In this paper we propose a conceptualization of ‘posthumous social status’ as a performative reality accomplished through collective actions that are materially and symbolically legitimated. We question the classical definitions of social status that lead to oversocialized theoretical models, and we argue for the necessity to reconsider the relation between social status and social roles in order to gain insight into the reality of a social presence after death. On this account, we claim that the prestige attached to one's position (...) in society is a social phenomenon produced through autopoietic systems of social influence rather than a pre-existent and stable feature embedded in hierarchical structures and actions. Therefore, we clarify the link between social status and systems of influence through a case study in which we discuss how the Christian-Orthodox tradition is socially organized as a powerful realm of doing posthumous social status. (shrink)

What is animal welfare? Why has it proved so difficult to find a definition that everyone can agree on? This concise and accessible guide is for anyone who is interested in animals and who has wondered how we can assess their welfare scientifically. It defines animal welfare as 'health and animals having what they want', a definition that can be easily understood by scientists and non-scientists alike, expresses in simple words what underlies many existing definitions, and shows what evidence we (...) need to collect to improve animal welfare in practice. Above all, it puts the animal's own point of view at the heart of an assessment of its welfare. But, can we really understand what animals want? A consistent theme running through the book is that not only is it possible to establish what animals want, but that this information is vital in helping us to make sense of the long and often confusing list of welfare measures that are now in use such as 'stress' and 'feel good hormones', expressive sounds and gestures, natural behaviour, cognitive bias, and stereotypies. Defining welfare as 'health and what animals want' allows us to distinguish between measures that are simply what an animal does when it is alert, aroused, or active and those measures that genuinely allow us to distinguish between situations the animals themselves see as positive or negative. Sentience (conscious feelings of pleasure, pain, and suffering) is for many people the essence of what is meant by welfare, but studying consciousness is notoriously difficult, particularly in non-human species. These difficulties are discussed in the context of our current - and as yet incomplete - knowledge of human and animal consciousness. Finally, the book highlights some key ideas in the relationship between animal welfare science and animal ethics and shows how closely the well-being of humans is linked to that of other animals. The Science of Animal Welfare is an ideal companion for undergraduate and graduate students taking courses in animal behaviour and welfare, as well as for professional researchers, practitioners and animal welfare consultants. At the same time, it is easily understandable to non-scientists and anyone without prior knowledge but with an interest in animals and the rapidly evolving science of animal welfare. (shrink)

This book covers the theory of our moral behavior that seems to meander throughout the history of ideas and that led eventually to scientific explanation of human moral behavior with various interpretations of the natural moral law.

In 1976, I met John Bell several times in CERN and we talked about a possible violation of optical theorem, purity tests, EPR paradox, Bell’s inequalities and their violation. In this review, I resume our discussions, and explain how they were related to my earlier research. I also reproduce handwritten notes, which I gave to Bell during our first meeting and a handwritten letter he sent to me in 1982. We have never met again, but I have continued to discuss (...) BI-CHSH inequalities and their violation in several papers. The research stimulated by Bell’s papers and experiments performed to check his inequalities led to several important applications of quantum entanglement in quantum information and quantum technologies. Unfortunately, it led also to extraordinary metaphysical claims and speculations which in our opinion John Bell would not endorse today. BI-CHSH inequalities are violated in physics and in cognitive science, but it neither proved the completeness of quantum mechanics nor its nonlocality. Quantum computing advantage is not due to some magical instantaneous influences between distant physical systems. Therefore one has to be _cautious in drawing-far-reaching philosophical conclusions from Bell’s inequalities_. The true resource for quantum computing is contextuality and not nonlocality. (shrink)

Gdy kartkuje się tę książkę, to od razu rzuca się w oczy mieszanie treści biblijnych z szeregiem pojęć matematycznej i fizycznej natury. Gdy zaś próbuje się ją podczytywać, wtedy z kolei natrafia się na język filozoficzny. Mamy łączenie radykalnie odmiennych porządków sensu. Z jednej strony staje filozoficzna interpretacja pierwszych dziesięciu zdań Biblii, z drugiej szczególny opis kilku obiektów matematycznych i fizycznych. Pierwszym wrażeniem jest doznanie nieprzystawalności. Co jedno może mieć wspólnego z drugim? Oryginalność zestawienia jest uzasadniona celem prezentowanych rozważań. Najogólniej, (...) chodzi tu o możliwie odpowiedzialną, metodycznie kontrolowaną, racjonalną próbę interpretacji początku Biblii za pomocą pojęć filozoficznych, a następnie o odświeżenie wybranych symboli z początku Genesis za pomocą zmetaforyzowanych pojęć matematycznych i fizycznych. (shrink)

A growing body of empirical research examines the effects of the so-called “social determinants of health” on health and health inequalities. Several high-profile publications have issued policy recommendations to reduce health inequalities based on a specific interpretation of this empirical research as well as a set of normative assumptions. This article questions the framework defined by these assumptions by focusing on two issues: first, the normative judgments about the fairness of particular health inequalities; and second, the policy recommendations issued on (...) this basis. We argue that the normative underpinnings of the approach are insufficiently supported and that the policy recommendations do not necessarily follow from the arguments provided. Furthermore, while many of the policies recommended—such as improving people's living conditions and reducing inequalities in wealth and power—are justified in their own right, the way these recommendations are tied to health is problematic. (shrink)

James Tabery Helen Longino’s Studying Human Behavior is an overdue effort at a nonpartisan evaluation of the many scientific disciplines that study the nature and nurture of human behavior, arguing for the acceptance of the strengths and weaknesses of all approaches. After years of conflict, Longino makes the pluralist case for peaceful coexistence. Her analysis of the approaches raises the following question: how are we to understand the pluralistic relationship among the peacefully coexisting approaches? Longino is ironically rather unpluralistic about (...) her pluralism, forcing a choice between integrative pluralism and her preferred ineliminative pluralism. I hope to show that the analysis of approaches she offers actually accommodates a pluralism that is both integrative and ineliminative.Approaches to studying human behaviorPhilosophy of biology took shape as a discipline in the 1970s. This disciplinary formation over. (shrink)

The law of excluded middle is usually considered as intrinsically connected with the realistic standpoint and incompatible with the idealistic position. This is just what Ajdukiewicz claims in his critique of transcendental idealism. The analysis of Ajdukiewicz's argumentation raises the problem of validity of the law of excluded middle for vague (or incomplete) languages. The problem is being solved by differentiating between the logical (or ontological) and the metalogical (or semantical) law of excluded middle: in contrast to the former, the (...) latter is claimed to be invalid for the languages in question, without thereby embracing the idealist position. (shrink)

In a world increasingly concerned with the human species and its future, Marian Stamp Dawkins argues that we need to rethink some of the fundamental questions regarding animal welfare. How are we justified in projecting human emotions on to animals? What kind of mental lives do they have? What can science tell us about their quality of life?

This book explores how changes that occurred around 1989 shaped the study of the social sciences, and scrutinizes the impact of the paradigm of neoliberalism in different disciplinary fields. The contributors examine the ways in which capitalism has transmuted into a seemingly unquestionable, triumphant framework that globally articulates economics with epistemology and social ontology. The volume also investigates how new narratives of capitalism are being developed by social scientists in order to better understand capitalism's ramifications in various domains of knowledge. (...) At its heart, Beyond Neoliberalism seeks to unpack and disaggregate neoliberalism, and to take readers beyond the analytical limitations that a traditional framework of neoliberalism entails. (shrink)

Der Titel stellt die alte Pilatusfrage «Was ist Wahrheit?» im Zeitalter interdisziplinärer Umbrüche aus heutiger Sicht neu. Dazu wird die Wahrheit in der Ästhetik, Ethik, im Gewissen, in Technik und Hermeneutik neu reflektiert. Der Bogen spannt sich über klassische Begriffe bis zu den soziologischen Deformationen der Wahrheit durch den Pluralismus. Die Globalisierung der heutigen Informationsgesellschaft über PC und Internet brachte die Wahrheit aus der «Mode». Dazu wird ein Paradigmenwechsel vorgeschlagen, der auf Zusammenhängen zwischen apriorischen Erkenntnissen, unentscheidbaren Aussagen und dem Mysterium (...) beruht. Letztlich wird die Frage nach der «Wahrheit des Seins» als ihr transzendentales Spezifikum gestellt. Das objektive Maß der Wahrheit berührt neu die Klarheit der Wahrheit des Seins gegenüber der Widersprüchlichkeit des Irrtums. Titel und Thematik sind ein wissenschaftlich kompatibler Beitrag im Dialog zwischen Vernunft und Glaube als interdisziplinäre neue Antwort auf die alte Pilatusfrage. (shrink)

In the mid 1960s two artists associated with Fluxus, Milan Knk and Ken Friedman, began corresponding about the possibilities for conceptual and material exchange through the new media, or intermedia, of actions and correspondence art. To make connections across the geographic and political barrier between Eastern Europe and the West, they used flexible media within a distributive cognitive network to communicate about living and working counter to conformity and inertia in both places. Their use of intermedia reveals a pattern of (...) international information exchange that distinguishes contemporary art and experience from the modern. (shrink)

On some theories of rights, such as the Choice theory, only agents can have moral rights. The realm of right-holders thus excludes several potential candidates, among which are young children, mentally incapacitated persons, and groups since these are thought to lack the required degree of agency. This paper argues that groups can be right-holders. The argument comes in three steps: first, it is argued that full-blown or autonomous agency is not required for the possession of Choice theory rights, second, that (...) groups can be seen as agents, albeit in a limited sense, and third, that groups can make irreducibly collective choices in spite of their limited agency. The upshot of this argument is that groups can have rights, provided that they are organized around a coherent decision-making procedure; furthermore, this account can be employed to argue that other creatures of limited agency are possible right-holders. (shrink)

A recurring concern about luck egalitarianism is that its implementation would make some individuals, in particular those who lack marketable talents, experience shame. This, the objection goes, undermines individuals’ self-respect, which, in turn, may also lead to unequal respect between individuals. Loss of (self-)respect is a concern for any egalitarian, including distributive egalitarians, inasmuch as it is non-compensable. This paper responds to this concern by clarifying the relationship between shame and (self-)respect. We argue, first, a luck egalitarian society and ethos (...) would be radically different from the current one and incompatible with shame over lack of talent, and, second, that while shame may still occur in a less than ideal luck egalitarian society, this kind of shame does not undermine egalitarian commitments. (shrink)

MacIntyre is a major defender of the resurgence of the Aristotelian approach in ethical and political theory. He considers Aristotelianism not only a feasible, but also an intellectually superior alternative to most contemporary dominant ideologies, and to liberalism in particular. There is, however, an important and instructive modification to his view of what is admissible from Aristotle that should be accounted for. The paper traces MacIntyre’s search for a defensible restatement of the Aristotelian ethics and examines in particular his changing (...) attitude to metaphysics as the basis for ethics within his project. Different stages of the development to his proposed Aristotelian alternative are analyzed and evaluated. The paper tries to show that despite the fact that MacIntyre initially repudiated Aristotle’s metaphysical biology, nevertheless his account has always been (implicitly or explicitly) metaphysical. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: Redundancy, Utility, and Disquotation Limited Redundancy: A Dilemma Utility and Quine's Ladder A Variant Ladder and Dis‐That‐ISM Climbing the Ladder? Affirming a Lot of Sentences Needing the Truth Predicate? References.

In the Netherlands there is a growing debate over the possibility of introducting ‘compassionate interference’ as a form of good psychiatric care. Instead of respecting the autonomy of the patient by adopting an attitude of non‐interference, professional carers should take a more active and commited role. There was a great deal of hostile reaction to this suggestion, the most commonly voiced criticism being that it smacked of ‘modern paternalism’. Still, the current conception of care leaves us with a paradox. On (...) the one hand patients are regarded as individuals who have a strong interest in ( and a right to) freedom and non‐interference; on the other hand many of them have a desperate need for flourishing, viable relationships. In fact, part of their problem is that they cannot relate very well with other people. This creates a dichotomy, because respecting patients' autonomy often means that they cannot be given the help they so desperately need. In this respect current care practices do not answer the caring needs of these patients.The criticism on care practices is to be considerd as important. It invites us to reexamine and reevaluate the current conception of caring relationships and its main values. In line with this reexamination an alternative perspective on care is introduced in this paper, a perspective in which `compassionate interference' is not so much a threat to autonomy, but a means of attaining autonomy. For this we need a different definition of autonomy than that commonly used in current care practice. (shrink)

There are no moral cookbooks—no algorithms for whipping up moral confections to suit every occasion. But more modest and flexible tools might still be useful for practical ethics. One team describes how professionals can be taught to use a framework for understanding moral problems.

The paper clarifies Havel’s perception of post-democracy through his various writings and speeches, in comparison with the concepts of post-democracy as proposed by C. Crouch, J. Rancière, R. Rorty, S. Wolin, J. Habermas, and Ch. Mouffe. Consequently, Havel’s critique of the then Western parliamentary democracy and the very essence of his notion of post-democracy will be thoroughly illuminated. The historical and intellectual circumstances that shaped his thinking on the topic will be analysed as well. Some misinterpretations of Havel’s thinking that (...) have emerged in the meantime will also be clarified. (shrink)