The idea that science is or should be value-free, and that values are or should be formed independently of science, has been under fire by philosophers of science for decades. Science and Moral Imagination directly challenges the idea that science and values cannot and should not influence each other. Matthew J. Brown argues that science and values mutually influence and implicate one another, that the influence of values on science is pervasive and must be responsibly managed, and that science (...) can and should have an influence on our values. This interplay, he explains, must be guided by accounts of scientific inquiry and value judgment that are sensitive to the complexities of their interactions. Brown presents scientific inquiry and value judgment as types of problem-solving practices and provides a new framework for thinking about how we might ethically evaluate episodes and decisions in science, while offering guidance for scientific practitioners and institutions about how they can incorporate value judgments into their work. His framework, dubbed "the ideal of moral imagination," emphasizes the role of imagination in value judgment and the positive role that value judgment plays in science. (shrink)

Spinoza was one of the most influential figures of the Enlightenment, but his often obscure metaphysics makes it difficult to understand the ultimate message of his philosophy. Although he regarded freedom as the fundamental goal of his ethics and politics, his theory of freedom has not received sustained, comprehensive treatment. Spinoza holds that we attain freedom by governing ourselves according to practical principles, which express many of our deepest moral commitments. Matthew J. Kisner focuses on this theory and presents (...) an alternative picture of the ethical project driving Spinoza's philosophical system. His study of the neglected practical philosophy provides an accessible and concrete picture of what it means to live as Spinoza's ethics envisioned. (shrink)

In this chapter I focus on two problems facing immigration systems around the world, and Australia in particular. The topics addressed are chosen because each one involves important fundamental rights and because significant improvement in these areas is possible even if each state acts alone, without significant coordination with others. First, I examine refugee programmes, focussing specifically on the ‘two- tier’ refugee programmes pioneered by Australia with the introduction of Temporary Protection Visas by the Howard Government in 1999. Next, I (...) look at recent declines in refugee resettlement schemes from already stingy levels and, in relation to Australia in particular, I show how the tying of resettlement numbers to the number of affirmative asylum claims granted is both wrong- headed and counterproductive. The second area of immigration policy explored is family migration, another area where immigration systems around the world have been moving in the wrong direction, often via less than transparent administrative processes. Australia is no exception. While Australia’s family migration system is reasonably good on its face, in practice there are several factors which make the programme significantly less than satisfactory from the perspective of protecting the basic rights of migrants and, arguably more importantly, citizens. These problems can and should be fixed in straightforward ways, and since doing so would be more just, would have few— if any— significant negative consequences, and in fact would have a number of clear benefits, those changes should be made. (shrink)

‘Gender disappointment’ is regularly reported by those whose child’s sex does not match the sex that they, the parent, desired. With symptoms ranging from mere fleeting sadness to documented cases of serious depression, alienation from one’s child, and emotional suffering, it is clear that so-called ‘gender disappointment’ is a serious issue, that has, as yet, seen little philosophical attention (though see Hendl and Browne 2020). In this chapter I explore gender disappointment, not from the perspective of a parent who ended (...) up with the child of the wrong sex at birth, but rather, from the perspective of a different kind of gender disappointment: the transgender person who grew up and only then disappointed their parents by turning out to be the ‘wrong’ gender. This perspective, I argue, reveals a great deal about the shared gender essentialism at the heart of patriarchal and cissexist ideology. Moreover, I will argue that it reveals the underlying propertarian relationship of parents to their children under contemporary capitalism – a troubling relationship that legitimates the treatment of children as objects to be designed and controlled as commodities at the whims of parents. In this way I disagree with Whyman when he writes that “a preference for having a child of one sex over the other should be considered one of those irrational things of which some sense can nevertheless be made – like aesthetic taste” (Whyman 2021, 113-114). I argue, to the contrary, that the desire for a child of one particular gender is not akin to a mere unproblematic aesthetic preference. Instead, and following the rich feminist tradition of thinking about the patriarchal origins of sexual desire, I argue that we must see these desires as troubling reflections of dominant patriarchal and cissexist ideology, underwritten by a particular neoliberal capitalist mode of production. Moreover, we can seek to change those desires. (shrink)

Havstad (2022) argues that the argument from inductive risk for the claim that non-epistemic values have a legitimate role to play in the internal stages of science is deductively valid. She also defends its premises and thus soundness. This is, as far as we are aware, the best reconstruction of the argument from inductive risk in the existing literature. However, there is a small flaw in this reconstruction of the argument from inductive risk which appears to render the argument invalid. (...) This flaw is superficial, and a small amendment to it rescues the claim of validity. (shrink)

In 2005, Charles Mills published “‘Ideal Theory’ as Ideology” in Hypatia: a withering critique of much of contemporary political philosophy and ethics. For Mills such work in philosophy failed to attend to the realities of social life and politics, and in remaining silent on actual issues of domination and oppression served an ideological role in supporting the interests of white bourgeois men. Around the time that Charles Mills launched his broadside against ideal theory, trans theorists had been fighting their own (...) battle against the abstraction of theory from the realities of trans lives and oppression. Vivian Namaste (2000) and Jay Prosser (1998) argued that contemporary gender theory failed to justice to the actuality of trans life, retreating instead to understanding trans life through literary archetypes and idealized radical figures. In this chapter I’ll compare Mills’ critique of ideal theory with the transfeminist critique of 1990s gender theory, arguing that they share much in common. Centrally, both critiques share an underlying commitment to theory needing to be grounded in the actuality of oppression and power relations. This common thread, I suggest, must continue to guide transfeminist thought and action: contra Marquis Bey (2022) transfeminist thought and praxis must continue to be about trans lives, about the oppression of trans women, and about ways of actually achieving liberation from our current dire position. (shrink)

Putative examples of true contradictions in the social world have been given by dialetheists such as Graham Priest, Richard Routley, and Val Plumwood. However, we feel that it has not been decisively argued that these examples are in fact true contradictions rather than merely apparent. In this paper we adopt a new strategy to show that there are some true contradictions in the social world, and hence that dialetheism is correct. The strategy involves showing that a group of sincere dialetheists (...) can, given an appropriately formed institution, bootstrap contradictions into existence. We discuss objections and consider the implications of this finding for debates over logic. (shrink)

We uncover a largely unnoticed and unaddressed problem in conservation research: arguments built within studies are sometimes defective in more fundamental and specific ways than appreciated, because they misrelate values and empirical matters. We call this the unraveled rope problem because just as strands of rope must be properly and intricately wound with each other so the rope supports its load, empirical aspects and value aspects of an argument must be related intricately and properly if the argument is to objectively (...) support its conclusion. By characterizing this problem with precision, our study differs from but complements existing studies of value issues in conservation science, in two ways. First, it focuses on key relationships between empirical issues and value issues, relations that have sometimes been obscured by focusing on these issues more independently of each other. Second, it focuses on these relationships within arguments and deploys a method of argument analysis and evaluation honed in other fields but under-utilized in conservation science. By combining our study's novel features, we detail six families of argument defect that exemplify the unraveled rope problem within existing literature. These defects sometimes manifest within basic research stages, rather than just in more applied downstream stages where roles for values are already obvious to many. As scientific reasoning and communication become increasingly important for addressing society's greatest environmental challenges, overcoming the unraveled rope problem will be essential to the success and integrity of conservation research. Therefore, we also outline potential solutions, preventative measures, and useful further work for conservation researchers. (shrink)

This paper is about both an application of virtue ethics, and about virtue ethics itself. A popular application of neo-Aristotelian virtue ethics to environmental issues is called interpersonal extensionism. It argues that we should view the normative range of traditional interpersonal virtues, such as compassion and humility, as extending beyond our interactions with people to also include our interactions with non-human environments. This paper uncovers an unaddressed problem for this view, then proposes a solution by revising how we understand neo-Aristotelian (...) virtue ethics itself. The tenet in question, defended by virtue ethicists such as Hursthouse and Foot, claims that a character trait counts as a virtue only if it is strictly necessary for human flourishing. This tenet threatens interpersonal extensionism because, as I show, the extended or environment-regarding aspects of virtues such as compassion and humility are not strictly speaking necessary for human flourishing: people can in principle flourish without those. But I then argue that diversities across both people and environments give us good, seldom acknowledged, reasons to revise neo-Aristotelian virtue ethics so that it no longer imposes the tenet that led to this problem. Neither a trait nor an aspect of it need be necessary for human flourishing in order to count as a neo-Aristotelian virtue. Indeed, marked variation between people and between environments can be complementary with respect to flourishing. Sometimes, for instance, part of the reason an environment-regarding aspect of compassion is virtuous is because of its distinct role in creating conditions that increase the chance that others will flourish. To show these things, I draw from work in philosophy of science on cluster approaches to categories and constitution, and from experiences working with diverse people in Canada's diverse national and provincial parks. (shrink)

IntroductionThis paper’s argument can be stated simply: first, the primary unacknowledged cause of modern warfare (that is, since the Great War of 1914–18) is neither “nationalism” nor “imperialism” (to name two popular bogeymen) but modern rationality itself, specifically the epistemological revolution embodied in the philosophy of the Prussian philosopher Immanuel Kant (1724–1804); second, the current Ukraine War is a case in point, one that interacts with contemporary transformations in Western culture (especially the abolishment of a sense of the objective reality (...) and meaning of male and female sexual differentiation) in ways that reveal the current Russia–Ukraine War as reprising—if it does not merely continue—the ideational conflict at the heart of the Great War, a conflict that emerges for the reasons set forth as the Ur-Krieg, or “source war,” of the historical era we inhabit. In making this argument, this paper will take its inspiration from the writings of the little-known Russian philosopher Vladimir Ern (1882–1917), and for this reason, we begin in a public lecture hall in Moscow in 1914. (shrink)

There have now been a few attempts in trans theory to give an account of trans epistemology (see Radi 2019; Meadow 2016; and Dickson 2021). I will suggest that despite an admirable goal—that of giving an epistemology that provides a methodologically radical and distinctively trans break from other contemporary epistemological theory—thus far no account has been successful. Instead, I suggest that, in the absence of a more satisfactory radical account of trans epistemology, we can think of trans epistemology as a (...) methodologically moderate (though politically radical) extension of mainstream epistemology. (shrink)

Ageing causes progressive decline in metabolic, behavioural, and physiological functions, leading to a reduced health span. The extracellular matrix (ECM) is the three‐dimensional network of macromolecules that provides our tissues with structure and biomechanical resilience. Imbalance between damage and repair/regeneration causes the ECM to undergo structural deterioration with age, contributing to age‐associated pathology. The ECM ‘Ageing Across the Life Course’ interdisciplinary research network (ECMage) was established to bring together researchers in the United Kingdom, and internationally, working on the emerging field (...) of ECM ageing. Here we report on a consultation at a joint meeting of ECMage and the Medical Research Council / Versus Arthritis Centre for Integrated Research into Musculoskeletal Ageing, held in January 2023, in which delegates analysed the key questions and research opportunities in the field of ECM ageing. We examine fundamental biological questions, enabling technologies, systems of study and emerging in vitro and in silico models, alongside consideration of the broader challenges facing the field. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reason, Passion, and Metaphysics in Bonaventure:Against Hylomorphic EnthusiasmMatthew J. DugandzicIntroductionContemporary commentators on Aquinas's understanding of the passions all agree that reason is supposed to be the ruler of the passions, but they disagree on the character of this rule. Some would ascribe a high degree of freedom to the passions, such that, even though reason is overall the ruler of the passions, sometimes the passions are right to resist (...) this rule.1 Others argue that the passions ought to obey reason slavishly, such that, if any passion is to be virtuous, it must result from "reason's immediate control,... [that is,] reason now commanding this or that passion."2 Many other thinkers would fall somewhere in between these two positions at various points, such that giving a full account of the range of these positions would be quite complicated, but these scholars could also be placed neatly into two categories according to how they would answer the following question: Are virtuous passions only those that arise in response to reason's immediate command, or can other passions be included, such as those that, for example, without [End Page 123] being explicitly commanded to do so by reason, prompt reason to do this or that, or even inform reason about some aspect of an object?3 Until recently, most scholars of Thomas Aquinas would have held the latter position, that the passions sometimes have some positive roles to play in the virtuous life even when they arise in the absence of an immediate command from reason.4 In recent years, however, the number of scholars who maintain the former position, holding that any passion that does not arise in response to reason's immediate command is not virtuous, has been growing.5 [End Page 124]My aim in this article is further to bolster the case of those who hold that, for Aquinas, the only passions that are virtuous are those that arise from reason's immediate command. I will do this by criticizing an argument that is commonly used by those who oppose this position, and which I refer to as "hylomorphic enthusiasm." Generally speaking, the logic of hylomorphic enthusiasm goes like this: Aquinas's understanding of the relationship between passion and reason is rooted in his hylomorphic view of the unity between body and soul, which unity implies that, for him, reason and passion have something of a collegial relationship, whereby reason rules the passions not despotically, but as a ruler who, though in charge, is nevertheless interested in hearing what his subjects have to say. Paul Gondreau, for example, says that, in Aquinas's view, reason rules over the passions as in a "constitutional monarchy," in which "citizens submit to the supreme authority of the monarch, yet without relinquishing all their political rights and privileges."6 For Gondreau, Aquinas's characterization of the relationship between reason and passion was unique for his time, and was due to his similarly unique "hylemorphic [sic] metaphysics of human nature."7 Bonaventure, on the other hand, did not share this hylomorphic view of the relationship between body and soul, but was rather a substance dualist, and so, consequently, he thought that reason cannot rule the passions politically, but can only "'tame' the passions by a kind of exterior imposition, or forced 'submission to reason' [obtemperat ratoini)]."8In sum, the position of the hylomorphic enthusiasts is this: Aquinas's hylomorphic view of the unity of body and soul implies a collegial view of reason's rulership over passion, while Bonaventure's more dualistic view of the relationship between body and soul implies that reason could rule the passions only despotically, rather than politically. There are a number of premises, both implicit and explicit, in this argument. For the sake of focusing this paper, I will choose to focus on two. First, I will focus on the explicit claim that Bonaventure held a dualistic view of the relationship [End Page 125] between body and soul; I maintain that Bonaventure's understanding of the relationship between body and soul is no more dualistic than Aquinas's. Second, an implicit premise of hylomorphic enthusiasm is that having a hylomorphic or... (shrink)

Based on the French notion of terroir or ‘the taste of place,’ a certified geographical indication (GI) identifies an agro-food product as originating in a particular territory and suggests that its quality, reputation, or other characteristics are essentially or exclusively attributable to its geographical origin. Previous scholarship exploring the social construction of terroir has focused on how disparities in political, economic, and cultural power shape GI regulations, certification procedures, and territorial boundaries. While these works have considered knowledge as a resource (...) deployed through relations of authority, studies of GI implementation have not adequately considered an important aspect of power in contemporary politics: the epistemic authority to assert the legitimacy of knowledge and its relevance to policymaking. In contrast, in this article, I take the accomplishment of epistemic authority – to determine the ‘essential’ and ‘exclusive’ physical and/or cultural attributes of place that shape product character – as key to the social construction of terroir and the institutionalization of GI regulations. This process is explored through a case study of Ecuador’s 2013-2019 implementation of a GI for Galápagos Islands coffee. I draw on analysis of relevant policy and regulatory documents and semi-structured interviews with 21 key stakeholders to argue that analytical attention to the legitimacy and relevance of terroir knowledge explains how coffee producers were able to deploy authoritative knowledge to disrupt and reinforce relations of authority and challenge the terms and mechanisms of GI qualification. (shrink)

This paper concerns virtue-based ethical principles that bear upon agricultural uses of technologies, such as GM crops and CRISPR crops. It does three things. First, it argues for a new type of virtue ethics approach to such cases. Typical virtue ethics principles are vague and unspecific. These are sometimes useful, but we show how to supplement them with more specific virtue ethics principles that are useful to people working in specific applied domains, where morally relevant domain-specific conditions recur. We do (...) this while still fulfilling the need for principles and associated practical reasoning to flexibly respect variation between cases. Second, with our more detailed approach we criticize and improve upon a commonly discussed principle about ecosystemic external goods that are crucial for human flourishing. We show this principle is far more conservative than appreciated, as it would prohibit many technology uses that are uncontroversially acceptable. We then replace this principle with two more specific ones. One identifies specific conditions in which ecosystem considerations are against a technology use, the other identifies favorable conditions. Third, we uncover a humility-based principle that operates within an influential “hubris argument” against uses of several biotechnologies in agriculture. These arguments lack a substantive theory of the nature of humility. We clarify such a theory, and then use it to replace the uncovered humility-based principle with our own more specific one that shifts focus from past moral failings, to current epistemic limits when deciding whether to support new technologies. (shrink)

In a document penned under the direction of its then-president Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, the Vatican’s International Theological Commission observed that many neo-Darwinian materialists and their Christian critics share a misunderstanding of the nature of divine causality. This article explores the thought of Joseph Ratzinger in view of proposing the features of a path that seeks to eschew these faulty understandings of how God causes evolutionary change within our world, thus providing an alternative to the Intelligent Design movement’s approach to creation.. (...) Ratzinger has a deep respect for the integrity of nature, rejecting the notion that God is a “craftsman” who “tinkers” with the world. According to Ratzinger, evolutionary change occurs “precisely in the processes of a living being” even as human beings are “not the mere product of development.” Finally, the emeritus pontiff insists that creation is an ever-present act that unfolds “in the manner in which thought is creative,” a dynamic that he describes variously as a story, drama, melody, and symphony. Wedding these and other key insights, this article submits that Ratzinger’s thought on evolution should lead us to conceive of creation less along the lines of an intelligently designed machine and more as a masterpiece story that is continually being told as its plot unfolds naturally over the course of time. (shrink)

Digital technologies are changing our understanding of ethical emulation. In this article, Matthew Dennis proposes that some social media technologies have given rise to a strikingly new set of ethical ideals, often concerned with the ideal of self-cultivation. While there is relatively little philosophical discussion of these kinds of ideals, Dennis suggests that scrutiny of Friedrich Nietzsche's ethical philosophy offers a guiding account of why the ideal of self-directed character change is important. He concludes by speculating on how the (...) digital affordances of social media technologies will change the way in which ethical exemplars influence future generations. (shrink)

Spinoza’s ethical claims rest on a basic set of concepts that he regards as kinds of activity: striving, power, virtue, freedom, perfection, among others. Steven Nadler articulates a standard way of thinking about the relationship between these activity concepts: “a number of terms in Spinoza are co-extensive and refer to the same ideal human condition. We can set up the following equation for Spinoza: virtue = knowledge = activity = freedom = power = perfection. Necessarily, the more virtuous a person (...) is, the more knowledge he has, the more free, active and powerful he is, and the more he has achieved of human perfection.” This paper counters that Spinoza’s various notions of activity are not coextensive and do not refer to the same thing. In particular, Spinoza employs two basic notions of activity: striving and being an adequate cause. While these notions of activity are closely connected, they are not coextensive because a thing can strive without being an adequate cause of an effect. I defend that Spinoza’s various other activity concepts—virtue, perfection, reason and so forth—are pegged to one of these two basic notions of activity, so that Spinoza’s activity concepts are bifurcated into two categories, which are not coextensive with one another. Indeed, the members of each category may not be coextensive with one another. -/- Because these basic activity concepts play a fundamental role in Spinoza’s philosophical claims, this thesis has far-reaching implications. Most notably, the standard way of thinking mentioned above indicates that Spinoza’s basic ethical concepts, such as freedom and virtue, are coextensive with being an adequate cause. Since an adequate cause is the sole cause of some effect, this reading implies that freedom and virtue amount to being a sole cause and, thus, to being causally independent and self-sufficient. I argue, in contrast, that human freedom and virtue are coextensive with striving, which does not require causal independence. On this reading, human freedom and virtue can include instances of causal dependence, which implies that Spinoza’s ethics takes a more favorable view of human dependence, passivity and cooperation. (shrink)

Educators are conflicted about whether school provides an appropriate space to teach ethics. Still, they want to develop the moral character of their students, and most of these efforts have used various citizenship values to address our frustration with students’ ‘lack of character’. Recently, a wave of work in the philosophy of education has rejuvenated discussion of Aristotelian virtue ethics, which forms the backbone for programmes that many schools are now adopting. Mark Jonas and Yoshiaki Nakazawa, however, argue that schools (...) should revisit Plato’s pedagogical methods, as well. If educators want to develop virtue in students, they need to understand the mechanism behind moral development. Guided by Plato, they argue that expert teachers use psychological, pedagogical, and philosophical reasoning to induce epiphanies in students, then guide them through virtue-oriented rehabituation. The goal of this article is to explore the legitimacy of Jonas and Nakazawa’s Platonic theory. I begin by describing the state of modern democratic education and its relationship to teaching ethics. I argue that character development is the appropriate route educators should take but that Jonas and Nakazawa’s theory only gives educators a partial understanding of how to do so. They give a plausible model for how our best educators are effective, but we are left wanting a much more robust, instructive picture. I suggest that we need a broader overhaul of the way we view education in a modern democratic society; character development must proceed from a different normative picture of the individual’s place in society. (shrink)

Professional statements guide neonatal resuscitation thresholds at the border of viability. A 2015 systematic review of international guidelines by Guillen et al. found considerable variability between statements’ clinical recommendations for infants at 23–24 weeks gestational age (GA). The authors concluded that differences in the type of data included were one potential source for differing resuscitation thresholds within this “ethical gray zone.” How statements present ethical considerations that support their recommendations, and how this may account for variability, has not been as (...) rigorously explored. We performed a mixed-methods exploratory analysis of 25 current international guidelines for neonatal resuscitation at 22+0−25+0 weeks GA. Qualitative analysis using a modified grounded theory yielded 34 distinct codes, eight categories, and four overarching themes. Three themes, consequentialism, principlism, and rights-based, consisted of concepts central to these ethical frameworks. The fourth theme, clinical reasoning, described counseling practices, medical management, outcomes data, and prognostic uncertainty, without any ethical context. The theme of clinical reasoning appeared in 22 of 25 guidelines. Ten guidelines lacked any ethical theme. Guidelines with an identified ethical theme were more likely to recommend comfort care than guidelines without an identified ethical theme, and recommended it at a higher average GA (22.7 weeks vs. 22.0 weeks, p = 0.03). Thus, how ethical concepts are incorporated into guidelines potentially impacts resuscitation thresholds. We argue that inclusion of explicit discussion of ethical considerations surrounding resuscitation in the “gray zone” would clarify values that inform recommendations and facilitate discussions about how neonatology ought to approach periviability as outcomes continue to evolve. (shrink)

The university has long been oriented toward a meritocratic ideal that emphasizes individual labor and individual measures of success. However, recent studies showing the professorate to be depressed, lonely, and extremely anxious about their future careers raise questions about the merits of such meritocracy. Drawing upon classical sociological theories of solidarity as well as recent scholarship on meritocracy in American culture this essay argues that the meritocratic ideals of contemporary academia have stripped it of the ability to produce the genuine (...) solidarity that sustains communities. (shrink)

This paper argues that Shaftesbury differs from other moral sentimentalists (Hutcheson, Hume, Smith) because he conceives of the moral sentiments as partial and first-personal, rather than impartial and spectatorial. This difference is grounded in Shaftesbury’s distinctive notion that moral self-governance consists in the self-examination of soliloquy. Breaking with his Stoic influences, Shaftesbury holds that the moral sentiments play the role of directing and guiding soliloquy. Because soliloquy is first-personal reflection that is directed to achieving happiness, claiming that the moral sentiments (...) direct soliloquy leads Shaftesbury to conceive of the moral sentiments as arising from the internal perspective of an agent focused on her own happiness. This provides Shaftesbury with a stronger framework for understanding moral sentiments, for it avoids the difficulty of explaining why the sentiments of others or those arising from an imagined spectator’s perspective are motivating or authoritative for us. (shrink)

The costs of the COVID-19 pandemic are yet to be calculated, but they include the loss of millions of lives and the destruction of countless livelihoods. What is certain is that the SARS-CoV-2 virus has changed the way we live for the foreseeable future. It has forced many to live in ways they would have previously thought impossible. As well as challenging scientists and medical professionals to address urgent value conflicts in the short term, COVID-19 has raised slower-burning value questions (...) for corporations, public institutions, governments, and policymakers. In simple terms, the pandemic has brought what we care about into sharp relief, both collectively and individually. Whether this revaluation of our values will last beyond the current pandemic is unknown. Once COVID-19 has been tamed, will the desire to return to our previous lives be irresistible? Or will living under pandemic conditions have taught us something that will be incorporated into how we design our future lives and technologies? These are hard questions for the ethics of technology, which this volume aims to explore and address. (shrink)

What does it mean to consider the world of AI through a Christian lens? Rapid developments in AI continue to reshape society, raising new ethical questions and challenging our understanding of the human person. Encountering Artificial Intelligence draws on Pope Francis’ discussion of a culture of encounter and broader themes in Catholic social thought in order to examine how current AI applications affect human relationships in various social spheres and offers concrete recommendations for better implementation. The document also explores questions (...) regarding personhood, consciousness, and the kinds of relationships humans might have with even the most advanced AI. Through these discussions, this book investigates the theoretical and practical challenges to interpersonal encounter raised by the age of AI. (AI Research Group for the Centre for Digital Culture of the Dicastery of Culture and Education of the Holy See). (shrink)

Spinoza’s bold, spirited defense of toleration is an animating theme of the Theological-Political Treatise (TTP) and an important reason for the significant historical impact of the text. But Spinoza’s arguments for toleration can be challenging to discern. True to its title, the TTP offers two main arguments for toleration, one political, the other theological. This paper argues that Spinoza’s theological argument for toleration is closely connected to a distinct and often overlooked argument from pluralism. This paper examines Spinoza’s argument from (...) pluralism and defends that it is more attractive to similar arguments for toleration offered by Bodin and Bayle. It is more attractive than Bodin’s pluralism argument because Spinoza’s allows that religious beliefs and doctrines of faith have a rational justification, which makes possible a more optimistic picture of the prospects for religious disputation. Spinoza’s pluralism argument is also more attractive than Bayle’s argument because Spinoza’s does not regard religious beliefs as justified by sincerity, which means that he does not need to recognize any problematic rights of erroneous conscience, nor is he forced to accept as justified sincere beliefs in persecution or obviously immoral or irreligious beliefs. (shrink)

Different translations of Plutarch's De Pythiae oraculis 404B reflect an interpretative difficulty not yet adequately thematized by exegetes. Plutarch's dialogues on the Delphic oracle describe two perspectives on mantic inspiration: possession prophecy, where the god takes over the prophetess as a passive apparatus, and stimulation prophecy, where the god incites the prophecy, but the prophetess delivers the oracle through her own faculties. Plutarch understands the Pythia at Delphi to exhibit stimulation prophecy, not possession. One of his metaphors for inspiration comes (...) from the theatre: the god ‘puts the oracle into the Pythia's mouth, like an actor speaking through the mask’ (De Pyth. or. 404B [Russell]). Some translators take the metaphor as describing possession prophecy (Goodwin), while others take it as stimulation prophecy (Babbitt)—in other words, it may describe the view Plutarch affirms or the view he rejects. This article assesses the two alternatives, concluding that the theatre metaphor describes possession prophecy. (shrink)

During his more than fifty-year writing and teaching career, Horace M. Kallen (1882-1974), the American Jewish philosopher who coined the term "cultural pluralism," incorporated into his pragmatism-infused philosophy of life a number of different sciences, from racial science to psychology and physics. Part biography, part cultural history, "Horace Kallen Confronts America" offers fresh insight into the larger question of how social discourses shape modern American Jewish identity.

ABSTRACT Recent historical discussion of conceptual engineering by analytic philosophers has largely focused on precedents for contemporary conceptual engineering within the history of analytic philosophy. However, I suggest that we can and should look outside of the analytic tradition for further examples of conceptual engineering, and inspiration for further work in conceptual engineering. Here I will look to one such other tradition – American Black feminism. I do this by considering the work of Audre Lorde and Patricia Hill Collins in (...) tandem with a tradition that is the more usual stomping ground of analytic philosophers: logical positivism. I draw out Rudolf Carnap and Otto Neurath’s respective views on conceptual engineering, before turning to Collins and Lorde. I suggest that Collins on the power of self-definition provides a model of conceptual engineering that closely matches that given by Neurath, whilst we can read Lorde’s work on poetry as giving a distinctively individualist spin on the conceptual engineering. I conclude with a comparative discussion of the various models on offer, suggesting that rather than being in competition, these various views of conceptual engineering are best seen as a toolbox of methods for conceptual engineering. (shrink)

ABSTRACT This article reevaluates Hölderlin’s social and political thought in the 1790s. Against Georg Lukács, it argues that Hölderlin’s politics of the new mythology, while utopian, are not mystical. In the Fragment of Philosophical Letters and the Oldest System-Programme of German Idealism, Hölderlin instead articulates two fundamental claims. Socially, the new mythical collectivity must elevate (erheben) the social relations produced by bourgeois society, exalting them in aesthetic-religious form, rather than sublating (aufheben) them, modifying both their form and their content. Politically, (...) realizing this new collectivity requires transcending the state, and so is essentially revolutionary. Hölderlin’s prosaic writings thus supplement Hyperion’s romantic critique of modernity. They take as their point of departure a sober exposition of the social relations of the market emerging in Hölderlin’s time and, from within these relations, excavate a new mythical collectivity capable of suturing the fragmentary divisions of modern life. (shrink)

Proponents of the value ladenness of science rely primarily on arguments from underdetermination or inductive risk, which share the premise that we should only consider values where the evidence runs out or leaves uncertainty; they adopt a criterion of lexical priority of evidence over values. The motivation behind lexical priority is to avoid reaching conclusions on the basis of wishful thinking rather than good evidence. This is a real concern, however, that giving lexical priority to evidential considerations over values is (...) a mistake and unnecessary for avoiding the wishful thinking. Values have a deeper role to play in science. (shrink)

Spinoza's Ethics is one of the most significant texts of the early modern period, important to history, philosophy, Jewish studies and religious studies. It had a major influence on Enlightenment thinkers and the development of the modern world. In Ethics, Spinoza addresses the most fundamental perennial philosophical questions concerning the nature of God, human beings and a good life. His startling answers synthesize the longstanding traditions of ancient Greek and Jewish philosophy with the developments of the emerging scientific revolution. The (...) resulting philosophical system casts out the willing, personal God of Abrahamic religions and takes up the challenge of reconceiving the natural world and human beings in an entirely secular way. This volume offers a new translation based on a new critical edition, reflecting the state of the art in Spinoza scholarship, and also includes an introduction, chronology and glossary to help make this notoriously difficult text accessible. (shrink)

The view that it is better for life to be created free of disability is pervasive in both common sense and philosophy. We cast doubt on this view by focusing on an influential line of thinking that manifests it. That thinking begins with a widely-discussed principle, Procreative Beneficence, and draws conclusions about parental choice and disability. After reconstructing two versions of this argument, we critique the first by exploring the relationship between different understandings of well-being and disability, and the second (...) by more briefly focusing on the idea of a significant reason. By placing these results against the broader historical and ongoing contexts in which the lives of those with disabilities have been deemed of inferior quality, we conclude with a call for greater humility about disability and well-being in thought and practice. (shrink)

A recovery of Georg Lukács's later thought on aesthetics, politics, and ontology and the first articulation of its unity, through the lens of the philosopher's writing on totality and reification.

RAS GTPases play essential roles in normal development and are direct drivers of human cancers. Three decades of study have failed to wholly characterize pathways stimulated by activated RAS, driven by engagement with ‘effector’ proteins that have RAS binding domains (RBDs). Bone fide effectors must bind directly to RAS GTPases in a nucleotide‐dependent manner, and this interaction must impart a clear change in effector activity. Despite this, for most proteins currently deemed effectors there is little mechanistic understanding of how binding (...) to the GTPase alters protein function. There has also been limited effort to comprehensively resolve the specificity of effector binding to the full array of RAS superfamily GTPase proteins. This review will summarize what is known about RAS‐driven activation for an array of potential effector proteins, focusing on structural and mechanistic effects and highlighting how little is still known regarding this key paradigm of cellular signal transduction. (shrink)

_Published by Taylor & Francis Group for the American Association of Colleges for Teacher Education_ This _Handbook_ addresses the concept and implementation of technological pedagogical content knowledge -- the knowledge and skills that teachers need in order to integrate technology meaningfully into instruction in specific content areas. Recognizing, for example, that effective uses of technology in mathematics are quite different from effective uses of technology in social studies, teachers need specific preparation in using technology in each content area they will (...) be teaching. Offering a series of chapters by scholars in different content areas who apply the technological pedagogical content knowledge framework to their individual content areas, the volume is structured around three themes: What is Technological Pedagogical Content Knowledge? Integrating Technological Pedagogical Content Knowledge into Specific Subject Areas Integrating Technological Pedagogical Content Knowledge into Teacher Education and Professional Development The _Handbook of Technological Pedagogical Content Knowledge for Educators_ is simultaneously a mandate and a manifesto on the engagement of technology in classrooms based on consensus standards and rubrics for effectiveness. As the title of the concluding chapter declares, "It’s about time!" The American Association of Colleges for Teacher Education is a national, voluntary association of higher education institutions and related organizations. Our mission is to promote the learning of all PK-12 students through high-quality, evidence-based preparation and continuing education for all school personnel. For more information on our publications, visit our website at: www.aacte.org. (shrink)

Evolutionary gradualism, the randomness of mutations, and the hypothesis that natural selection exerts a pervasive and substantial influence on evolutionary outcomes are pair-wise logically independent. Can the claims about selection and mutation be used to formulate an argument for gradualism? In his Genetical Theory of Natural Selection, R.A. Fisher made an important start at this project in his famous “geometric argument” by showing that a random mutation that has a smaller effect on two or more phenotypes will have a higher (...) average fitness than a random mutation that has a larger phenotypic effect. Motoo Kimura’s demonstration that a gene’s probability of fixation depends on both the selection coefficient and the effective population size shows that Fisher’s argument for gradualism was mistaken. Here we analyze Fisher’s argument and explain how Kimura’s theory leads to a conclusion that Fisher did not anticipate. We identify a fallacy that reasoning about fitness differences and their evolutionary consequences should avoid. We then distinguish forward-directed from backward-directed versions of gradualism. The backward-directed thesis about a single mutation may be correct, but the forward-directed thesis is not. After that we consider a sequence of random mutations that all affect the same cluster of phenotypes and Allen Orr’s idea that there is an optimal sequence of mutation sizes, moving from larger to smaller as the population approaches a fixed optimum. This provides a likelihood justification for a forward-directed version of gradualism when there is a fixed optimum, but it also provides an argument against forward-directed gradualism if the optimum shifts substantially as the population evolves. Finally, we consider whether genome-wide association studies (GWASs) can furnish empirical evidence that bears on the truth of gradualism. The version of gradualism that GWASs directly bear on concerns the phenotypic effect size of a gene after it arises by mutation and has reached an appreciable frequency, not the phenotypic size of the mutation event itself. (shrink)

"What is gender? More importantly, what should gender look like in the 21st century? This book brings together philosophy with insights from feminist and transgender theory to argue for a position called 'ameliorative pluralism' about gender: that there should be more than two genders, and that each gender term should have multiple meanings. Matthew Cull argues that we should be pluralists about gender, developing and arguing for a position that more apt for contemporary transgender and feminist activism. The 21st (...) century requires a new way of thinking about gender. What Gender Should Be sets out to provide it"--. (shrink)

Asylum has become a highly charged political issue across developed countries, raising a host of difficult ethical and political questions. What responsibilities do the world's richest countries have to refugees arriving at their borders? Are states justified in implementing measures to prevent the arrival of economic migrants if they also block entry for refugees? Is it legitimate to curtail the rights of asylum seekers to maximize the number of refugees receiving protection overall? This book draws upon political and ethical theory (...) and an examination of the experiences of the United States, Germany, the United Kingdom and Australia to consider how to respond to the challenges of asylum. In addition to explaining why asylum has emerged as such a key political issue in recent years, it provides a compelling account of how states could move towards implementing morally defensible responses to refugees. (shrink)

Assertion is a speech act that stands at the intersection of the philosophy of language and social epistemology. It is a phenomenon that bears on such wide-ranging topics as testimony, truth, meaning, knowledge and trust. It is thus no surprise that analytic philosophers have devoted innumerable pages to assertion, trying to give the norms that govern it, its role in the transmission of knowledge, and most importantly, what assertion is, or how assertion is to be defined. -/- In this thesis (...) I attempt to show that all previous answers to the question “What is assertion?” are flawed. There are four major traditions in the literature: constitutive norm theories of assertion, accounts that treat assertion as the expression of speaker attitudes, accounts that treat assertion as a proposal to add some proposition to the common ground, and accounts that treat assertion as the taking of responsibility for some claim. Each tradition is explored here, the leading theories within the tradition developed, and then placed under scrutiny to demonstrate flaws within the positions surveyed. -/- I follow the work of G.E. Moore and William P. Alston, whilst drawing on the work of Robert Brandom in order to give a new bipartite theory of assertion. I argue that assertion consists in the explicit presentation of a proposition, along with a taking of responsibility for that proposition. Taking Alston’s explicit presentation condition and repairing it in order to deal with problems it faces, whilst combining it with Brandom’s responsibility condition, provides, I believe, the best account of assertion. (shrink)

This thesis is an attempt to provide an account of gender. In particular, it is an attempt to develop an ameliorative approach to gender that satisfies a number of transfeminist political goals. That is, following Sally Haslanger, I ask what do we want gender to be? In order to answer the question, I develop a novel Neurathian methodology for conceptual engineering, and a distinctively ‘activist’ take on that project. From there I criticise a number of theories of gender and suggest (...) that we should instead adopt a position I call Ameliorative Semantic Pluralism. That is, a position that endorses multiple meanings for gender terms. I develop this position in conversation with those traditions that arose from the anti-essentialism debates of the 1990s – family resemblance theories, Butlerian performativity, deflationism, scepticism, and nihilism about gender. I provide novel critiques of each position but take seriously the concerns that each position had. I end the thesis by drawing on Audre Lorde to engineer one of the senses of the term ‘agender’ that speaks to my phenomenology, before using that account to critique some further recent attempts to theorise nonbinary gender identities. (shrink)