One of the most provocative projects in recent analytic philosophy has been the development of the doctrine of externalism, or, as it is often called, anti-individualism. While there is no agreement as to whether externalism is true or not, a number of recent investigations have begun to explore the question of what follows if it is true. One of the most interesting of these investigations thus far has been the question of whether externalism has consequences for the doctrine that we (...) have authoritative, a priori self-knowledge of our mental states. The selected works presented in this volume, some previously published, some new, are representative of this debate and open up new questions and issues for philosophical investigation, including the connection between externalism, self-knowledge, epistemic warrant, and memory. (shrink)

Feminist bioethics is a relatively new field, the major works in which only started to appear in the late 1980s. At first feminist bioethicists focused mainly on issues of particular concern to women such as reproduction. Recently, papers have begun to appear that show that a feminist analysis can be brought to bear on any subject traditional bioethics discusses. So far, however, feminist bioethics has not been brought to bear on psychiatry. There have been feminist critiques of psychiatry and feminist (...) discussions of certain diagnostic categories that disproportionately affect women, but these are concerned with womens issues within psychiatry and how psychiatry has been used to oppress women. Certainly these are important, but what has been missing is a discussion of psychiatry in the sense that feminist bioethics suggests a general critique of psychiatry and the rethinking of the practice of psychiatry, regardless of whether the specific instances involved are womens issues. In this paper I look at what such a feminist bioethical intervention into psychiatry would look like. (shrink)

This is the first comparative study of Nietzsche's Birth of Tragedy and Schiller's Aesthetic Letters, two crucial texts in aesthetic and cultural theory. Martin's scrupulous examination and comparison reveals the common ground shared by the two writers, who are usually regarded as being poles apart. In addition, Martin shows how this common ground mutually illuminates both texts.

A growing body of research suggests that students achieve learning outcomes at higher rates when instructors use active-learning methods rather than standard modes of instruction. To investigate how one such method might be used to teach philosophy, we observed two classes that employed Reacting to the Past, an educational role-immersion game. We chose to investigate Reacting because role-immersion games are considered a particularly effective active-learning strategy. Professors who have used Reacting to teach history, interdisciplinary humanities, and political theory agree that (...) it engages students and teaches general skills like collaboration and communication. We investigated whether it can be effective for teaching philosophical content and skills like analyzing, evaluating, crafting, and communicating arguments in addition to bringing the more general benefits of active learning to philosophy classrooms. Overall, we find Reacting to be a useful tool for achieving these ends. While we do not argue that Reacting is uniquely useful for teaching philosophy, we conclude that it is worthy of consideration by philosophers interested in creative active-learning strategies, especially given that it offers a prepackaged set of flexible, user-friendly tools for motivating and engaging students. (shrink)

ABSTRACT Because Pastafarianism – or the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster – is a parodic religion, common sense suggests its ‘adherents’ should not receive exemptions. However, the prima facie case for excluding Pastafarians is complicated by the fact that many assert their religion is as legitimate as any other religion and that their beliefs are genuine. Indeed, Pastafarians have already obtained exemptions in various countries. Taking the dominant liberal egalitarian, integrity‐based approach to exemptions, this article investigates whether there is (...) a principled, objective basis for excluding Pastafarians that accounts for their assertions. To that end, I examine four tests: a religion, seriousness, obligation, and sincerity test. I assess whether each test can actually exclude Pastafarians, and if it could, can it do so in a way that is consistent with liberal egalitarian commitments. I argue that only a sincerity test – based on consistent behaviour and a willingness to bear the costs of one's beliefs – satisfies both of these conditions, but, on a weak and contingent basis. (shrink)

We created Justice: The Game, an educational, role-immersion game designed to be used in philosophy courses. We seek to describe Justice in sufficent detail so that it is understandable to readers not already familiar with role-immersion pedagogy. We hope some instructors will be sufficiently interested in using the game. In addition to describing the game we also evaluate it, thereby highlighting the pedagogical potential of role-immersion games designed to teach political philosophy. We analyze the game by drawing on our observations (...) as designers and playtesters of Justice, along with feedback from students obtained in focus-groups conducted shortly after playtesting ended. We present evidence that Justice, compared to conventional instructional methods alone, plausibly enhances student learning of philosophical skills and content by requiring them to practice those skills and put their content-area knowledge to use in a highly-motivating and engaging context. (shrink)

La influencia perniciosa que el populismo tiene sobre numerosas construcciones, tiene a extenderse también al cosmopolitismo. En el terreno fértil de posmodernidad relativista y de narrativas contrahegemónicas, hay que deshacer dicotomías artificialmente construidas y fácilmente manipulables. En este trabajo se justificará por qué el populismo es una amenaza para la construcción cosmopolita y se reflejarán los aspectos que separan al populismo del proyecto cosmopolita. A partir de uno de los subtipos del populismo, el punitivo, se examinará la problemática que suscita (...) su aplicación a dos de las vertientes del identitarismo como son las cuestiones relativas al género (sexo) y a la idiosincrasia nacional (frente a “los otros”). Se justificará cómo el cosmopolitismo, lejos de negar tales cuestiones identitarias, lo que hace es trabajar con ellas de forma distinta. (shrink)

I reconstruct and analyze al-Ghazali’s arguments defending a plurality of real divine attributes in The Incoherence of the Philosophers. I show that one of these arguments can be made to engage with and defend Jeffrey E. Brower and Michael C. Rea’s “Numerical Sameness Without Identity” model of the Trinity. To that end, I provide some background on the metaphysical commitments at play in al-Ghazali’s arguments.

Over the past decade, attention to epistemically significant disagreement has centered on the question of whose disagreement qualifies as significant, but ignored another fundamental question: what is the epistemic significance of disagreement? While epistemologists have assumed that disagreement is only significant when it indicates a determinate likelihood that one’s own belief is false, and therefore that only disagreements with epistemic peers are significant at all, they have ignored a more subtle and more basic significance that belongs to all disagreements, regardless (...) of who they are with—that the opposing party is wrong. It is important to recognize the basic significance of disagreement since it is what explains all manners of rational responses to disagreement, including assessing possible epistemic peers and arguing against opponents regardless of their epistemic fitness. (shrink)

This collection of papers by prominent feminist thinkers advances the positive feminist project of remapping the moral by developing theory that acknowledges the diversity of women.

This volume brings together some of the most distinguished thinkers in the field of theology to consider the question of the meaning of life in the various global religions.

This essay shows that some recent work by George Weaver can be reformulated in an especially perspicuous way within the theory of closure systems. Closure theoretic generalizations of some theorems of Robert Goldblatt are presented. And, more generally, the relation between closure systems and the deducibility relations of Goldblatt is explored.

Cada vez son más estrechas las relaciones entre la informática y el Derecho. La evolución ha sido notable: de la informática jurídica documental, que nos ha facilitado en numerosas ocasiones obtener información jurídica muy completa en un corto espacio de tiempo, hemos pasado a una Informática jurídica de gestión, que cada día avanza más en su empeño de liberar al jurista de las tareas más rutinarias. Se ha llegado así a la Informática jurídica decisional, con un futuro más prometedor. Pero (...) también, como contrapartida, es la esfera que más susceptibilidades y reticencias provoca. Concretamente, vamos a prestar especial atención a la proyección de las nuevas tecnologías en las decisiones judiciales, tanto en la vertiente de la Inteligencia Artificial como en la de los Sistemas Expertos Jurídicos: es un área controvertida, ya que en la actualidad no es posible, ni deseable, una suplantación plena del razonamiento jurídico del juez o del abogado por el cálculo informático del ordenador. Basta que se configure como una herramienta de apoyo o de ayuda a la decisión. Todo ello proyecta una nueva línea de reflexión para la Filosofía del Derecho, como es la hermenéutica telemática. (shrink)

There is widespread agreement in neuroscience and psychology that the visual system identifies objects and faces based on a pattern of activation over many neurons, each neuron being involved in representing many different categories. The hypothesis that the visual system includes finely tuned neurons for specific objects or faces for the sake of identification, so‐called “grandmother cells”, is widely rejected. Here it is argued that the rejection of grandmother cells is premature. Grandmother cells constitute a hypothesis of how familiar visual (...) categories are identified, but the primary evidence against this hypothesis comes from studies that have failed to observe neurons that selectively respond to unfamiliar stimuli. These findings are reviewed and it is shown that they are irrelevant. Neuroscientists need to better understand existing models of face and object identification that include grandmother cells and then compare the selectivity of these units with single neurons responding to stimuli that can be identified. (shrink)

Friedrich Nietzsche’s intellectual autobiography Ecce Homo has always been a controversial book. Nietzsche prepared it for publication just before he became incurably insane in early 1889, but it was held back until after his death, and finally appeared only in 1908. For much of the first century of its reception, Ecce Homo met with a sceptical response and was viewed as merely a testament to its author’s incipient madness. This was hardly surprising, since he is deliberately outrageous with the ‘megalomaniacal’ (...) self-advertisement of his chapter titles, and brazenly claims ‘I am not a man, I am dynamite’ as he attempts to explode one preconception after another in the Western philosophical tradition. In recent decades there has been increased interest in the work, especially in the English-speaking world, but the present volume is the first collection of essays in any language devoted to the work. Most of the essays are selected from the proceedings of an international conference held in London to mark the centenary of the first publication of Ecce Homo in 2008. They are supplemented by a number of specially commissioned essays. Contributors include established and emerging Nietzsche scholars from the UK and USA, Germany and France, Portugal, Sweden and the Netherlands. (shrink)