In discussions of standards of proof, a familiar perspective often emerges. According to what we call specificationism, standards of proof are legal rules that specify the quantum of evidence required to determine that a litigant’s claim has been proven. In so doing, they allocate the risk of error among litigants (and potential litigants), minimizing the risk of certain types of error. Specificationism is meant as a description of the way the rules actually function. We argue, however, that its claims are (...) either mistaken or at a minimum deeply misleading, especially when it comes to standard of proof rules (SPRs) that contain indeterminate formulas, as is typical. As against specificationism, we argue that SPRs are best understood as rules that confer competence to decide whether a given standard has been met—according to whatever vague or inchoate interpretation (if any) of the rule in question triers of fact implicitly or explicitly employ. We call this the competence-norm approach. (shrink)

Several studies highlight the importance of the order of different instructional methods when designing learning environments. Correct but also erroneous worked examples are frequently used methods to foster students’ learning performance, especially in problem-solving. However, so far no study examined how the order of these example types affects learning. While the expertise reversal effect would suggest presenting correct examples first, the productive failure approach hypothesizes the reversed order to be learning-facilitating. In addition, congruency of subsequent exemplified problems was tested as (...) a moderator of the effect of order on learning. For example, with arithmetic tasks, congruent problems target exactly the same calculation while incongruent problems refer to different calculations. Following cascade theory, a model of cognitive skill acquisition, presenting correct examples first should be more effective when the subsequent exemplified problems are different. To test the hypotheses, 83 university students were assigned to one of the four conditions in a 2 × 2 between-subject design. Learners navigated through a slideshow on the topic of Vedic mathematics consisting of explicit instruction, worked examples differing in terms of the experimental condition, and transfer problems. Although no main or interaction effects were found regarding students’ learning performance, mediational analysis offered support for the expertise reversal effect, as it indicated that there is a significant indirect effect of order via mental load on learning. Presenting correct examples first and erroneous examples second resulted in a lower mental load, which in turn was associated with better learning performance. In contrast, presenting erroneous examples first and correct examples second resulted in a more accurate self-assessment of learning performance. These findings offer first insights into the question of how the presentation order of different example types impacts learning and provide practical recommendations for the design of educational media. Results are discussed in light of the ongoing debate regarding the question if less guided instructional methods should precede or succeed more guided methods. (shrink)

This essay revisits the drafting of the first UNESCO Statement on Race in order to reorient historical understandings of mid-twentieth-century anti-racism and science. Historians of science have primarily interpreted the UNESCO statements as an oppositional project led by anti-racist scientists from the North Atlantic and concerned with dismantling racial typologies, replacing them with population-based conceptions of human variation. Instead of focusing on what anti-racist scientists opposed, this article highlights the futures they imagined and the applied social-science projects that anti-racist science (...) drew from and facilitated. The scientific experts who participated in drafting the first UNESCO Statement on Race played important roles in late colonial, post-colonial and international projects designed to modernize, assimilate and improve so-called backward communities – typically indigenous or Afro-descendent groups in the global South. Such connections between anti-racist science and the developmental imaginaries of the late colonial period indicate that the transition from fixed racial typologies to sociocultural and psychological conceptualizations of human diversity legitimated the flourishing of modernization discourses in the Cold War era. In this transition to an economic-development paradigm, ‘race’ did not vanish so much as fragment into a series of finely tuned and ostensibly anti-racist conceptions that offered a moral incentive for scientific elites to intervene in the ways of life of those deemed primitive. (shrink)

As science studies scholars, one of our basic tasks is to draw the boundaries that will de?ne our units of inquiry and constrain the chronological and geographical limits of our studies. Without these boundaries, the categories of our analysis remain imprecise. Fortunately, we now have an extensive toolkit to help us with this task. With paradigms, research programs, epistemic cultures, or styles of reasoning, historians, philosophers, and sociologists of science now have a large set of resources for locating the ?ssures (...) and discontinuities in science. The papers from the focused discussion of this issue of Spontaneous Generations present us with an opportunity to take a step back and examine the ways that science studies scholars are currently drawing boundaries. In reviewing the articles for this discussion, our aim as editors was to re?ect on what boundaries scholars were paying attention to and what use we can make of these boundaries. (shrink)

Histories of economic development during the Cold War do not typically consider connections to race science and eugenics. By contrast, this article historicizes the debates sparked by the International Labor Organization’s Puno–Tambopata project in Peru and demonstrates how Cold War development practice shared common epistemological terrain with racial and eugenic thought from the Andes. The International Labor Organization project’s goal of resettling indigenous groups from the Peruvian highlands to lower-lying tropical climates sparked heated debates about the biological specificity of Andean (...) highlanders’ physiques and ability to survive in the tropics. Such concerns betrayed the antitypological consensus expressed in the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization Race Statements and defended by one of the main proponents of the resettlement project, the Swiss–American anthropologist Alfred Métraux. The concern with Andean racial types was central to the research agenda of the acclaimed Peruvian physiologist Carlos Monge, who endorsed modernization projects that did not entail moving highlanders outside of their traditional climate. The debates sparked by the Puno–Tambopata project demonstrate how Cold War development discourse grappled with racial and eugenic thought from Latin America and the Global South and thereby produced projects of indigenous “improvement.”. (shrink)

This book treats practical and political reasoning as an active engagement with the world and other people; it cannot be understood as exclusively cognitive and this is seen as a virtue rather than a deficiency. Informal, emotional, characterological, aesthetic and interactional aspects of thought can be constituents of reasonable arguing. The work examines key capacities connected with argumentation, in a variety of fields from professional and medical ethics to work organization and the practice of art.

The Gait Deviation Index is a multivariate measure of overall gait pathology based on 15 gait features derived from three-dimensional kinematic data. GDI aims at providing a comprehensive, easy to interpret, and clinically meaningful metric of overall gait function. It has been used as an outcome measure to study gait in several conditions: cerebral palsy, post-stroke hemiparetic gait, Duchenne muscular dystrophy, and Parkinson’s disease, among others. Nevertheless, its use in population with Spinal Cord Injury has not been studied yet. The (...) aim of the present study was to investigate the applicability of the GDI to SCI through the assessment of the relationship of the GDI with the Walking Index for Spinal Cord Injury II. 3D gait kinematics of 34 patients with incomplete SCI was obtained. Besides, 3D gait kinematics of a sample of 50 healthy volunteers was also gathered with Codamotion motion capture system. A total of 302 and 446 strides were collected. GDI was calculated for each stride and grouped for each WISCI II level. HV data were analyzed as an additional set. Normal distribution for each group was assessed with Kolmogorov-Smirnov tests. Afterward, ANOVA tests were performed between each pair of WISCI II levels to identify differences among groups. The results showed that the GDI was normally distributed across all WISCI II levels in both iSCI and HV groups. Furthermore, our results showed an increasing relationship between the GDI values and WISCI II levels in subjects with iSCI, but only discriminative in WISCI II levels 13, 19, and 20. The index successfully distinguished HV group from all the individuals with iSCI. Findings of this study indicated that the GDI is not an appropriate multivariate walking metric to represent the deviation of gait pattern in adult population with iSCI from a normal gait profile when it is compared with the levels of walking impairment described by the WISCI II. Future work should aim at defining and validating an overall gait index derived from 3D kinematic gait variables appropriate for SCI, additionally taking into account other walking ability outcome measures. (shrink)

This white paper outlines the plans of the History Philosophy Culture Working Group of the Next Generation Event Horizon Telescope Collaboration.

Este artículo se propone examinar la historia de la recepción inicial de las vanguardias históricas en la literatura hispanoamericana a través de la obra de Alfonso Reyes. Sin ignorar el estallido de la Revolución Mexicana y de la Primera Guerra Mundial, el futurismo y el cubismo responden a la praxis cotidiana relacionada con el belicismo. Ambos pueden encontrarse en otros textos de Reyes escritos entre 1914 y 1924 en Madrid, donde él se había autoexiliado. Este ensayo termina comparando (...) el vanguardismo inicial de Reyes con el de Borges y Huidobro. (shrink)

'Everyone knows what attention is’ according to William James. Much work on attention in psychology and neuroscience cites this famous phrase only to quickly dismiss it. But James is right about this: ‘attention’ was not introduced into psychology and neuroscience as a theoretical concept. I argue that we should therefore study attention with broadly the same methodology that David Marr has applied to the study of perception. By focusing more on Marr's Computational Level of analysis, we arrive at a unified (...) answer to the question of what attention is, what role it plays in the mind, and why organisms like us have that capacity. I propose a methodology for studying attention at Marr's Computational Level that optimizes in a three-dimensional space: it should capture core aspects of our first-person experience of attention, be explanatorily powerful in psychology and neuroscience, and fertile in an interdisciplinary context. I show how this methodology leads to what I call the priority structure account of attention. Attention is what organizes current information to make it more useful for the organism. We can identify it by four features. Attention, in this way, helps a cognitive system to integrate its informational state with its current motivational state. I describe how this account improves on alternatives and shows why attention is a useful concept in many disciplines and for connecting them. -/- This article is categorized under: Philosophy > Psychological Capacities Psychology > Attention Philosophy > Foundations of Cognitive Science. (shrink)

The normative force of evidence can seem puzzling. It seems that having conclusive evidence for a proposition does not, by itself, make it true that one ought to believe the proposition. But spelling out the condition that evidence must meet in order to provide us with genuine normative reasons for belief seems to lead us into a dilemma: the condition either fails to explain the normative significance of epistemic reasons or it renders the content of epistemic norms practical. The first (...) aim of this paper is to spell out this challenge for the normativity of evidence. I argue that the challenge rests on a plausible assumption about the conceptual connection between normative reasons and blameworthiness. The second aim of the paper is to show how we can meet the challenge by spelling out a concept of epistemic blameworthiness. Drawing on recent accounts of doxastic responsibility and epistemic blame, I suggest that the normativity of evidence is revealed in our practice of suspending epistemic trust in response to impaired epistemic relationships. Recognizing suspension of trust as a form of epistemic blame allows us to make sense of a purely epistemic kind of normativity the existence of which has recently been called into doubt by certain versions of pragmatism and instrumentalism. (shrink)

_Blood_, according to Gil Anidjar, maps the singular history of Christianity. As a category for historical analysis, blood can be seen through its literal and metaphorical uses as determining, sometimes even defining Western culture, politics, and social practices and their wide-ranging incarnations in nationalism, capitalism, and law. Engaging with a variety of sources, Anidjar explores the presence and the absence, the making and unmaking of blood in philosophy and medicine, law and literature, and economic and political thought from ancient Greece (...) to medieval Spain, from the Bible to Shakespeare and Melville. The prevalence of blood in the social, juridical, and political organization of the modern West signals that we do not live in a secular age into which religion could return. Flowing across multiple boundaries, infusing them with violent precepts that we must address, blood undoes the presumed oppositions between religion and politics, economy and theology, and kinship and race. It demonstrates that what we think of as modern is in fact imbued with Christianity. Christianity, Blood fiercely argues, must be reconsidered beyond the boundaries of religion alone. (shrink)

Shoemaker (1996) presenteda prioriarguments against the possibility of ‘self‐blindness’, or the inability of someone, otherwise intelligent and possessed of mental concepts, to introspect any of her concurrent attitude states. Ironically enough, this seems to be a position that Gopnik (1993) and Carruthers (2006, 2008, 2009a,b) have proposed as not only possible, but as the actual human condition generally! According to this ‘Objectivist’ view, supposed introspection of one's attitudes is not ‘direct’, but an ‘inference’ of precisely the sort we make about (...) the attitudes of others, an inference that has the advantage in our own case ofonlyour own sensory data and memories, our behavior, and of the context we are in; i.e. we are all substantially self‐ blind. After sorting out a number of methodological and verbal issues, I argue, first, that thea prioriarguments against Objectivism don't succeed, and that Gopnik and Carruthers are right to regard the issue as an empirical one. On the other hand, I think they seriously underestimate the difficulty of establishing Objectivism. It is unlikely there is an inferential procedure from the data of pure sensation, behavior and context to the relevant self‐attributions that would be as spectacularly reliable as people manifestly seem to be. Moreover, there is a simpler model: the mind very likely consists of a panoply of sub‐routines some of whose outputs are ‘tagged’ for their having been so processed, rather in the way that software ‘documents’ are on standard computers. Introspection plausibly consists in a person's simply attending to distinctive constellations of these tags, even though they may lack phenomenal feels. This draws attention to an important independent fact: that much of phenomenology (or ‘what it's like’ to be in a certain state) may be constituted by facts that are not phenomenal. (shrink)

In this article, I propose a unified account of systemic emergence, downward causation, and interlevel integrative explanations. First, I argue for a relational-transformational notion of emergence and a structural-relational account of downward causation in terms of both its transformational and conditioning effects. In my view, downward causation can avoid the problems traditionally attributed to it, provided that we are able to reconceptualize the notion of ‘whole’ and that form of causality in a purely relational way. In this regard, I distinguish (...) contextual or whole-to-part causation from downward causation, the latter defined by the existence of second-order structural relations. Finally, I argue that while emergence and downward-structural causation imply the in-principle failure of micro-determinism and therefore micro-reduction, they do not rule out the possibility of any type of explanation. On the contrary, they call for the development of interlevel integrative explanations. (shrink)

Entre justification et explication, entre dire et faire, la destruction. Est-ce une chose ou un événement? Un geste, une oeuvre ou une opération? Un thème ou un titre? Est-ce même bien un mot? Qu'appelle-t-on destruction? Avec Heidegger, Derrida en appelle à la destruction. Oui, à la destruction. L'a-t-on entendu? Comme Heidegger (et c'est aussi ce "comme" qu'il s'agira d'examiner ici), Derrida nomme et renomme la destruction. Il lui donne le temps et le nom, une renommée. Il la surnomme "déconstruction", par (...) exemple, ou, plus tard, "mal d'archive". Comme Heidegger, Derrida travaille, traduit et retraduit la destruction, faisant parfois comme si tous ses mots, tous les mots et les phrases qu'il propose et déploie à propos de la destruction, entretenaient des rapports sans rapport, rapports déjà trop clairs, ou encore bien obscurs. Qu'appelle-t-on destruction? Après Heidegger, Derrida s'y est attardé, lui qui parlait, encore et encore, de destination et de destruction, lui qui nous a rappelés si souvent à la destruction qui arrive, partout où elle arrive. Posons que c'était l'un de ses combats, l'une de ses longues guerres (avec lui-même, d'abord, et avec la destruction). Sera-ce finalement la nôtre? Est-il aujourd'hui temps de penser - après Heidegger, avec Derrida -, temps de combattre aussi peut-être, au moins d'écouter, la destruction qui vient? Est-il encore temps de témoigner de la destruction qui croit? (shrink)

It is often argued that there are no practical reasons for belief because we could not believe for such reasons. A recent reply by pragmatists is that we can often believe for practical reasons because we can often cause our beliefs for practical reasons. This paper reveals the limits of this recently popular strategy for defending pragmatism, and thereby reshapes the dialectical options for pragmatism. I argue that the strategy presupposes that reasons for being in non-intentional states are not reducible (...) to reasons to act. Pragmatists who want to preserve a motivational constraint on reasons therefore have exactly two options: either arguing that there are irreducible reasons for being in non-intentional states ; or arguing that we can believe directly for practical reasons. I argue that the prospects for the former option are dim because irreducible reasons to be in states are hard to square with the motivational constraint on reasons. Returning to the more traditional route of arguing for pragmatism by defending a version of doxastic voluntarism therefore seems to be the more promising way for pragmatists to go. (shrink)

One objection that has been raised for meta-ethical expressivism is that expressivists must give an account of the nature of the attitude which constitutes moral thinking, but that any expressivist account that attempts to do seems to fail. Call this objection the “moral attitude problem.” In this article I suggest a strategy for expressivists to escape this problem: I argue that the moral attitude problem is a problem that arises not only for expressivists but also for meta-ethical cognitivists, and that (...) expressivists can use the same resources used by cognitivists to escape this problem. (shrink)

Speech Acts, Criteria and Intentions What makes a speech act a speech act? Which are its necessary and sufficient conditions? I claim in this paper that we cannot find an answer to those questions in Austin's doctrine of the infelicities, since some infelicities take place in fully committing speech acts, whereas others prevent the utterance from being considered as a speech act at all. With this qualification in mind, I argue against the idea that intentions—considered as mental states accomplishing a (...) causal role in the performance of the act—should be considered among the necessary conditions of speech acts. I would thus like to deny a merely ‘symptomatic’ account of intentions, according to which we could never make anything but fallible hypotheses about the effective occurrence of any speech act. I propose an alternative ‘criterial’ account of the role of intentions in speech acts theory, and analyse Austin's and Searle's approaches in the light of this Wittgensteinian concept. Whether we consider, with Austin, that speech acts ‘imply’ mental states or, with Searle, that they ‘express’ them, we could only make sense of this idea if we considered utterances as criteria for intentions, and not as alleged behavioural effects of hidden mental causes. (shrink)

Many of our attitudes are non-culpable: there was nothing that we should have done to avoid holding them. I argue that we can still be blameworthy for non-culpable attitudes: they can impair our relationships in ways that make our full practice of apology and forgiveness intelligible. My argument poses a new challenge to indirect voluntarists, who attempt to reduce all responsibility for attitudes to responsibility for prior actions and omissions. Rationalists, who instead explain attitudinal responsibility by appeal to reasons-responsiveness, can (...) make sense of blameworthiness for non-culpable attitudes. In response, voluntarists could propose a revision of our actual practices. This would lead us into a quite different debate. (shrink)

In his new book, Logical Form, Andrea Iacona distinguishes between two different roles that have been ascribed to the notion of logical form: the logical role and the semantic role. These two roles entail a bifurcation of the notion of logical form. Both notions of logical form, according to Iacona, are descriptive, having to do with different features of natural language sentences. I agree that the notion of logical form bifurcates, but not that the logical role is merely descriptive. In (...) this paper, I focus on formalization, a process by which logical form, on its logical role, is attributed to natural language sentences. According to some, formalization is a form of explication, and it involves normative, pragmatic, as well as creative aspects. I present a view by which formalization involves explicit commitments on behalf of a reasoner or an interpreter, which serve the normative grounds for the evaluation of a given text. In previous work, I proposed the framework of semantic constraints for the explication of logical consequence. Here, I extend the framework to include formalization constraints. The various constraints then serve the role of commitments. I discuss specific issues raised by Iacona concerning univocality, co-reference and equivocation, and I show how our views on these matters diverge as a result of our different starting assumptions. (shrink)

Blockchain is a pioneering technology that allows the creation of innovative information exchange ecosystems thanks to unique properties, such as immutability, distribution and transparency. By combining this technology with the emergent internet of things (IoT), many innovative business models can be created. The main objective of this work is to present the design and an initial implementation of a decentralized rental system that takes advantage of smart contracts developed on a public blockchain, combined with the potential of the IoT and (...) its intimate relationship with cyber-physical systems. The logic to be implemented in the blockchain is applied in this paper by using the Ethereum programming language, so that the developed application covers the entire car rental process offered in traditional web applications, but adding more autonomy, functionalities and ease of use for both lessees and lessors. Following Ethereum application development guidelines, all business logic is located in the smart contracts implemented in the network, where they can be used to control the car rental system. While this is a work in progress, the results obtained in the first proof of concept have been very promising. (shrink)

Philosophers of well-being have tended to adopt a foundationalist approach to the question of theory and measurement, according to which theories are conceptually before measures. By contrast, social scientists have tended to adopt operationalist commitments, according to which they develop and refine well-being measures independently of any philosophical foundation. Unfortunately, neither approach helps us overcome the problem of coordinating between how we characterize well-being and how we measure it. Instead, we should adopt a coherentist approach to well-being science.

The move from open outcry to electronic trading added another responsibility to futures exchanges—that of matching orders between buyers and sellers. Matching systems can affect the level and speed of price discovery, the distribution of revenue, as well as the level of price efficiency of a given market. Whether the matching system is procedurally fair is another important consideration. I argue that while FIFO (First In First Out) is a fair procedure in principle and is perceived as the default matching (...) system, it is not a fair procedure in practice. Likewise, while pro rata is a fair procedure in principle, it is not so in practice. Nevertheless, both FIFO and pro rata are relics of an open outcry system. Instead, I propose an alternative approach to matching systems that builds on the strengths of electronic trading—the ability to randomize in real time. I introduce random selection for service (RSS) as a matching system that is procedurally fair both in principle and in practice. (shrink)

According to ordinary language philosophy (OLP), philosophical problems can be solved by investigating ordinary language, often because the problems stem from its misuse. According to ideal language philosophy (ILP), on the other hand, philosophical problems exist because ordinary language is flawed and has to be improved or replaced by constructed languages that do not exhibit these flaws. OLP and ILP together make up linguistic philosophy, the view that philosophical problems are problems of language. Linguistic philosophy is opposed to what may (...) be called, for lack of a better word, ‘traditional philosophy’ (TP), the view that philosophical problems can be solved by discovering non-linguistic facts. In the following, OLP, ILP, and TP are taken to be methodologies, that is, frameworks in which to interpret and evaluate different philosophical methods (i.e., argumentative strategies). The two linguistic methodologies are discussed separately with TP as a foil, and then used to interpret the status of different philosophical methods. While each of the methods discussed here finds a plausible interpretation in each methodology, there are other arguments for and against linguistic philosophy in general, and for and against ILP and OLP in particular. As none of these arguments is decisive, I conclude with a superficial moral about peaceful co-existence. (shrink)

Feelings are conscious mental events that represent body states as they undergo homeostatic regulation. Feelings depend on the interoceptive nervous system (INS), a collection of peripheral and central pathways, nuclei and cortical regions which continuously sense chemical and anatomical changes in the organism. How such humoral and neural signals come to generate conscious mental states has been a major scientific question. The answer proposed here invokes (1) several distinctive and poorly known physiological features of the INS; and (2) a unique (...) interaction between the body (the ‘object’ of interoception) and the central nervous system (which generates the 'subject' of interoception). The atypical traits of the INS and the direct interactions between neural and non‐neural physiological compartments of the organism, neither of which is present in exteroceptive systems, plausibly explain the qualitative and subjective aspects of feelings, thus accounting for their conscious nature. (shrink)

Die sogenannte individualisierte Medizin (IM) ist in den letzten Jahren zu einem Schlagwort in Wissenschaft, Politik und Öffentlichkeit geworden. Wie jede technologische Neuentwicklung hat sie jedoch (potentielle) ethische Implikationen, die es zu berücksichtigen gilt, um eine angemessene Entwicklung und Anwendung individualisierter Präventions- und Therapiemaßnahmen zu ermöglichen. Allerdings steht eine ethische Bewertung der IM vor verschiedenen methodischen Herausforderungen, die sich insbesondere aus der Heterogenität des Problembereichs, begrifflicher Unklarheit sowie dem Frühstadium ihrer Entwicklung ergeben. Der vorliegende Beitrag spezifiziert zunächst den Begriff der (...) IM, um den Kontext der weiteren Überlegungen einzugrenzen. Anschließend wird eine heuristisch zu verstehende Typologie (möglicher) individual- und sozialethischer Implikationen der IM entwickelt. Sie verdeutlicht, dass die IM vorwiegend ethische Probleme aufwirft, die aus anderen biomedizinischen Bereichen bekannt sind. Welche dieser Probleme tatsächlich relevant sind, ist allerdings abhängig von der jeweils spezifischen IM-Maßnahme. Eine adäquate ethische Bewertung kann daher nur durch die Evaluation jedes einzelnen individualisierten Ansatzes erfolgen. (shrink)

Die sogenannte individualisierte Medizin (IM) ist in den letzten Jahren zu einem Schlagwort in Wissenschaft, Politik und Öffentlichkeit geworden. Wie jede technologische Neuentwicklung hat sie jedoch (potentielle) ethische Implikationen, die es zu berücksichtigen gilt, um eine angemessene Entwicklung und Anwendung individualisierter Präventions- und Therapiemaßnahmen zu ermöglichen. Allerdings steht eine ethische Bewertung der IM vor verschiedenen methodischen Herausforderungen, die sich insbesondere aus der Heterogenität des Problembereichs, begrifflicher Unklarheit sowie dem Frühstadium ihrer Entwicklung ergeben. Der vorliegende Beitrag spezifiziert zunächst den Begriff der (...) IM, um den Kontext der weiteren Überlegungen einzugrenzen. Anschließend wird eine heuristisch zu verstehende Typologie (möglicher) individual- und sozialethischer Implikationen der IM entwickelt. Sie verdeutlicht, dass die IM vorwiegend ethische Probleme aufwirft, die aus anderen biomedizinischen Bereichen bekannt sind. Welche dieser Probleme tatsächlich relevant sind, ist allerdings abhängig von der jeweils spezifischen IM-Maßnahme. Eine adäquate ethische Bewertung kann daher nur durch die Evaluation jedes einzelnen individualisierten Ansatzes erfolgen. (shrink)

In Ancient Greece, the figure of the hero was identified as a demigod, possessed of altruistic and virtuous deeds. When Pierre de Coubertin reinstated the Olympic Games, the athlete was personified as a modern hero. Its antithesis, the anti-hero, has more virtue that defects, no evil but he does not care on the means to achieve his goals. In the eyes of everyone involved in sports competition, these characters captivate and at the same time, create conflicts of ethics and aesthetics. (...) The purpose of this paper is to perform an ethical reflection linked to principles that contribute for the human growth and accomplishment, as well as the aesthetic on the perception of the sensitive, reverberated by sensations and feelings emerging from athletes. Connecting the ethic with the aesthetic spheres, we could have in the sports a phenomenon walking toward a common point between moral and aesthetic, between the good and the beauty. (shrink)

It has been argued that the explanation of self-control requires positing special motivational powers. Some think that we need will-power as an irreducible mental faculty; others that we need to think of the active self as a dedicated and depletable pool of psychic energy or – in today more respectable terminology – mental resources; finally, there is the idea that self-control requires postulating a deep division between reason and passion – a deliberative and an emotional motivational system. This essay argues (...) that no such special motivational powers are necessary. Yet, at the same time, self-control does powerfully illustrate the importance of a feature of the mind. What it illustrates, I argue, is the importance of the mental activity of attention in the control of all action. It is by appeal to this mental activity that we can dispense with special motivational powers. If we think of Humeanism as the view that there is fundamentally only one kind of motivational system and that all action is based in that system, then this essay contributes to a defense of Humeanism. On the other hand, the essay also shows that any model of agency in terms of only beliefs and desires, motivational and representational states, or preferences and credences is incomplete. A different conception of Humeanism as the view that every mental state is either motivational, representational, or a combination of them, is false. (shrink)

Generating an account that can sidestep the disagreement among substantive theories of well-being, while at the same time still providing useful guidance for well-being public policy, would be a significant achievement. Unfortunately, the various attempts to remain agnostic regarding what constitutes well-being fail to either be an account of well-being, provide useful guidance for well-being policy, or avoid relying on a substantive well-being theory. There are no theory-free lunches in well-being policy. Instead, I propose an intermediate account, according to which (...) well-being is constituted by endorsed veridical experiences. This account refers back to theories of well-being but does so as agnostically as possible. An intermediate account of well-being is meant as a policy guiding compromise between the different theories of well-being that make claims regarding what constitutes well-being. An intermediate account does as well as can be hoped for in providing a basis for well-being policy. (shrink)

Physicians frequently encounter situations in which their professional practice is intermingled with moral affordances stemming from other domains of the physician’s lifeworld, such as family and friends, or from general morality pertaining to all humans. This article offers a typology of moral conflicts ‘at the margins of professionalism’ as well as a new theoretical framework for dealing with them. We start out by arguing that established theories of professional ethics do not offer sufficient guidance in situations where professional ethics overlaps (...) with moral duties of other origins. Therefore, we introduce the moral theory developed by Christine M. Korsgaard, that centres around the concept of practical identity. We show how Korsgaard’s account offers a framework for interpreting different types of moral conflicts ‘at the margins of professionalism’ to provide either orientation for solving the conflict or an explanation for the emotional and moral burden involved in moral dilemmas. (shrink)

Downward causation exercised by emergent properties of wholes upon their lower-level constituents’ properties has been accused of conceptual and metaphysical incoherence. Only upward causation is usually peacefully accepted. The aim of this paper is to criticize and refuse the traditional hierarchical-vertical way of conceiving both types of causation, although preserving their deepest ontological significance, as well as the widespread acceptance of the traditional atomistic-combinatorial view of the entities and the relations that constitute the so-called ‘emergence base’. Assuming those two perspectives (...) with no reserves, we are condemned to confine our debate to the question of whether reified wholes can have the power to downwardly change or influence their lower-level parts, a question which seems profoundly misleading to me. I therefore propose an alternative relational ontological view, assuming a straightforward horizontal and intra-level way of representing those putative cases of cross-level causation. I finally confront two recent replies to Kim’s well-known objections to DC—Craver and Bechtel and Kistler :595–609, 2009)—, emphasizing their global positive approaches, as well as the reasons why their accounts still seem insufficient to me. I conclude arguing that both Kim’s principle of the causal closure of the physical domain and its allegation of an overdetermination in cases of DC can be surpassed by the new relational ontological perspective presented here. (shrink)

The year 1492 is only the last in a series of “ends” that inform the representation of medieval Spain in modern Jewish historical and literary discourses. These ends simultaneously mirror the traumas of history and shed light on the discursive process by which hermetic boundaries are set between periods, communities, and texts. This book addresses the representation of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries as the end of al-Andalus (Islamic Spain). Here, the end works to locate and separate Muslim from Christian (...) Spain, Jews from Arabs, philosophy from Kabbalah, Kabbalah from literature, and texts from contexts. The book offers a reading of texts that emerge from its Andalusi, Jewish, and Arabic cultural sphere: Maimonides’ Guide of the Perplexed; the major text of Kabbalah, the Zohar; and the Arabic rhymed prose narrative of Ibn al-Astarkuwi. The author argues that these texts are written in a language that disrupts the possibility of locating it in a pre-existing cultural situation, a recognizable literary tradition, or a particular genre. At stake are issues – texts and contexts – that have gained particular urgency in the writings of such recent thinkers as Walter Benjamin, Jacques Derrida, Giorgio Agamben, Jean-Luc Nancy, and Avital Ronell. The book reads the place and taking place of language, interrogating the notion of disappearing contexts and the view that language is derivative of its true place, the context that, having ended, is mourned as silent and lost. (shrink)