While a growing body of scholarship identifies urban agriculture’s broad suite of benefits and drivers, it remains unclear how motivations to engage in urban agriculture (UA) interrelate or how they differ across cities and types of organizations. In this paper, we draw on survey responses collected from more than 250 UA organizations and businesses from 84 cities across the United States and Canada. Synthesizing the results of our quantitative analysis of responses (including principal components analysis), qualitative analysis of textual data (...) excerpted from open-ended responses, and a review of existing literature, we describe six motivational frames that appear to guide organizations and businesses in their UA practice: Entrepreneurial, Sustainable Development, Educational, Eco-Centric, DIY Secessionist, and Radical. Identifying how practitioners stack functions and frame their work is a first step in helping to differentiate the diverse and often contradictory efforts transforming urban food environments. We demonstrate that a wide range of objectives drive UA and that political orientations and discourses differ by geography, organizational type and size, and funding regime. These six paradigms provide a basic framework for understanding UA that can guide more in-depth studies of the gap between intentions and outcomes, while helping link historically and geographically specific insights to wider social and political economic processes. (shrink)

In this discussion piece, eight scholars in geography, urban planning, and agri-food studies from the United States (US) and France engage in a bi-national comparison to deepen our collective understanding of food and land justice. We specifically contextualize land justice as a critical component of food justice in both the US and France in three key areas: access to land for cultivation, urban agriculture, and non-agricultural forms of food provisioning. The US and France are interesting cases to compare, considering the (...) differences and similarities in their colonial and agricultural histories, persistent and systemic race and class-based inequities in land access, and the roles of public bodies and social movements. In this paper, we synthesize literature, share reflections, and offer directions for future scholarship, including a broader comparative research agenda. An important difference we found is in the degree of scholarly attention to race and how it mediates access to land. We also observe that few scholars articulate a clear definition of justice in their work, nor do they share a common justice framework. We hope that this paper contributes to a more robust food and land justice framework for the use of scholars, practitioners and activists. (shrink)

There is general consensus that explainable artificial intelligence is valuable, but there is significant divergence when we try to articulate why, exactly, it is desirable. This question must be distinguished from two other kinds of questions asked in the XAI literature that are sometimes asked and addressed simultaneously. The first and most obvious is the ‘how’ question—some version of: ‘how do we develop technical strategies to achieve XAI?’ Another question is specifying what kind of explanation is worth having in the (...) first place. As difficult and important as the challenges are in answering these questions, they are distinct from a third question: why do we want XAI at all? There is vast literature on this question as well, but I wish to explore a different kind of answer. The most obvious way to answer this question is by describing a desirable outcome that would likely be achieved with the right kind of explanation, which would make the explanation valuable instrumentally. That is, XAI is desirable to attain some other value, such as fairness, trust, accountability, or governance. This family of arguments is obviously important, but I argue that explanations are also intrinsically valuable, because unexplainable systems can be dehumanizing. I argue that there are at least three independently valid versions of this kind of argument: an argument from participation, from knowledge, and from actualization. Each of these arguments that XAI is intrinsically valuable is independently compelling, in addition to the more obvious instrumental benefits of XAI. (shrink)

It is a truth universally acknowledged that a claim of metaphysical modality, in possession of good alethic standing, must be in want of an essentialist foundation. Or at least so say the advocates of the reductive-essence-first view, according to which all modality is to be reductively defined in terms of essence. Here, I contest this bit of current wisdom. In particular, I offer two puzzles—one concerning the essences of non-compossible, complementary entities, and a second involving entities whose essences are modally (...) ‘loaded’—that together strongly call into question the possibility of reducing modality to essence. (shrink)

Nathan Coombs demonstrates that the Marxist science of history has been reimagined by a strand of contemporary French theory after Louis Althusser. Taking a comparative approach, Coombs explores the technical details of both traditions' historical sciences.

Bare particularism is a constituent ontology according to which substances—concrete, particular objects like people, tables, and tomatoes—are complex entities constituted by their properties and their bare particulars. Yet, aside from this description, much about bare particularism is fundamentally unclear. In this paper, I attempt to clarify this muddle by elucidating the key metaphysical commitments underpinning any plausible formulation of the position. So the aim here is primarily catechismal rather than evangelical—I don’t intend to convert anyone to bare particularism, but, by (...) looking at a series of questions, to instead specify what, if one is a bare particularist, one is committed to. Along the way, I address three major objections: a classic objection about whether bare particulars have properties, a new objection raised by Bailey, and an understanding objection that questions some of the position’s resources. (shrink)

A thesis (“weak BCP”) nearly universally held among philosophers of probability connects the concepts of objective chance and metaphysical modality: Any prospect (outcome) that has a positive chance of obtaining is metaphysically possible—(nearly) equivalently, any metaphysically impossible prospect has zero chance. Particular counterexamples are provided utilizing the monotonicity of chance, one of them related to the four world paradox. Explanations are offered for the persistent feeling that there cannot be chancy metaphysical necessities or chancy metaphysical impossibilities. Chance is objective but (...) contrary to popular opinion it is also largely epistemic. Chancy necessities are analogous to necessary a posteriori truths. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, Volume 99, Issue 3, Page 644-662, November 2019. (shrink)

If the laws of nature are metaphysically necessary, then it appears that miracles are metaphysically impossible. Yet Locke accepts both Essentialism, which takes the laws to be metaphysically necessary, and the possibility of miracles. I argue that the apparent conflict here can be resolved if the laws are by themselves insufficient for guaranteeing the outcome of a particular event. This suggests that, on Locke’s view, the laws of nature entail how an object would behave absent divine intervention. While other views (...) of laws also make miracles counterfactually dependent on God’s will, I show how this view is consistent with the Essentialist commitment to the view that the laws are metaphysically necessary. Further, I argue Locke’s view is a relatively attractive version of Essentialism, in part, because it allows for the possibility of miracles. (shrink)

Kit Fine has replied to my criticism of a technical objection he had given to the version of Millianism that I advocate. Fine evidently objects to my use of classical existential instantiation in an object-theoretic rendering of his meta-proof. Fine’s reply appears to involve both an egregious misreading of my criticism and a significant logical error. I argue that my rendering is unimpeachable, that the issue over my use of classical EI is a red herring, and that Fine’s original argument (...) commits the straw-man fallacy. I argue further that contrary to Fine’s gratuitous attribution, what Kripke’s Pierre lacks and a typical bilingual has is not knowledge of a “manifest-making” premise, but the capacity to recognize London when it is differently designated. Fine’s argument refutes a preposterous theory no one advocates while leaving standard Millianism unscathed. The failure of his argument threatens to render Fine’s central notion of “coordination” redundant or empty. (shrink)

"Explores the nature of time and its implications for questions of politics, ethics, and the self.

A Russellian notion of what it is for a proposition to be “directly about” something in particular is defined. Various strong and weak, and mediate and immediate, Russellian notions of general aboutness are then defined in terms of Russellian direct aboutness. In particular, a proposition is about something iff the proposition is either directly, or strongly indirectly, about that thing. A competing Russellian account, due to Kaplan, is criticized through a distinction between knowledge by description and denoting by description. The (...) epistemological significance of Russellian aboutness is assessed. A Russellian substitute for de re propositional attitude is considered. (shrink)

Drug-resistant tuberculosis has a high mortality rate. Most medicines used to treat it are poorly tested and have terrible side effects. Activists have campaigned for patients with drug-resistant TB to have access to experimental drugs, particularly one called bedaquiline, before these have been approved by regulatory authorities such as the Food and Drug Administration in the United States and the Medicines Control Council in South Africa. Some activists have also campaigned for bedaquiline to be approved by regulatory authorities before testing (...) of the drug is completed. These campaigns raise ethical concerns about whether patients should be offered experimental, unapproved, medicines for the treatment of life-threatening illnesses, and if authorities should approve drugs for life-threatening illnesses when vital questions about safety and efficacy remain outstanding. (shrink)

Hume famously argues that the laws of nature provide us with decisive reason to believe that any testimony of a miracle is false. In this paper, I argue that the laws of nature, as such, give us no reason at all to believe that the testimony of a miracle is false. I first argue that Hume’s proof is unsuccessful if we assume the Humean view of laws, and then I argue that Hume’s proof is unsuccessful even if we assume the (...) governing view of laws. I conclude that regardless of which kind of view we adopt, the fact that a miracle is a violation of the laws of nature does not give us any reason to believe it did not happen. (shrink)

Whether intentional suppression of an unpleasant or unwanted memory reduces the ability to recall that memory subsequently is a contested issue in contemporary memory research. Building on findings that similar processes are recruited when individuals remember the past and imagine the future, we measured the effects of thought suppression on memory for imagined future scenarios. Thought suppression reduced the ability to recall emotionally negative scenarios, but not those that were emotionally positive. This finding suggests that intentionally avoiding thoughts about emotionally (...) negative episodes may inhibit representations of those memories, progressively reducing their availability to recall. (shrink)

This paper presents a Lewis-Skyrms signaling game that can exhibit a type of compositionality novel to the signaling game literature. The structure of the signaling game is motivated by an analogy to the alarm calls of putty-nosed monkeys (Cercopithecus nictitans). Putty-nosed monkeys display a compositional system of alarm calls with a semantics that is sensitive to the ordering of terms. This sensitivity to the ordering of terms has not been previously modeled with a Lewis-Skyrms signaling game literature. Signaling games are (...) valued for showing how communicative systems can arise with minimal learning tools. Simulation results show that basic (Roth-Erev) reinforcement learning is sufficient for the acquisition of a compositional signaling system sensitive to the ordering of terms. (shrink)

Over the past century, six studies – the most recent data from 2000 – and one review have comprehensively examined the content of medical oaths and oath-taking practices, all focusing on North Amer...

As the Cold War winds down and the atmosphere heats up, the environment is rising to the top of the global agenda. The number of refrigerators, not missiles, are what count now; the most urgent mission of the U2 spyplane is no longer detecting ICBMs on the ground in Russia, but ozonedepleting CFCs above the Arctic. Already, terms like “industrial disarmament” and “ecological security” are seeping into the mainstream political discourse.

This article is an interrogation of a small practical project I recently undertook to examine the relation between ‘studio exercises’, commonplace in creative practices, and ‘training’ that is typical of corporate environments, to see how this affects the use of technology in each context. This project titled ‘Office Exercise’ focuses on the relationship between the roll of ‘experiment’ and ‘exercise’ in the production of creative work involving technology. As a series of works ‘Office Exercise’ examines creative practice involving technology and (...) the tensions it produces between the artistic applications of technology to a given situation and the simultaneous proficiency/competency of the use of this technology. (shrink)

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

The market can produce skewed information about investigational products awaiting FDA approval. But the FDA rarely steps in to correct such misleading information, despite statutory authority to do so. This article evaluates a recommendation by the FDA Transparency Working Group that FDA more clearly signal when and how it will correct misleading information about investigational products, and why such a recommendation is particularly important after the 21st Century Cures Act.

Non-governmental organizations often regard expanding revenue and reducing costs as standard procedures to achieve corporate sustainability, while at the same time considering human resources as important assets. Government agencies have greater flexibility in staffing, and their human resource strategies for employee education and training often use organizational learning to develop operational performance. Training is regarded as a panacea for corporate sustainability and channels have been established to support employees' learning. Curriculum development of synchronous online learning is an approach that requires (...) further investigation. We distributed 360 questionnaires to supervisors and employees of the Taipei City Government, Taiwan. A total of 268 valid copies were retrieved, giving a response rate of 74%. The study results are expected to help public sector employers enhance employee cohesiveness and generate more operational team spirit. (shrink)

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)

This article offers an interpretation of a controversial aspect of Frege’s The Foundations of Arithmetic, the so-called Julius Caesar problem. Frege raises the Caesar problem against proposed purely logical definitions for ‘0’, ‘successor’, and ‘number’, and also against a proposed definition for ‘direction’ as applied to lines in geometry. Dummett and other interpreters have seen in Frege’s criticism a demanding requirement on such definitions, often put by saying that such definitions must provide a criterion of identity of a certain kind. (...) These interpretations are criticized and an alternative interpretation is defended. The Caesar problem is that the proposed definitions fail to well-define ‘number’ and ‘direction’. That is, the proposed definitions, even when taken together with the extra-definitional facts, fail to fix unique semantic extensions for ‘number’ and ‘direction’, and thereby fail to fix unique truth-values for sentences like ‘Caesar is a number’ and ‘England is a direction’. A minor modification of the criticized definitions well-defines ‘0’, ‘successor’ and ‘number’, thereby avoiding the Caesar problem as Frege understands it, but without providing any criterion of number identity in the usual sense. (shrink)

This essay argues that the motifs of divine vengeance present in the Histories reflect a conscious, considered theory of divine action. This theory is defined by Herodotus’ empirical methodology and his lack of poetic revelation or other claimed insight into the nature and motivations of divinity. For Herodotus, divinity possesses a basically regulatory role in the cosmos, ensuring that history follows certain consistent patterns. One such pattern is vengeance, by which a large-scale balance of reciprocity is maintained in human events (...) through human and divine acts of repayment. This theory underlies Herodotus’ historical project, reinforcing his general skepticism about human knowledge and power and making possible his universalizing approach to historical narrative. (shrink)

The Stoics claim that only a body can be a substance (οὐσία). They also claim that the cosmos taken as a whole is one continuous body, finite in extent, comprising within itself all the bodies that there are. Given these claims, one might expect that when confronted with the question of what lies outside the cosmos, the Stoics would take the Aristotelian line: namely, that there is nothing whatsoever outside the cosmos. But this is not what the Stoics say. They (...) say, rather, that outside the cosmos lies an infinite expanse of void, conceived of as a three-dimensional extension empty of body.1Of course, the Stoics do not consider this void outside the cosmos to be a substance, since it is not a body. They class it .. (shrink)

The aim of this essay is to show that Erasmus’s concept of peace should be understood as a form of irenicism rather than pacifism. I argue that Erasmus’s basic claims on war and peace do not qualify him as a pacifist, first of all because his concept of peace is non-universal: it is exclusively Christian since it does not include Muslims and Jews unless they have converted to Christianity. Secondly, Erasmus’s willingness to fight the Turks and his call for a (...) Christian war against them suggests that he was not a pacifist. Since the peace Erasmus preached for was exclusively Christian, it cannot be identified as pacifism in its accepted universal sense, but rather as a commitment to the peace of Christendom, and therefore his concept of peace should more precisely be described as irenic. By shedding new light on Erasmus’s notion of war and peace, this essay suggests that his alleged religious tolerance should be considered anew. (shrink)

Contemporary proponents of republican political theory often focus on the concept of freedom as non-domination, and how best to promote it within a state. However, there is little attention paid to what the republican conception of freedom demands in the international realm. In this essay I examine what is required for an agent to enjoy freedom as non-domination, and argue that this might only be achieved for individuals if one of two possibilities is pursued internationally: either (1) all nations are (...) made equally powerful, such that none may arbitrarily impose its will on another without penalty, or (2) all nations are joined under a global sovereign which guarantees that the weaker states are not subject to the whims of the stronger. I further argue that the first condition cannot suffice for achieving true non-domination, and as a result, republicanism must prescribe working toward the establishment of a global state. This paper provides an important contribution to the literature by addressing the international implications of the republican conception of freedom. (shrink)