Nick Bostrom and others have suggested treating decision-making under moral uncertainty as analogous to parliamentary decision-making. The core suggestion of this “parliamentary approach” is that the competing moral theories function like delegates to the parliament, and that these delegates then make decisions by some combination of bargaining and voting. There seems some reason to hope that such an approach might avoid standard objections to existing approaches (for example, the “maximise expected choiceworthiness” (MEC) and “my favourite theory” approaches). However, the parliamentary (...) approach is so far extremely underspecified, making it largely indeterminate how such a model will in fact behave in the respects that those concerned with moral uncertainty care about. This paper explores one way of making it precise. We treat predicaments of moral uncertainty as analogous to bargaining situations alone (setting aside voting), and apply a version of the Nash solution that is standard in bargaining theory. The resulting model does indeed perform in many of the hoped-for ways. However, so also does a version of MEC that employs a structural approach to intertheoretic comparisons. It seems to us an open question which, regarding this version of MEC and the bargaining-theoretic approach, is superior to the other. We identify the key points on which the two differ. (shrink)

Since the nineteenth century the theory and practice of mainstream Western medicine has been grounded in the biomedical model. In the later years of the twentieth century, however, it has faced a range of serious problems, which when viewed collectively, remain unresolved despite a variety of responses. The question we now face is whether these problems can be dealt with by modifying and extending the principles underlying the biomedical model, or whether a more radical solution is required. Recent critiques of (...) Western medicine have focused mainly on the biopsychosocial model in relation to the former approach, but it will be contended that this cannot deal adequately with the challenges that medicine currently faces, because although it addresses both the scientific and humanistic aspects of medicine it fails to harmonise them. I shall therefore argue for the necessity of a more radical approach, and suggest that what is required to accomplish this is the development of a new medical cosmology, rooted in an older and more global framework. Such a fundamental change would inevitably involve a long term process which it is not yet possible to fully comprehend let alone specify in detail. Some of the necessary features of such a new medical cosmology can, however, already be distinguished and the outline of these is described. (shrink)

Book synopis: A collection of more than 30 specially commissioned essays, this volume surveys the work of the 17th-century philosopher-scientist commonly regarded as the founder of modern philosophy, while integrating unique essays detailing the context and impact of his work. Covers the full range of historical and philosophical perspectives on the work of Descartes Discusses his seminal contributions to our understanding of skepticism, mind-body dualism, self-knowledge, innate ideas, substance, causality, God, and the nature of animals Explores the philosophical significance of (...) his contributions to mathematics and science Concludes with a section on the impact of Descartes's work on subsequent philosophers. (shrink)

Ten years after the Human Genome Project’s completion the life sciences stand in a moment of uncertainty, transition, and contestation. The postgenomic era has seen rapid shifts in research methodology, funding, scientific labor, and disciplinary structures. Postgenomics is transforming our understanding of disease and health, our environment, and the categories of race, class, and gender. At the same time, the gene retains its centrality and power in biological and popular discourse. The contributors to Postgenomics analyze these ruptures and continuities and (...) place them in historical, social, and political context. Postgenomics, they argue, forces a rethinking of the genome itself, and opens new territory for conversations between the social sciences, humanities, and life sciences. Contributors. Russ Altman, Rachel A. Ankeny, Catherine Bliss, John Dupré, Michael Fortun, Evelyn Fox Keller, Sabina Leonelli, Adrian Mackenzie, Margot Moinester, Aaron Panofsky, Sarah S. Richardson, Sara Shostak, Hallam Stevens. (shrink)

When we define something as a crime, we generally thereby criminalize the attempt to commit that crime. However, it is a vexing puzzle to specify what must be the case in order for a criminal attempt to have occurred, given that the results element of the crime fails to come about. I argue that the philosophy of action can assist the criminal law in clarifying what kinds of events are properly categorized as criminal attempts. A natural thought is that this (...) project should take the form of specifying what it is in general to attempt or try to perform an action, and then to define criminal attempts as attempts to commit crimes. Focusing on Gideon Yaffe's resourceful work in Attempts (Oxford University Press, 2010) as an example of this strategy, I argue that it results in a view that is overly inclusive: one will count as trying to commit a crime even in the far remote preparatory stages that we in fact have good reason not to criminalize. I offer an alternative proposal to distinguish between mere preparations and genuine attempts that has its basis not in trying, but doing: a criminal attempt is underway once what the agent is doing is a crime. Working out the details of this schema turns out to have important implications for action theory. A recently burgeoning view known as Naive Action Theory holds that all action can be explained by appeal to some further thing that the agent is doing, and that that the same explanatory nexus is at work even when we appeal to what the agent is intending, trying, or preparing to do -- these notions do explanatory work because they too refer to actions that are in progress, albeit in their infancy. If this is right, than the notion of 'doing' will also be too inclusive for the purposes of the criminal law. I argue that we should draw the reverse conclusion: the distinctions between pure intending, trying, preparing, and doing serve an important purpose in the criminal law, and this fact lends support to the view that they are genuine metaphysical and explanatory distinctions. (shrink)

After offering an opening consideration of the hazards of neoliberalism, I address the general shape of the crisis of care that has evolved under its auspices. Two aspects of this crisis require greater attention: the moral precarity of caregivers and the relational harms of neoliberal capitalism. Thus, I first consider the moral precarity that caregivers experience by drawing on a concept that originates in scholarly work on the experiences of healthcare workers and combat veterans, namely, moral injury. Through this concept, (...) we can see how caregivers in late-stage capitalism face a seemingly unavoidable violation of their own significant moral beliefs. Second, I examine how the crisis of care results not only in individual harms of moral injury but also in harms to relationships themselves, as I continue to track the impact of moral injury on our intrapersonal and interpersonal lives. Ultimately, I argue that an important facet of the crisis of care is how it operates as a crisis of relationality in which our intrapersonal and interpersonal connections are placed under practical and moral strain. In taking a broader view, we can see how the fraying of particular intrapersonal and interpersonal connections can accumulate, resulting in the unraveling of wider webs of interdependency, just when we need them most. Throughout the paper, I zero in on the moral implications of the crisis of care driven by neoliberalism, featuring the damages that caregivers and their relationships sustain when situated in morally precarious ways. In doing so, I drive home the point that the crisis of care under neoliberalism is as much a moral and relational crisis as it is a political and economic one. (shrink)

ABSTRACT The assumptions underlying the traditional biomedical model of health and illness and criticisms of it are described. An examination of the historical development of ideas concerning cot (crib) deaths shows how early explanations, which were congruent with this model, came to be discredited. Because subsequent explanations have also been considered unsatisfactory, cot deaths have come to be regarded as medically problematic. The relationship of models of health and illness to cot deaths has therefore been exposed to an unusual degree (...) of scrutiny. Two possible contending models, social epidemiological and socio‐economic are identified, and their status vis‐à‐vis the biomedical model is considered. The choice as to which of these models is applied to cot deaths is shown to be not only of theoretical interest but also to have ethical implications for health care policy and medical practice. (shrink)

Armstrong describes the rise of a new mode of medical practice that he calls in the following terms: Surveillance medicine gives rise to a novel and underexplored aspect of the long-standing tension between the different goals of clinical medicine and public health.

Richard Feynman has claimed that anti-particles are nothing but particles `propagating backwards in time'; that time reversing a particle state always turns it into the corresponding anti-particle state. According to standard quantum field theory textbooks this is not so: time reversal does not turn particles into anti-particles. Feynman's view is interesting because, in particular, it suggests a nonstandard, and possibly illuminating, interpretation of the CPT theorem. In this paper, we explore a classical analog of Feynman's view, in the context of (...) the recent debate between David Albert and David Malament over time reversal in classical electromagnetism. (shrink)

This book provides a compositional, truth-conditional, crosslinguistic semantics for evidentiality, the linguistic encoding of the source of information on which a statement is based. Central to the proposed theory is the distinction between what propositional content is at-issue and what content is not-at-issue. Evidentials contribute not-at-issue content, and can affect the level of commitment a sentence makes to the main proposition, contributed by sentential mood. In this volume, Sarah Murray builds on recent work in the formal semantics of evidentials (...) and related phenomena, and proposes a semantics that does not appeal to separate dimensions of illocutionary meaning. Instead, she argues that all sentences make three contributions: at-issue content, not-at-issue content, and an illocutionary relation. At-issue content is presented and made available for subsequent anaphora, but is not directly added to the common ground; not-at-issue content directly updates the common ground; and the illocutionary relation uses the at-issue content to impose structure on the common ground, which, depending on the clause type, can trigger further updates. 0The analysis is supported by extensive empirical data from Cheyenne, drawn from the author's own fieldwork, as well as from English and a variety of other languages. (shrink)

Over a span of thirty years, twentieth-century French philosophers Emmanuel Levinas and Jacques Derrida held a conversation across texts. Sharing a Jewish heritage and a background in phenomenology, both came to situate their work at the margins of philosophy, articulating this placement through religion and literature. Chronicling the interactions between these thinkers, Sarah Hammerschlag argues that the stakes in their respective positions were more than philosophical. They were also political. Levinas's investments were born out in his writings on Judaism (...) and ultimately in an evolving conviction that the young state of Israel held the best possibility for achieving such an ideal. For Derrida, the Jewish question was literary. The stakes of Jewish survival could only be approached through reflections on modern literature's religious legacy, a line of thinking that provided him the means to reconceive democracy. Hammerschlag's reexamination of Derrida and Levinas's textual exchange not only produces a new account of this friendship but also has significant ramifications for debates within Continental philosophy, the study of religion, and political theology. (shrink)

A new collection of essays highlighting the wide range of Buber's thought, career, and activism. Best known for I and Thou, which laid out his distinction between dialogic and monologic relations, Martin Buber (1878-1965) was also an anthologist, translator, and author of some seven hundred books and papers. Martin Buber: Creaturely Life and Social Form, edited by Sarah Scott, is a collection of nine essays that explore his thought and career. Martin Buber: Creaturely Life and Social Form shakes up (...) the legend of Buber by decentering the importance of the I-Thou dialogue in order to highlight Buber as a thinker preoccupied by the image of relationship as a geode to spiritual, social, and political change. The result is a different Buber than has hitherto been portrayed, one that is characterized primarily by aesthetics and politics rather than by epistemology or theology. Martin Buber: Creaturely Life and Social Form will serve as a guide to the entirety of Buber's thinking, career, and activism, placing his work in context and showing both the evolution of his thought and the extent to which he remained driven by a persistent set of concerns. (shrink)

This paper proposes a theory of text on-screen as “unvoiceover.” It addresses both the case for captioning as social good and the affordances (aesthetic, affective) of writing in or over the moving image. Advancing an argument informed by perspectives from d/deaf Studies, Critical Disability Studies and Digital Interface Studies, and applying modes of analysis from literary criticism alongside those proper to the study of moving image and sound, it examines the idiosyncrasies of text-in-motion as non-sonorous, fugitive counterpart to the traditional, (...) troublesome “voiceover.” To develop a poetics of the unsounding voice on-screen, the paper focalizes its argument through multimedia artist Liza Sylvestre’s Captioned series: a body of moving image work that is itself, paradoxically, uncaptioned. Framing Sylvestre’s lyrical “unvoiceover” as a reimagining of the lost roles of film explainers and literary intertitles, I argue that the artist’s takeover of the caption track intervenes critically in contemporary debates about the ethics of audio-visual translation, situated description and access as public ethos rather than private concern. Posing the artist’s personal-and-political writing as suggestive of a lower-case analogue to Deaf Gain, I show how Sylvestre’s “unvoiceover” educates its “receivers” in the purpose and functioning of captions. By reading Sylvestre’s writing on-screen more closely than its fugitive form seems to invite, I show how the unvoiceover encultures its own demands on its readers and elicits its own habits of reading. By scrutinizing how Sylvestre’s series makes the case for captioning, this paper makes the case for a new appraisal of the aesthetic, affective and political affordances of the unvoiceover as writing on the run. (shrink)

This volume is an interdisciplinary attempt to insert a broader, historically informed perspective into current political and academic debates on the issue of evidence and the reliability of scientific knowledge. Evidence in Action is the perfect resource for all those interested in the relationship between science, technology, and the role of knowledge in society.

The prospect of using genome technologies to modify the human germline has raised profound moral disagreement but also emphasizes the need for wide-ranging discussion and a well-informed policy response. The Hinxton Group brought together scientists, ethicists, policymakers, and journal editors for an international, interdisciplinary meeting on this subject. This consensus statement formulated by the group calls for support of genome editing research and the development of a scientific roadmap for safety and efficacy; recognizes the ethical challenges involved in clinical reproductive (...) applications of genome editing but, importantly, rejects the idea that human reproductive germline modification is necessarily morally unacceptable; and highlights the importance of meaningful engagement in discussions of genome editing and the development of regulation and oversight mechanisms to govern future uses of such technologies. (shrink)

Traditional philosophical discussions of knowledge have focused on the epistemic status of full beliefs. In this book, Moss argues that in addition to full beliefs, credences can constitute knowledge. For instance, your .4 credence that it is raining outside can constitute knowledge, in just the same way that your full beliefs can. In addition, you can know that it might be raining, and that if it is raining then it is probably cloudy, where this knowledge is not knowledge of propositions, (...) but of probabilistic contents. -/- The notion of probabilistic content introduced in this book plays a central role not only in epistemology, but in the philosophy of mind and language as well. Just as tradition holds that you believe and assert propositions, you can believe and assert probabilistic contents. Accepting that we can believe, assert, and know probabilistic contents has significant consequences for many philosophical debates, including debates about the relationship between full belief and credence, the semantics of epistemic modals and conditionals, the contents of perceptual experience, peer disagreement, pragmatic encroachment, perceptual dogmatism, and transformative experience. In addition, accepting probabilistic knowledge can help us discredit negative evaluations of female speech, explain why merely statistical evidence is insufficient for legal proof, and identify epistemic norms violated by acts of racial profiling. Hence the central theses of this book not only help us better understand the nature of our own mental states, but also help us better understand the nature of our responsibilities to each other. (shrink)

Abstract In this paper I criticise a recent account of fictional discourse proposed by Nathan Salmon. Salmon invokes abstract artifacts as the referents of fictional names in both object- and meta-fictional discourse alike. He then invokes a theory of pretence to forge the requisite connection between object-fictional sentences and meta-fictional sentences, in virtue of which the latter can be assigned appropriate truth-values. I argue that Salmon's account of pretence renders his appeal to abstract artifacts as the referents of fictional names (...) in object-fictional discourse explanatorily redundant. I further argue that his account is therefore no improvement over those he criticises, thus leaving his own account unmotivated. (shrink)

_The Routledge Companion to Philosophy of Psychology, Second Edition_ is an invaluable guide and major reference source to the major topics, problems, concepts and debates in philosophy of psychology and is the first companion of its kind. A team of renowned international contributors provide forty-nine chapters organised into six clear parts: Historical background to Philosophy of Psychology Psychological Explanation Cognition and Representation The biological basis of psychology Perceptual Experience Personhood. _The Companion_ covers key topics such as the origins of experimental (...) psychology; folk psychology; behaviorism and functionalism; philosophy, psychology and neuroscience; the language of thought, modularity, nativism and representational theories of mind; consciousness and the senses; dreams emotion and temporality; personal identity and the philosophy of psychopathology. For the_ second edition_ many of the current chapters have been updated, and seven new chapters added on important new topics such predictive processing, comparative cognition, learning, and group cognition, as well as a new introductory chapter by the editors on the demarcation between philosophy and psychology. Essential reading for all students of philosophy of mind, science and psychology, _The Routledge Companion to Philosophy of Psychology _will also be of interest to anyone studying psychology and its related disciplines. (shrink)

In this reflection, I respond to Anthony Reddie's reflections and assertions about the sacramentality of black flesh in a world shaped by white supremacy. I locate myself as Korean American and refer to my experience of ministering to university students during the rise of Black Lives Matter in the US. Instead of offering cognate claims for the sacramentality of Asian flesh, I ask what theological repentance should look like in light of the historical profaning of the black body. Using the (...) work of two black American artists, jazz musician Robert Glasper and painter Titus Kaphar, I offer beginning reflections on how our liturgies and practices need to change as part of theological repentance—including lament. (shrink)

In this paper I distinguish three kinds of kinds: traditional philosophical kinds such as truth, knowledge, and causation; natural science kinds such as spin, charge and mass; and social kinds such as class, poverty, and marriage. The three-fold taxonomy I work with represents an idealised abstraction from the wide variety of kinds that there are and the messy phenomena that underlie them. However, the kinds I identify are discrete, and the three-fold taxonomy is useful when it comes to understanding claims (...) about the normativity, scope, and implementation of conceptual engineering. In particular it reveals: first, that conceptual engineering in a broad sense is not distinctively normative; but second, that there is a distinctive normativity present in conceptual engineering in the narrow sense of amelioration; third, that conceptual engineering in the narrow sense of amelioration is only possible for terms that refer to kinds whose grounds we can change; and fourth, that the amelioration of such kind terms can be brought about as a result of changing the grounds of those kinds. The overall aim is to draw attention to the differences between kinds of kinds to make sense of the diverse and often conflicting claims in the conceptual engineering literature, both from its proponents and from its detractors. The hope is that paying attention to the differences between kinds of kinds will provide a better understanding of the landscape. (shrink)

This paper develops a precise understanding of the thesis of moral encroachment, which states that the epistemic status of an opinion can depend on its moral features. In addition, I raise objections to existing accounts of moral encroachment. For instance, many accounts fail to give sufficient attention to moral encroachment on credences. Also, many accounts focus on moral features that fail to support standard analogies between pragmatic and moral encroachment. Throughout the paper, I discuss racial profiling as a case study, (...) arguing that moral encroachment can help us identify one respect in which racial profiling is epistemically problematic. (shrink)

One of the main themes that has emerged from behavioral decision research during the past three decades is the view that people's preferences are often constructed in the process of elicitation. This idea is derived from studies demonstrating that normatively equivalent methods of elicitation (e.g., choice and pricing) give rise to systematically different responses. These preference reversals violate the principle of procedure invariance that is fundamental to all theories of rational choice. If different elicitation procedures produce different orderings of options, (...) how can preferences be defined and in what sense do they exist? This book shows not only the historical roots of preference construction but also the blossoming of the concept within psychology, law, marketing, philosophy, environmental policy, and economics. Decision making is now understood to be a highly contingent form of information processing, sensitive to task complexity, time pressure, response mode, framing, reference points, and other contextual factors. (shrink)

In this paper, I develop a neglected puzzle for the moral realist. I then canvass some potential responses. Although I endorse one response as the most promising of those I survey, my primary goal is to make vivid how formidable the puzzle is, as opposed to offering a definitive solution.

Generic generalizations such as ‘mosquitoes carry the West Nile virus’ or ‘sharks attack bathers’ are often accepted by speakers despite the fact that very few members of the kinds in question have the predicated property. Previous work suggests that such low-prevalence generalizations may be accepted when the properties in question are dangerous, harmful, or appalling. This paper argues that the study of such generic generalizations sheds light on a particular class of prejudiced social beliefs, and points to new ways in (...) which those beliefs might be undermined and combatted. (shrink)

This contribution to the volume explains predicativism, including reasons that favour it and different versions of it. What all predicativist theories have in common is the claim that a proper name is a general, predicative term, with a hidden determiner in its single use.

This book traces the historic transformation of institutional review boards (IRBs) from academic committees to compliance bureaucracies. Sarah Babb opens the black box of contemporary IRB decision-making, which is increasingly outsourced to specialized private firms.

This book examines the paradox of digital enhancement: we simultaneously desire to be governed by the logic of perfection and to be self-governed. Through genealogical and aesthetic critique, Sarah Bianchi questions the costs of our digital present and conceptualizes how to critically construct an enlightened agency.

A Pulitzer Prize–winning dance critic teaches us to appreciate—and enact—grace in every dimension, from the physical to the emotional. Grace has long been taught as essential to civilized living. The Three Graces—goddesses of charm, beauty, and creativity—exemplify ease and harmony with one another and the world around them. But what has happened to this simple, marvelous concept of being at ease in the world? With warmth, humor, and an ever-perceptive eye, Sarah L. Kaufman sifts the graceful from the graceless, (...) celebrating heart-catching moments of physical elegance in sports, movies, dance, fashion, and music; rare sightings of celebrity grace; the secrets of gracious hosts; and grace found unexpectedly, in the kitchen of a high-end restaurant and among strippers in a basement bar. Kaufman’s thought-provoking reflections on these physical and social acts of grace offer hope for even the clumsiest, most awkward among us. Guided by the muse of Cary Grant (with further inspiration from Smokey Robinson, Roger Federer, Nelson Mandela, Margot Fonteyn, Amy Purdy, Beyoncé, and others), Kaufman illuminates the importance of grace in the small moments of everyday life. In The Art of Grace, she inspires us to walk taller, spend time on unnecessary kindnesses, and celebrate the grace notes in our lives and those of others. (shrink)

Sustainable Medicine is based on the premise that twenty-first century Western medicine--driven by vested interests--is failing to address the root causes of disease. Symptom-suppressing medication and "polypharmacy" have resulted in an escalation of disease and a system of so-called "health care," which more closely resembles "disease care." In this essential book, Dr. Sarah Myhill aims to empower people to heal themselves by addressing the underlying causes of their illness. She presents a logical progression from identifying symptoms, to understanding the (...) underlying mechanisms, to relevant interventions and tests and tools with which to tackle the root causes. As Myhill writes, "It's all about asking the question 'why?'" Sustainable Medicine covers a wide range of symptoms including inflammation (infection, allergy, autoimmunity), fatigue, pain, toxic symptoms, deficiency symptoms, and hormonal symptoms. And Dr. Myhill includes a toolbox of treatments for specific illnesses and ailments, as well as a general approach to avoiding and treating all disease. Finally, she offers a series of case histories to show how people have successfully taken control of their health and healed even in the face of the most discouraging symptoms--all without the harmful interventions of 21st century Western medicine. (shrink)

I expect you have managed to break some of your unloved habits, and to cultivate others that you embrace. Given the well-known difficulties involved in breaking and making habits, our own successfu...

Some omissions seem to be causes. For example, suppose Barry promises to water Alice’s plant, doesn’t water it, and that the plant then dries up and dies. Barry’s not watering the plant – his omitting to water the plant – caused its death. But there is reason to believe that if omissions are ever causes, then there is far more causation by omission than we ordinarily think. In other words, there is reason to think the following thesis true.

According to Bayesian epistemology, the epistemically rational agent updates her beliefs by conditionalization: that is, her posterior subjective probability after taking account of evidence X, pnew, is to be set equal to her prior conditional probability pold(·|X). Bayesians can be challenged to provide a justification for their claim that conditionalization is recommended by rationality—whence the normative force of the injunction to conditionalize? There are several existing justifications for conditionalization, but none directly addresses the idea that conditionalization will be epistemically rational (...) if and only if it can reasonably be expected to lead to epistemically good outcomes. We apply the approach of cognitive decision theory to provide a justification for conditionalization using precisely that idea. We assign epistemic utility functions to epistemically rational agents; an agent’s epistemic utility is to depend both upon the actual state of the world and on the agent’s credence distribution over possible states. We prove that, under independently motivated conditions, conditionalization is the unique updating rule that maximizes expected epistemic utility. (shrink)

An introduction to the paragone -- The archetype of beauty : Narcissus and the birth of the beau idéal -- Pygmalion and Galatea : the battle between iconophobes and iconodules -- Salomé versus Medusa.

"The mind once enlightened cannot again become dark." As an English corset-maker's son, Thomas Paine was expected to spend his life sewing women's underwear. But as a teenager, Thomas dared to change his destiny, enduring years of struggle until a meeting with Benjamin Franklin brought Thomas to America in 1774-and into the American Revolution. Within fourteen months, Thomas would unleash the persuasive power of the written word in Common Sense-a brash wake-up call that rallied the American people to declare independence (...) against the mightiest empire in the world. This fascinating and extensively researched biography, based on numerous primary sources, will immerse readers in Thomas Paine's inspiring journey of courage, failure, and resilience that led a penniless immigrant to change the world with his words. (shrink)