Translational ethics (TE) has been developed into a specific approach, which revolves around the argument that strategies for bridging the theory‐practice gap in bioethics must themselves be justified on ethical terms. This version of TE incorporates normative, empirical and foundational ethics research and continues to develop through application and in the face of new ethical challenges. Here, I explore the idea that the academic field of bioethics has not yet sufficiently analysed its own philosophical foundation for how it can, and (...) should, be practically relevant; neither has it comprehensively discussed the limitations on what impacts bioethicists should pursue. As a result, there has not been adequate training on how to suitably and appropriately impact real‐world practices. Moreover, bioethical perspectives are often competing with other strong interests, for example, economic and political, which may weaken their impact on policy‐making. The TE approach I propose can not only facilitate practical impacts of academic bioethics by being better informed by real‐world ethical issues but it also supports targeted and ethical justifications of the actual impact of academic work in real‐world contexts. In this paper, I clarify the premises for this TE approach, identify further challenges and sketch out potential solutions for the implementation of this methodological framework. (shrink)

In his Encomium of Helen and On Not Being, Gorgias of Leontinoi discusses the nature and function of speech more extensively than any other surviving author before Plato. His discussions are not only surprising in the way they characterize the power of logos and its effects on a listener but also in how the two descriptions of speech seem to contradict one another. In the Helen, Gorgias claims that logos is a very powerful entity, capable of affecting a listener in (...) whatever way it wants. In On Not-Being, he makes the very different (but no less exaggerated) claim that logos is a non-entity, incapable of referring to anything other than itself. In this essay I show how these apparently contradictory accounts might be brought into harmony with one another.2 In the first part I address some of the interpretive difficulties with the text of Gorgias’s On Not Being (henceforth ONB) and the role that irony plays in the work. In particular I argue (as others have before) that Gorgias’s remarks about the impotency of speech are not meant to be taken seriously. Instead, they are aimed more squarely at raising questions about how exactly speech is thought to function and, more specifically, how linguistic reference works—i.e., how words somehow correspond to things, on one level, and to our ideas about things, on another. In the second and third parts of this paper, I illustrate how Gorgias’s concern with linguistic reference in ONB goes on to inform his notion of logos in the Encomium of Helen. I point specifically to evidence found in an important and often overlooked exit clause at the close of ONB regarding the difference between words and things. There, Gorgias insists that if words manifest meaning at all, they must appeal to their own sort of sense organ. In the Helen, he draws on the concepts of soul (psychē) and opinion (doxa) in order to construct this alternative, psychagogic account in which utterances are actually apprehended in ways akin to sense perception. Whether or not one is convinced by Gorgias’s alternative account of how speech works, the description he gives of logos does notionally circumvent the problem of linguistic reference and, in doing so, pushes one to think beyond the potentially constrictive framework of nomen et nominatum. I argue that, when read in this way, these two early discussions of logos represent a unified progression of serious thought about how speech works. (shrink)

Since the English translation first appeared in 1923, Rudolf Otto's volume has established itself as a classic in the field of religious philosophy. It offers an in-depth inquiry into the non-rational factor in the idea of the divine and its relation to the rational.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Will Many Be Saved? What Vatican II Actually Teaches and Its Implications for the New Evangelization by Ralph MartinR. Jared StaudtWill Many Be Saved? What Vatican II Actually Teaches and Its Implications for the New Evangelization. By Ralph Martin. Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 2012. Pp. 332. $24.00 (paper). ISBN: 978-0-8028-6887-9.The proper interpretation of the Second Vatican Council remains a pressing topic fifty years after the Council’s completion. Pope (...) Benedict XVI made it a hallmark of his pontificate to insist upon a hermeneutic of continuity in interpreting the council in relation to the past, opposing this view to one of discontinuity and rupture (see his “Christmas Address to the Roman Curia,” Dec. 22, 2005). Viewing the council in terms of rupture and correspondingly as an opportunity for disruptive innovation has been described by many as the “Spirit of the Council.” Recently, the conflict of these rival hermeneutics has resurfaced in vehement fashion in relation to proposals for innovation in pastoral practice and even in doctrine regarding marriage and sexuality.Ensuring a proper interpretation of the council requires not only a deep and thorough examination of texts themselves of the council, but also a careful placing of the texts within the Catholic tradition. In this endeavor, [End Page 147] Ralph Martin’s Will Many Be Saved? provides a needed analysis of the council’s teaching concerning salvation and its pastoral implications. In particular, Martin focuses on the meaning, historical and scriptural sources, and theological interpretation of Lumen Gentium (LG) §16. In doing so, he touches on a number of key issues relating to the legacy of Vatican II, most importantly the decline of the missions and evangelization in general. Martin argues that abandoning the proclamation of sin and the possibility of hell in favor of the universality of salvation has led to a serious crisis of evangelization.The first chapter, “Vatican II and the Priority of Evangelization,” places the theme of evangelization at the center of the council’s message. Pope Paul VI declared in Evangelii nuntiandi that the very purpose of the council was to make the Church more fit for the evangelization of the modern world. The topic of evangelization was taken up by Pope John Paul II in his own call for a New Evangelization. Although the New Evangelization focuses on restoring faith in the context of post-Christian cultures, John Paul also sought to reinvigorate the foreign missions, as seen in his encyclical Redemptoris missio. Martin contrasts this emphasis on evangelization with its diminishment in practice due to “a lack of conviction that being a Christian is really necessary in order to be saved. If it is not really necessary... why bother to evangelize?” (5). Although Martin recognizes that the Church teaches the possibility of salvation outside of the visible bounds of the Church, he also posits that “doctrinal ignorance or confusion about what the Church is actually teaching about the possibility of salvation” creates “one obstacle... to evangelization” (6). To respond to this confusion, he turns specifically to LG §16 to clarify the Church’s teaching.The second chapter provides Martin’s initial observations on this central text. Martin divides the text into three sections. The first, 16a, enunciates that those who have not received the gospel are still related to the people of God in various ways, mentioning Jews and Muslims explicitly, and affirms God’s universal will for salvation in 1 Tim 2:4. 16b deals with the possibility of salvation for those ignorant of the gospel, who live rightly in accord with conscience. 16c offers a sobering note, stating that “very often” the deception of the evil one and sin lead to “ultimate despair” and ending with the need to evangelize in order “to procure... salvation.” Martin notes that LG §16 was not controversial during the conciliar debates, though it did raise some concern from missionary bishops, who insisted on a strong reinforcement of the need for evangelization. Though LG only speaks of the possibility of salvation, Martin recognizes a leap from possibility to “probability or even certainty” in the later interpretation of the council (17, italics original), and he cites... (shrink)

In The Value Gap, Toni Rønnow-Rasmussen addresses the distinction between what is finally good and what is finally good-for, two value notions that are central to ethics and practical deliberation. The first part of the book argues against views that claim that one of these notions is either faulty, or at best conceptually dependent on the other notion. Whereas these two views disagree on whether it is good or good-for that is the flawed or dependent concept, it is argued, as (...) against both approaches, that goodness and goodness-for are independent value notions that cannot be fully understood in terms of one another. The second part provides an analysis of good and good-for in terms of a fitting-attitude analysis. By elaborating a more nuanced understanding of the key elements of this analysis—reasons and pro-attitudes—Rønnow-Rasmussen challenges the widespread idea that there are no genuine practical and moral dilemmas. The result is that the gap between favouring for a reason what is good and favouring for a reason what is good for someone appears insurmountable. (shrink)

Elliot R. Wolfson intervenes in the debate over Martin Heidegger and Nazism from a unique perspective, as a scholar of Jewish mysticism and philosophy who has been profoundly influenced by Heidegger's work. He reveals crucial aspects of Heidegger's thinking that betray an affinity with dimensions of Jewish thought.

This chapter contains sections titled: References.

In this chapter, Hankinson discusses the theory of Atomism, from Leucippus and Democritus to Epicurus and his followers. The early Atomists were concerned with the circumvention of the Eleatic denial of motion; they did so by positing unchanging atoms and the existence of the void in which the atoms move. Democritean Atomism is thoroughly mechanistic and reductionist; Epicurean Atomism is ontologically more generous, accepting, for instance, the reality of properties and guaranteeing, by virtue of the controversial notion of the ‘swerve’, (...) the exercise of free will. Thus, although strictly speaking it denies uncaused events, Epicureanism nevertheless holds that human action is not subject to determinism. The later Epicureans also reject the Stoic view that fundamental physical principles are logically necessary truths. (shrink)

In the face of environmental crises such as climate change, pollution and biodiversity loss—which all adversely impact on health—Gils-Schmidt and Salloch explore whether physicians can be justified in taking climate issues into account in clinical care.1 While their approach centres on the ‘climate-sensitive’ decisions, physicians can carry out on the micro-level of clinical decision-making, they encourage further discussions on how climate-related issues can be included across different levels of decision-making in healthcare. We propose a list of tasks and a model (...) to assist with navigating the range of factors and structural elements an environmentally sensitive ethics must address. Stephen Gardiner’s notion of a perfect moral storm is central to understanding these issues.2 Gardiner describes how a perfect moral storm occurs in the centre of three overlapping conditions for human action and policymaking in the face of climate change. This storm is driven by: (1) a lack of interest among current generations to meet global needs and accommodate the well-being of future generations, (2) a lack of ecological concerns for other parts of nature than humans and (3) weak ethical and political theories and institutions shaping policy decisions on issues with severe implications across borders and generations. Moreover, these conditions are embedded in the existing, complex world of ethically unjustified power imbalances and social injustice. The growing awareness of healthcare’s climate footprint has amplified and accelerated global, grassroots action to make healthcare more environmentally friendly. This includes incorporating environmental impacts into quality improvement methodologies, building communities of practice to explore how to make …. (shrink)

Some standards, such as moral and prudential standards, provide genuinely or authoritatively normative reasons for action. Other standards, such as the norms of masculinity and the mafia’s code of omerta, provide reasons but do not provide genuinely normative reasons for action. This paper first explains that there is a similar distinction amongst attitudinal standards: some attitudes (belief, desire) have standards that seem to give rise to genuine normativity; others (boredom, envy) do not. This paper gives a value-based account of which (...) attitudinal standards give rise to genuine normativity. It argues that this account has interesting implications before extending it to provide an account of which action-guiding standards are genuinely normative. It argues that this value-based account of which standards are genuinely normative is more plausible than alternatives suggested in the literature and has interesting implications for genuine normativity in law and aesthetics. (shrink)

Professor Foot's Hart Lecture, now published (1995), is largely devoted to an attack on people she calls ‘subjectivists’ and ‘noncognitivists', among whom she includes myself, although she is so good as to allow me, in a footnote, to reject thenames.She seems to imply thereby that this is a mere matter of nomenclature or terminology. But in truth her use of these terms makes one suspect that she has not fully understood either the issues or what I have said about them.It (...) may therefore be useful to explain yet again why I reject these descriptions. I have done so already in a paper to a conference in Moscow which she heard, and to which she kindly refers (Hare 1993a). These explanations would not be important if she were the only person to be confused about this matter; but the confusions are so widespread, even among professional philosophers who should know better, and are so often taught to succeeding generations of students, that it is worth while to make yet another attempt to clear them up - though the confusions are so insidious that I have not much hope that they will ever be eradicated. (shrink)

The COVID-19 crisis opened up discussions on using online tools and platforms for academic work, e.g. for research (management) events that were originally designed as face-to-face interactions. As social scientists working in the domain of responsible research and innovation (RRI), we draft this paper to open up a dialogue on Responsible online Research and Innovation (RoRI), and deliberate particular socioethical opportunities and challenges of the onlineification in collaborative theoretical and empirical research. An RRI-inspired ‘going online’ approach would mean, we suggest, (...) trying to make academic events and research activities more inclusive, researchers’ attitude to their work more reflective and suggest processes that are more responsive to societal needs and ethical concerns. For such systematic reflection, we suggest using the RRI-heuristic provided by Owen et al., and applying the dimensions of ‘Anticipation, Inclusion, Reflection and Responsiveness’ (AIRR) in order to identify and reflect on the dilemmas involved in ‘going online’ in one’s research. (shrink)

In this paper I examine Grace A. de Laguna’s theory of universals in its historical context and in relation to contemporary debates in analytic metaphysics. I explain the central features of her theory, arguing that her theory should be classified as a form of immanent realism and as a powers ontology. I then show in what ways her theory affords a theory of modality in terms of potentialities and discuss some of its consequences along the way.

This article is featured in a special issue dedicated to theme, "the human being in the digital era: awareness, critical thinking and political space in the age of the internet and artificial intelligence." In this article, I consider the way that social-media companies nudge us to spend more time on their platforms, and I argue that, in principle, these nudges are morally permissible: they are not manipulative and do not violate any obvious moral rules. The moral problem, I argue, is (...) not with nudging in principle but is instead with the fact that users are being nudged towards something bad for them. In practice, this often involves being nudged to spend an unhealthy amount of time using a social-media app or being nudged towards content that is bad for us, such as by promoting eating-disorder content to young girls. Since nudging is morally permissible, it is open to these companies to use the same technologies to nudge us towards the good. (shrink)

Knowledge; information; learning, philosophy of; teaching and study.

Vijf Nederlandse filosofen geven elk vanuit een andere filosofische achtergrond weer wat hun mensbeeld is.

Information can be public among a group. Whether or not information is public matters, for example, for accounts of interdependent rational choice, of communication, and of joint intention. A standard analysis of public information identifies it with (some variant of) common belief. The latter notion is stipulatively defined as an infinite conjunction: for p to be commonly believed is for it to believed by all members of a group, for all members to believe that all members believe it, and so (...) forth. This analysis is often presupposed without much argument in philosophy. Theoretical entrenchment or intuitions about cases might give some traction on the question, but give little insight about why the identification holds, if it does. The strategy of this paper is to characterize a practical-normative role for information being public, and show that the only things that play that role are (variants of) common belief as stipulatively characterized. In more detail: a functional role for “taking a proposition for granted” in non-isolated decision making is characterized. I then present some minimal conditions under which such an attitude is correctly held. The key assumption links this attitude to beliefs about what is public. From minimal a priori principles, we can argue that a proposition being public among a group entails common commitment to believe among that group. Later sections explore partial converses to this result, the factivity of publicity and publicity from the perspective of outsiders to the group, and objections to the aprioricity of the result deriving from a posteriori existential presuppositions. (shrink)

Our gender identity is our sense of ourselves as a woman, a man, as genderqueer, or as another gender. Our gender is the property we have of being a woman, being a man, being non-binary, or being another gender. What is the relationship between our gender identity and our gender? Recently, much work has been done on ameliorative accounts of the gender concepts that we should accept and on the metaphysics of gender properties. From this work 4 views of the (...) relationship between having gender identity G (e.g. having a female gender identity) and being a gender G (e.g. being a woman) have emerged. A first, the no connection view, says that gender identity and gender are entirely distinct; Sally Haslanger’s ameliorative account of gender, as well as Theodore Bach’s account of gender properties, are instances of this view. A second, the gender-identity-first view, says that all there is to our gender is our gender identity; this view is at least similar to views that Talia Bettcher and R.A. Briggs and B.R. George have argued for. A third, contextualist view, says that in some contexts and relative to certain standards, our gender identity determines our gender, and that in others it does not; Ásta and Robin Dembroff have proposed and defended views along these lines. A fourth view, the two gender properties view, says that there are two properties that can make it the case that one is gender G (in any context), one’s having gender identity G and one’s being socially classed as a G; Katharine Jenkins and Elizabeth Barnes have proposed views along these lines. This article explains these 4 different views and spells out their prospects, and the problems they face, as both ameliorative and as metaphysical views. (shrink)

Hermann von Helmholtz’s work on perceptual science had a fundamental impact on Neo-Kantian movements in the late nineteenth century, and his influence continues to be felt in psychology and analytic philosophy of perception. As is widely acknowledged, Helmholtz denied that we can perceive mind-independent properties of external objects, a view I label Ignorance. Given his commitment to Ignorance, Helmholtz might seem to be committed to a subjectivism according to which we only perceive properties of our own representations. Against this, I (...) argue that for Helmholtz, the properties we perceive are not monadic properties of either the subject or the object. Rather, Helmholtz endorsed a relationalism about the properties we perceive: the properties of objects we perceive are all relational properties. I then suggest that once we take into account oft-neglected terminological distinctions in Helmholtz’s corpus, we are better able to make sense of his commitment to relationalism. (shrink)

Many philosophers believe that there is a causal condition on perception, and that this condition is a conceptual truth about perception. A highly influential argument for this claim is based on intuitive responses to Gricean style thought experiments. Do the folk share the intuitions of philosophers? Roberts et al. (2016) presented participants with two kinds of cases: Blocker cases (similar to Grice’s case involving a mirror and a pillar) and Non-Blocker cases (similar to Grice’s case involving a clock and brain (...) stimulation). They found that a substantial minority agreed that seeing occurs in the Non-Blocker cases, and that in the Blocker cases significantly less agreed that seeing occurs. They thus hypothesized that folk intuitions better align with a no blocker condition than with a causal condition. This paper continues this line of enquiry with two new experiments. The paper investigates the generality and robustness of Roberts et al.’s findings by expanding the sense modalities tested from only vision to audition and olfaction as well. The paper also uses Gricean style thought experiments as a case study for investigating the “reflection defense” against the negative project in experimental philosophy. Our results replicate and extend Roberts et al.’s study and support their hypothesis that folk intuitions better align with a no blocker condition. They also provide an empirical reason to doubt the reflection defense. (shrink)

In the paper “Translational Neuroethics: A Vision for a More Integrated, Inclusive, and Impactful Field,” Wexler and Sullivan provide an insightful analysis of challenges within the field and how t...

This is the first edition of Plato's Republic to be based on an exhaustive examination of all the textual evidence - manuscripts, including papyri; quotations and allusions in ancient authors; translations into Coptic, Arabic and Hebrew. The three primary manuscripts have been examined with particular care. Many new readings have been introduced in the text and a critical apparatus gives details for all relevant textual evidence.

Functionalism as a philosophical position has been recently applied to the case of emotion research. However, a number of objections have been raised against applying such a view to scientific theorizing on emotions. In this article, I argue that functionalism is still a viable strategy for emotion research. To do this, I present functionalism in philosophy of mind and offer a sketch of its application to emotions. I then discuss three recent objections raised against it and respond to each of (...) them. These objections claim that functionalism is intractable because (i) it does not support a scientifically interesting taxonomy of emotions for experimental settings, (ii) it is inherently teleological, and (iii) it cannot be falsified. I argue that these objections either rely on a simplified version of functionalism as a philosophical position or they pose challenges that functionalists can readily address. Lastly, I conclude by drawing some lessons these objections suggest for a tractable functionalist account of emotions. (shrink)