Bishop and Trout here present a unique and provocative new approach to epistemology. Their approach aims to liberate epistemology from the scholastic debates of standard analytic epistemology, and treat it as a branch of the philosophy of science. The approach is novel in its use of cost-benefit analysis to guide people facing real reasoning problems and in its framework for resolving normative disputes in psychology. Based on empirical data, Bishop and Trout show how people can improve their reasoning by relying (...) on Statistical Prediction Rules. They then develop and articulate the positive core of the book. Their view, Strategic Reliabilism, claims that epistemic excellence consists in the efficient allocation of cognitive resources to reliable reasoning strategies, applied to significant problems. The last third of the book develops the implications of this view for standard analytic epistemology; for resolving normative disputes in psychology; and for offering practical, concrete advice on how this theory can improve real people's reasoning. This is a truly distinctive and controversial work that spans many disciplines and will speak to an unusually diverse group, including people in epistemology, philosophy of science, decision theory, cognitive and clinical psychology, and ethics and public policy. (shrink)

Michael Davis, a leading figure in the study of professional ethics, offers here both a compelling exploration of engineering ethics and a philosophical analysis of engineering as a profession. After putting engineering in historical perspective, Davis turns to the Challenger space shuttle disaster to consider the complex relationship between engineering ideals and contemporary engineering practice. Here, Davis examines how social organization and technical requirements define how engineers should (and presumably do) think. Later chapters test his analysis of engineering judgement (...) and autonomy empirically, engaging a range of social science research including a study of how engineers and managers work together in ten different companies. (shrink)

This paper contributes to our understanding of farm data value chains with assistance from 54 semi-structured interviews and field notes from participant observations. Methodologically, it includes individuals, such as farmers, who hold well-known positionalities within digital agriculture spaces—platforms that include precision farming techniques, farm equipment built on machine learning architecture and algorithms, and robotics—while also including less visible elements and practices. The actors interviewed and materialities and performances observed thus came from spaces and places inhabited by, for example, farmers, crop (...) scientists, statisticians, programmers, and senior leadership in firms located in the U.S. and Canada. The stability of “the” artifacts followed for this project proved challenging, which led to me rethinking how to approach the subject conceptually. The paper is animated by a posthumanist commitment, drawing heavily from assemblage thinking and critical data scholarship coming out of Science and Technology Studies. The argument’s understanding of “chains” therefore lies on an alternative conceptual plane relative to most commodity chain scholarship. To speak of a data value chain is to foreground an orchestrating set of relations among humans, non-humans, products, spaces, places, and practices. The paper’s principle contribution involves interrogating lock-in tendencies at different “points” along the digital farm platform assemblage while pushing for a varied understanding of governance depending on the roles of the actors and actants involved. (shrink)

Michael J. Loux here presents a fresh reading of two of the most important books of the Metaphysics, Books Z and H, in which Aristotle presents his mature theory of primary substances. Focusing on the interplay of Aristotle's early and late views, Loux maintans that the later concept of ousia should be understood in terms of a theory of predication that carries interesting implications for contemporary metaphysics. Loux argues that in his first attempt in identifying ousiai in the Categories, (...) Aristotle encountered a set of ontological problems which he wrestled with again in Metaphysics Z and H. In the Categories, where the primary realities are basic subjects of predication construed in essentialist terms as things falling under natural kinds, familiar particulars are the primary ousiai. In subsequent works, Aristotle holds that since familiar particulars come into being and pass away, they must be composites of matter and form; and in Metaphysics Z and H, he explores the implications of this insight for the search for ousia. Maintaining that the substantial forms of familiar particulars are the primary ousiai, the later Aristotle interprets forms as predicable universals rather than as particulars, each uniquely possessed by a single object. (shrink)

The concept that peope have of themselves as a 'person' is one of the most intimate notions that they hold. Yet the way in which the category of the person is conceived varies over time and space. In this volume, anthropologists, philosophers, and historians examine the notion of the person in different cultures, past and present. Taking as their starting point a lecture on the person as a category of the human mind, given by Marcel Mauss in 1938, the contributors (...) critically assess Mauss's speculation that ntions of the person, rather than being primarily philosophical or psychological, have a complex social and ideological origin. Discussing societies ranging from ancient Greece, India, and China to modern Africa and Papua New Guinea, they provide fascinating descriptions of how these different cultures define the person. But they also raise deeper theoretical issues: What is universally constant and what is culturally variable in people's thinking about the person? How can these variations be explained? Has there been a general progressive development toward the modern Western view of the person? What is distinctive about this? How do one's notions of the person inform one's ability to comprehend alternative formulations? These questions are of compelling interest for a wide range of anthropologists, philosophers, historians, psychologists, sociologists, orientalists, and classicists. The book will appeal to any reader concerned with understanding one of the most fundamental aspects of human existence. (shrink)

How should we understand the political morality of migration? Are travel bans, walls, or carrier sanctions ever morally permissible in a just society? This book offers a new approach to these and related questions. It identifies a particular vision of how we might apply the notion of justice to migration policy - and an argument in favor of expanding the ethical tools we use, to include not only justice but moral notions such as mercy.

“What does it mean to say that we live in a secular age?” This apparently simple question opens into the massive, provocative, and complex A Secular Age, where Charles Taylor positions secularism as a defining feature of the modern world, not the mere absence of religion, and casts light on the experience of transcendence that scientistic explanations of the world tend to neglect. -/- In Varieties of Secularism in a Secular Age, a prominent and varied group of scholars chart the (...) conversations in which A Secular Age intervenes and address wider questions of secularism and secularity. The distinguished contributors include Robert Bellah, José Casanova, Nilüfer Göle, William E. Connolly, Wendy Brown, Simon During, Colin Jager, Jon Butler, Jonathan Sheehan, Akeel Bilgrami, John Milbank, and Saba Mahmood. -/- Varieties of Secularism in a Secular Age is edited by Michael Warner, Jonathan VanAntwerpen, and Craig Calhoun. (shrink)

Transpersonal Psychology concerns the study of those states and processes in which people experience a deeper sense of who they are, or a greater sense of connectedness with others, with nature, or the spiritual dimension. Pioneered by respected researchers such as Jung, Maslow and Tart, it has nonetheless struggled to find recognition among mainstream scientists. Now that is starting to change. Dr. Michael Daniels teaches the subject as part of a broadly-based psychology curriculum, and this book brings together the (...) fruits of his studies over recent years. It will be of special value to students, and its accessible style will appeal also to all who are interested in the spiritual dimension of human experience. The book includes a detailed 38-page glossary of terms and detailed indexes. (shrink)

Centre for Applied Philosophy and Public Ethics, The Australian National University, LPO Box 8260, ANU, Canberra ACT 2601, Australia. Email: michael.selgelid{at}anu.edu.au ' + u + '@ ' + d + ' '/ /- ->. Home page: http: //www.cappe.edu.au/staff/michael-selgelid.htmThis article advocates the development of a moderate pluralist theory of political philosophy that recognizes that utility, liberty and equality are legitimate, independent social values and that none should have absolute priority over the others. Inter alia, such a theory would provide (...) a principled means for striking a balance, or making trade-offs, between these values in cases of conflict. Recent developments in public health ethics have made progress in thinking about how to make trade-offs between liberty and utility in particular. While public health ethicists often claim that the least restrictive alternative should be used to achieve the public health goal in question, I argue that a plausible but under-recognized idea is that the least restrictive alternative might sometimes involve improvement of global health via redistributive taxation—i.e., rather than coercive social distancing measures. I conclude by demonstrating that the proportionality principle leaves open the question of when exactly utility outweighs liberty or vice versa—and I argue that, rather than speaking about the morality of liberty-infringing public health interventions in categorical/binary terms, it would be more fruitful and realistic to think and speak about the degree to which a liberty-infringing public health intervention is morally appropriate. CiteULike Connotea Del.icio.us What's this? (shrink)

Michael J. Almeida presents a bold new defence of the existence of God. He argues that entrenched principles in philosophical theology which have served as basic assumptions in apriori, atheological arguments are in fact philosophical dogmas. Almeida argues that not only are such principles false - they are necessarily false.

The book is an argument about the moral foundations of foreign policy. It argues that the traditional idea of liberal equality can be interpreted so as to give moral guidance to policy leaders in understanding what they ought to seek internationally.

An important application of ultrafilters is in the ultraproduct construction in model theory. In this paper we study ultraproducts of countable structures, whose universe we assume is ω , using ultrafilters on a countable index set, which we also assume to be ω . Many of the properties of the ultraproduct are in fact inherent properties of the ultrafilter. For example, if we take a sequence of countable linear orders without maximal element, then their ultraproduct will have no maximal element, (...) and we can ask what its cofinality is. This cardinal depends only on the ultrafilter; it does not depend on what linear orders comprise the factors. (shrink)

Dewey scholar Michael Eldridge provides a thorough and well-researched interpretation of Dewey's philosophy that focuses on the role of intelligence in human ...

More than two hundred cities in the United States have now declared themselves to be sanctuary cities. This declaration involves a commitment to non-compliance with federal law; the sanctuary city will refuse to use its own juridical power – including, more crucially, its own police powers – to assist the federal government in the deportation of undocumented residents. We will argue that the sanctuary city might be morally defensible, even if deportation is not always wrong, and even if the federal (...) government is legally permitted to demand that states participate in the process of deportation. We defend this conclusion with reference to a simple, but powerful, norm of international law: that of non-refoulement. As we will discuss, this norm articulates the idea that no state may rightly use its coercive power to move a person into a position in which their basic rights are at risk. We take this norm as a morally defensible principle, and ask what could follow from its acceptance. We argue that this norm has implications for a variety of actors – especially when we notice that those who are facing unjust risks of death are, in general, entitled to use defensive violence against their aggressors. This simple fact, we argue, can help offer a novel defense of the sanctuary city. (shrink)

Utilizing an idea that has its first appearance in Gerhard Gentzen’s unpublished manuscripts, we generate an exhaustive repertoire of all the possible inference rules that are related to the left implication inference rule of the sequent calculus from a ground sequent, that is, a logical axiom. We discuss the similarities and differences of these derived rules as well as their interaction with the implication right rule under cut and the structural axiom. We further consider the question of analyticity of cuts (...) in calculi using one of the new rules instead of the standard left implication rule. (shrink)

Most conspiracy theories exist as part of “stigmatized knowledge” – that is, knowledge claims that have not been accepted by those institutions we rely upon for truth validation. Not uncommonly, believers in conspiracy theories also accept other forms of stigmatized knowledge, such as unorthodox forms of healing and beliefs about Atlantis and UFOs. Rejection by authorities is for them a sign that a belief must be true. However, the linkage of conspiracy theories with stigmatized knowledge has been weakening, because stigmatized (...) knowledge itself is growing more problematic. What was once clearly recognizable as “the fringe” is now beginning to merge with the mainstream. This process of “mainstreaming the fringe” is the result of numerous factors, including the ubiquity of the Internet, the growing suspicion of authority, and the spread of once esoteric themes in popular culture. Only a permeable membrane now separates the fringe from the mainstream. Thus conspiracism is no longer the province only of small, isolated coteries. It now has the potential to make the leap into public discourse. This, of course, does not apply to every conspiracy theory, but it happens enough to suggest that we are at an important transition point. The recent controversy in the United States over whether a conspiracy existed to hide President Obama’s alleged foreign birth – a claim that years earlier would never have emerged beyond small radical groups – suggests the nature of the change. It also suggests the dangers that political cultures may face in the future. (shrink)

Michael Pakaluk presents the first systematic study in English of Books VIII and IX of Aristotle's masterpiece of moral philosophy, the Nicomachean Ethics; these books comprise one of the most famous of all discussions of friendship. Pakaluk accompanies his fresh and accurate translation with a philosophical commentary which unfolds lucidly the various arguments in the text, assuming no knowledge of Greek on the part of the reader.

Michael Halewood uses ideas from analytic philosophy, continental philosophy and social theory to look at how language relates to the world, and the world to language. He primarily draws on the work of Alfred North Whitehead, and incorporating the ideas of Gilles Deleuze, John Dewey and Luce Irigaray, to view the world as 'in process'.

This translation seeks to make Aristotle's terse and concentrated Greek fairly intelligible to those who read him in English. Those who want to read through the Ethics to grasp the main outlines of Aristotle's position need a translation that can be understood without detailed explanations.

Metaphysics: The Basics is a concise and engaging introduction to the philosophical study of the world and universe in which we live. Concerned with questions about reality, existence, time, identity and change, metaphysics has long fascinated people but to the uninitiated some of the issues and problems can appear very complex. In this lively and lucid book, Michael Rea examines and explains key questions in the study of metaphysics such as: • Can two things be in the same place (...) at the same time? • Do creatures of fiction exist? • Are human beings free? • Is time travel possible? • Is there just one world or many worlds? With a glossary of key terms and suggestions for further reading, the book considers key philosophical arguments around Metaphysics, making this an ideal starting point for anyone seeking a full introduction to the debates both within and about metaphysics. (shrink)

Michael Walzer; Education, Democratic Citizenship and Multiculturalism, Journal of Philosophy of Education, Volume 29, Issue 2, 30 May 2006, Pages 181–189, http.

In this expansive and provocative new work, Michael Dango theorizes how aesthetic style manages crisis--and why taking crisis seriously means taking aesthetics seriously. Detoxing, filtering, binging, and ghosting: these are four actions that have come to define how people deal with the stress of living in a world that seems in permanent crisis. As Dango argues, they can also be used to describe contemporary art and literature. Employing what he calls "promiscuous archives," Dango traverses media and re-shuffles literary and (...) art historical genealogies to make his case. The book discusses social media filters alongside the minimalism of Donald Judd and La Monte Young and the television shows West Wing and True Detective. It reflects on the modernist cuisine of Ferran Adrià and the fashion design of Issey Miyake. And, it dissects writing by Jenifer Egan, David Foster Wallace, David Mitchell, and Zadie Smith. Unpacking how the styles of these works detox, filter, binge, or ghost their worlds, Crisis Style is at once a taxonomy of contemporary cultural production and a theorization of action in a world always in need of repair. Ultimately, Dango presents a compelling argument for why we need aesthetic theory to understand what we're doing in our world today. (shrink)

Michael Bacon gives a critical presentation of Rorty's writings on pragmatism and political theory, comparing and contrasting him with pragmatists such as Hilary Putnam and Susan Haack and liberals such as John Rawls and Brian Barry. The result is an imaginative presentation of one of contemporary philosophy's most innovative and important thinkers.

Centre for Applied Philosophy and Public Ethics (CAPPE), Menzies Centre for Health Policy, The Australian National University, LPO Box 8260, ANU Canberra ACT 2601, Australia. Tel.: +61 (0)2 6125 4355; Mobile: +61 (0)431 124 286; Fax: +61 (0)2 6125 6579; Email: michael.selgelid{at}anu.edu.au ' + u + '@' + d + ' '//--> Abstract Thomas Pogge has proposed a supplement to the standard patent regime whereby innovating companies would be rewarded in proportion to the extent to which their innovations lead (...) to reduction of the global burden of disease (GBD). This paper argues that an expansion of this proposal—whereby provision of already existing medicines are incentivised in a similar way—would provide a more comprehensive solution to the healthcare situation in developing countries. It then considers the practical challenges that the implementation of such a proposal (expanded or otherwise) would entail. Though these include difficulties associated with disease burden metric, I argue that the most serious difficulties are associated with the problem of causal attribution. A basic idea underlying Pogge's proposal is that the disease burden reduction attributable to particular interventions can be determined. Theoretically speaking, in cases involving multiple interacting causal factors, there may be no fact of the matter regarding the extent to which disease burden reduction should be attributed to one intervention as opposed to another; and (even if workable practical solutions to this theoretical challenge can be met) the data requirements for implementation would be daunting. CiteULike Connotea Del.icio.us What's this? (shrink)

A revival of panpsychistic considerations of the mind's place in nature has recently enriched the debate on the mind-body problem in the contemporary philosophy of the mind. The essays assembled in the present collection aim to supply a positive contribution to these considerations, providing new perspectives on panpsychism by shedding new light on its arguments and impacts, as well as on its problems and theoretical challenges. Panpsychism is discussed as a position that understands consciousness as a truly fundamental feature of (...) our reality—not only with respect to the human species, but also with respect to the evolution of the universe as such. (shrink)

Data protection law has a linear logic, in that it purports to trace the lifecycle of personal data from creation to collection, processing, transfer, and ultimately its demise, and to regulate each step so as to promote the data subject’s control thereof. Big data defies this linear logic, in that it decontextualizes data from its original environment and conducts an algorithmic nonlinear mix, match, and mine analysis. Applying data protection law to the processing of big data does not work well, (...) to say the least. This Article examines the case of big medical data. A survey of emerging research practices indicates that studies either ignore data protection law altogether or assume an ex post position, namely that because they are conducted after the data has already been created in the course of providing medical care, and they use de-identified data, they go under the radar of data protection law. These studies focus on the end-point of the lifecycle of big data: if sufficiently anonymous at publication, the previous steps are overlooked, on the claim that they enjoy immunity. I argue that this answer is too crude. To portray data protection law in its best light, we should view it as a process-based attempt to equip data subjects with some power to control personal data about them, in all phases of data processing. Such control reflects the underlying justification of data protection law as an implementation of human dignity. The process-based approach fits current legal practices and is justified by reflecting dignitarian conceptions of informational privacy. (shrink)

This article highlights that in our rush to call for the democratization of science and expertise we must not forget to speak to what type of democratization we are calling for. In short, not all participatory forms are the same. In developing this argument, I examine one such form that has yet to receive much attention from science and technology studies scholars: the agricultural field day. In examining the field day, we find that its orientation—that is, toward either the conventional (...) or sustainable model of agriculture—shapes significantly its democratic approach to knowledge coproduction. To help inform how we understand conventional and sustainable field days, I turned to two conceptual frameworks of participation: namely, that of Wynne and Funtowicz and Ravetz. In doing this, we find that conventional field days mirror closely that form of public participation detailed by Funtowicz and Ravetz, while sustainable field days reflect that conceptualized by Wynne. (shrink)

Eddo Evink criticizes Emmanuel Levinas’s supposed view that all acts of intentionality and rationality commit transcendental violence against their objects, including the Other. If this is so, Levinas undermines the possibility of his own philosophy. Evink further argues: that there are non-violent forms of intentionality and so intentionality is only potentially violent; that some non-violent counter-pole is needed to define violence; that there are contradictions in Levinas’s notion of violence; that Levinas, like empiricists, aspires to a metaphysical absolute untainted by (...) language; and that he presupposes the philosophical, ontological, and linguistic frameworks he criticizes. However, to answer these objections, one must understand Levinas as developing two distinct modalities of relationship: Being and Otherwise than Being. These modalities clash in the face-to-face relationship when the phenomenon of the face defects into responsibility for the Other. The epistemology and ontology of Being involve distinctive acts, affects, forms of temporality, and experiences of self that undergo a tectonic shift in confrontation with the ethically obligating Other. Here the focus is not on the violence of concepts ever seeking to subjugate the Other but rather on the Other whose summons both provokes knowledge to retreat and is able to be shown in a philosophy, even if that philosophy betrays the saying in the said, while also having the potential to reduce that betrayal. The focus should not be on transcendental violence tracking down and cornering the Other but on the Other ethically disrupting Being. With that focus, it becomes clear that concentrating on transcendental violence is a kind of violence. (shrink)

1. Bd. Einleitung, Text und Übersetzung -- 2. Bd. Kommentar.

Michael Strawser provides a new reading of Spinoza as a philosopher of love for whom the ethically qualified conception of noble love is central. Strawser situates Spinoza’s philosophy of love within the Jewish and Cartesian traditions and shows how this active conception of love can conquer hatred and bring people together.

This article details how patent law works to create discrete, immutable biological ‘objects’. This socio-legal maneuver is necessary to distinguish these artifacts from the unwieldy realm of the natural world. The creation of ‘objects’ also serves the interests of capital, where a stable, unchanging, immutable object goes hand in hand with commodification. Yet this stabilization is incomplete. Pointing to a variety of different examples, this article illustrates how biotech patents do not speak to specific, immutable things. Biotech patents, rather, are (...) better understood as ontologically fluid, which is to say their identity cannot be ‘fixed’ — or, at least, not without undermining the very existence of today’s biotechnology regime. The article concludes by speaking briefly about how this mutability is perpetuating certain inequalities, particularly between holders of various property forms. (shrink)

My book, "The Darwinian Revolution" gives an overview of the revolution as understood at the time of its writing (1979). It shows that many factors were involved, from straight science through philosophical methodology, and on to religious influences and challenges. Also of importance were social factors, not the least of which was the professionalization of science in Britain in the 19th century. Since the appearance of that book, new, significant factors have become apparent, and here I discuss some of the (...) most important -- especially the way in which evolution as an idea came into being as an epiphenomenon of the ideology of cultural progress; the (often tense) interaction between ideas of biological progress and the urge to professionalization, and of how this led to a delay in the full appreciation of what Charles Darwin had done in the "Origin;" and the ongoing divide between biological functionalists and biological formalists, a Kuhnian-type paradigm difference that persists across the Darwinian revolution. (shrink)

To understand the changing patterns within agriculture, it is important to look not only at social relations and organisational configurations. Also salient to such an analysis is an examination of how those formations give shape to non-humans. Much attention has been placed recently on the political economy of agriculture when speaking of these emergent patterns. Yet in doing this, the natural environment is all too often relegated to the backdrop; where the agroeconomy is viewed as something that manoeuvres within the (...) environment but never through it. The conceptual groundwork for this paper draws from two often unconnected scholars: Michel Foucault and Fernand Braudel. In Foucault, we find a framework, with a little conceptual development, through which to talk about how the economy (of both discipline and capital) enters into nature. Specifically, the argument is made that through the embodiment of discipline, nature too becomes disciplined. Yet in Foucault we find a discursive conception of socio-economic history; where capitalism is discussed, but always as an effect of the discursive structures of power/knowledge. Enter the work of Braudel, to provide us with a materialist counterweight to Foucault's theorising. In Braudel, we find a detailed analysis on the emergence of capitalism, out of which then comes his distinction between markets and anti-markets. In short, when both accounts of history are overlaid, interesting connections between the emergence of Braudelian anti-markets and Foucaultian discipline are revealed. Two brief case studies are then examined to add further depth to the discussion: the first focusing on corn; the second centring on the cow. The paper then concludes speaking on the issue of resistance. (shrink)

Through autobiography, I explain why I cannot accept conventional Christianity or any other form of religious belief. I sketch how, through modern evolutionary theory, I try to find an alternative world‐picture, one which is, however, essentially agnostic about ultimate meanings. I characterize my position as being that of “David Hume brought up‐to‐date by Charles Darwin.” I express sad skepticism about ever realizing the hopes on which Zygon was founded.

This paper argues for a broader understanding of complexity; an understanding that speaks to the multidimensionality of environmental problems. As argued, environmental problems rest upon ontological, epistemological, and moral claims; they rest, in other words, upon statements about what is, knowledge, and what ought to be, respectively. To develop and illustrate this argument, the GMO (genetically modified organism) controversy is broken down according to these three dimensions. Dissecting environmental problems in this manner reveals why we cannot look solely toward the (...) natural sciences for resolution: because these problems beg questions that cannot be answered with references to materiality alone. (shrink)