In 1939, scholars associated with the pro-Nazi Thüringian German Christian movement founded a research institute dedicated to the task of removing the legacy of Judaism from Christianity. The mission of the Institute for the Study and Elimination of Jewish Influence on German Church Life was to render Christianity acceptable within the antisemitic and militarized climate of National Socialism. This task required purging Christian theology of Jewish influence, a feature evident in the Institute's version of the New Testament titled The Message (...) of God. This publication aimed to transform the religious experience of ordinary German believers and would eventually sell over 200,000 copies. This article examines material in this text as it relates to the Sermon on the Mount and concludes that, despite the apparent incongruity between Nazi ideology and New Testament ethics, the editors of the so-called ‘Nazi Bible’ believed their task to be guided by Christian ethical principles. (shrink)

Highly mobile computing devices promise to improve quality of life, productivity, and performance. Increased situation awareness and reduced mental workload are two potential means by which this can be accomplished. However, it is difficult to measure these concepts in the ‘wild’. We employed an ultra-portable battery operated and wireless functional near infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) to non-invasively measure hemodynamic changes in the brain’s prefrontal cortex. Measurements were taken during navigation of a college campus with either a hand-held display, or an augmented (...) reality wearable display. Hemodynamic measures were also paired with secondary tasks of visual perception and auditory working memory to provide behavioral assessment of situation awareness and mental workload. Navigating with an augmented reality wearable display produced the least workload during both secondary tasks. The hemodynamics associated with errors were also different between the two devices. Errors with an augmented reality wearable display were associated with increased prefrontal activity and the opposite was observed for the hand-held display. This suggests that the cognitive mechanisms underlying errors between the two devices differ. These findings show fNIRS is a valuable tool for assessing new technology in ecologically valid settings and that head-mounted displays offer benefits with regards to mental workload while navigating, and potentially superior situation awareness with improved display design. (shrink)

Engaging in environmental stewardship is critical for sustainability. Understanding individual differences and engagement is an important gap in present scholarship and addressing it is necessary to understand individual factors that relate to the types of activities engaged in, motivations and barriers to environmental stewardship. We surveyed 637 Canadian and American adults via Amazon Mechanical Turk, querying a range of demographic, psychological and environmental perceptions factors as well as motivations and barriers to stewardship activities. Respondents were ultimately grouped into Non-Stewards, Home-Oriented (...) Stewards and Community-Oriented Stewards. Few differences were found among these groups. However, Home-Oriented Stewards and Community-Oriented Stewards exhibited very different initial and ongoing motivations to engage in environmental stewardship. Accordingly, we identify stewardship motivations as a potential leverage point and as one of several promising avenues for future research related to enhancing engagement in environmental stewardship for the sustainability of the planet. (shrink)

Kopec and Titelbaum collect five alleged counterexamples to Uniqueness, the thesis that it is impossible for agents who have the same total evidence to be ideally rational in having different doxastic attitudes toward the same proposition. I argue that four of the alleged counterexamples fail, and that Uniqueness should be slightly modified to accommodate the fifth example.

This essay describes Newman’s adaptations of plays by Plautus (c. 254–184 BC) and Terence (195/185–159 BC) for performance at the Birmingham Oratory School. Because Newman believed in the value of Latin plays for students, he expended a great deal of energy on their adaptation and production while carefully editing the plays to omit any questionable content.

Contemporary philosophers of mathematics are deadlocked between two alternative ontologies for numbers: Platonism and nominalism. According to contemporary mathematical Platonism, numbers are real abstract objects, i.e. particulars which are nonetheless “wholly nonphysical, nonmental, nonspatial, nontemporal, and noncausal.” While this view does justice to intuitions about numbers and mathematical semantics, it leaves unclear how we could ever learn anything by mathematical inquiry. Mathematical nominalism, by contrast, holds that numbers do not exist extra-mentally, which raises difficulties about how mathematical statements could be (...) true or false. Both theories, moreover, leave inexplicable how mathematics could have such a close relationship with natural science, since neither abstract nor mental objects can influence concrete physical objects. The Thomist understanding of quantity as an accident inhering in concrete substances breaks this deadlock by granting numbers a foundation in extra-mental reality which explains why numeric expressions are relevant in natural science and how we come to know the truth or falsity of mathematical statements. Further, this kind of moderate realism captures the semantic advantages of the Platonists and the ontological parsimony of the nominalists (since for Thomists quantity is not a separate, free-standing ontological addition). Despite these advantages, the Thomistic understanding of number has been out of favor since the work of Cantor, who argued that actual infinities (regarded by Aristotelians as impossible) are required for modern developments in mathematics. This paper frees philosophers of mathematics to embrace the advantages of Thomistic realism by showing that Cantor’s understanding of actual and potential infinity is not the same as Aquinas’s, and that potential infinities (in Aquinas and Aristotle’s sense) can do all the work Cantor claims for actual infinities in modern mathematics. (shrink)

Physicians vary in their moral judgments about health care costs. Social intuitionism posits that moral judgments arise from gut instincts, called “moral foundations.” The objective of this study was to determine if “harm” and “fairness” intuitions can explain physicians’ judgments about cost-containment in U.S. health care and using cost-effectiveness data in practice, as well as the relative importance of those intuitions compared to “purity”, “authority” and “ingroup” in cost-related judgments.

In epistemology and the philosophy of science, there has been an increasing interest in the social aspects of belief acquisition. In particular, there has been a focus on the division of cognitive labor in science. This essay explores several different models of the division of cognitive labor, with particular focus on Kitcher, Strevens, Weisberg and Muldoon, and Zollman. The essay then shows how many of the benefits of the division of cognitive labor flow from leveraging agent diversity. The essay concludes (...) by examining the benefits and burdens of diversity, particularly in the evaluative diversity that can be found in interdisicplinary science. (shrink)

Recent setbacks to international institutions and projects of global governance have been viewed as marking a resurgence of nation-state sovereignty. In fact, however, many of the major controversies and developments in contemporary international law and geopolitics concern the administration, autonomy, and internal hierarchy not of states, but of supra-state regions. The spatial logic of a world divided into such regions is best articulated in Carl Schmitt’s theory of the Großraum, which in various respects describes and explains key features of modern (...) world order. Taking regional systems as self-constituting political units characterized by internal forms of dominance and legitimation aids in identifying the operation of hegemony in contemporary international law and institutions. It also makes possible a reinterpretation of global constitutionalist discourse as a democratizing project that finds its most important expressions in counter-hegemonic movements within the various “great spaces” constituting today’s world. (shrink)

In this paper we argue that there is a kind of moral disagreement that survives the Rawlsian veil of ignorance. While a veil of ignorance eliminates sources of disagreement stemming from self-interest, it does not do anything to eliminate deeper sources of disagreement. These disagreements not only persist, but transform their structure once behind the veil of ignorance. We consider formal frameworks for exploring these differences in structure between interested and disinterested disagreement, and argue that consensus models offer us a (...) solution concept for disagreements behind the veil of ignorance. (shrink)

In this article we outline the ways in which questions of language have both revealed problems with conceptions of knowledge and suggested constructive ways of addressing those problems. Having examined the limitations of instrumental notions of language, we outline some alternatives, especially those developed from the middle of the 19th and throughout the 20th century. We locate forceful and influential philosophical interventions in the writings of Nietzsche and Heidegger and foundational revisions in the linguistics of Ferdinand de Saussure and his (...) structuralist inheritors. We also chart the parallel path of literary theory from Mallarmé through Blanchot and poststructuralism to deconstruction. We conclude, after making some observations about the politicization of language in the works of feminist and postcolonial theorists, with some remarks about how the question of language helps to problematize global knowledge. (shrink)

The import of underground facilities in military strategy in the US grew exponentially after the Gulf War. The success of precision-guided conventional missiles meant that any above-ground building or complex could be accurately targeted and destroyed, thus driving states with less sophisticated weapons to go underground to secure space for covert weapons development and the protection of command and control centres for military and governmental functions. Underground facilities have thus become the main challenge to objects of detection and targeting practices (...) for US military research and development. This article provides a meditation on the underground in relation to military planning and technology, the limits of aerial visual control of terrain, the plans by the US military to counter underground defensive moves, the efficacy of tele-technologies to detect and destroy such installations at a distance, and an oblique genealogy of aerial and subterrestrial strategies in relation to technologies to overcome the limitations of each. In so doing, the article argues a deeply connected relationship between the imaginary and the material in attempts to realize a mastery of space and populations essential to military operations, thus posing questions about sensory perception, the status of the subject with regard to agency and control, and the prosthetic outfitting of the subject that both supports and blunts agency and control. (shrink)

The design office of Charles and Ray Eames was a collaborative, interdisciplinary, multimedia affair linking Hollywood, the State Department, universities, the corporate sector and international fairs during the height of the Cold War. Bringing together design, furniture, cutting-edge technology and experimental, avant-garde informed-multiscreen projections, the Eames Office operated as a humanities/IT/media/arts lab. For the 1964 World’s Fair, the Eameses created ‘The Information Machine’ for IBM. The techniques of display and experimental juxtaposition of images, sound and new media capacities later migrated (...) to the many ‘happenings’ following in the wake of Allan Kaprow’s medial and performative experiments. The Eames Office crafted for the 1964 World’s Fair a vision of global change and possibility grounded in avant-garde visual techniques and aesthetics that continue to constitute a specific globe crafted by the US Cold War military-industrial-university-entertainment complex that remains the grounds for our current collective nomos. (shrink)

This introduction to the special section ‘The Half-Life of the Avant-Garde: 50 Years On from 50 Years On’ explains why the section is conceived to look back at the century since the First World War. It is designed to offer ways of rethinking the concept and the role of the anniversary, where the First World War constitutes the memorialized event. The organization of the section follows the movement between often hidden or submerged forms of continuity. It attempts to think some (...) of the aesthetic and technological legacies and inheritances of the First World War in its durational 100th anniversary through a specific temporal strategy most succinctly captured in the phrase ‘50 years on from 50 years on’. The entry point is the middle of the 20th century, allowing contributors to work backward and forward by examining links between the three separate temporal frames. The consistency but also the strangeness of critical practices, as world history passes with its violent climaxes and depressions, has unique contours in each frame, with Dada providing an exemplary through-line. (shrink)

Scholars have extensively debated the family’s place within liberalism, generally, and specific attention and critique has been given to the family in Rawls’ work. What has received less focus are the requirements of parents in a Rawlsian polity and, further, what those requirements might imply for the one case where states explicitly regulate the process of becoming parents: adoption. This paper seeks to discover what might be required of parents, adoptive or otherwise, in a Rawlsian social contract state. Second, it (...) considers adoptive parent selection in light of these requirements as well as Rawls’ arguments regarding merit and fair equality of opportunity. Finally, it considers what such a merit-based selection of adoptive parents implies for the disputed rights of same-sex couples to adopt children. Further, because the question of merit in this case will hinge upon what it means to be a “fit parent,” it also draws upon relevant empirical social science studies regarding gay and lesbian parents. The paper, then, evaluates both the theoretical and empirical validity of generalized claims that same-sex couples are less fit to be parents than are heterosexual couples. (shrink)

It has become an article of faith among historians of logic that the square of opposition diagram is due not to Aristotle, but to Apuleius. I examine three Aristotelian texts and argue that Prior Analytics I.46 contains a square of opposition, making Aristotle the discoverer of the diagram.

Persian possesses a number of stative complex predicates with _dâshtan_ ‘to have’ that express certain kinds of mental state. I propose that these _possessive experiencer complex predicates_ be given a formal semantic treatment involving possession of a portion of an abstract quality by an individual, as in the analysis of property concept lexemes due to Francez and Koontz-Garboden (Language 91(3):533–563, 2015 ; Natural Language and Linguistic Theory 34:93–106, 2016 ; Semantics and morphosyntactic variation: Qualities and the grammar of property concepts, (...) Oxford University Press, 2017 ). Augmented with an analysis of prepositional phrases introducing the target of the mental state and an approach to gradability in terms of measure functions (Wellwood in Measuring predicates, PhD dissertation, University of Maryland, College Park, 2014 ), the analysis explains various properties of possessive experiencer complex predicates, including the behavior of target phrases, the ability of the non-verbal element to be modified by a range of adjectives, the direct participation of the non-verbal element in comparative constructions, and the ability of degree expressions to modify both the non-verbal element and the VP containing the complex predicate. Theoretically, the analysis ties transitive mental state expressions to the grammar and semantics of property concept sentences, which are expressed via possessive morphosyntax cross-linguistically, and connects with syntactic proposals that independently argue for a universal underlyingly possessive morphosyntax for mental state predicates (Noonan in Case and syntactic geometry, PhD dissertation, McGill University, 1992 ; Hale and Keyser in Prolegomenon to a theory of argument structure, MIT Press, 2002 ). The work here also motivates modifications to Francez and Koontz-Garboden’s original proposal, and opens new questions in the original empirical domain of the analysis of possessive predicating strategies for the expression of property concept sentences. (shrink)

In this work, we present a mathematical model for the emergence of descriptive norms, where the individual decision problem is formalized with the standard Bayesian belief revision machinery. Previous work on the emergence of descriptive norms has relied on heuristic modeling. In this paper we show that with a Bayesian model we can provide a more general picture of the emergence of norms, which helps to motivate the assumptions made in heuristic models. In our model, the priors formalize the belief (...) that a certain behavior is a regularity. The evidence is provided by other group members’ behavior and the likelihood by their reliability. We implement the model in a series of computer simulations and examine the group-level outcomes. We claim that domain-general belief revision helps explain why we look for regularities in social life in the first place. We argue that it is the disposition to look for regularities and react to them that generates descriptive norms. In our search for rules, we create them. (shrink)

Although Australia has comparatively few individuals seeking asylum, it has had a mandatory detention policy in place since 1992. This policy has been maintained by successive governments despite the overwhelmingly negative impact mandatory detention has on mental health. For mental health professionals working in this environment, a number of moral, ethical, and human rights issues are raised. These issues are discussed here, with a focus on dual loyalty conflicts and drawing on personal experience, the bioethics and human rights literature, and (...) recent parliamentary inquiries. For those who continue to work in this environment, future directions are also discussed. (shrink)

Social evolution theory conventionally takes an externalist explanatory stance, treating observed cooperation as explanandum and the positive assortment of cooperative behaviour as explanans. We ask how the circumstances bringing about this positive assortment arose in the first place. Rather than merely push the explanatory problem back a step, we move from an externalist to an interactionist explanatory stance, in the spirit of Lewontin and the Niche Construction theorists. We develop a theory of ‘social niche construction’ in which we consider biological (...) entities to be both the subject and object of their own social evolution. Some important cases of the evolution of cooperation have the side-effect of causing changes in the hierarchical level at which the evolutionary process acts. This is because the traits that act to align the fitness interests of particles in a collective can also act to diminish the extent to which those particles are bearers of heritable fitness variance, while augmenting the extent to which collectives of such particles are bearers of heritable fitness variance. In this way, we can explain upward transitions in the hierarchical level at which the Darwinian machine operates in terms of particle-level selection, even though the outcome of the process is a collective-level selection regime. Our theory avoids the logical and metaphysical paradoxes faced by other attempts to explain evolutionary transitions. (shrink)

This paper examines a puzzle about whether truth is a valuable property: Valuable properties, like beauty and moral goodness, come in degrees; but truth does not come in degrees. Hence, the argument concludes, truth is not valuable. This result is puzzling since it seems to conflict with a deep intuition that truth is valuable. It is suggested that a roughly Platonic theory, on which truth is distinguished into two different concepts, gives a satisfying answer to the puzzle. One of these (...) concepts can be had in degrees, which, it is suggested, may be determined by the true proposition's explanatory power. (shrink)

Many people believe that Somalia’s economy has been in chaos since the collapse of its national government in 1991. We take a comparative institutional approach to examine Somalia’s performance relative to other African countries both when Somalia had a government and during its extended period of anarchy. We find that although Somalia is poor, its relative economic performance has improved during its period of statelessness. We also describe how Somalia has provided basic law and order and a currency, which have (...) enabled the country to achieve the coordination that has led to improvements in its standard of living. (shrink)

This collection examines the question of nonhuman animal agency by shifting emphasis from the human perspective toward that of other animals, exploring modes of ...

The paper puts forward a pluralistic account of fairness within which concepts of equality of sacrifice and outcome, desert, and randomized outcomes within a fair framework all have their place. The distinction between efficiency and fairness is set out early on, and it is later argued that only efficient social arrangements can withstand the questioning about the fairness of the way they distribute their benefits to their beneficiaries and impose demands on those whose taxes pay for them that the modern (...) welfare state increasingly has to face. (shrink)

I argue that the ‘aoristic’ operators, which are intended to describe the logic of vagueness, do not form a standard modal logic. I redefine the operators so that they do form a standard modal logic, provide a semantics of that logic, and argue that the logic is not as strong as standardly claimed.

In this paper I present an in-class game designed to simulate the dynamics of the state of nature. I first explain the mechanics of the game, and how to administer it in the classroom. Then I address how the game can help introduce students to a number of important topics in political philosophy. In broad terms, the game serves to generate discussion regarding to main questions. (1) How does civil society come about? (2) Is the state of nature and the (...) arrangement which arises from it fair? In so doing I suggest how the game can further student understanding of figures such as Aristotle, Hobbes, Locke, Hume, Rousseau, Marx, and Rawls. (shrink)

In his article “Insight: Genesis and Ongoing Context,” Fred Crowe calls out Lonergan’s line “the diagram is more important than…is ordinarily believed” as the “philosophical understatement of the century.” Sixteen pages later he identifies elaborating an invariant cognitional theory to underlie generalized emergent probability and thus “the immanent order of the universe of proportionate being,” as “our challenge,” “but given the difficulty” he does not “see any prospect for an immediate answer.” Could this have something to do with the lack (...) of a comprehensive diagram of cognitional theory? Appendix A of The Boston College Lectures on Mathematical Logic and Existentialism offers diagrams of the dynamics of knowing and doing perhaps copied from Lonergan’s own blackboard work, but they do not distinguish explanatory and descriptive insights, let alone statistical insights, and do not illustrate the pull upwards or the fusing of routinized insights. Before we can effectively relate cognitional theory to generalized emergent probability, we must have an adequately rigorous and precise cognitional theory. I firmly believe in the truth of Lonergan’s fundamental insights, but in order to rigorously undergird generalized emergent probability there are many pertinent questions about his cognitional theory which must be asked and answered. In this paper I (1) review some of Lonergan’s attempts to diagram cognitional theory and discuss what insights they do and do not express, (2) elaborate and defend principles for making our formulations of insight into insight rigorous and clear, and (3) attempt to build up a diagram which makes full use of those principles in a maximally expressive way. (shrink)

Genetic research into ageing, longevity and late-onset disease is becoming increasingly common. Yet, there is a paucity of knowledge related to clinical actionability and the return of pathogenic variants to otherwise healthy elderly individuals. Whether or not genetic research in the elderly should be managed differently from standard practices adapted for younger populations has not yet been defined. In this article, we provide an overview of ethical and practical challenges in preparing for a genetic study of over 14 000 healthy (...) Australians aged 70 years or older enrolled in the ASPirin in Reducing Events in the Elderly Healthy Ageing Biobank. At the time of consent, all participants in this study were free of life-threatening illness, cardiovascular disease or cognitive impairment. ASPREE is thus a cohort of healthy elderly individuals with seemingly minimal burden of genetic disease recruited without ascertainment bias. The cohort presents a unique opportunity to address the penetrance of known pathogenic variants in a population without disease symptoms; however, it also raises a number of ethical concerns regarding the interpretation and disclosure of variants with known clinical actionability. Some of the challenges include how to manage the interpretation, disclosure and actioning of pathogenic variants found in otherwise healthy elderly adults without disease symptoms, whether or not to disclose findings for the benefit of family members rather than elderly consented donors themselves, how to manage the return of genetic findings to the elderly individuals who are now in severe cognitive decline or terminal illness, how to ensure quality of information and clinical service upon disclosure of results to this demographic and how to prepare for the insurance implications of disclosing genetic information under Australian law. We discuss these and other dilemmas and propose a defensible plan of management. Trial registration number ISRCTN83772183. (shrink)

It is widely assumed that causation is an extensional relation: if c causes e and c = d, then d causes e. Similarly, if c causes e and e = f, then c causes f. Moving to the formal mode we have: The Extensionality Thesis (ET): (i) If „c causes e‟ is true and „c‟ and „d‟ co-refer, then „d causes e‟ is true; and (ii) If „c causes e‟ is true and „e‟ and „f‟ co-refer, then „c causes f‟ (...) is true. (shrink)

Kazimir Malevich’s style of Suprematist painting represents the inauguration of nothing less than a new form of culture premised upon a demolition of the Western tradition’s reifying habits of objective thought. In ridding his canvases of all objects and mimetic conventions, Malevich sought to reconfigure human perception in such a way as to open consciousness to alternative modes of organization and signification. In this paper, I argue that Malevich’s revolutionary aesthetic strategy can be illuminated by a return to the very (...) basis of this tradition, namely by a reconsideration of Aristotle’s account in De Anima III.2 of the initial possibility of objective perception as such. (shrink)

Excerpt: …I here tackle three topics: first, the lowly place of happiness among the goals of political action in the great tradition of political thought; second, the novelty of the idea of happiness is the proper aim or public policy; and last, the importance of the distinction between what was aptly described by T.H. Green as "hindering hindrances to the good life" and the promotion of happiness by political action. As that might suggest, I shall say some unkind things about (...) the paternalism implicit in some recent emphasis on happiness as an object of state action. (shrink)

For several decades, renewed interest in the connection between perception and knowledge has sustained a robust debate over external world skepticism. Recently, however, a growing consensus claims the skeptical challenge has been substantially met, and that realism in some robust form has emerged a clear victor. I invite us to rethink this consensus in a two-part response. The first forges a temporary alliance with skepticism against prominent forms of contemporary realism. That these fail to rebuff ews bolsters Barry Stroud’s call (...) for a new paradigm of objectivity. In the second part I sketch such a paradigm based upon a transactional interpretation of John Dewey’s pragmatism, and indicate its resilience to skeptical attacks. (shrink)

In Trust in a Polarized Age, Kevin Vallier gives himself the unenviable and yet essential task of diagnosing and responding to the problem of democratic governa.