Like much in this book, the title and dust jacket illustration are clever. The first evokes Hume's remark in the Treatise that ‘Reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions.’ The second, which represents a cross between a dance-step and a clinch, links up with the title and anticipates an example used throughout the book to support its central claims: that Ronnie, unlike Bradley, has a reason to go to a party – namely, that there will (...) be dancing at the party – because Ronnie, unlike Bradley, loves dancing. So, the explanation of why Ronnie's and Bradley's reasons differ lies in their respective psychologies.Schroeder argues for a version of the Humean Theory of Reasons he calls Hypotheticalism, which says that every reason is explained by a desire in the same way as Ronnie's is. Schroeder argues that on almost every count, Hypotheticalism is as good as, or preferable to, the Humean and non-Humean alternatives; and he defends it against an array of objections. For example, he explains that while Hypotheticalism claims that ‘desires have to serve in the explanation of every reason because desires are part of the correct analysis of reasons’, it does not claim that a desire that explains a reason is part of that reason: rather it is a background condition for it. This, Schroeder argues, allows him to rebut a variety of objections that depend on conflating reasons with their background conditions. Other …. (shrink)

This editorial complements the editorial opening Philosophies eight years ago. The success of the original vision of the journal has been confirmed by the high quality of published works and its institutional recognition. The journal Philosophies evolves, but this evolution is an adaptation to the conditions of better realization of its original mission to promote the reintegration of fragmented by specialization knowledge guided by philosophy. In contrast to the editorial published at the time of the opening of the journal presenting (...) general philosophical principles guiding its early development which are equally valid today as eight years ago, the present editorial focuses on philosophical but also more practical aspects of its operation and its role in the academic community together with an extensive clarification of their misunderstanding in decisions regarding submission of contributions. (shrink)

This essay brings together the perspectives of phenomenology and East Asian philosophies through an engagement with Dōgen, Heidegger, Nishida, and Nishitani to address the concept of place in relation to the concept and feeling of homelessness. With respect to the notion of dwelling and finding one’s place in the world and with oneself, the experience of being and feeling lost psychologically will be considered as a way (dao) toward overcoming nihilism and as an opening to attaining an awakened mind.

Open access. This open-access book discusses vulnerability and the protection-inclusion dilemma of including those who suffer from serious poverty, severe stigma, and structural violence in research. Co-written with representatives from indigenous peoples in South Africa and sex workers in Nairobi, the authors come down firmly on the side of inclusion. In the spirit of leaving no one behind in research, the team experimented with data collection methods that prioritize research participant needs over researcher needs. This involved foregoing the collection of (...) personal data and community researchers being involved in all stages of the research. In the process, the term ‘vulnerability’ was illuminated across significant language barriers as it was defined by indigenous peoples and sex workers themselves. The book describes a potential alternative to exclusion from research that moves away from traditional research methods. By ensuring that the research is led by vulnerable groups for vulnerable groups, it offers an approach that fosters trust and collaboration with benefits for the community researchers, the wider community as well as research academics. Those living in low-income settings, in dire situations that are summarized with the term ‘vulnerability’ know best what their problems are and which priorities they have. To exclude them from research for their own protection is a patronizing approach which insinuates that researchers and research ethics committees know best. The team from this book have shown that minimally risky and minimally burdensome research tailored towards the needs of highly marginalized and stigmatized communities can be scientifically valuable as well as inclusive and equitable. I congratulate them. Prof. Klaus Leisinger, President Global Values Alliance, Former personal advisor to Kofi Annan on corporate responsibility. (shrink)

Imagine you are walking down a city street. It is windy and raining. Amidst the bustle you see a young woman. She sits under a railway bridge, hardly protected from the rain and holds a woolen hat containing a small number of coins. You can see that she trembles from the cold. Or imagine seeing an old woman walking in the street at dusk, clutching her bag with one hand and a walking stick with the other. A group of male (...) youths walk behind her without overtaking, drunk and in the mood for mischief. It doesn't need an academic to say what vulnerability is. We can all see it, much more often than we care to. (shrink)

edited by Tuija Takala and Matti Häyry, welcomes contributions on the conceptual and theoretical dimensions of bioethics.

The relation between the Greek and Judeo-Christian traditions is "the great problem" of Western philosophy, according to Emmanuel Levinas. In this book Brian Schroeder, Silvia Benso, and an international group of philosophers address the relationship between Levinas and the world of ancient thought. In addition to philosophy, themes touching on religion, mythology, metaphysics, ontology, epistemology, ethics, and politics are also explored. The volume as a whole provides a unified and extended discussion of how an engagement between Levinas and thinkers from (...) the ancient tradition works to enrich understandings of both. This book opens new pathways in ancient and modern philosophical studies as it illuminates new interpretations of Levinas' ethics and his social and political philosophy. (shrink)

This article considers how we should frame the ethical issues raised by current proposals for large-scale genebanks with on-going links to medical and lifestyle data, such as the Wellcome Trust and Medical Research Council's 'UK Biobank'. As recent scandals such as Alder Hey have emphasised, there are complex issues concerning the informed consent of donors that need to be carefully considered. However, we believe that a preoccupation with informed consent obscures important questions about the purposes to which such collections are (...) put, not least that they may be only haphazardly used for research —an end that would not fairly reflect the original altruistic motivation of donors, and the trust they must invest. We therefore argue that custodians of such databases take on a weighty pro-active duty, to encourage public debate about the ends of such collections and to sponsor research that reflects publicly agreed priorities and provides public benefits. (shrink)

The intentionalist about consciousness holds that the qualitative character of experience, “what it’s like,” is determined by the contents of a select group of special intentional states of the subject. Fred Dretske (1995), Mike Thau (2002), Michael Tye (1995) and many others have embraced intentionalism, but these philosophers have not generally appreciated that, since we are intimately familiar with the qualitative character of experience, we thereby have special access to the nature of these contents. In this paper, we take advantage (...) of this fact to show that intentionalism is incompatible with the idea that these contents are singular or general propositions, and thus that intentionalism is incompatible with one dominant trend in thinking about contents in general. In particular, there appear to be insoluble difficulties in explaining how the phenomenology of place and time can be explained by any intentionalist theory appealing to singular or general propositions. (shrink)

Benefit sharing has been a recurrent theme in international debates for the past two decades. However, despite its prominence in law, medical ethics and political philosophy, the concept has never been satisfactorily defined. In this conceptual paper, a definition that combines current legal guidelines with input from ethics debates is developed. Philosophers like boxes; protective casings into which they can put concisely-defined concepts. Autonomy is the human capacity for self-determination; beneficence denotes the virtue of good deeds, coercion is the intentional (...) threat of harm and so on. What about benefit sharing? Does the concept have a box and are the contents clearly defined? The answer to this question has to be no. The concept of benefit sharing is almost unique in that various disciplines use it regularly without precise definitions. In this article, a definition for benefit sharing is provided, to eliminate unnecessary ambiguity. (shrink)

This volume is the first ever collection devoted to the field of proof-theoretic semantics. Contributions address topics including the systematics of introduction and elimination rules and proofs of normalization, the categorial characterization of deductions, the relation between Heyting's and Gentzen's approaches to meaning, knowability paradoxes, proof-theoretic foundations of set theory, Dummett's justification of logical laws, Kreisel's theory of constructions, paradoxical reasoning, and the defence of model theory. The field of proof-theoretic semantics has existed for almost 50 years, but the term (...) itself was proposed by Schroeder-Heister in the 1980s. Proof-theoretic semantics explains the meaning of linguistic expressions in general and of logical constants in particular in terms of the notion of proof. This volume emerges from presentations at the Second International Conference on Proof-Theoretic Semantics in Tübingen in 2013, where contributing authors were asked to provide a self-contained description and analysis of a significant research question in this area. The contributions are representative of the field and should be of interest to logicians, philosophers, and mathematicians alike. (shrink)

As topics in the philosophy of emotion, pleasure and displeasure get less than their fair share of attention. On the one hand, there is the fact that pleasure and displeasure are given no role at all in many theories of the emotions, and secondary roles in many others.1 On the other, there is the centrality of pleasure and displeasure to being emotional. A woman who tears up because of a blustery wind, while an ill-advised burrito weighs heavily upon her digestive (...) tract, feels an impressive number of the sensations felt by someone who is gut-wrenchingly sad. Yet, unless she feels bad, the way she feels is only a pale echo of the feeling of sadness. If she feels good in spite of the burrito and the wind, then she does not feel at all the way she would if she were sad. Likewise, a man falling asleep can hardly fail to feel his muscles relax, his heart rate fall, and so on, but unless he feels good his state is only a shadow of feeling content. This paper will begin with a sketch of the nature of pleasure and displeasure, and the relation between them and the feelings that are characteristic of emotions. It will then argue that the capacity to feel pleased and displeased is, quite literally, a sense modality: one allowing us to perceive net change in the satisfaction of our intrinsic desires. As with any sense modality, the capacity to feel pleased and displeased displays substantial modularity. The paper concludes by considering the ways in which the modularity of pleasure and displeasure contributes to effects that might reasonably be called “the modularity of the emotions.”. (shrink)

1. Bd. Einleitung. Der altarische Himmelsgott, das höchste gute Wesen. -- 2. Bd. Naturverehrung und Lebensfeste.

Long claimed to be the dominant conception of practical reason, the Humean theory that reasons for action are instrumental, or explained by desires, is the basis for a range of worries about the objective prescriptivity of morality. As a result, it has come under intense attack in recent decades. A wide variety of arguments have been advanced which purport to show that it is false, or surprisingly, even that it is incoherent. Slaves of the Passions aims to set the record (...) straight, by advancing a version of the Humean theory of reasons which withstands this sophisticated array of objections. Schroeder defends a radical new view which, if correct, means that the commitments of the Humean theory have been widely misunderstood. Along the way, he raises and addresses questions about the fundamental structure of reasons, the nature of normative explanations, the aims of and challenges facing reductive views in metaethics, the weight of reasons, the nature of desire, moral epistemology, and most importantly, the relationship between agent-relational and agent-neutral reasons for action. (shrink)

In the Book of Common Prayer’s Rite II version of the Eucharist, the congregation confesses, “we have sinned against you in thought, word, and deed”. According to this confession we wrong God not just by what we do and what we say, but also by what we think. The idea that we can wrong someone not just by what we do, but by what think or what we believe, is a natural one. It is the kind of wrong we feel (...) when those we love believe the worst about us. And it is one of the salient wrongs of racism and sexism. Yet it is puzzling to many philosophers how we could wrong one another by virtue of what we believe about them. This paper defends the idea that we can morally wrong one another by what we believe about them from two such puzzles. The first puzzle concerns whether we have the right sort of control over our beliefs for them to be subject to moral evaluation. And the second concerns whether moral wrongs would come into conflict with the distinctively epistemic standards that govern belief. Our answer to both puzzles is that the distinctively epistemic standards governing belief are not independent of moral considerations. This account of moral encroachment explains how epistemic norms governing belief are sensitive to the moral requirements governing belief. (shrink)

The author wishes to add the following correction to his paper published in Philosophies [1]:The repeated fragment from lines 13–18 and part of 19 on page 69 should be deleted [...].

Reasons First explores the hypothesis that reasons have a basic explanatory role in ethics and epistemology. While widely accepted concerning moral worth, Schroeder argues that this idea also illuminates some long-standing puzzles to do with knowledge.

The role of "skillful means" is examined in relation to the important Mahāyāna philosopher Nāgārjuna, and it is argued that the doctrine of "emptiness" is best understood as a critical reflection on the nature of Buddhist praxis. Whereas traditional Western scholarship sees Nāgārjuna as struggling with certain metaphysical problems, a "skillful means" reading situates his philosophy within a debate about the nature and efficacy of Buddhist practice. Thus, a "skillful means" reading of Nāgārjuna does not ask what it means for (...) causality, the self, or consciousness to be "empty" in a very general sense, but how "emptiness" relates to the soteriological practices of Buddhism and what it means for these practices to be "empty" of inherent nature. It is argued that this situates Nāgārjuna's philosophy within a highly critical, self-reflective movement in the Buddhist tradition. (shrink)

The purpose of this paper is to conceptualize and explore what I shall call the Common Subject Problem for ethics. The problem is that there seems to be no good answer to what property everyone who makes moral claims could be talking and thinking about. The Common Subject Problem is not a new problem; on the contrary, I will argue that it is one of the central animating concerns in the history of both metaethics and normative theory. But despite its (...) importance, the Common Subject Problem is essentially invisible on many contemporary ways of carving up the problems of metaethics and normative ethical theory. My aim, therefore, is to make progress – in part by naming the problem, but also by beginning to sketch out the contours of what gives the problem its force, by distinguishing between different paths of response to the problem and assessing some of their chief merits, and finally, by distinguishing the Common Subject Problem from another problem with which it has come to be conflated. This nearby problem is the Moral Twin Earth Problem. Whereas the Common Subject Problem is a problem about what property ‘wrong’ could refer to, the Moral Twin Earth Problem is a problem about how ‘wrong’ could refer to it. The upshot of the paper, therefore, is to rescue one of the historically significant problems in normative ethics and metaethics – a problem that is essentially about normative semantics – from the illusion that has persisted over the last twenty years that it is really, somehow, a problem about metasemantics. Once we have reclaimed this problem, we can see that it could still be a problem even if there are no distinctively metasemantic problems in metaethics at all, that it is a problem faced by a wider variety of views, and that the space of possible solutions is much wider and more interesting for normative theory, moral psychology, and moral epistemology. (shrink)

edited by Doris Schroeder, welcomes contributions on all areas outlined below. Submitted papers are peer-reviewed. To submit a paper or to discuss suitable topics, please e-mail Doris Schroeder at [email protected].

G. FREGE, Collected papers on mathematics, logic, and philosophy. Edited by B. McGuinness. Translated by M. Black, V. H. Dudman, P. Geach, H. Kaal, E.-H. W. Kluge, B. McGuinness and R. H. Stoothoff. Oxford and New York: Blackwell, 1984. viii + 412pp. £28.50.

Global bioethics is a bold project. In its moderate form, it aims to find solutions to the dilemmas posed by modern medicine and the biological sciences through intercultural understanding of human obligations and opportunities. In its more ambitious form, it endeavors to cover all possible ethical problems arising with regard to life and living things on earth. Given the ambitiousness of even the moderate aim, it is unsurprising that disputes are frequent and agreements are scarce. One of the most contentious (...) issues is whether human rights should play an important role in global bioethics or not. a. (shrink)

On September 28, 2002, 11-year-old Jakob von Metzler, a banker's son, was abducted on the way to his parents' house in Frankfurt. A sum of one million Euro was demanded for his release. Three days after Jakob's disappearance, Magnus Gäfgen, a 32-year-old law student, collected the ransom from the arranged tram stop in Frankfurt during the night. While under observation by the police, he ordered a new Mercedes and booked a holiday abroad. Seventy-six hours after Jakob's disappearance, the police arrested (...) Gäfgen and his 16-year-old girlfriend while simultaneously searching his flat. There they found the missing ransom, but no sign of Jakob. a b. (shrink)

Joining the debate over the roles of reason and appetite in the moral mind, In Praise of Desire takes the side of appetite. Acting for moral reasons, acting in a praiseworthy manner, and acting out of virtue are simply acting out of intrinsic desires for the right or the good.

This chapter contains sections titled: I II III IV V Bibliography.

My project in Being For is both constructive and negative. The main aim of the book is to take the core ideas of meta-ethical expressivism as far as they can go, and to try to develop a version of expressivism that solves many of the more straightforward open problems that have faced the view without being squarely confronted. In doing so, I develop an expressivist framework that I call biforcated attitude semantics, which I claim has the minimal structural features required (...) in order to solve some of these open problems facing expressivism. I take biforcated attitude semantics to prove that expressivism is a coherent and interesting hypothesis about the semantics of natural languages.So much for the constructive part; having argued that biforcated attitude semantics incorporates the minimal moves required in order to solve a few of the more pressing open questions facing expressivism, I use it in order to productively constrain what an expressivist answer to further open questions must look like. The results, I end up arguing, are ultimately not promising; the very same structural features that expressivists need in order to answer so simple a problem as to explain why ‘P’ and ‘∼P’ are inconsistent sentences lead to a very general problem about how ordinary, non-moral sentences are to end up with the right truth-conditions, and though I show how to finesse this problem for some simple constructions – truth-conditional connectives and the quantifiers – I ultimately argue that it can’t be done for the full range of constructions in natural languages – including terms like modals, tense and binary quantifiers like ‘most’. So even if expressivism is coherent and interesting, it is an extremely unpromising hypothesis about the language that we actually speak.The main theme of the book is that the most fruitful way …. (shrink)

This paper deals with Popper's little-known work on deductive logic, published between 1947 and 1949. According to his theory of deductive inference, the meaning of logical signs is determined by certain rules derived from ?inferential definitions? of those signs. Although strong arguments have been presented against Popper's claims (e.g. by Curry, Kleene, Lejewski and McKinsey), his theory can be reconstructed when it is viewed primarily as an attempt to demarcate logical from non-logical constants rather than as a semantic foundation for (...) logic. A criterion of logicality is obtained which is based on conjunction, implication and universal quantification as fundamental logical operations. (shrink)

The concept of a reason is now central to many areas of contemporary philosophy. Key theses in ethics, epistemology, political philosophy, philosophy of action, and the philosophy of the emotions, among others, have come to be framed in terms of reasons. And yet, despite their centrality, theorists seem to take inconsistent things for granted about how reasons work, what kinds of things can be reasons, what reasons favor, and more. Somehow reasons have come to be both indispensable and impenetrable. -/- (...) The Fundamentals of Reasons offers a comprehensive introduction to the philosophy of reasons. Focusing on the twin roles of reasons in explanation and deliberation, the book not only emphasizes what has made reasons central across philosophy but it also explores why philosophers have such incompatible pictures about what reasons are and how they work. Working from the inside out, Howard and Schroeder identify contentious assumptions about not only the internal structure of reasons but also their relationship to other important concepts, and then show how these contentious assumptions shape the many downstream applications of reasons in ethics, epistemology, political philosophy, and beyond. -/- This mildly opinionated exploration of key questions about the significance and nature of reasons helps the reader to navigate this important part of the philosophical landscape and to get clearer about why reasons seem important and what their import, ultimately, is. (shrink)

The author wishes to add the following correction to his paper published in Philosophies [1]:The repeated fragment from lines 13–18 and part of 19 on page 69 should be deleted [...].

In Section 10 of Grundgesetze, Volume I, Frege advances a mathematical argument (known as the permutation argument), by means of which he intends to show that an arbitrary value-range may be identified with the True, and any other one with the False, without contradicting any stipulations previously introduced (we shall call this claim the identifiability thesis, following Schroeder-Heister (1987)). As far as we are aware, there is no consensus in the literature as to (i) the proper interpretation of the permutation (...) argument and the identifiability thesis, (ii) the validity of the permutation argument, and (iii) the truth of the identifiability thesis. In this paper, we undertake a detailed technical study of the two main lines of interpretation, and gather some evidence for favoring one interpretation over the other. (shrink)

Sally Gadow's tenure as professor of nursing at the University of Colorado Health Sciences Center during my doctoral studies radically changed my view on science, nursing, relationships, and most importantly, the world. In this paper, I use ideas stimulated by Gadow's classes to argue that recognizing ambiguity through an attitude of metaphysical revolt can free nurses to form relationships with patients who are complex subjects rather than objects to be treated. I will first discuss Camus’ ideas of absurdity from the (...) Myth of Sisyphus, comparing the awake passions of Don Juan and the maniacal (and fatal) love of Romeo and Juliet (1955). Merleau‐Ponty's (1962) work on the dialectic of human sexuality sheds light on the intrinsic bodily ambiguity of human existence as seen through sexual attraction. de Beauvoir (1948) further lends insight into ideas of ambiguity, relationship, and freedom. Finally, I will argue that recognition of the intrinsic ambiguity of existence coupled with an attitude of metaphysical revolt may free nurses and patients from external frameworks that limit experience, impose meaning, and in the process, sever human relationship. (shrink)

We reconstruct Frege’s treatment of certain deducibility problems posed by Boole. It turns out that in his formalization and solution of Boole’s problems Frege anticipates the idea of propositional resolution.

We address the relationship between a music performer and her instrument as a possible model for re-thinking wearable technologies. Both musical instruments and textiles invite participation and by engaging with them we intuitively develop a sense of their malleability, resistance and fragility. In the action of touching we not only sense, but more importantly we react. We adjust the nature of our touch according to a particular material’s property. In this paper we draw on musical practice as it suggests attitudes (...) of specificity rather than adaptability. This practice exposes the design of generalised multi-use devices, such as the all-in-one electronic organ, as rooted in utilitarian thinking. We argue that this tendency ignores the complexities of musical cultures and thus fails to provide technologies, which provoke creative action rather than aim for the promise of control and efficiency. (shrink)

According to noncognitivists, when we say that stealing is wrong, what we are doing is more like venting our feelings about stealing or encouraging one another not to steal, than like stating facts about morality. These ideas challenge the core not only of much thinking about morality and metaethics, but also of much philosophical thought about language and meaning. _Noncognitivism in Ethics_ is an outstanding introduction to these theories, ranging from their early history through the latest contemporary developments. Beginning with (...) a general introduction to metaethics, Mark Schroeder introduces and assesses three principal kinds of noncognitivist theory: the speech-act theories of Ayer, Stevenson, and Hare, the expressivist theories of Blackburn and Gibbard, and hybrid theories. He pays particular attention both to the philosophical problems about what moral facts could be about or how they could matter which noncognitivism seeks to solve, and to the deep problems that it faces, including the task of explaining both the nature of moral thought and the complexity of moral attitudes, and the ‘Frege-Geach’ problem. Schroeder makes even the most difficult material accessible by offering crucial background along the way. Also included are exercises at the end of each chapter, chapter summaries, and a glossary of technical terms - making _Noncognitivism in Ethics_ essential reading for all students of ethics and metaethics. (shrink)

Benefit sharing has been a recurrent theme in international debates for the past two decades. However, despite its prominence in law, medical ethics and political philosophy, the concept has never been satisfactorily defined. In this conceptual paper, a definition that combines current legal guidelines with input from ethics debates is developed. Philosophers like boxes; protective casings into which they can put concisely-defined concepts. Autonomy is the human capacity for self-determination; beneficence denotes the virtue of good deeds, coercion is the intentional (...) threat of harm and so on. What about benefit sharing? Does the concept have a box and are the contents clearly defined? The answer to this question has to be no. The concept of benefit sharing is almost unique in that various disciplines use it regularly without precise definitions. In this article, a definition for benefit sharing is provided, to eliminate unnecessary ambiguity. (shrink)

Most philosophers find it puzzling how beliefs could wrong, and this leads them to conclude that they do not. So there is much philosophical work to be done in sorting out whether I am right to say that they do, as well as how this could be so. But in this paper I will take for granted that beliefs can wrong, and ask instead when beliefs wrong. My answer will be that beliefs wrong when they falsely diminish. This answer has (...) three parts: that beliefs wrong only when they are false, that beliefs wrong only when they diminish, and that false diminishment is sufficient for wronging. I will seek to elaborate on and defend all three of these claims, but it is the first to which I will give the most attention. (shrink)

To desire something is a condition familiar to everyone. It is uncontroversial that desiring has something to do with motivation, something to do with pleasure, and something to do with reward. Call these "the three faces of desire." The standard philosophical theory at present holds that the motivational face of desire presents its unique essence--to desire a state of affairs is to be disposed to act so as to bring it about. A familiar but less standard account holds the hedonic (...) face of desire to reveal to true nature of desire. In this view, to desire something is to tend to pleasure if it seems that the desired state of affairs has been achieved, or displeasure if it seems otherwise, thus tying desire to feelings instead of actions. In Three Faces of Desire, Schroeder goes beyond actions and feelings to advance a novel and controversial theory of desire that puts the focus on desire's neglected face, reward. Informed by contemporary science as much as by the philosophical tradition, Three Faces of Desire discusses recent scientific discoveries that tell us much about the way that actions and feelings are produced in the brain. In particular, recent experiments reveal that a distinctive system is responsible for promoting action, on the one hand, and causing feelings of pleasure and displeasure, on the other. This system, the brain's reward system, is the causal origin of both action and feeling, and is the key to understanding the nature of desire. (shrink)