Several papers (e.g. [7, 23, 42]) have recently sought to give general frameworks for online structures and algorithms ([4]), and seeking to connect, if only by analogy, online and computable structure theory. These initiatives build on earlier work on online colouring and other combinatorial algorithms by Bean [10], Kierstead, Trotter et al. [48, 54, 57] and others, as we discuss below. In this paper we will look at such frameworks and illustrate them with examples from the first author’s MSc Thesis (...) ([58]). In this thesis, Askes looks at online, adversarial online and strongly online algorithms and structures. Additionally, we prove some new theorems about online algorithms on graphs of bounded pathwidth as well as some new results on punctually 1-decidable structures. (shrink)

One’s account of the meaning of ethical sentences should fit – roughly, as part to whole – with one’s account of the meaning of sentences in general. When we ask, though, where one widely discussed account of the meaning of ethical sentences fits with more general accounts of meaning, the answer is frustratingly unclear. The account I have in mind is the sort of metaethical expressivism inspired by Ayer, Stevenson, and Hare, and defended and worked out in more detail recently (...) by Blackburn, Gibbard, and others. So, my first aim (§1) in this paper is to pose this question about expressivism’s commitments in the theory of meaning and to characterize the answer I think is most natural, given the place expressivist accounts attempt to occupy metaethics. This involves appeal to an ideationalist account of meaning. Unfortunately for the expressivist, however, this answer generates a problem; it’s my second aim (§2) to articulate this problem. Then, my third aim (§3) is to argue that this problem doesn’t extend to the sort of account of the meaning of ethical claims that I favor, which is like expressivism in rejecting a representationalist order of semantic explanation but unlike expressivism in basing an alternative order of semantic explanation on inferential role rather than expressive function. (shrink)

This Article provides a comprehensive, critical overview of proposals to use happiness surveys for steering public policy. Happiness or “subjective well-being” surveys ask individuals to rate their present happiness, life-satisfaction, affective state, etc. A massive literature now engages in such surveys or correlates survey responses with individual attributes. And, increasingly, scholars argue for the policy relevance of happiness data: in particular, as a basis for calculating aggregates such as “gross national happiness,” or for calculating monetary equivalents for non-market goods based (...) on coefficients in a happiness equation. But is individual well-being equivalent to happiness? The happiness literature tends to blur or conflate important concepts: well-being, subjective well-being, happiness, utility, satisfaction. A preference-realization account of well-being denies the equivalence of happiness and welfare, since someone can have preferences for non-mental attributes, such as health, autonomy, goal-fulfillment, knowledge or the quality of her relationships. It is critical, therefore, to differentiate two potential policy roles for happiness surveys. First, the survey response may provide prima facie evidence of the respondent’s preference-utility: the extent to which her preferences are realized. Second, it may indicate her experience-utility: the quality of her mental states. The Article clarifies these two, very different, ideas. It then criticizes, in turn, the preference-utility and the experience-utility defenses of the policy relevance of happiness surveys. Enthusiasm about happiness is premature. (shrink)

The sex/gender distinction is a staple of feminist philosophy. In slogan form: sex is “natural,” while gender is the “social meaning” of sex. Considering the importance of the sex/gender distinction—which, here, I neither endorse nor reject—it’s interesting to ask if philosophers working on the metaphysics of sexuality might make use of an analogous distinction. In this paper, I argue that we ought to endorse the sexual orientation/identity distinction. In particular, I argue that the orientation/identity distinction is indispensable to normative explanations (...) regarding LGBTQIA+ oppression and resistance. As a case study, I consider the oppression involved in the gentrification of historic queer neighborhoods. (shrink)

We investigated whether mathematicians typically agree about the qualities of mathematical proofs. Between-mathematician consensus in proof appraisals is an implicit assumption of many arguments made by philosophers of mathematics, but to our knowledge the issue has not previously been empirically investigated. We asked a group of mathematicians to assess a specific proof on four dimensions, using the framework identified by Inglis and Aberdein (2015). We found widespread disagreement between our participants about the aesthetics, intricacy, precision and utility of the proof, (...) suggesting that a priori assumptions about the consistency of mathematical proof appraisals are unreasonable. (shrink)

The problem of stored beliefs is that of explaining how non-occurrent, seemingly justified beliefs are indeed justified. Internalism about epistemic justification, the view that one’s mental life alone determines what one is justified in believing, allegedly cannot solve this problem. This paper provides a solution. It asks: Does having a belief that p require having a special relation to a mental representation that p? If the answer is yes, then there are no stored beliefs, and so there is no problem. (...) Drawing on extensive research in cognitive psychology, this paper argues that memory doesn’t store the representations required for stored belief, and we don’t bear the special relation to anything memory does store. On the leading “no” answer, a belief is roughly a set of dispositions. This paper argues that a justified belief is then best understood as a set of dispositions. Since these dispositions are mental, internalism can count the right stored beliefs as justified. (shrink)

Is drastic action against global warming essential to avoid impoverishing our descendants? Or does it mean robbing the poor to give to the rich? We do not yet know. Yet most of us can agree on the importance of minimising expected deprivation. Because of the vast number of future generations, if there is any significant risk of catastrophe, this implies drastic and expensive carbon abatement unless we discount the future. I argue that we should not discount. Instead, the rich countries (...) should stump up the funds to support abatement both for themselves and the poor states of the world. Yet to ask the present generation to assume all the costs of drastic mitigation.is unfair.Worse still, it is politically unrealistic.We can square the circle by shifting part of the burden to our descendants. Even if we divert investment from other parts of the economy or increase public debt, future people should be richer, so long as we avert catastrophe. If so, it is fair for them to assume much of the cost of abatement.What we must not do is to expose them to the threat of disaster by not doing enough. (shrink)

How come quantum theory has anything to do with mind? Is your theory refutable? What is the point of all the technical detail? Do you suggest that the operation of the brain involves large scale quantum coherence? Isn't large scale quantum coherence necessary to solve the problem of the unity of consciousness? How does a many-minds interpretation survive Occam's razor? What, briefly, is your current philosophical position? What is your understanding of the relationship between mind and brain for split-brain patients? (...) Do you believe that the mind can survive the death of the brain? No journal reference is given for several of the recent papers on your home page. Where will these papers be printed? How are the “source” and “pdf” versions of the papers on your home page produced and viewed? Why does the page with your photograph behave oddly in some browsers? Where can I find an elementary introduction to the interpretation of quantum theory? Doesn't decoherence theory solve all the problems of the interpretation of quantum theory? How do the ambiguities of decoherence affect the many-worlds interpretation? Could you expand on your answers to the two previous questions? Why isn't the conventional interpretation of quantum theory adequate? What about the Bohm interpretation? What about consistent histories? Does the present many-minds interpretation solve all the problems? (shrink)

_Evil Media_ develops a philosophy of media power that extends the concept of media beyond its tried and trusted use in the games of meaning, symbolism, and truth. It addresses the gray zones in which media exist as corporate work systems, algorithms and data structures, twenty-first century self-improvement manuals, and pharmaceutical techniques. _Evil Media _invites the reader to explore and understand the abstract infrastructure of the present day. From search engines to flirting strategies, from the value of institutional stupidity to (...) the malicious minutiae of databases, this book shows how the devil is in the details. The title takes the imperative "Don't be evil" and asks, what would be done any differently in contemporary computational and networked media were that maxim reversed. Media here are about much more and much less than symbols, stories, information, or communication: media do things. They incite and provoke, twist and bend, leak and manage. In a series of provocative stratagems designed to be used, Evil Media sets its reader an ethical challenge: either remain a transparent intermediary in the networks and chains of communicative power or become oneself an active, transformative medium. (shrink)

In this article, we report a study in which 109 research-active mathematicians were asked to judge the validity of a purported proof in undergraduate calculus. Significant results from our study were as follows: (a) there was substantial disagreement among mathematicians regarding whether the argument was a valid proof, (b) applied mathematicians were more likely than pure mathematicians to judge the argument valid, (c) participants who judged the argument invalid were more confident in their judgments than those who judged it valid, (...) and (d) participants who judged the argument valid usually did not change their judgment when presented with a reason raised by other mathematicians for why the proof should be judged invalid. These findings suggest that, contrary to some claims in the literature, there is not a single standard of validity among contemporary mathematicians. (shrink)

A large literature documents the correlates and causes of subjective well-being, or happiness. But few studies have investigated whether people choose happiness. Is happiness all that people want from life, or are they willing to sacrifice it for other attributes, such as income and health? Tackling this question has largely been the preserve of philosophers. In this article, we find out just how much happiness matters to ordinary citizens. Our sample consists of nearly 13,000 members of the UK and US (...) general populations. We ask them to choose between, and make judgments over, lives that are high in different types of happiness and low in income, physical health, family, career success, or education. We find that people by and large choose the life that is highest in happiness but health is by far the most important other concern, with considerable numbers of people choosing to be healthy rather than happy. We discuss some possible reasons for this preference. (shrink)

This article reflects on the relative silence of African farmers within debates around the potential for genetically modified crops to transform agriculture on the continent. It proposes two strategies for amplifying these voices—one focused on research methodologies, the other on outreach—in order to transform the conversation around GM’s potential in Africa into one that revolves around farmer preferences and priorities.

Constitutivists hope to locate the foundations of ethics in the nature of action. They hope to find norms that are constitutive of agency. Recently David Enoch has argued that even if there are such norms, they cannot provide the last word when it comes to normativity, since they cannot tell us whether we have reason to be agents rather than shmagents. I argue that the force of the shmagency objection has been considerably overestimated, because philosophers on both sides of the (...) debate have failed to grasp the true source of the authority of agency’s constitutive norm. Some constitutivists believe that this authority is rooted in the inescapability of agency. Yet agency is not, in fact, inescapable. What actually grounds the authority of agency’s constitutive norm is the fact that there is no standpoint outside of agency from which we can intelligibly ask normative questions. (shrink)

What is philosophy of education? This question has been answered in as many ways as there are those who self-identify as philosophers of education. However, the questions our field asks and the research conducted to answer them often produce papers, essays, and manuscripts that we can read, evaluate, and ponder. This paper turns to those tangible products of our scholarly activities. The titles, abstracts, and keywords from every article published from 2000 to 2010 in four journals of educational philosophy were (...) analyzed to find out what kind of research is being published in the field of philosophy of education. Over 143 different concepts were identified and analyzed from 1,572 articles. The data suggests that philosophy and education, while primarily concerned with theory, teaching, and learning, tackles a diversity of subjects in a slightly narrowing band of thematic topics. (shrink)

Nonsymbolic comparison tasks are commonly used to index the acuity of an individual's Approximate Number System (ANS), a cognitive mechanism believed to be involved in the development of number skills. Here we asked whether the time that an individual spends observing numerical stimuli influences the precision of the resultant ANS representations. Contrary to standard computational models of the ANS, we found that the longer the stimulus was displayed, the more precise was the resultant representation. We propose an adaptation of the (...) standard model, and suggest that this finding has significant methodological implications for numerical cognition research. (shrink)

This chapter is an essay in a volume that examines constitutional law in the United States through the lens of H.L.A. Hart's "rule of recognition" model of a legal system. My chapter focuses on a feature of constitutional practice that has been rarely examined: how jurists and scholars argue about interpretive methods. Although a vast body of scholarship provides arguments for or against various interpretive methods -- such as textualism, originalism, "living constitutionalism," structure-and-relationship reasoning, representation reinforcement, minimalism, and so forth (...) -- very little scholarship shifts to the meta-level and asks: What are the considerations that jurists and scholars bring to bear in arguing that one or another interpretive method is legally favored? And can we "make sense" of this body of argument? Is there a model of legal discourse that both accurately describes how U.S. jurists and scholars actually argue about interpretive methods, and that vindicates this discourse (in the sense of seeing these actors as making valid arguments)? I find that Hart's rule-of-recognition model fails to describe or vindicate how U.S. jurists and scholars argue about interpretive methods. The problem, in a nutshell, is that Hart sees legal argument as asserting or presupposing the social fact of contemporary official acceptance of a rule of recognition. By contrast, jurists and scholars typically point to social facts other than contemporary official acceptance in arguing for the legal status of an interpretive method -- for example, the fact that the method is supported by Framers' intent, or by U.S. culture and tradition, or by precedent. Further, jurists and scholars very often argue that some interpretive method is legally favored even though the method is controversial. On Hart's model, such a claim is problematic -- because, on his model, the content of the rule of recognition is not controversial, but rather a matter of consensus among officials. The upshot may just be that Hart's model is a failure. However, another possibility is to adopt an "error theory" of U.S. constitutional discourse. It may perhaps be the case that U.S. jurists and scholars often make claims for the favorable legal status of some interpretive method that are inconsistent with the best understanding of the nature of law. (shrink)

Biogenic approaches investigate cognition from the standpoint of evolutionary function, asking what cognition does for a living system and then looking for common principles and exhibitions of cognitive strategies in a vast array of living systems—non-neural to neural. One worry which arises for the biogenic approach is that it is overly permissive in terms of what it construes as cognition. In this paper I critically engage with a recent instance of this way of criticising biogenic approaches in order to clarify (...) their theoretical commitments and prospects. In his critique of the biogenic approach, Fred Adams uses the presence of intentional states with conceptual content as a criterion to demarcate cognition-driven behaviour from mere sensory response. In this paper I agree with Adams that intentionality is the mark of the cognitive, but simultaneously reject his overly restrictive conception of intentionality. I argue that understanding intentionality simpliciter as the mark of the mental is compatible with endorsing the biogenic approach. I argue that because cognitive science is not exclusively interested in behaviour driven by intentional states with the kind of content Adams demands, the biogenic approach’s status as an approach to cognition is not called into question. I then go on to propose a novel view of intentionality whereby it is seen to exist along a continuum which increases in the degree of representational complexity: how far into the future representational content can be directed and drive anticipatory behaviour. Understanding intentionality as existing along a continuum allows biogenic approaches and anthropogenic approaches to investigate the same overarching capacity of cognition as expressed in its different forms positioned along the continuum of intentionality. Even if all organisms engage in some behaviour that is driven by weak intentional dynamics, this does not suggest that every behaviour of all organisms is so driven. As such, the worry that the biogenic approach is overly permissive can be avoided. (shrink)

Abstract If asked about the Darwinian influence on William James, some might mention his pragmatic position that ideas are “mental modes of adaptation,” and that our stock of ideas evolves to meet our changing needs. However, while this is not obviously wrong, it fails to capture what James deems most important about Darwinian theory: the notion that there are independent cycles of causation in nature. Versions of this idea undergird everything from his campaign against empiricist psychologies to his theories of (...) mind and knowledge to his pluralistic worldview; and all of this together undergirds his attempts to challenge determinism and defend freewill. I begin this paper by arguing that James uses Darwinian thinking to bridge empiricism and rationalism, and that this merger undermines environmental determinism. I then discuss how Darwinism informs his concept of pluralism; how his concept challenges visions of a causally welded “block universe”; and how it also casts doubt on the project of reducing all reality to physical reality, and therewith the wisdom of dismissing consciousness as an inert by-product of physiology. I conclude by considering how Darwinism helps him justify the pragmatic grounds upon which he defends freewill. (shrink)

Sometimes in the course of image-making, images are asked to represent unusual things. Around 1960, scientists and engineers working on the Computer-Aided Design Project at MIT began imagining that computers could be “active partners” to human designers. They began talking about a future of “human-computer symbiosis.” And they created a new type of image—the screenshot—that represented this new possibility. This paper describes early CAD research as a site for the emergence of the ideal of the interactive computer and how this (...) ideal was described and distributed through screenshots.Though we now routinely associate computers with interactivity, interactivity was beyond the average user’s experience in 1960.... (shrink)

Philosophy of Science After Feminism is an important contribution to philosophy of science, in that it argues for the central relevance of advances from previous work in feminist philosophy of science and articulates a new vision for philosophy of science going in to the future. Kourany’s vision of philosophy of science’s future as “socially engaged and socially responsible” and addressing questions of the social responsibility of science itself has much to recommend it. I focus the book articulation of an ethical-epistemic (...) ideal for science, the Ideal of Socially Responsible Science, compare it to recent work in the same vein by Heather Douglas, and argue for some advantages of Kourany’s approach. I then ask some critical question about the view, particularly with respect to the source of values that are to be integrated into science and the status of values that are to be so integrated. I argue that Kourany is too sanguine about where the values that inquirers will use come from and that these values seem to be accorded too fixed a status in her account. (shrink)

In sections 2.21.23-25 of An Essay concerning Human Understanding, John Locke considers and rejects two ways in which we might be “free to will”, which correspond to the Thomistic distinction between freedom of exercise and freedom of specification. In this paper, I examine Locke’s arguments in detail. In the first part, I argue for a non-developmental reading of Locke’s argument against freedom of exercise. Locke’s view throughout all five editions of the Essay is that we do not possess freedom of (...) exercise (at least in most cases). In the second part, I argue that, when Locke asks whether we possess freedom of specification, his question is intentionally ambiguous between two readings, a first-order reading and a higher-order reading. Locke’s view is that, on either reading, we do not possess freedom of specification (at least in any interesting sense). (shrink)

The notion of a physiological individuals has been developed and applied in the philosophy of biology to understand symbiosis, an understanding of which is key to theorising about the major transition in evolution from multi-organismality to multi-cellularity. The paper begins by asking what such symbiotic individuals can help to reveal about a possible transition in the evolution of cognition. Such a transition marks the movement from cooperating individual biological cognizers to a functionally integrated cognizing unit. Somewhere along the way, did (...) such cognizing units simultaneously have cognizers as parts? Expanding upon the multiscale integration view of the Free Energy Principle, this paper develops an account of reciprocal integration, demonstrating how some coupled biological cognizing systems, when certain constraints are met, can result in a cognizing unit that is in ways greater than the sum of its cognizing parts. Symbiosis between V. Fischeri bacteria and the bobtail squid is used to provide an illustration this account. A novel manner of conceptualizing biological cognizers as gradient is then suggested. Lastly it is argued that the reason why the notion of ontologically nested cognizers may be unintuitive stems from the fact that our folk-psychology notion of what a cognizer is has been deeply influenced by our folk-biological manner of understanding biological individuals as units of reproduction. (shrink)

This book explores the historical development of new moral concepts, an activity the author labels "moral articulation." Starting from examples of new moral language developed in the twentieth century, like 'sexual harassment', 'genocide', 'racism', and 'hate speech', this book asks: are we simply naming moral realities that already existed, fully formed and intact, prior to their expression in language? Or do changes in our concepts and language sometimes reshape the objects they bring to light? Moral Articulation outlines an ethical framework (...) that allows us to embrace a version of the latter, transformative view without sacrificing notions of moral truth, objectivity, and knowledge. The result is a variation of moral realism that is sensitive to deep historical changes in morality. The book presents a view of moral value as extending beyond what we are presently able to put into words, urging that new developments in moral language often begin in dissonant experiences of conceptual and discursive breakdown. Resisting a tendency in contemporary ethics to start with situations and dilemmas whose descriptions are already given, this book argues that the struggle to piece together a discursively articulate picture of a situation in the first place is an ethical task in its own right. The result is a thoroughly historical yet objective picture of ethics that emphasizes the role of language in prompting moral change in our life-form. It draws inspiration from Aristotelian, Hegelian, Wittgensteinian, and liberatory praxis-inspired philosophy, as well as from Charles Taylor and Iris Murdoch. (shrink)

Those who have emphasised Nietzsche's naturalism have often claimed that he emulates natural scientific methods by offering causal explanations of psychological, social, and moral phenomena. In order to render Nietzsche's method consistent with his methodology, such readers of Nietzsche have also claimed that his objections to the use of causal explanations are based on a limited scepticism concerning the veracity of causal explanations. My contention is that proponents of this reading are wrong about both Nietzsche's methodology and his method. I (...) argue for this by: first, showing that Nietzsche was suspicious of causal explanations not only on sceptical grounds but also for reasons provided by his psychological analysis of our tendency to look for causes; and second, arguing for a non-causal interpretation of Nietzsche's approach to psychological explanation. (shrink)

Why does art matter to us, and what makes it good? Why is the role of imagination so important in art? Illustrated with carefully chosen colour and black-and-white plates of examples from Michaelangelo to Matisse and Poussin to Pollock, _Revealing Art_ takes us on a compelling and provocative journey. Kieran explores some of the most important questions we can ask ourselves about art: how can art inspire us or disgust us? Is artistic judgement simply a matter of taste? Can art (...) be immoral or obscene, and should it be censored? He brings such abstract issues to life with fascinating discussions of individual paintings, photographs and sculptures, such as Michelangelo's _Pieta_, Andres Serrano's _Piss Christ_ and Francis Bacon's powerful paintings of the Pope. He also suggests some answers to problems that any one in an art gallery or museum is likely to ask themselves: what is a beautiful work of art? and can art really reveal something true about our own nature? _Revealing Art _is ideal for anyone interested in debates about art today, or who has simply stood in front of a painting and felt baffled. (shrink)

Schuklenk and van de Vathorst's paper is a very welcome addition to the literature on the assisted dying debate and will be of great interest to clinicians working in the field of mental health.1 Many psychiatrists will have had patients who have asked them to allow them to die, to desist in their efforts to prevent their suicide, and one of us has had personal experience, outside of professional life, of being asked to aid in someone's attempt to end their (...) life in the context of an episode of mood disorder. The person with depression asking professionals, friends and family members to aid them in ending their life is a very real phenomenon. In their discussion, Schuklenk and van de Vathorst's paper uses two principles that we endorse and add weight to their argument: namely, the reality of suffering in depression and the parity of mental and physical illness. Indeed, the case Schuklenk and van de Vathorst make is a strong one and our commentary will focus on the premise of the argument around choosing death and some empirical clarification about competence in depression and the nature of treatment-resistant depression (TRD) and its prognosis. The conceptual concern we wish to discuss in relation to assisted dying, endorsed by the state and legislature, is not linked to any moral or religious concern, or even on grounds related to ‘slippery slope’ or ‘abuse’ arguments. Rather the worry is how one could operationalise decisions around assisted dying as based on competence and capacity and view such decisions as rational. I think this concern is not limited to depressive illness, but to all decisions regarding choosing non-existence. Schuklenk and van de Vathorst offer the following useful criteria to regulate assisted suicide:1. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Conflicts—and Consensus—about Conflicts of Interest in MedicineMatthew K. Wynia and Bette–Jane Crigger*This fascinating collection of essays about individual experiences of conflict of interest leaves little doubt that physicians remain divided about the importance, impact and meaning of conflicts of interest in their work. These essays offer differing views about what conflicts of interest look and feel like “on the ground” and about whether specific conflicts of interest are bad, (...) just a fact of life, or maybe even good.Conflict, Conflict EverywhereThese essays situate conflict of interest in a variety of contexts: the treatment recommendations a physician makes for an individual patient; the relationship between teaching physician and medical student or practicing physician and health care organization; the interaction between academic researchers and industry collaborators or professional bodies and industry supporters. In this, the narratives taken together reflect the scope of concern about conflict of interest in medicine familiar in the literature. In his classic 1993 essay, Dennis Thompson noted that concerns about conflict of interest encompass issues of physician self–referral, risk sharing between physicians and health care institutions, gifts from industry, hospital purchasing practices, as well as sponsored research and research with patients (Thompson 1993). To that list have subsequently been added relationships with industry in medical education at all levels, physicians’ service as consultants to industry or members of industry speakers bureau, and development of clinical practice guidelines (Lo & Fields 2009).That almost none of these essays draw attention to some widely publicized situations of conflict of interest—for example, gifts to physicians or the provision of drug samples—should, we think, be seen more as an artifact of the authors’ varied individual experiences than as a failure by the authors to engage key concerns in the ongoing professional and public debate. It could also be that the authors, asked to submit personal stories, assumed that yet another essay about the ‘traditional’ issues in the conflicts of interest literature would be seen as redundant, routine or even boring. Or, there is the tantalizing possibility that the absence of some of the more familiar conflicts from these narratives is the early fruit of efforts to address these traditional issues through policies governing interactions between physicians and industry promulgated by academic medical centers and health systems, medical specialty societies, and industry.One significant area of concern that has emerged in recent years is conflict of interest in the development of clinical practice guidelines. E.g., Choudry et al. 2002; Sniderrman & Furberg 2009; Guyatt et al. 2010. Although none of the essays in this [End Page 101] collection address it head on, Perlmutter touches on several key issues. His depiction of how an FDA committee process limited the input he was able to provide as an expert, undermined his potential to contribute to the professional dialogue, and raised concerns about the objectivity of the drug approval process echoes concerns about objectivity, the role of expert opinion, and the presence on guideline development panels of individuals with financial interests in the recommendations to be developed that have been explored at some length in the literature, most recently by the Institute of Medicine in reports on evidentiary standards (Eden et al 2011) and principles for guideline development (Graham et al. 2011).Conflict of Interest or Dual Agency?Several essays set out physicians’ experience in navigating situations of diverging expectations. Bierut, for example, reflects on the disjunction between the goals and products of academic researchers and commercial sponsors. She saw herself advancing basic knowledge and was forced to grapple with the reality of sponsors’ goals to advance commercial ends as well. Nagldinne and Mikulec each recall struggles to reconcile their obligation to exercise professional judgment on behalf of patients with the demands of health care organizations focussed also on the bottom line. Cruz–Flores attests to the challenge of making recommendations for care when one is both a practicing clinician and a clinical investigator engaged in research that might offer benefit to a patient for whom there are limited options.Thompson defined conflicts of interest as “a set of conditions in which professional judgment concerning a primary interest (such as a patient’s welfare or the validity of... (shrink)

The recent emergence of machine-manipulated media raises an important societal question: How can we know whether a video that we watch is real or fake? In two online studies with 15,016 participants, we present authentic videos and deepfakes and ask participants to identify which is which. We compare the performance of ordinary human observers with the leading computer vision deepfake detection model and find them similarly accurate, while making different kinds of mistakes. Together, participants with access to the model’s prediction (...) are more accurate than either alone, but inaccurate model predictions often decrease participants’ accuracy. To probe the relative strengths and weaknesses of humans and machines as detectors of deepfakes, we examine human and machine performance across video-level features, and we evaluate the impact of preregistered randomized interventions on deepfake detection. We find that manipulations designed to disrupt visual processing of faces hinder human participants’ performance while mostly not affecting the model’s performance, suggesting a role for specialized cognitive capacities in explaining human deepfake detection performance. -/- . (shrink)

Public pressure is essential for providing multinational enterprises (MNEs) with motivation to follow the standards of human rights conduct set in soft-law instruments, such as the United Nations Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights. But how does the public judge MNE involvement in human rights violations? We empirically answer this question drawing on an original survey of American adults. We asked respondents to judge over 12,000 randomly generated scenarios in which MNEs may be considered to have been involved in (...) human rights violations. Our findings reveal substantial gaps between public judgments and the standards set in soft law and the normative literature. We identify the attributes of episodes of human rights violations involving MNEs that influence public judgments, including the relationship between the MNE and the perpetrator, the practice of due diligence, and the type of abuse. These results provide insights as to when we might expect public pressure to drive MNE compliance with soft-law instruments, and they direct attention to specific standards that will likely require stronger, ‘hard’ law approaches or broader efforts to shift the public’s view. (shrink)

Simone Weil wrote that, “We do not have to understand new things, but by dint of patience, effort and method to come to understand with our whole self the truths which are evident.” This is reminiscent of the suggestion in Plato’s Meno that knowledge is recollection. Although most of us would not take Plato at his word, we might charitably read him and Weil as suggesting that the solution to some problems depends not upon learning something new, but rather in (...) understanding how to apply what we have already learned, in knowing how to look at the problem in the right way, or how to ask the right question, so that the solution—the answer, the right course of action—becomes clear. Knowing how to apply ourselves, our skills, and our experiences, is what it means to have practical wisdom. It is traditionally assumed that the virtuous person is also the practically wise person, that there is no human virtue without such wisdom. Although this view that practical wisdom is internal to the virtues has been challenged on various grounds, here I will travel close to the traditional conception while also convinced that what I offer here identifies an important relationship between patience and practical wisdom regardless of whether we construe virtues in an Aristotelian fashion or otherwise. (shrink)

One of the most basic functions of human language is to convey who did what to whom. In the world's languages, the order of these three constituents (subject [S], verb [V], and object [O]) is uneven, with SOV and SVO being most common. Recent experiments using experimentally elicited pantomime provide a possible explanation of the prevalence of SOV, but extant explanations for the prevalence of SVO could benefit from further empirical support. Here, we test whether SVO might emerge because (a) (...) SOV is not well suited for describing reversible events (a woman pushing a boy) and (b) pressures to be efficient and mention subjects before objects conspire to rule out many other alternatives. We tested this by asking participants to describe reversible and non‐reversible events in pantomime, and we instructed some participants to be consistent in the form of their gestures and to teach them to the experimenter. These manipulations led to the emergence of SVO in speakers of both English (SVO) and Turkish (SOV). (shrink)

The aim of this volume is to critically assess the philosophical importance of phenomenology as a method for studying the normativity of meaning and its transcendental conditions. Using the pioneering work of Steven Crowell as a springboard, phenomenologists from all over the world examine the promise of phenomenology for illuminating long-standing problems in epistemology, the philosophy of mind, action theory, the philosophy of religion, and moral psychology. The essays are unique in that they engage with the phenomenological tradition not as (...) a collection of authorities to whom we must defer, or a set of historical artifacts we must preserve, but rather as a community of interlocutors with views that bear on important issues in contemporary philosophy. The book is divided into three thematic sections, each examining different clusters of issues aimed at moving the phenomenological project forward. The first section explores the connection between normativity and meaning, and asks us to rethink the relation between the factual realm and the categories of validity in terms of which things can show up as what they are. The second section examines the nature of the self that is capable of experiencing meaning. It includes essays on intentionality, agency, consciousness, naturalism, and moral normativity. The third section addresses questions of philosophical methodology, examining if and why phenomenology should have priority in the analysis of meaning. Finally, the book concludes with an afterword written by Steven Crowell. Normativity, Meaning, and the Promise of Phenomenology will be a key resource for students and scholars interested in the phenomenological tradition, the transcendental tradition from Kant to Davidson, and existentialism. Additionally, its forward-looking focus yields crucial insights into pressing philosophical problems that will appeal to scholars working across all areas of the discipline. ks us to rethink the relation between the factual realm and the categories of validity in terms of which things can show up as what they are. The second section examines the nature of the self that is capable of experiencing meaning. It includes essays on intentionality, agency, consciousness, naturalism, and moral normativity. The third section addresses questions of philosophical methodology, examining if and why phenomenology should have priority in the analysis of meaning. Finally, the book concludes with an afterword written by Steven Crowell. Normativity, Meaning, and the Promise of Phenomenology will be a key resource for students and scholars interested in the phenomenological tradition, the transcendental tradition from Kant to Davidson, and existentialism. Additionally, its forward-looking focus yields crucial insights into pressing philosophical problems that will appeal to scholars working across all areas of the discipline. (shrink)

This article considers the criticisms made by Friedrich Nietzsche of the ethics of St Augustine. Nietzsche’s main criticism presses us to ask whether Augustine can recognize an internal connection between natural human activity and supernatural happiness. The absence of any such connection, alleges Nietzsche, is the self-defeating flaw of Augustine’s eudaimonism, a flaw, paradoxically, that only insures human misery. Rebutting these charges, this article argues, requires us to recognize a form of natural happiness that is proportionate to create human nature.

Our understanding of Locke’s theory of ideas is stymied by his reticence about what he means by ‘idea’. I attempt to work around the problem by focusing on some neglected questions that afford us a better picture of his theory. I ask not what his ideas are, but what kinds of states or episodes he counts as someone’s having an idea, and what is involved in having simple and complex ideas. I argue that although we can make sense of much (...) of what he says about having simple and complex ideas, he is muddled about simplicity and complexity. (shrink)

Identity is a contemporary buzzword in education, referencing the individual and the social, the personal and the political, self and other. Following Maggie MacLure, we can think of identity in terms of teachers ‘arguing for themselves’, or giving an account of themselves. Yet in the wake of poststructuralism's radical de‐centering of the subject and its highlighting of a number of impediments to agency, we might well ask how teachers are to give an account of themselves? This paper offers reading of (...) identity that recognizes its paradoxical aspects, yet also contains scope for ethical agency. The latter is explored via a ‘diagram’ that utilizes Foucault's four axes of ethics to elaborate a framework for thinking about teacher identity as ethical self‐formation and for engaging in what I refer to here as ‘identity work’. This approach to thinking about teacher identity recognizes our discursive determination, yet also offers scope for recognizing and building ethical agency. (shrink)

Good chefs know the importance of maintaining sharp knives in the kitchen. What’s their secret? A well-worn Taoist allegory offers some advice. The king asks about his butcher’s impressive knifework. “Ordinary butchers,” he replied “hack their way through the animal. Thus their knife always needs sharpening. My father taught me the Taoist way. I merely lay the knife by the natural openings and let it find its own way through. Thus it never needs sharpening” (Kahn 1995, vii; see also Watson (...) 2003, 46). Plato famously employed this image as an analogy for the reality of his Forms (Phaedrus, 265e). Just like an animal, the world comes pre-divided for us. Ideally, our best theories will be those which “carve nature at its joints”. While Plato employed the “carving” metaphor to convey his views about the reality of his celebrated Forms, its most common contemporary use involves the success of science -- particularly, its success in identifying distinct kinds of things. Scientists often report discovering new kinds of things -- a new species of mammal or novel kind of fundamental particle, for example -- or uncovering more information about already familiar kinds. Moreover, we often notice considerable overlap in different approaches to classification. As Ernst Mayr put it: No naturalist would question the reality of the species he may find in his garden, whether it is a catbird, chickadee, robin, or starling. And the same is true for trees or flowering plants. Species at a given locality are almost invariably separated from each other by a distinct gap. Nothing convinced me so fully of the reality of species as the observation . . . that the Stone Age natives in the mountains of New Guinea recognize as species exactly the same entities of nature as a western scientist. (Mayr 1987, 146) Such agreement is certainly suggestive. It suggests that taxonomies are discoveries rather than mere inventions. Couple this with their utility in scientific inference and explanation and we have compelling reason for accepting the objective, independent reality of many different natural kinds of things.. (shrink)

When embedding data are used to argue against semantic theory A and in favor of semantic theory B, it is important to ask whether A could make sense of those data. It is possible to ask that question on a case-by-case basis. But suppose we could show that A can make sense of all the embedding data which B can possibly make sense of. This would, on the one hand, undermine arguments in favor of B over A on the basis (...) of embedding data. And, provided that the converse does not hold—that is, that A can make sense of strictly more embedding data than B can—it would also show that there is a precise sense in which B is more constrained than A, yielding a pro tanto simplicity-based consideration in favor of B. In this paper I develop tools which allow us to make comparisons of this kind, which I call comparisons of potential expressive power. I motivate the development of these tools by way of exploration of the recent debate about epistemic modals. Prominent theories which have been developed in response to embedding data turn out to be strictly less expressive than the standard relational theory, a fact which necessitates a reorientation in how to think about the choice between these theories. (shrink)

We go through life, focusing our attention on many things. But how much do we focus on ourselves? We may be aware of many things, but are we self-aware? This is a question our contemporary culture asks us to consider more and more, and words like "self-awareness," "personal identity," "authenticity," and "mindfulness" are becoming not just buzz-words but virtues. The ancient dictum "know thyself" reverberates in all corners of our lives, from Disney characters on our TVs to DISC profiles at (...) our workplaces. Some of the more mindful members of our society may even be tempted to disdain those who are not as mindful as they are. But what if our self-aware culture, hailing us to pursue our true selves, is unaware of itself? What if our definitions of true and false self-understanding are myopic, slanted towards a narrow solipsism that is actually leading people away from authenticity, while all the while championing it? If so, how would we know? Who is best able to define these things and to teach us how to know ourselves truly? Matthew Brett Vaden traces the wisdom of past and modern-day sages to discover how we can truly discover ourselves. (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)

In previous studies investigating entrainment and person perception, synchronized movements were found to enhance memory for incidental person attributes. Although this effect is robust, including in dance, the process by which it is actuated are less well understood. In this study, two hypotheses are investigated: that enhanced memory for person attributes is the result of (1) increased gaze time between in-tempo dancers, and/or (2) greater attentional focus between in-tempo dancers. To explore these possible mechanisms in the context of observing dance, (...) an eye-tracking study was conducted in which subjects watched videos of pairs of laterally positioned dancers; only one of the dancers was synchronized with the music, the other being asynchronous. The results were consistent with the first hypothesis—music-dance synchrony gives rise to increased visual inspection times. In addition, there was a preference for upper-body fixations over lower-body fixations across both synchronous and asynchronous conditions. A subsequent, single-dancer eye-tracking study investigated fixations across different body regions, including head, torso, legs and feet. Significantly greater dwell times were recorded for head than torso and legs; feet attracted significantly less dwell time than any other body region. Lastly, the study sought to identify dance gestures responsible for torso- and head-directed fixations. Specifically we asked whether there are features in dance that are specially designed to direct an observer’s gaze towards the face—the main “communicative portal” with respect to the transmission of intent, affect and empathy. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:An American Scholar Recalls Karl Barth’s Golden Years as a Teacher (1958–1964) by Raymond Kemp Anderson, and: The Westminster Handbook to Karl Barth ed. by Richard E. BurnettMatthew R. JantzenAn American Scholar Recalls Karl Barth’s Golden Years as a Teacher (1958–1964) Raymond Kemp Anderson lewiston, ny: edwin mellen press, 2013. 438 pp. $159.95The Westminster Handbook to Karl Barth Edited by Richard E. Burnett louisville, ky: westminster john knox (...) press, 2013. 242 pp. $35.00On April 2, 1966, Karl Barth received a letter from Peter Vogelsanger, informing him that Emil Brunner—the recipient of Barth’s thunderous “Nein!” on the subject of natural theology in 1934—was on his deathbed. Two days later, Barth responded and asked Vogelsanger to tell Brunner that “the time when I thought I should say No to him is long since past, and we all live only by the fact that a great and merciful God speaks his gracious Yes to all of us.” The irenic, compassionate, and affirming tone of this letter is typical of the “mature” Barth, whom Raymond Anderson studied under from 1958 to 1964 as a ThD student at the University of Basel. This period of doctoral study is the subject of Anderson’s interesting and eminently readable new book. Anderson enjoyably weaves together several different genres in his reflections on his experience with Barth, smoothly transitioning back and forth between personal memoir, constructive theological argument, and thoughtful interpretation of Barth’s life and writings.Structurally, the book offers a series of recollections and reflections gathered loosely around common themes rather than a tightly knit argument pursued rigorously from beginning to end. In other words, the work is a series of sketches from the artist’s notebook, as opposed to one intricate and detailed portrait focusing on a single subject. [End Page 207]In the first five chapters of the book, Anderson sketches a picture of the elderly Karl Barth who served as his “doktorvater,” drawing material from his student notes and personal memories of the years he spent with Barth in Basel. While Anderson finds continuity between the earlier and later writings of Barth, he suggests that the older Barth began to increasingly unfold the “fuller, grace-centered and human-shaped positive implications” of the earlier writings (viii). In Anderson’s experience, Barth’s early appeal to “Let God be God!” had in those later years “mellowed to an even deeper appeal to let God be himself, human as well, in the most unexpected ways” (11). This mellowing extended beyond Barth’s writing to his personality and demeanor as a teacher and theologian. The Barth whom Anderson knew was humble, understated, and compassionate, a sympathetic listener and a generous interpreter—in short, an “un-dogmatic” dogmatician (139).In the sixth chapter, Anderson shifts gears and reproduces extensive transcriptions of his own notes from several of Barth’s biweekly English-language colloquia on the topics of natural theology, the Old Testament promise, Paul Tillich, and existentialism. Anderson suggests that these notes are particularly valuable because in them one witnesses Barth explaining the bare essentials of his thinking in clear and simple English terms. This is true for large portions of the transcriptions. However, it must be said that there are also portions of these transcriptions that suffer from the lack of clarity that one might expect to find in student notes of discussions conducted in a language with which Barth was not completely comfortable. Nevertheless, these transcriptions provide previously unpublished primary source material from Barth that is worth examining.From chapter 7 until the end of the book, Anderson takes up the task of “sketching key insights and special teachings from the mature Barth that in the years since Barth’s death have shown themselves to carry special significance for our American college classroom, church school, and pulpit” (205). These include, but are not limited to, Barth’s attitude toward America, his emphasis on the priority of grace, his theology of nature (not his natural theology), and his positions on theories of religion, satisfaction theories of the atonement, election, universalism, and even the possibility of extraterrestrial life. This section also includes... (shrink)

To what extent can animal behaviour be described as rational? What does it even mean to describe behaviour as rational? -/- This book focuses on one of the major debates in science today - how closely does mental processing in animals resemble mental processing in humans. It addresses the question of whether and to what extent non-human animals are rational, that is, whether any animal behaviour can be regarded as the result of a rational thought processes. It does this with (...) attention to three key questions, which recur throughout the book and which have both empirical and philosophical aspects: What kinds of behavioural tasks can animals successfully perform? What if any mental processes must be postulated to explain their performance at these tasks? What properties must processes have to count as rational? The book is distinctive in pursuing these questions not only in relation to our closest relatives, the primates, whose intelligence usually gets the most attention, but also in relation to birds and dolphins, where striking results are also being obtained. -/- Some chapters focus on a particular species. They describe some of the extraordinary and complex behaviour of these species - using tools in novel ways to solve foraging problems, for example, or behaving in novel ways to solve complex social problems - and ask whether such behaviour should be explained in rational or merely mechanistic terms. Other chapters address more theoretical issues and ask, for example, what it means for behaviour to be rational, and whether rationality can be understood in the absence of language. -/- The book includes many of the world's leading figures doing empirical work on rationality in primates, dolphins, and birds, as well as distinguished philosophers of mind and science. The book includes an editors' introduction which summarises the philosophical and empirical work presented, and draws together the issues discussed by the contributors. (shrink)

Does the soul have powers? If so, what general account can philosophy give of powers of the soul? One can broach some of Thomas Aquinas’s more obscure teachings concerning the soul and its powers, such as that the soul alone is the subject of some powers and that powers flow from the soul, by asking these broad questions. Many commentators have preferred, however, to focus on specific powers of the soul, which has resulted in detailed studies of, for example, the (...) intellect and the will. Here, however, I take up powers of the soul in general and, through a causal analysis of their being, articulate what they are. (shrink)

Augustine is both one of the great dogmatic thinkers in our Western tradition and also one of the most Socratic. How can that be? I suggest that Augustine is given to puzzling over questions of the form “How is it possible that p?”– for example, “How is it possible to measure time when no length of time is ever present to be measured?” Moreover, he asks questions of this form even when he is in no doubt that p is the (...) case. (Thus he is in no doubt that we can measure periods of time even though, strictly speaking, no period of time is ever present.) I suggest further that we can learn something about good teaching from studying Augustine's Socratic‐style inquiry. (shrink)

TRAGICALLY, ETHNIC CONFLICTS HAVE BECOME ONE OF THE HALLMARKS of the post-Cold War era. In response to this, two distinct traditions appear to be emerging.The first continues the classical just war tradition while the second represents a new "reconciliation tradition," built largely around questions of restorative justice in areas of social division. Our goal in this essay is to begin a rapprochement of these divergent traditions by asking the question, what does a restorative justice perspective offer to the just war (...) tradition? We proceed in three stages: first, we survey the current state of the just war tradition; second, we introduce the reconciliation tradition, drawing on both reconciliation thinkers and the practical experience of experiments in social reconciliation in South Africa and Rwanda; and third, we draw these two traditions together with a series of constructive proposals for how the reconciliation tradition can enrich the just war tradition. (shrink)

In Knowledge in a Social World, Alvin Goldman presents a framework to quantify the epistemic effects that various policies, procedures, and behaviors can have on a group of agents. In this essay, I show that the framework requires some modifications when applied to agents with credences. The required modifications carry with them an interesting consequence, namely, that any group whose members disagree can become more accurate by forming a consensus through averaging their credences. I sketch a way that this result (...) can be used to show that individual norms of rationality and group norms of rationality can dictate conflicting behaviors for the members of some groups. I conclude by discussing how some of the assumptions used to generate the consensus result might be loosened.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.WE OUGHT TO AGREE: A CONSEQUENCE OF REPAIRING GOLDMAN'S GROUP SCORING RULEVolume 9, Issue 2Matthew KopecDOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/epi.2012.3Your 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. WE OUGHT TO AGREE: A CONSEQUENCE OF REPAIRING GOLDMAN'S GROUP SCORING RULEVolume 9, Issue 2Matthew KopecDOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/epi.2012.3Available 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. WE OUGHT TO AGREE: A CONSEQUENCE OF REPAIRING GOLDMAN'S GROUP SCORING RULEVolume 9, Issue 2Matthew KopecDOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/epi.2012.3Available 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)

Contemporary medical practice and health policy are increasingly animated by the concept of providing high value care. Nevertheless, there can be disagreements about how value is defined and from whose perspective. Individual patients suffering from terminal cancer, for example, may have a different perception of the value of an expensive chemotherapy when compared to health policymakers, insurers, or others responsible for the financial solvency of health care organizations. Thus it seems reasonable to ask what is meant by “value” in high (...) value care. In light of Edmund Pellegrino’s significant contributions to the philosophy of medicine, medical humanities, and bioethics, it seems equally reasonable to examine how he might answer it. This paper describes a Pellegrino-inspired theory of value that is instrumental, agent relative, and pluralistic. It then compares and contrasts this to the contemporary view and argues that only when individual patients incorporate concern for societal-level value into their conceptions of the highest good can the Pellegrino-inspired and contemporary views of value be reconciled. (shrink)

The papers included in this special issue were selected from a series of three interdisciplinary workshops titled Species in the Age of Discordance. Participants including philosophers, phylogeneticists, systematists, population geneticists, invasion biologists, historians, social scientists, botanists, herpetologists, ichthyologists, and microbiologists, among others, were asked to consider species in the context of discordance. The sense of “discordance” was left intentionally ambiguous in the call for abstracts, as our goal was to examine this question from many different perspectives, to seek out connections (...) across disciplines, to think about the different ways discordance surrounding species is conceived, and to ascertain how the varieties of discordance might inform each other. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Matthew S. Santirocco JUSTICE IN SOPHOCLES' ANTIGONE Sophocles' Antigone is most often apprehended in terms of conflicts, an approach which the play does indeed invite. The personal clash of Antigone and Creon generates conflicts on many different levels— political (individual or family vs. state, aristocracy vs. democracy), theological (gods vs. men), philosophical (nature vs. law or convention), sexual (woman vs. man), even chronological (young vs. old). However, insofar (...) as no list can ever be so inclusive as the play itself, all such discussions tend by their very nature to be reductionist. And even if a balanced critique were possible at this level, a tragedy is not the sum of abstract conflicts; it is theatre, people in action. Furthermore, the conflict approach encourages us to ask the wrong questions. Although conflict need not imply resolution, critics persist in searching for it. Yet there is no resolution in the Antigone except by death. Similarly, such an approach invites us to ask who is right, Antigone or Creon. But in a very real sense this question misses Sophocles' point. Relevant, perhaps, to versions by Anouilh and Brecht, the question misleads when applied to the ancient play. It is interesting that we oversimplify, for Sophocles' sympathies are more expansive and complex than these modern interpretations of his myth. For all these reasons a valid alternative approach to the play may be to consider it not in terms of the conflicts incarnated in the personalities but rather in terms of one theme in the context of which all the conflicts are played out. The precise issue here, as so often in Greek tragedy, is a philosophical one. As the religious thought of an earlier era was yielding to judicial and political thought, and as older heroic ideals were being supplanted by a rationalistic view of man, tragedy's function in fifth-century Athens was, in part at least, to expose and explore these cultural displacements, either by affirming traditional values and concepts or else by questioning their continued validity. One such concept, perhaps the most recurrent in tragedy, 180 Matthew S. Santirocco181 is justice, dike. Originally a term used to refer to things as they are, dike came also to acquire a normative sense, things as they ought to be. At different times and in different contexts the word can signify custom or usage, law-enforcing authority, penalty, and ofcourse "justice" as a higher standard. Its precise semantic range is wide and fluctuating. Thus tragedy becomes, in a sense, a matter of vocabulary. In the Antigone the characters appeal to justice, but each defines it differently, so that the conflict is not so much between justice and injustice as between one sort of justice and another. The Oresteia of Aeschylus had earlier celebrated the transition from vendetta justice to courtroom justice. The Antigone, however, focuses not so much on the changes in dike as on a question these changes raise, namely the very possibility of dike. The establishment of the law court brought Aeschylus' trilogy to a resolved ending. Sophocles' vision in the Antigone is much more austere. Although he acknowledges the existence of an ideal of justice, he exposes the tensions and ambiguities inherent in it and thereby questions whether that ideal can ever be realized in the lives of men. II A key text concerning justice is contained in one of the choral odes. But can it be trusted? The tragic chorus is not, after all, the mouthpiece of the poet as was the comic chorus in Aristophanes' parabaseis. Nor is it always or necessarily the mouthpiece of the audience, SchlegeFs "ideal spectator." In the Antigone, as elsewhere, the chorus simply constitutes a panel of the population (here, of Thebes) and its perspective on the action is, if not omniscient, not particularly partisan either. Gordon Kirkwood has demonstrated the many dramatic functions of the Sophoclean chorus, including its ambiguities. In the Antigone no fewer than three odes are ambiguous, leaving in doubt the identity of the one who has disturbed order and right (332-75), who has violated the will of heaven (582-625), and whose mind has been perverted by love (781-816). Although the chorus may not be aware of the... (shrink)

[Excerpted From Editor's Introduction] Matthew Crippen takes this up in a Marcusian critique of Wittgenstein that attends, among other things, to the place of silence in that discourse. Referring to Horkheimer’s citation of the Latin aphorism that silence is consent, Crippen is critical of Wittgenstein’s admonition that we must pass over in silence those matters of which we cannot speak. This raises fascinating questions for critical theory that Crippen explores particularly with reference to Marcuse’s concept of one-dimensionality. To the (...) extent that Wittgenstein’s philosophy is “therapeutic,” it may effectively contain dissent by “helping” dissenters become “well-adjusted.” Marcuse, of course, was particularly concerned with the power of Total States— and particularly those engendered by advanced industrial capitalism—to contain dissent precisely by using therapeutic techniques to maintain adjustment. Bringing Marcuse and Wittgenstein together here has particularly explosive possibilities. In the context of a Total State, transformation depends on the possibility of calling the State into question from the inside (since “total” States systematically eliminate “outsides”). This is the point at which Wittgenstein’s silence becomes most intriguing. What is it, we must ask, that we cannot say? Silence may be (as Martin Luther King, Jr. said) more than consent: there comes a time when silence is betrayal. But this is one of many places where it pays to look at what is done as much as what is said. What game, we might ask, is Wittgenstein playing? And, more to the point, what is the field of play that joins Wittgenstein and Marcuse? John Cage famously said “I have nothing to say and I am saying it and that is poetry as I need it...” Crippen begins a process (via Wittgenstein) of putting poetry into play that has important implications for the public work of philosophers. (shrink)