases can be explained as stemming from a cautionary principle motivated by the asymmetry between the risk of wrongly interfering and that of refraining from interfering. (shrink)

As a model for processing information about people's perceptions to understand the complex world and society in which they live, the cultural schema serves as a key concept in Cultural Linguistics when directing to the perception and processing of information about people, and social groups, and events. Cultural schema theory is valuable in deciphering culturally structured concepts, covering the entire range of human experience expressed in many fields such as education, belief, religion, etc. Through the practice of sacred rituals, each (...) religious believer can form his system of ideas about entities in his or her belief world. Those experiences and experiences are conceptualized through the language picture. In the process of cultural development and integration, the cultural awareness of the Catholic community also reflects certain changes in Catholicism in the West in harmony with the customs and beliefs of Eastern countries. like Vietnam, expressed through the practice of funeral rites and traditional marriage of the Vietnamese. In this article, by using quantitative and qualitative methods, we have conducted a character analysis of the above cultural schemas based on the corpus of 120 discourses drawn during the implementation perform funeral and marriage rites for Vietnamese Catholics. Research results show that cultural schemas (event diagrams, role schemas, image schemas, propositional schemas, and emotional schemas) reflect the cultural knowledge (beliefs, standards, principles, and expectations) of each Vietnamese Catholic about DEATH and MARRIAGE as a journey or a new transformation in one's life... That is the basis for them to transmit achieve and explain the basic values of these two concepts, helping us to understand more deeply the mind of the Vietnamese Catholic community in Vietnam when performing two important rituals in human life in reality. (shrink)

Can we hold agents responsible for their implicitly biased behavior? The aim of this text is to show that, from the nurturing stance, holding subjects responsible for their implicitly biased behavior is justified, even though they are not blameworthy. First, I will introduce the nurturing stance as Daphne Brandenburg originally developed it. Second, I will specify what holding somebody responsible from the nurturing stance amounts to. Third, I show how and why holding responsible can help a subject develop an impaired (...) capacity. Fourth, I analyze empirical data about holding prejudiced subjects responsible and highlight that the internal motivation to control prejudiced reactions decreases implicit attitudes’ influences. Furthermore, the data show that in order to be appropriate moral demands have to acknowledge the target's autonomy and competence. In sum, from the nurturing stance, holding implicitly biased subjects responsible is appropriate if they can adequately respond to the moral demands. (shrink)

The coming of bioethics -- The coming of bioethicists -- "Choices on our conscience": the inauguration of the Kennedy Institute of Education -- "Hello, Dolly": bioethics in the media -- Celebrating bioethics and bioethicists -- Thinking socially and culturally in bioethics -- Reminiscences of observing participants -- Bioethics circles the globe -- Bioethics in France -- The development of bioethics in the Islamic Republic of Pakistan -- The coming of the culture wars to American bioethics.

This study evaluated the integration of psychology ethics into an introductory psychology course. Students in two general psychology sections were exposed to an infusion of psychology ethics in teaching, research, and clinical practice, whereas students in two sections were exposed to traditional course content. Students completed a pre and post-test assessment including a psychology ethics questionnaire and open-ended responses to three ethics case studies. Students in the ethics group displayed a statistically significant increase in scores on both measures from pre (...) to post-test. However, students in the traditional group showed no improvement in scores. (shrink)

U.S. immigration policies history in the early 20th century has mostly been thought through the linear growing power of restrictionists versus liberals, resulting in 1917 Burnett law - containing the literacy test - and then 1921 and 1924 Quota laws. The latter has been described by scholars as the product of direct infuence of Eugenist activists or of Eugenists mixed with Racists . Yet, the thorough study of the policy process permit to trace the origin of the quota laws in (...) the mind of a key civil servant: William Walter Husband and in the activism of Sydney L. Gulick, a theology professor who spent his whole life searching for quelling American-Japanese relations. The latter conceived an immigration quotas plan whose aim was to give equal treatment to all ‘races’ and peoples. The Immigration Restriction League, had no other choice than to recognize Gulick's large success in loobying his plan. Yet, in a last move, the IRL succeeded to maintain the exclusion of Asians in what became the Emergency Quota Act of 1921. Far from Eugenist influence, this Act is the product of a battle between non racist and racist restrictionists upon the means and goals of immigration control. During years, they were permanently engaged into fierce political battles whose outcome had a significant impact on immigration restriction policies. (shrink)

Ce travail a pour objet d’examiner comment sont articulés deux thèmes centraux de l’oeuvre philosophique de Poincaré : la question de la nature mathématique de la physique et la critique des questionnements « métaphysiques » relatifs aux théories scientifiques. En s’appuyant sur la dimension linguistique du traitement de ces thèmes par Poincaré et en analysant certains aspects de ses réflexions sur le continu et la mesure des grandeurs physiques, notre examen sera poursuivi en suivant le fil conducteur de la distinction (...) entre les notions d’identité numérique et d’égalité, dont nous tâcherons de montrer qu’elle sous-tend tout à la fois la caractérisation par Poincaré de la métaphysique et ses considérations sur la géométrie et le continu.The purpose of this study is to examine the link between two main topics of Poincaré’s philosophical work : the question of the mathematical nature of physics and the criticism of “metaphysical” questions about physical theories. By focusing on the linguistic dimension of Poincaré’s treatment of these subjects and by analysing some aspects of his reflections about continuum and physical measurement, our inquiry will be pursued following the vital lead of the distinction between numerical identity and equality, which appears to underlie both Poincaré’s characterisation of metaphysics and his reflections about geometry and the continuum. (shrink)