This research note is the eighth instalment in our series of preliminary findings on the census and study of the reception of De iure belli ac pacis. The note presents a bibliographical description of Laurentius’ 1647 re-issue of the 1631 edition by Blaeu, considers Laurentius’ motivation and methods of production, lists and maps the currently known twenty-three surviving copies, and briefly describes two notable exemplars.

This note studies the 1650 edition of Hugo Grotius’s De iure belli ac pacis. Using online and card catalogues, we have located eighty-nine copies, thirty-seven of which we examined in person, with an additional six fully digitised copies online. We hope that this research note on the preliminary results will generate greater interest in this unduly neglected edition. The note shows how, despite the connection established in the history of seventeenth-century politics that emphasized the ties between Grotius and the Peace (...) of Westphalia, the reception of Grotius’s 1650 edition bore no relation to the debates at Osnabrück and Münster. However, this is an influential edition, cherished by collectors and authors. According to our findings, it would be reproduced in a number of later reprints. (shrink)

This research note offers a contextual overview of the printing history of Johann Blaeu’s 1646 octavo edition of Hugo Grotius’s De iure belli ac pacis (ibp). The note examines the printing process of the last edition that was prepared while Grotius was still alive, though it was published after his death. The note also sheds light on the theological dimension of some readers’ annotations, and concludes by discussing the impact this edition had on the modern versions of the text.

This paper transforms elements of Hegel’s thought into antiracism through the work of James Baldwin in three Acts. Act One offers a Hegelian Account of Honesty that is structurally inspired by “conscience” from his Phenomenology of Spirit. Honesty has two, seemingly paradoxical, dimensions. To address the unacknowledged whiteness in Hegel, we turn to Baldwin in Act Two. Baldwin deepens and problematizes Hegelian Honesty through a conceptual diagnosis of “double misrecognition”: the first is the misrecognition of Blackness as inferior, the second (...) is the misrecognition of whiteness as superior. Act Three articulates how the structure of whiteness forecloses Schuld and shame by connecting this dual foreclosure to the two dimensions of Hegelian honesty and Baldwin’s diagnosis of double misrecognition. We conclude by formulating a sketch of “antiracist idealism” as version of what the Germans call Vergangenheitsaufarbeitung, that is, doing the hard, uncomfortable labor of comprehending how the present is not separate from but completely composed of old scars, wounds, violence, and atrocities. Antiracist idealism enables us to both learn from yet also challenge canonical idealism through contemporary forms of antiracism. (shrink)

In December 2013, the Nonhuman Rights Project (NhRP) filed a petition for a common law writ of habeas corpus in the New York State Supreme Court on behalf of Tommy, a chimpanzee living alone in a cage in a shed in rural New York (Barlow, 2017). Under animal welfare laws, Tommy’s owners, the Laverys, were doing nothing illegal by keeping him in those conditions. Nonetheless, the NhRP argued that given the cognitive, social, and emotional capacities of chimpanzees, Tommy’s confinement constituted (...) a profound wrong that demanded remedy by the courts. Soon thereafter, the NhRP filed habeas corpus petitions on behalf of Kiko, another chimpanzee housed alone in Niagara Falls, and Hercules and Leo, two chimpanzees held in research facilities at Stony Brook University. Thus began the legal struggle to move these chimpanzees from captivity to a sanctuary, an effort that has led the NhRP to argue in multiple courts before multiple judges. The central point of contention has been whether Tommy, Kiko, Hercules, and Leo have legal rights. To date, no judge has been willing to issue a writ of habeas corpus on their behalf. Such a ruling would mean that these chimpanzees have rights that confinement might violate. Instead, the judges have argued that chimpanzees cannot be bearers of legal rights because they are not, and cannot be persons. In this book we argue that chimpanzees are persons because they are autonomous. (shrink)

We submit this brief in support of the Nonhuman Rights Project’s efforts to secure habeas corpus relief for the elephant named Happy. We reject arbitrary distinctions that deny adequate protections to other animals who share with protected humans relevantly similar vulnerabilities to harms and relevantly similar interests in avoiding such harms. We strongly urge this Court, in keeping with the best philosophical standards of rational judgment and ethical standards of justice, to recognize that, as a nonhuman person, Happy should be (...) released from her current confinement and transferred to an appropriate elephant sanctuary, pursuant to habeas corpus. (shrink)

This study examines the conflation of terms such as “knowledge” and “understanding” in peer-reviewed literature, and tests the hypothesis that little current research clearly distinguishes between importantly distinct epistemic states. Two sets of data are presented from papers published in the journal Public Understanding of Science. In the first set, the digital text analysis tool, Voyant, is used to analyze all papers published in 2014 for the use of epistemic success terms. In the second set of data, all papers published (...) in Public Understanding of Science from 2010–2015 are systematically analyzed to identify instances in which epistemic states are empirically measured. The results indicate that epistemic success terms are inconsistently defined, and that measurement of understanding, in particular, is rarely achieved in public understanding of science studies. We suggest that more diligent attention to measuring understanding, as opposed to mere knowledge, will increase efficacy of scientific outreach and communication efforts. (shrink)

We submit this brief in support of the Nonhuman Rights Project’s efforts to secure habeas corpus relief for the elephant named Happy. The Supreme Court, Bronx County, declined to grant habeas corpus relief and order Happy’s transfer to an elephant sanctuary, relying, in part, on previous decisions that denied habeas relief for the NhRP’s chimpanzee clients, Kiko and Tommy. Those decisions use incompatible conceptions of ‘person’ which, when properly understood, are either philosophically inadequate or, in fact, compatible with Happy’s personhood.

The U.S. National Institute of Allergies and Infectious Diseases and the National Institute of Mental Health have a new research priority: inclusion of terminally ill persons living with HIV in HIV cure-related research. For example, the Last Gift is a clinical research study at the University of California San Diego for PLWHIV who have a terminal illness, with a prognosis of less than 6 months. As end-of-life HIV cure research is relatively new, the scientific community has a timely opportunity to (...) examine the related ethical challenges. Following an extensive review of the EOL and HIV cure research ethics literature, combined with deliberation from various stakeholders and our experience with the Last Gift study to date, we outline considerations to ensure that such research with terminally ill PLWHIV remains ethical, focusing on five topics: 1) protecting autonomy through informed consent, 2) avoiding exploitation and fostering altruism, 3) maintaining a favorable benefits/risks balance, 4) safeguarding against vulnerability through patient-participant centeredness, and 5) ensuring the acceptance of next-of-kin/loved ones and community stakeholders. EOL HIV cure-related research can be performed ethically and effectively by anticipating key issues that may arise. While not unique to the fields of EOL or HIV cure-related research, the considerations highlighted can help us support a new research approach. We must honor the lives of PLWHIV whose involvement in research can provide the knowledge needed to achieve the dream of making HIV infection curable. (shrink)

In this brief, we argue that there is a diversity of ways in which humans (Homo sapiens) are ‘persons’ and there are no non-arbitrary conceptions of ‘personhood’ that can include all humans and exclude all nonhuman animals. To do so we describe and assess the four most prominent conceptions of ‘personhood’ that can be found in the rulings concerning Kiko and Tommy, with particular focus on the most recent decision, Nonhuman Rights Project, Inc v Lavery.

James L. Anderson analyzed the conceptual novelty of Einstein's theory of gravity as its lack of ``absolute objects.'' Michael Friedman's related concept of absolute objects has been criticized by Roger Jones and Robert Geroch for implausibly admitting as absolute the timelike 4-velocity field of dust in cosmological models in Einstein's theory. Using Nathan Rosen's action principle, I complete Anna Maidens's argument that the Jones-Geroch problem is not solved by requiring that absolute objects not be varied. Recalling Anderson's (...) proscription of (globally) ``irrelevant'' variables that do no work (anywhere in any model), I generalize that proscription to locally irrelevant variables that do no work in some places in some models. This move vindicates Friedman's intuitions and removes the Jones-Geroch counterexample: some regions of some models of gravity with dust are dust-free, and there is no good reason to have a timelike dust 4-velocity vector there. Eliminating the irrelevant timelike vctors keeps the dust 4-velocity from counting as absolute by spoiling its neighborhood-by-neighborhood diffeomorphic equivalence to (1,0,0,0). A more fundamental Gerochian timelike vector field presents itself in gravity with spinors in the standard orthonormal tetrad formalism, though eliminating irrelevant fields might solve this problem as well. (shrink)

Nishida Kitaro, originator of the Kyoto School and 'father of Japanese Philosophy' is usually viewed as an essentially apolitical thinker who underwent a 'turn' in the mid-1930s, becoming an ideologue of Japanese imperialism. Political Philosophy in Japan challenges the view that a neat distinction can be drawn between Nishida's apolitical 'pre-turn' writings and the apparently ideological tracts he produced during the war years. In the context of Japanese intellectual traditions, this book suggests that Nishida was a political thinker form the (...) very beginning of his career, and consequently, his later political works cannot be dismissed as peripheral to his philosophical project. Counter-intuitively however, Christopher Goto-Jones argues that a consistently political reading of his philosophy reveals a dissenting standpoint even during the height of the Pacific War. This book argues that the prevailing postwar tendency to dismiss interwar and wartime Japanese culture as fascist or ultra nationalist en total neglects a lively political discourse, which contained some serous and profound political insight and even dissent. By suggesting that Nishida tetsugaku was a voice of dissent during Japan's Great East Asia War, Goto-Jones presents a case for the rehabilitation of Nishida as a political thinker, and as an example of a Japanese resistance, able to make a valuable contribution to contemporary debates about international political, globalization , and inter-cultural relations. Offering a unique and potentially controversial view of the subject of Nishida and the Kyoto School, The Political Philosophy of Japan will be of huge interest to anyone studying Japanese History, Political Philosophy and comparative philosophy alike. (shrink)

While mechanistic explanation and, to a lesser extent, nomological explanation are well-explored topics in the philosophy of biology, topological explanation is not. Nor is the role of diagrams in topological explanations. These explanations do not appeal to the operation of mechanisms or laws, and extant accounts of the role of diagrams in biological science explain neither why scientists might prefer diagrammatic representations of topological information to sentential equivalents nor how such representations might facilitate important processes of explanatory reasoning unavailable to (...) scientists who restrict themselves to sentential representations. Accordingly, relying upon a case study about immune system vulnerability to attacks on CD4+ T-cells, I argue that diagrams group together information in a way that avoids repetition in representing topological structure, facilitate identification of specific topological properties of those structures, and make available to controlled processing explanatorily salient counterfactual information about topological structures, all in ways that sentential counterparts of diagrams do not. (shrink)

Call a bit of scientific discourse a description of a missing system when (i) it has the surface appearance of an accurate description of an actual, concrete system (or kind of system) from the domain of inquiry, but (ii) there are no actual, concrete systems in the world around us fitting the description it contains, and (iii) that fact is recognised from the outset by competent practitioners of the scientific discipline in question. Scientific textbooks, classroom lectures, and journal articles abound (...) with such passages; and there is a widespread practice of talking and thinking as though there are systems which fit the descriptions they contain perfectly, despite the recognition that no actual, concrete systems do so—call this the face value practice. There are, furthermore, many instances in which philosophers engage in the face value practice whilst offering answers to epistemological and methodological questions about the sciences. Three questions, then: (1) How should we interpret descriptions of missing systems? (2) How should we make sense of the face value practice? (3) Is there a set of plausible answers to (1) and (2) which legitimates reliance on the face value practice in our philosophical work, and can support the weight of the accounts which are entangled with that practice? In this paper I address these questions by considering three answers to the first: that descriptions of missing systems are straightforward descriptions of abstract objects, that they are indirect descriptions of “property-containing” abstracta, and that they are (in a different way) indirect descriptions of mathematical structures. All three proposals are present in the literature, but I find them wanting. The result is to highlight the importance of developing a satisfactory understanding of descriptions of missing systems and the face value practice, to put pressure on philosophical accounts which rely on the practice, and to help us assess the viability of certain approaches to thinking about models, theory structure, and scientific representation. (shrink)

The proposal that there is an illusion of conscious will has been supported by findings that priming of stimulus location in a task requiring judgements of action-authorship can enhance participants’ experience of agency. We attempted to replicate findings from the ‘Wheel of Fortune’ task [Aarts, H., Custers, R., & Wegner, D. M. . On the inference of personal authorship: enhancing experienced agency by priming effect information. Consciousness and Cognition, 14, 439–458]. We also examined participants’ performance on this task in relation (...) to self-reported passivity experiences and hallucination-proneness. We found a significant effect of priming, with primes being found to increase the experience of agency. An interaction between gender and priming was also found, with priming enhancing feelings of agency in women but not in men. There were no significant correlations between levels of self-reported passivity experiences or hallucination-proneness and participants’ susceptibility to the priming effect on ratings of agency. Implications of these findings are discussed with regard to a prominent model of passivity experiences. (shrink)

During his celebrated 1922 debate with Bergson, Einstein famously proclaimed: “the time of the philosopher does not exist, there remains only a psychological time that differs from the physicist’s.” Einstein’s dictum, I maintain, has been metabolized by the natural sciences, which typically presuppose, more or less explicitly, the existence of a single, univocal, temporal substratum, ultimately determined by physics. This reductionistic assumption pervades much biological and biomedical practice. The chronological age allotted to individuals is conceived as an objective quantity, allowing (...) one to straightforwardly assign and compare the biological age of organisms. This essay argues that the standard practice of assessing the age and aging of organisms against the backdrop of a physical conception of time is problematic. This becomes especially evident in light of recent discoveries of various levels of senescence underlying the development of individual organisms—a phenomenon known as ‘age mosaicism.’ The bottom line is that the study of age and aging requires a biological conception of time, as opposed to a physical one. Einstein clearly wasn’t wrong about his operationalization of time in relativity theory. Still time may be less monolithic than he surmised. (shrink)

Short-term international medical outreach experiences are becoming more popular among medical students. As the popularity of these trips grows, participants, scholars, and institutions have become more aware of the potential pitfalls of such experiences. Loyola University Chicago Stritch School of Medicine has an approximately 20-year international service immersion program that has sent more than 1,400 participants to more than 30 countries. Recently, ISI programming has been adjusted to provide students more formal sessions exploring the ethics of the ISI trips. Students (...) are required to attend both pre- and post-trip educational sessions covering a wide range of relevant global health topics as well as participating in in-country reflections and post-trip debriefings. This recent adjustment has evolved further to become the foundation for the SSOM’s four-year Global Health Honors program that not only encourages an ethical foundation for the student’s ISI experience but also hopes to provide a foundation for students as they look toward a future career in global health. (shrink)

Bernard Charbonneau’s The Green Light is a classic text of French environmentalism, first published in 1980 but unavailable in English until now. Philosophically, I found the book to be underwhelming, but Charbonneau makes no apologies for this:The author’s viewpoint is...not that of a specialist,...of a bona fide philosopher or poet, but that of a man who needs air to breathe, water to drink and dive in, time and space to play, silence to sleep or reflect...who has felt in his bones (...) and his eye each of the blows the land has endured.Charbonneau’s motivations for writing are personal, but not private; the introduction which chronicles his own background, struggles, and heartbreak might be the most compelling part... (shrink)

Interpreting crises and transformative processes as complex and rhythmic phenomena A webinar with Prof. Michel Alhadeff-Jones - Sciences de l'éducation et de la formation.

It is increasingly common for universities to provide cross-curricular education in bioethics as part of contemporary attempts to produce 'global citizens.' In this article I examine three perspectives drawn from research into pedagogy that has been conducted from the perspective of cognitive anthropology and consider its relevance to bioethics education. I focus on: two metaphors of learning, participation and acquisition, identified by Sfard; the psychological notion of moral development; and the distinction between socialization and enculturation. Two of these perspectives have (...) been particularly fruitful in understanding the processes of teaching and learning in a variety of domains. The third perspective has been developed in relation to the formal ethical education of medical students. I examine their relevance for 'non-professional' bioethics education suggesting that if we take seriously the idea that it is part of 'educating for citizenship' then the distinction between 'ethics' and 'politics' is blurred as such programmes aim at the development of student's political subjectivity. (shrink)

We contribute to the literature on ethics in the professions by theorizing how global mobility precipitates professional insecurity and constrained moral agency. We present our findings of a study of accountants migrating to Canada. Using postcolonial theory and relational/poststructuralist theories of identity and ethics, we contrast the experiences of marginalized and privileged migrant accountants to show how those with “diverse” social identities are not recognized by professionals in Canada and must seek recognition from Canadian colleagues, employers, and clients to reconstitute (...) their professional identities and moral agency. We discuss the implications of the exclusion and marginalization of professionals for migrants, the profession, and society more generally. (shrink)

Economists have long treated technological phenomena as events transpiring inside a black box and, on the whole, have adhered rather strictly to a self-imposed ordinance not to inquire too seriously into what transpires inside that box. The purpose of Professor Rosenberg's work is to break open and examine the contents of the black box. In so doing, a number of important economic problems be powerfully illuminated. The author clearly shows how specific features of individual technologies have shaped a number of (...) variables of great concern to economists: the rate of productivity improvement, the nature of learning processes underlying technological change itself, the speed of technology transfer, and the effectiveness of government policies that are intended to influence technologies in particular ways. The separate chapters of this book reflect a primary concern with some of the distinctive aspects of industrial technologies in the twentieth century, such as the increasing reliance upon science, but also the considerable subtlety and complexity of the dialectic between science and technology. Other concerns include the rapid growth in the development of costs associated with new technologies as well as the difficulty of predicting the eventual performance characteristics of newly emerging technologies. (shrink)

We sometimes seek expert guidance when we don’t know what to think or do about a problem. In challenging cases concerning medical ethics, we may seek a clinical ethics consultation for guidance. The assumption is that the bioethicist, as an expert on ethical issues, has knowledge and skills that can help us better think about the problem and improve our understanding of what to do regarding the issue.The widespread practice of ethics consultations raises these questions and more:What would it take (...) to be a moral expert?Is anyone a moral expert, and if so, how could a non-expert identify one?Is it in any way problematic to accept and follow the advice of a moral expert as opposed to coming to moral conclusions on your own?What should we think and do when moral experts disagree about a practical ethical issue?In what follows, we address these theoretical and practical questions about moral expertise. (shrink)

'Knowledge Capitalism' reveals how the emerging knowledge-based economy is redefining firms, empowering individuals and reshaping learning and work. It provides a practical tool-set for business managers to interpret and manage change.

Jacques Derrida returns relentlessly to the question of literature which is already a prominent concern in early texts such as Writing and Difference. The focus of this article is the conception of literature in ‘Literature in Secret: An Impossible Filiation’, in which Derrida discusses filiation with reference to Abraham and Isaac, the fundamental necessity of secrecy and the notion of the pardon. Above all, it is Kafka's Letter to His Father which perhaps provides a paradigm for defining literature. In this (...) specular address, the promise of a heritage is in the balance. Writing incessantly on Kafka, Maurice Blanchot also reflects on literature. The notion of literature put forward by Derrida in ‘Literature in Secret: An Impossible Filiation’ is considered in this article, as well as reflections by Blanchot, to show what might be at stake in Kafka's Letter to His Father. (shrink)

It is proposed to remove the difficulty of nonitegrability of length in the Weyl geometry by modifying the law of parallel displacement and using “standard” vectors. The field equations are derived from a variational principle slightly different from that of Dirac and involving a parameter σ. For σ=0 one has the electromagnetic field. For σ<0 there is a vector meson field. This could be the electromagnetic field with finite-mass photons, or it could be a meson field providing the “missing mass” (...) of the universe. In cosmological models the two natural gauges are the Einstein gauge and the cosmic gauge. With the latter the universe has a fixed size, but the sizes of small systems decrease with time and their masses and energies increase, thus producing the Hubble effect. The field of a particle in this gauge is investigated, and it leads to an interesting solution of the Einstein equations that raises a question about the Schwarzschild solution. (shrink)

This paper is designed to help people rationally engage moral issues regarding the treatment of animals, specifically uses of animals in medical and psychological experimentation, basic research, drug development, education and training, consumer product testing and other areas.

Although actual human omniscience is unimaginable, it is not obvious what it means to be limited with regard to thought. One of Kant's significant contributions to epistemology was his redefinition of the limits of thought. He is explicit about this when he contrasts human, receptive intuition, and the creative intuition that an infinite being would have. Importantly, judging and reasoning are only necessary for a mind that is first affected by an object through sensibility, which is not the case for (...) a being with creative intuition, since this kind of intuition creates its own object. This means that the intellect of Kant's God is distinct from the human intellect in kind, since judging and reasoning are essentially finite activities; they are already evidence of a finite, human cognition. In contrast, Aristotle argues that human cognition - beyond its capacity for discursivity - is able to contemplate; as we will see, Aristotle argues that contemplation is divine, and so a limited intellect can become more or less like an omniscient intellect depending on the quality of one's contemplative life. In this work, I want to 1) establish that Kant and Aristotle have incompatible conceptions of non-omniscience, 2) trace the epistemological commitments that motivate their rival positions on non-omniscience, 3) show that their particular views on the legitimacy of metaphysical judgments presuppose their particular interpretations of non-omniscience, and 4) argue that Kant provides a superior analysis of non-omniscience. (shrink)

A critique of ‘beyond left and right’ ideologies, from red Toryism to techno-libertarianism.

Kausales Denken spielt sowohl im Alltag wie auch im wissenschaftlichen Forschungsprozess eine zentrale Rolle. Es erlaubt uns, Phänomene vorherzusagen, zu kontrollieren und zu verstehen. Kausales Denken geht über die Angabe der Ursachen eines Phänomens hinaus: Wollen wir verstehen, warum ein Fahrrad fährt, so versuchen wir, Schritt für Schritt nachzuvollziehen, wie die einzelnen Bestandteile des Fahrrads zusammenwirken, um miteinander die Bewegung zu produzieren. Wir sind an dem Mechanismus interessiert, durch den das Phänomen zustande kommt. Dieses Vorgehen wird in der Wissenschaftsphilosophie wie (...) auch in der Kognitionspsychologie mit Hilfe mechanistischer Theorien kausalen Denkens beschrieben. Der Sammelband bringt erstmals Vertreter beider Disziplinen in sechs aufeinander abgestimmten Beiträgen zusammen. Neben einer Diskussion der Kernmerkmale mechanistischen Denkens stehen insbesondere Fragen nach dem Erwerb mechanistischer Denkstrukturen und nach der Rolle von Handlungen und Handlungserfahrungen im Fokus. (shrink)

This volume is a collection which includes the text of papers presented at the September 2008 Cambridge Symposium on Archaeology and Linguistics in the Andes. The Cambridge symposium sought to bring together the disciplines of linguistics and archaeology, in order to dispel a number of popular myths about the language history of the Andes. This introductory chapter first sets out the structure of the book and introduces its component chapters. Thereafter it clarifies briefly a number of principles from historical linguistics (...) that are indispensable to an understanding of how language data can inform us about prehistory at all, as a general methodological background to the chapters that follow. Next, it reviews the traditional model for associating the linguistic and archaeological records in the Andes, and the problems that attend it. Finally, it looks at one particular cross-disciplinary proposal that has commanded much attention worldwide, but precious little hitherto in the Andes: the ‘farming/language dispersal’ hypothesis. (shrink)

This edited collection of original essays explores the irreducible role of aesthetic forms of experience and activity in the philosophies of Walter Benjamin and Theodor W. Adorno.

This essay argues for the philosophical standing of Walter Benjamin’s early work and posits a deeper continuity between this early work as a philosopher and the subsequent development of his work as a writer. When these fragments are read in proper relation to each other, they reveal for the first time many of the key innovations of Benjamin as a philosopher, as well as his points of influence on Horkheimer and Adorno. His early ‘Program’ critiques the Enlightenment conception of experience (...) as a means for gaining empirical knowledge, and announces the need for a new concept of experience. Benjamin follows through on this program with a method of philosophical enquiry that is by turns fragmentary and constellational, developing a series of provisional notions of experience, which form a constellation with one another: perception, mimesis, language as a medium of experience, observation and memory. (shrink)

The neologism post-truth is commonly used to characterize a polity in which false and biased beliefs have corrupted public opinion and policymaking. Simplifying and broadening our use of the adjective beyond its current narrow meaning could make post-truth a useful addition to the lexicons of history, politics, and philosophy. Its current use, however, is unhelpful and distracting (at best), and experienced as demeaning and humiliating (at worst). Contemporary polities are better characterized as post-trust. A polity becames post-trust when testimony from (...) either a community of knowledge workers or a social group of complainants—such as women who give testimony of sexual assault—loses influence upon public opinion and policymaking. (shrink)