War and Border Crossings brings together renowned scholars to address some of the most pressing problems in public policy, international affairs, and the intercultural issues of our day. Contributors from widely varying disciplines discuss cross-cultural ethical issues and international topics ranging from American international policy and the invasion and occupation of Iraq to domestic topics such as immigration, the war on drugs, cross-cultural bioethics and ethical issues involving American Indian tribes. The culture clashes discussed in these essays raise serious questions (...) about what principles ought to inform the negotiating of conflicts in order to achieve, or at least approach, outcomes that are fundamentally just, fair, responsible, and ethical. (shrink)

Presents a plethora of approaches to developing human potential in areas not conventionally addressed. Organized in two parts, this international collection of essays provides viable educational alternatives to those currently holding sway in an era of high-stakes accountability.

This chapter addresses two questions. First, can phenomenology be naturalized? Second, if so, how? It employs the term ‘phenomenology’, and understands the question in this second sense. At the same time, responses to the question about naturalising consciousness and the question about naturalising phenomenology, in this second sense, are interlaced. Edmund Husserl has been careful about how he defined phenomenology, distinguishing it from a naturalistic enterprise. The Centre de Recherche en Epistémologie Appliquée proposal shows that a sufficiently complex mathematics can (...) help the translation of data from phenomenological and naturalistic realms. Neuroscientists often attract to personal-level practices and phenomenological experiences in establishing their experiments, and in many cases the only way to define the explanadum is in terms of phenomenology. The ‘truth’ of naturalism is not the naturalism which Husserl cautioned against, but a redefined non-reductionist naturalism that correlates with a redefined phenomenology. (shrink)

Sentimental Rules is an ambitious and highly interdisciplinary work, which proposes and defends a new theory about the nature and evolution of moral judgment. In it, philosopher Shaun Nichols develops the theory that emotions play a critical role in both the psychological and the cultural underpinnings of basic moral judgment. Nichols argues that our norms prohibiting the harming of others are fundamentally associated with our emotional responses to those harms, and that such 'sentimental rules' enjoy an advantage in cultural (...) evolution, which partly explains the success of certain moral norms. This has sweeping and exciting implications for philosophical ethics. Nichols builds on an explosion of recent intriguing experimental work in psychology on our capacity for moral judgment and shows how this empirical work has broad import for enduring philosophical problems. The result is an account that illuminates fundamental questions about the character of moral emotions and the role of sentiment and reason in how we make our moral judgments. This work should appeal widely across philosophy and the other disciplines that comprise cognitive science. (shrink)

This essay explains some basic concepts about BDSM, and it responds to two important objections to it. The first is the psychological objection—that BDSM practitioners suffer from mental disorders—and the second is the ethical objection—that BDSM practitioners have morally compromised desires because of the kinds of activities they desire to participate in, especially ones that involve roles that dip into tortured oppressive histories (e.g., "rape" scenes, "master-and-slave" scenes). The paper argues that both objections fail, and, more specifically focusing on the (...) ethical objection, argues that BDSM desires are psychologically, conceptually, and phenomenologically different from their seeming counterpart real-life desires that are truly ethically defective. Finally, the paper argues that BDSM practitioners, in having to always understand, explore, and justify their desires (especially to a majority that is hostile to them), have an interesting chance to lead rich, flourishing lives. (shrink)

Miller analyzes the relationship between consent and autonomy by offering three pictures. For autonomy, Miller distinguishes between procedural, substantive, and weak substantive autonomy. The corresponding views of consent are what Miller has termed as consensual minimalism, consensual idealism, and consensual realism. The requirements of sexual consent under consensual minimalism are a voluntary informed agreement. However, feminist critiques reveal the inadequacies of this simple position. Consensual idealism, which corresponds with substantive autonomy, offers a robust picture where consent and autonomy must be (...) based on non-oppression. However, this view is considered too ideal and it ignores context. Weak substantive autonomy takes into account the context in the sexual domain. Correspondingly, consensual realism takes into account the context and still fulfills the requirements of consent. (shrink)

This chapter corrects for Susan Sontag's undeserved neglect by contemporary ethical philosophers by bringing awareness to some of the unique metaethical insights born of her reflections on photographic representations of evil. I argue that Sontag's thought provides fertile ground for thinking about: (1) moral perception and its relation to moral knowledge; and (2) the epistemic and moral value of our emotional responses to the misery and suffering of others. I show that, contrary to standard moral perception theory (e.g. Blum 1994), (...) Sontag holds that we can have general moral perceptual knowledge. I then explore Sontag's idea that certain emotional responses, like sympathy and compassion, can sometimes be impertinent, in virtue of their having false or illusory content. I explain why this is so, and show the epistemic and motivational problems it poses for moral sentimentalism. (shrink)

The ideal introduction for students of semantics, Lexical Meaning fills the gap left by more general semantics textbooks, providing the teacher and the student with insights into word meaning beyond the traditional overviews of lexical relations. The book explores the relationship between word meanings and syntax and semantics more generally. It provides a balanced overview of the main theoretical approaches, along with a lucid explanation of their relative strengths and weaknesses. After covering the main topics in lexical meaning, such as (...) polysemy and sense relations, the textbook surveys the types of meanings represented by different word classes. It explains abstract concepts in clear language, using a wide range of examples, and includes linguistic puzzles in each chapter to encourage the student to practise using the concepts. 'Adopt-a-Word' exercises give students the chance to research a particular word, building a portfolio of specialist work on a single word. (shrink)

Williams (1970) argues that our intuitions about personal identity vary depending on how a given thought experiment is framed. Some frames lead us to think that persistence of self requires persistence of one's psychological characteristics; other frames lead us to think that the self persists even after the loss of one's distinctive psychological characteristics. The current paper takes an empirical approach to these issues. We find that framing does affect whether or not people judge that persistence of psychological characteristics is (...) required for persistence of self. Open-ended, abstract questions about what is required for survival tend to elicit responses that appeal to the importance of psychological characteristics. This emphasis on psychological characteristics is largely preserved even when participants are exposed to a concrete case that yields conflicting intuitions over whether memory must be preserved in order for a person to persist. Insofar as our philosophical theory of personal identity should be based on our intuitions, the results provide some support for the view that psychological characteristics really are critical for persistence of self. (shrink)

Conversation is, first of all, an event, something that happens. But the concept of conversation has also been appropriated by various thinkers as a model or metaphor of hermeneutical experience, of communication, political discourse, the acquisition of knowledge, and so forth. As an event it has been analyzed within the hermeneutical tradition, from Schleiermacher to Gadamer, and in this analysis it has been tied to Romantic conceptions such as the universality of language, "linguistic heritage" (Angeborenheit der Sprache ), and what (...) von Humboldt called "the common denominator of human nature," the universal and spiritual humanity that we all share.1 So conceived conversation has been made a model of hermeneutical experience. Gadamer, as is well known, characterizes reading as a conversation or dialogue with a text. This is more than metaphor, he tells us. Interpretation means bringing the text "into the living present of conversation" (TM 368), restoring it to an original condition. (shrink)

This paper, in opposition to the standard theories of social cognition found in psychology and cognitive science, defends the idea that direct perception plays an important role in social cognition. The two dominant theories, theory theory and simulation theory , both posit something more than a perceptual element as necessary for our ability to understand others, i.e., to “mindread” or “mentalize.” In contrast, certain phenomenological approaches depend heavily on the concept of perception and the idea that we have a direct (...) perceptual grasp of the other person’s intentions, feelings, etc. This paper explains precisely what the notion of direct perception means, offers evidence from developmental studies, and proposes a non-simulationist interpretation of the neuroscience of mirror systems. (shrink)

Que signifie le fait d’avoir le statut de personne morale, c’est-à-dire d’avoir la capacité de responsabilité morale? Dans un important essai sur la question, Dennett a proposé six conditions qui définissent ce concept. Premièrement, l’entité à laquelle nous attribuerions le statut de personne morale doit être douée de rationalité. Deuxièmement, elle doit être capable d’adopter la position intentionnelle — c’est-à-dire qu’elle doit être capable d’attribuer des intentions aux autres. Troisièmement, elle doit pouvoir être l’objet d’une certaine attitude. Quatrièmement, elle doit (...) être capable de réciprocité de manière à pouvoir répondre à cette attitude. Cinquièmement, elle doit être capable de communiquer avec les autres. Les troisième, quatrième et cinquième conditions, de façon explicite et significative, impliquent des dimensions sociales, bien que, pour Dennett, la nature précise de ces dimensions sociales demeure une question encore ouverte. Enfin, ces cinq premières conditions sont nécessaires pour la sixième : l’entité doit être capable de conscience de soi. La conscience de soi est comprise ici comme étant un processus mental d’un ordre supérieur, dont, ainsi que le suggèrent Dennett et d’autres, les jeunes enfants sont incapables. Bien plus, dans une variété d’autres contextes, Dennett. (shrink)

When first published twenty years ago, The Logic of Medicine presented a new way of thinking about clinical medicine as a scholarly discipline as well as a profession. Since then, advances in research and technology have revolutionized both the practice and theory of medicine. In this new, extensively rewritten edition, Dr. Murphy includes changes to show how these different areas of scholarship may affect details of "the logic of medicine" without compromising its fundamental coherence. New to this edition are (...) discussions of the challenge of the flood of new empirical data, new ideas in genetics, molecular biology, homeostasis, pathogenesis, cancer, aging, and Alzheimer's disease. Murphy also comments on such new theoretical topics as dynamic systems, chaos, and fractals and their impact on the burgeoning fields of philosophy and practice of medicine. Written with medical students in mind, the book includes a glossary, many new examples, and problems for solutions with comments on each. An entirely new chapter deals with modeling. Clinicians and researchers will also find the principles thought-provoking and illuminating. (shrink)

I examine several aspects of the experience of time in depression and in the experience of different emotions. Both phenomenological and experimental studies show that depressed subjects have a slowed experience of time flow and tend to overestimate time spans. In comparison to patients in control conditions, depressed patients tend to be preoccupied with past events, and less focused on present and future events. Recent empirical findings in studies of emotion perception show different degrees of over- or underestimation of time (...) in perception of faces showing different emotions compared with neutral faces. Clinical phenomenology predicts that the effects on time estimation would not be additive if these tests were conducted with depressed subjects. (shrink)

Emotional hardcore and other music genres featuring screamed vocals are puzzling for the appreciator. The typical fan attaches appreciative value to musical screams of emotional pain all the while acknowledging it would be inappropriate to hold similar attitudes towards their sonically similar everyday counterpart: actual human screaming. Call this the screamed vocals problem. To solve the problem, I argue we must attend to the anti-sublimating aims that get expressed in the emotional hardcore vocalist’s choice to scream the lyrics. Screamed vocals (...) help us see the value in rejecting (a) restrictive social norms of emotional expressiveness and (b) restrictive artistic norms about how one ought to express or represent pain in art, namely that if one is going to do so they must ensure the pain has been ‘beautified’. In developing this second point I argue that emotional hardcore is well-suited (though not individually so) for putting pressure on longstanding views in the history of aesthetics about the formal relationship between art and human pain. (shrink)

In the past dozen years a number of theoretical models of schizophrenic symptoms have been proposed, often inspired by advances in the cognitive sciences, and especially cognitive neuroscience. Perhaps the most widely cited and influential of these is the neurocognitive model proposed by Christopher Frith (1992). Frith's influence reaches into psychiatry, neuroscience, and even philosophy. The philosopher John Campbell (1999a), for example, has called Frith's model the most parsimonious explanation of how self-ascriptions of thoughts are subject to errors of identification. (...) "On reflection, it also seems that this is not just one possible theory; it is the simplest theory which has any prospect of explaining the sense of agency, and we ought to work from it, introducing complications only as necessary" (1999a, p. 612). Not everyone agrees. In their recent analysis of alien voices and inserted thoughts in schizophrenia, Stephens and Graham (2000) offer a critique of Frith. Their criticism, however, although serious, is neither deep nor extensive. They outline three points. First, Frith fails to provide an adequate account of why a subject who experiences thought insertion would misattribute that thought to some other agent. Second, Frith does not clarify the distinction between thought insertion and thought influence. And third, Frith fails to explain how a subject can claim both that he is thinking the thought and that the thought is someone else's thought (Stephens and Graham.. (shrink)

The category of jus post bellum is a welcome addition to discussions of the justice of war. But, despite its handy Latin label, we will argue that it cannot be properly understood merely as a set of corollaries from jus ad bellum and jus in bello. Instead, an acceptable theory of justice in the postwar period will have to draw on a broader set of normative ideas than those that have been the focus of the just war tradition. In this (...) paper, we will argue that norms of political reconciliation provide some of the resources we need to address postwar justice. (shrink)

The first IVF baby was born in the 1970s. Less than 20 years later, we had cloning and GM food, and information and communication technologies had transformed everyday life. In 2000, the human genome was sequenced. More recently, there has been much discussion of the economic and social benefits of nanotechnology, and synthetic biology has also been generating controversy. This important volume is a timely contribution to increasing calls for regulation - or better regulation - of these and other new (...) technologies. Drawing on an international team of legal scholars, it reviews and develops the role of human rights in the regulation of new technologies. Three controversies at the intersection between human rights and new technology are given particular attention. First, how the expansive application of human rights could contribute to the creation of a brave new world of choice, where human dignity is fundamentally compromised; second, how new technologies, and our regulatory responses to them, could be a threat to human rights; and, third, how human rights could be used to create better regulation of these technologies. (shrink)

A Polish group G is tame if for any continuous action of G, the corresponding orbit equivalence relation is Borel. When [Formula: see text] for countable abelian [Formula: see text], Solecki [Equivalence relations induced by actions of Polish groups, Trans. Amer. Math. Soc. 347 (1995) 4765–4777] gave a characterization for when G is tame. In [L. Ding and S. Gao, Non-archimedean abelian Polish groups and their actions, Adv. Math. 307 (2017) 312–343], Ding and Gao showed that for such G, the (...) orbit equivalence relation must in fact be potentially [Formula: see text], while conjecturing that the optimal bound could be [Formula: see text]. We show that the optimal bound is [Formula: see text] by constructing an action of such a group G which is not potentially [Formula: see text], and show how to modify the analysis of [L. Ding and S. Gao, Non-archimedean abelian Polish groups and their actions, Adv. Math. 307 (2017) 312–343] to get this slightly better upper bound. It follows, using the results of Hjorth et al. [Borel equivalence relations induced by actions of the symmetric group, Ann. Pure Appl. Logic 92 (1998) 63–112], that this is the optimal bound for the potential complexity of actions of tame abelian product groups. Our lower-bound analysis involves forcing over models of set theory where choice fails for sequences of finite sets. (shrink)

This book explores how some word meanings are paradigmatically related to each other, for example, as opposites or synonyms, and how they relate to the mental organization of our vocabularies. Traditional approaches claim that such relationships are part of our lexical knowledge (our "dictionary" of mentally stored words) but Lynne Murphy argues that lexical relationships actually constitute our "metalinguistic" knowledge. The book draws on a century of previous research, including word association experiments, child language, and the use of synonyms (...) and antonyms in text. (shrink)

Although many modern philosophers of law describe custom as merely a minor source of law, formal law is actually only one source of the legal customs that govern us. Many laws grow out of custom, and one measure of a law's success is by its creation of an enduring legal custom. Yet custom and customary law have long been neglected topics in unsettled jurisprudential debate. Smaller concerns, such as whether customs can be legitimized by practice or by stipulation, stipulated by (...) an authority or by general consent, or dictated by law or vice versa, lead to broader questions of law and custom as alternative or mutually exclusive modes of social regulation, and whether rational reflection in general ought to replace sub-rational prejudice. Can legal rules function without customary usage, and does custom even matter in society? The Philosophy of Customary Law brings greater theoretical clarity to the often murky topic of custom by showing that custom must be analyzed into two more logically basic concepts: convention and habit. James Bernard Murphy explores the nature and significance of custom and customary law, and how conventions relate to habits in the four classic theories of Aristotle, Francisco Suarez, Jeremy Bentham, and James C. Carter. He establishes that customs are conventional habits and habitual conventions, and allows us to better grasp the many roles that custom plays in a legal system by offering a new foundation of understanding for these concepts. (shrink)

This article addresses questions about the sense of agency and its distinction from the sense of ownership in the context of understanding schizophrenic thought insertion. In contrast to “standard” approaches that identify problems with the sense of agency as central to thought insertion, two recent proposals argue that it is more correct to think that the problem concerns the subject’s sense of ownership. This view involves a “more demanding” concept of the sense of ownership that, I will argue, ultimately depends (...) on the sense of agency. In this regard, the sense of agency still appears to be the originating problem. (shrink)

According to recent accounts of the imagination, mental mechanisms that can take input from both imagining and from believing will process imagination‐based inputs (pretense representations) and isomorphic beliefs in much the same way. That is, such a mechanism should produce similar outputs whether its input is the belief that p or the pretense representation that p. Unfortunately, there seem to be clear counterexamples to this hypothesis, for in many cases, imagining that p and believing that p have quite different psychological (...) consequences. This paper sets out some central problem cases and argues that the cases might be accommodated by adverting to the role of desires concerning real and imaginary situations. (shrink)

The everyday capacity to understand the mind, or 'mindreading', plays an enormous role in our ordinary lives. Shaun Nichols and Stephen Stich provide a detailed and integrated account of the intricate web of mental components underlying this fascinating and multifarious skill. The imagination, they argue, is essential to understanding others, and there are special cognitive mechanisms for understanding oneself. The account that emerges has broad implications for longstanding philosophical debates over the status of folk psychology. Mindreading is another trailblazing (...) volume in the prestigious interdisciplinary Oxford Cognitive Science series. (shrink)

It used to be a commonplace that the discipline of philosophy was deeply concerned with questions about the human condition. Philosophers thought about human beings and how their minds worked. They took an interest in reason and passion, culture and innate ideas, the origins of people’s moral and religious beliefs. On this traditional conception, it wasn’t particularly important to keep philosophy clearly distinct from psychology, history, or political science. Philosophers were concerned, in a very general way, with questions about how..

This chapter offers a general outline of Schopenhauer’s peculiarly named concept of the 'acquired character’ and explains its basic function in his ethical thought. For Schopenhauer, a person of acquired character is someone who knows the ways of acting (Handlungsweise) that are most expressive of their individuality and who allows that self-knowledge to structure their practical and emotional life. In keeping with certain elements of his psychological determinism, acquired character is not the acquisition of a ‘new’ character; rather, it is (...) the acquisition of self-knowledge of one’s essentially fixed empirical character. It is part of the argument of this chapter that by introducing the acquired character into his reflections on human action and agency Schopenhauer weaves a certain view of individual flourishing (eudaimonia) into his ethics. There are two central ingredients of Schopenhauer’s conception of eudaimonia, and both are linked to the acquired character. The first is self-knowledge; the second is a sense of personal autonomy that follows in the wake of the first. The chapter ends with a brief attempt to connect Schopenhauer’s concept of acquired character to contemporary debates in ethics concerning autonomy, practical identity, and what some call the ‘normative significance of self’. (shrink)

Some commentators argue that conception constitutes the onset of human personhood in a metaphysical sense. This threshold is usually invoked as the basis both for protecting zygotes and embryos from exposure to risks of death in clinical research and fertility medicine and for objecting to abortion, but it also has consequences for certain religious perspectives, including Catholicism whose doctrines directly engage questions of personhood and its meanings. Since more human zygotes and embryos are lost than survive to birth, conferral of (...) personhood on them would mean – for those believing in personal immortality – that these persons constitute the majority of people living immortally despite having had only the shortest of earthly lives. For those believing in resurrection, zygotes and embryos would also be restored to physical lives. These outcomes do not mean that conception cannot function as a metaphysical threshold of personhood, but this interpretation carries costs that others do not. For example, treating conception as a moral threshold of respect for human life in general, rather than as a metaphysical threshold of personhood, would obviate the prospect of the afterlife being populated in the main by persons who have never lived more than a few hours or days. (shrink)

In a detailed examination of Quine's Two Dogmas of Empiricism, I argue that Quine fails to make the case that there are no analytical truths in ordinary language. Drawing on admissions he makes with regard to definitions and languages' relationship to pragmatic considerations, and an examination of his arguments concerning the interdefinability of the terms `synonymous', and `analytic', I argue that analytic truths exist as deducible consequences of the various uses to which language or sub-languages are put.

In this paper, we investigate the role of intention and joint attention in joint actions. Depending on the shared intentions the agents have, we distinguish between joint path-goal actions and joint final-goal actions. We propose an instrumental account of basic joint action analogous to a concept of basic action and argue that intentional joint attention is a basic joint action. Furthermore, we discuss the functional role of intentional joint attention for successful cooperation in complex joint actions. Anika Fiebich is PhD (...) student in Philosophy at the Ruhr-University Bochum, Germany. Shaun Gallagher is Lilian and Morrie Moss Professor of Philosophy at the University of Memphis, USA. (shrink)

In this revised edition, two distinguished philosophers have extended and strengthened the most authoritative text available on the philosophy of law and jurisprudence. While retaining their comprehensive coverage of classical and modern theory, Murphy and Coleman have added new discussions of the Critical Legal Studies movement and feminist jurisprudence, and they have strengthened their treatment of natural law theory, criminalization, and the law of torts. The chapter on law and economics remains the best short introduction to that difficult, controversial, (...) and influential topic.Students will appreciate the careful organization and clear presentation of complicated issues as well as the emphasis on the relevance of both law and legal theory to contemporary society. (shrink)

This book delivers a definitive contribution to the understanding of Habermas's oeuvre as it applies to education. The authors examine Habermas's contribution to pedagogy, learning and classroom interaction; the relation between education, civil society and the state; forms of democracy, reason and critical thinking; and performativity, audit cultures and accountability.