Rush Rhees (1905-1989) was a philosopher, and a pupil and close friend of Ludwig Wittgenstein. While some of Rhees's own published papers became classics, most of his work remained unpublished during his lifetime. After his death, his papers were found to comprise sixteen thousand pages of manuscript on every aspect of philosophy, from philosophical logic to Simone Weil. This collection of unpublished papers, edited by D. Z. Phillips, includes Rhees's outstanding work on philosophy and religion. Written over an academic lifetime, (...) some of the papers are sympathetic to religion while others are not. It is Rhees's ability to interweave the personal and philosophical, and his integrity and intellectual honesty, which make this one of the most impressive books in twentieth-century philosophy of religion. (shrink)

Ethical debates around genetic enhancement tend to include an argument that the technology will eventually be fairly accessible once available. That we can fairly distribute genetic enhancement has become a moral defence of genetic enhancement. Two distribution solutions are argued for, the first being equal distribution. Equality of access is generally believed to be the fairest and most just method of distribution. Second, equitable distribution: providing genetic enhancements to reduce social inequalities. In this paper, I make two claims. I first (...) argue that the very assumption that genetic enhancements can be distributed fairly is problematic when considering our understanding of gene–environment interactions, for example, epigenetics. I then argue that arguments that genetic enhancements are permissible because the intended benefits can be distributed fairly as intended are misinformed. My first claim rests on the assertion that genetic enhancements do not enhance traits in a vacuum; genes are dependent on conducive environments for expression. If society cannot guarantee fair environments, then any benefit conferred from being genetically enhanced will be undermined. Thus, any argument that the distribution of genetic enhancements will be fair and that the technology is therefore morally permissible, is mistaken. (shrink)

Parents influence the development of their offspring in many ways beyond the transmission of DNA. This includes transfer of epigenetic states, nutrients, antibodies and hormones, and behavioural interactions after birth. While the evolutionary consequences of such nongenetic inheritance are increasingly well understood, less is known about how inheritance mechanisms evolve. Here, we present a simple but versatile model to explore the adaptive evolution of non-genetic inheritance. Our model is based on a switch mechanism that produces alternative phenotypes in response to (...) different inputs, including genes and non-genetic factors transmitted from parents and the environment experienced during development. This framework shows how genetic and non-genetic inheritance mechanisms and environmental conditions can act as cues by carrying correlational information about future selective conditions. Differential use of these cues is manifested as different degrees of genetic, parental or environmental morph determination. We use this framework to evaluate the conditions favouring non-genetic inheritance, as opposed to genetic determination of phenotype or within-generation plasticity, by applying it to two putative examples of adaptive non-genetic inheritance: maternal effects on seed germination in plants and transgenerational phase shift in desert locusts. Our simulation models show how the adaptive value of non-genetic inheritance depends on its mechanism, the pace of environmental change, and life history characteristics. (shrink)

Adapting gross motor movement to match the tempo of auditory rhythmic stimulation is a complex skill with a long developmental trajectory. Drumming tasks have previously been employed with infants and young children to measure the emergence of rhythmic entrainment, and may provide a tool for identification of those with atypical rhythm perception and production. Here we describe a new protocol for measuring infant rhythmic movement that can be employed at scale. In the current study, 50 two-year-olds drummed along with the (...) audiovisual presentation of four steady rhythms, using videos of isochronous drumming at 400, 500, 600, and 700 ms IOI, and provided their spontaneous motor tempo by drumming in silence. Toddlers’ drumming is observed from video recordings made in participants’ own homes, obtained via the Lookit platform for online infant studies. We use OpenPose deep-learning model to generate wireframe estimates of hand and body location for each video. The vertical displacement of the hand was extracted, and the power and frequency of infants’ rhythmic entrainment quantified using Fast Fourier Transforms. We find evidence for age-appropriate tempo-flexibility in our sample. Our results demonstrate the feasibility of a fully digital approach to measuring rhythmic entrainment from within the participant’s home, from early in development. (shrink)

Between 1937 and 1951 Wittgenstein had numerous philosophical conversations with his student and close friend, Rush Rhees. This article is composed of Rhees’s notes of twenty such conversations — namely, all those which have not yet been published — as well as some supplements from Rhees’s correspondence and miscellaneous notes. The principal value of the notes collected here is that they fill some interesting and important gaps in Wittgenstein ’s corpus. Thus, firstly, the notes touch on a wide range of (...) subjects, a number of which are only briefly addressed by Wittgenstein elsewhere, if at all. The subjects discussed include: explanation, ethics, anarchism, contradiction, psychoanalysis, colour, religion, concepts, classification, seeing-as, evolution, the relation between science and philosophy, and free will, amongst others. Secondly, the notes contain references to, and brief remarks about, philosophers of whom Wittgenstein otherwise says very little, if anything — such as Brentano, Heidegger, Aquinas, and Marx, amongst others. And thirdly, the notes provide us with valuable examples of Wittgenstein ’s use of some key ‘Wittgensteinian’ terms of art which are surprisingly rare in his written works, such as ‘surface-’ and ‘depth-grammar’, and ‘centres of variation’. (shrink)

By analyzing the feminist debates on Hans-Georg Gadamer, the author shows that feminist critics point to the need either to supplement or to replace Gadamer's philosophy with a greater sensitivity to the historical implications of women's experience. Thus, they are of the view either that Gadamer's philosophy has yet to come to terms with specific historical situations or that Gadamer's philosophy cannot come to terms with historical situatedness per se. The author contends that Gadamer's femi-nist critics do not locate the (...) source of his residual transcendentalism where it should be located: in the account of aesthetic judgment as a "pure feeling" that underpins his entire philosophy. This has the effect, of appearing to preserve aesthetic judgment as "pure feeling" as an apparently innocent remedy, to which some of his feminist critics actually appeal in opposition to his transcendentalism. The author argues, to the contrary, that aesthetic judgment, as a "pure feeling," is at once too com-plicit in the tradition that feminists seek to engage with, traditionally too insubstantial to make a rich resource for a feminist critique of that tradition, and ultimately too traditionally male-centered to be easily coopted by a feminist philosopher. (shrink)

In these discussions, Rush Rhees, who was a student and close friend of Wittgenstein, works out what he has learned from Wittgenstein's personal teaching and from study of his published and (at the time) unpublished writings. Some are review articles of books on Wittgenstein, and these are devoted to exposition of Wittgenstein's views. Others are independent discussions of special points in Wittgenstein's philosophy. The longest article, here published for the first time, is an account or record of what Wittgenstein said (...) about continuity in private discussion in 1938. (shrink)

Historically, farmers have been amongst the most innovative people in the world. However, agriculture now lags behind other sectors in its uptake of new information technologies for the control and automation of farming systems. In spite of decades of research into innovation, we still do not have a good understanding as to why this is the case. With the globalisation of food markets, IT adoption in agricultural communities is perceived to be increasingly important by policy makers. As the most marginalised (...) of rural communities, it is self-evident that agricultural communities in less developed countries are most in need of these systems. This paper proposes a new integral systems framework of e-agricultural adoption and innovation in less developed countries. It opens up a new avenue of research for control and automation systems theory and practice, which informs policy in respect of e-readiness of rural communities. (shrink)

Recent impossibility theorems for fair risk assessment extend to the domain of epistemic justice. We translate the relevant model, demonstrating that the problems of fair risk assessment and just credibility assessment are structurally the same. We motivate the fairness criteria involved in the theorems as also being appropriate in the setting of testimonial justice. Any account of testimonial justice that implies the fairness/justice criteria must be abandoned, on pain of triviality.

Food Deserts have recently beenidentified in the United Kingdom. They havebeen defined by Tessa Jowell, UK GovernmentHealth Minister, as an area ``where people donot have easy access to healthy, fresh foods,particularly if they are poor and have limitedmobility.'' The above definition is particularlyrelevant in Northern Ireland, where it isestimated that 32% of households do not haveeasy access to a car and it is recognized thatcertain groups in Northern Ireland are amongstthe poorest consumers in the United Kingdom.The phenomenon has been further (...) exacerbated bythe effect of large grocery retailers locatingon the periphery of towns and the subsequentdisplacement effect of independent retailers inthe town center. The resultant effect is suchthat disadvantaged consumers cannot accessfresh, quality, nutritious foods at anaffordable price. Preliminary researchindicates that certain consumer groups areexcluded from equitable shopping provision –possibly to the detriment of their healthstatus. Research methodology includes aconsumer questionnaire, consumer focus groups,interviews, and comparative shopping exercisesthat confirm an inability among vulnerableconsumer groups to achieve an affordable,healthy diet. This was further complicated bynon-car owners' and lower-income family unitsneeding to shop locally and more frequentlythan their higher-income, car-ownercounterparts. This was demonstrated with theuse of shopping diaries. Future research to beconducted includes a large-scale survey acrossNorthern Ireland to ascertain accessibility,availability, and affordability of qualityfresh foods and to distinguish the consumergroups who are most vulnerable. (shrink)

This paper generalizes rationalizability of a choice function by a single acyclic binary relation to rationalizability by a set of such relations. Rather than selecting those options in a menu that are maximal with respect to a single binary relation, a weakly pseudo-rationalizable choice function selects those options that are maximal with respect to at least one binary relation in a given set. I characterize the class of weakly pseudo-rationalizable choice functions in terms of simple functional properties. This result also (...) generalizes Aizerman and Malishevski's characterization of pseudo-rationalizable choice functions, that is, choice functions rationalizable by a set of total orders. (shrink)

Our editorial introduces this Special Issue devoted to exploring the ethics of youth work practice in the twenty-first century. The call for papers for this Special Issue went out in October 2022 w...

The question of how the probabilistic opinions of different individuals should be aggregated to form a group opinion is controversial. But one assumption seems to be pretty much common ground: for a group of Bayesians, the representation of group opinion should itself be a unique probability distribution, 410–414, [45]; Bordley Management Science, 28, 1137–1148, [5]; Genest et al. The Annals of Statistics, 487–501, [21]; Genest and Zidek Statistical Science, 114–135, [23]; Mongin Journal of Economic Theory, 66, 313–351, [46]; Clemen and (...) Winkler Risk Analysis, 19, 187–203, [7]; Dietrich and List [14]; Herzberg Theory and Decision, 1–19, [28]). We argue that this assumption is not always in order. We show how to extend the canonical mathematical framework for pooling to cover pooling with imprecise probabilities by employing set-valued pooling functions and generalizing common pooling axioms accordingly. As a proof of concept, we then show that one IP construction satisfies a number of central pooling axioms that are not jointly satisfied by any of the standard pooling recipes on pain of triviality. Following Levi, 3–11, [39]), we also argue that IP models admit of a much better philosophical motivation as a model of rational consensus. (shrink)

Merging of opinions results underwrite Bayesian rejoinders to complaints about the subjective nature of personal probability. Such results establish that sufficiently similar priors achieve consensus in the long run when fed the same increasing stream of evidence. Initial subjectivity, the line goes, is of mere transient significance, giving way to intersubjective agreement eventually. Here, we establish a merging result for sets of probability measures that are updated by Jeffrey conditioning. This generalizes a number of different merging results in the literature. (...) We also show that such sets converge to a shared, maximally informed opinion. Convergence to a maximally informed opinion is a (weak) Jeffrey conditioning analogue of Bayesian “convergence to the truth” for conditional probabilities. Finally, we demonstrate the philosophical significance of our study by detailing applications to the topics of dynamic coherence, imprecise probabilities, and probabilistic opinion pooling. (shrink)

In many assessment problems—aptitude testing, hiring decisions, appraisals of the risk of recidivism, evaluation of the credibility of testimonial sources, and so on—the fair treatment of different groups of individuals is an important goal. But individuals can be legitimately grouped in many different ways. Using a framework and fairness constraints explored in research on algorithmic fairness, I show that eliminating certain forms of bias across groups for one way of classifying individuals can make it impossible to eliminate such bias across (...) groups for another way of dividing people up. And this point generalizes if we require merely that assessments be approximately bias-free. Moreover, even if the fairness constraints are satisfied for some given partitions of the population, the constraints can fail for the coarsest common refinement, that is, the partition generated by taking intersections of the elements of these coarser partitions. This shows that these prominent fairness constraints admit the possibility of forms of intersectional bias. (shrink)

Rush Rhees questions the viability of moral theories and the general claims they make in ethics. He shows how one can both be concerned with knowing what one ought to do while recognizing that one's answer is a personal one. These insights, arrived at in a distinctive style, characteristic of Rhees, are then applied to issues of life and death, human sexuality, and our relations to animals. To recognize why philosophy cannot answer such questions for us is an affirmation, not (...) a denial, of their importance. (shrink)

This essay addresses the relationship between home, belonging and the maternal in feminist theory and fiction. Feminist discourse isoften typified by its critique of home: analysing the gendered assumptions underlying the depiction of home as nurturing, or exposing the regressive and essentialist connotations of the search for safe homes. A number of recent feminist theorists (Probyn, Bammer, Young) have, however, pointed to thepersistence of ‘retrograde’ desires for safety and belonging, particularly in an era of widespread dislocations. At the same time, (...) feminist critics such as Roberta Rubenstein have re-invoked the contested relationship between home and the maternal by arguing that the desire for home speaks to our earliest needs for security: a desire that ultimately maps on to a longing for the (idealized) mother as the ‘original safe home’ (Rubenstein, 2001). This essay draws upon the work of Rubenstein, Bammer and Young in order to examine the relationship between home and the maternal in a recent Irish novel, Mary Morrissy’s Mother of Pearl. The plot of this novel, dealing with the events surrounding an incident of baby snatching, suggests both the persistence of (the maternal) home as a desire and the impossibility of identifying an original or authentic maternal/home. By exploring how the protagonists of this novel negotiate the demands and appeals of home and motherhood, this essay will ask to what extent it may be possible for feminism to recuperate, or re-envision, the maternal/home as utopian ideal. (shrink)

For much of its history, philosophy was not merely a theoretical discipline but a way of life, an "art of living." This practical aspect of philosophy has been much less dominant in modernity than it was in ancient Greece and Rome, when philosophers of all stripes kept returning to Socrates as a model for living. The idea of philosophy as an art of living has survived in the works of such major modern authors as Montaigne, Nietzsche, and Foucault. Each of (...) these writers has used philosophical discussion as a means of establishing what a person is and how a worthwhile life is to be lived. In this wide-ranging, brilliantly written account, Alexander Nehamas provides an incisive reevaluation of Socrates' place in the Western philosophical tradition and shows the importance of Socrates for Montaigne, Nietzsche, and Foucault. Why does each of these philosophers—each fundamentally concerned with his own originality—return to Socrates as a model? The answer lies in the irony that characterizes the Socrates we know from the Platonic dialogues. Socratic irony creates a mask that prevents a view of what lies behind. How Socrates led the life he did, what enabled or inspired him, is never made evident. No tenets are proposed. Socrates remains a silent and ambiguous character, forcing readers to come to their own conclusions about the art of life. This, Nehamas shows, is what allowed Montaigne, Nietzsche, and Foucault to return to Socrates as a model without thereby compelling them to imitate him. This highly readable, erudite study argues for the importance of the tradition within Western philosophy that is best described as "the art of living" and casts Montaigne, Nietzsche, and Foucault as the three major modern representatives of this tradition. Full of original ideas and challenging associations, this work will offer new ways of thinking about the philosophers Nehamas discusses and about the discipline of philosophy itself. (shrink)

Essays offer a glimpse of the Vienna-born philosopher's personality, character, and life's work.

There is a theorem that shows that it is impossible for an algorithm to jointly satisfy the statistical fairness criteria of Calibration and Equalised Odds non-trivially. But what about the recently advocated alternative to Calibration, Base Rate Tracking? Here, we show that Base Rate Tracking is strictly weaker than Calibration, and then take up the question of whether it is possible to jointly satisfy Base Rate Tracking and Equalised Odds in non-trivial scenarios. We show that it is not, thereby establishing (...) an even more general impossibility theorem. (shrink)

Self‐care, or self‐management, is presented in healthcare policy as a precursor to patient empowerment and improved patient outcomes. Alternatively, critiques of the self‐care agenda suggest that it represents an over‐reliance on individual autonomy and responsibility, without adequate support, whereby ‘self‐care’ is potentially unachievable and becomes ‘care left undone’. In this sense, self‐care contributes to a blame culture where ill‐health is attributed to personal behaviours or lack thereof. Furthermore, self‐care may represent a covert form of rationing, as the fiscal means to (...) enable effective self‐care and supplement, or replace, self‐care capacities, is not provided. This paper explores these arguments through a contemporary ethical analysis of the self‐care agenda. The terms self‐care and self‐management are used interchangeably throughout whereby self‐management is understood as a point in the wider self‐care continuum. (shrink)

In this book, Rhees brings out the continuity in Wittgenstein's thought, and the radical character of his conclusions.

We explore which types of probabilistic updating commute with convex IP pooling. Positive results are stated for Bayesian conditionalization, imaging, and a certain parameterization of Jeffrey conditioning. This last observation is obtained with the help of a slight generalization of a characterization of externally Bayesian pooling operators due to Wagner :336–345, 2009). These results strengthen the case that pooling should go by imprecise probabilities since no precise pooling method is as versatile.

I provide a characterization of weakly pseudo-rationalizable choice functions---that is, choice functions rationalizable by a set of acyclic relations---in terms of hyper-relations satisfying certain properties. For those hyper-relations Nehring calls extended preference relations, the central characterizing condition is weaker than (hyper-relation) transitivity but stronger than (hyper-relation) acyclicity. Furthermore, the relevant type of hyper-relation can be represented as the intersection of a certain class of its extensions. These results generalize known, analogous results for path independent choice functions.

Our aim here is to present a result that connects some approaches to justifying countable additivity. This result allows us to better understand the force of a recent argument for countable additivity due to Easwaran. We have two main points. First, Easwaran’s argument in favour of countable additivity should have little persuasive force on those permissive probabilists who have already made their peace with violations of conglomerability. As our result shows, Easwaran’s main premiss – the comparative principle – is strictly (...) stronger than conglomerability. Second, with the connections between the comparative principle and other probabilistic concepts clearly in view, we point out that opponents of countable additivity can still make a case that countable additivity is an arbitrary stopping point between finite and full additivity. (shrink)

Four years after the publication of Wittgenstein's Investigations, Rush Rhees began writing critical reflections on the masterpiece he had helped to edit. In this edited collection of his previously unpublished writings, Rhees argues, contra Wittgenstein, that although language lacks the unity of a calculus it is not simply a family of language games. The unity of language is found in its dialogical character. It is in this context that we say something, and grow in understanding: notions not captured in Wittgenstein's (...) emphasis on language games, following rules, and using language. Rhees develops Wittgenstein's notion that to imagine a language is to image a form of life, without suggesting that we are all engaged in an all-inclusive conversation. The result is not only a major contribution to Wittgenstein scholarship, but an original discussion of central philosophical questions concerning the possibility of discourse. (shrink)

Rush, Ormond Vatican II still has a long way to go. Its vision is far from becoming a reality in the church. The council opened on Thursday 11 October 1962. As we celebrate the 50th anniversary of that day, it is an opportunity to recall the Australian participation in that historic event, to recall its vision, and for some self-examination as to how well we have received it.

Critical Theory constitutes one of the major intellectual traditions of the twentieth century, and is centrally important for philosophy, political theory, aesthetics and theory of art, the study of modern European literatures and music, the history of ideas, sociology, psychology, and cultural studies. In this volume an international team of distinguished contributors examines the major figures in Critical Theory, including Horkheimer, Adorno, Marcuse, Benjamin, and Habermas, as well as lesser known but important thinkers such as Pollock and Neumann. The volume (...) surveys the shared philosophical concerns that have given impetus to Critical Theory throughout its history, while at the same time showing the diversity among its proponents that contributes so much to its richness as a philosophical school. The result is an illuminating overview of the entire history of Critical Theory in the twentieth century, an examination of its central conceptual concerns, and an in-depth discussion of its future prospects. (shrink)

EDITOR'S NOTE The essay published here is edited from the Rush Rhees Nachlass, which is now in the possession of the University College of Swansea, under the direction of Professor D. Z. Phillips. The Nachlass is not at present open to students and scholars, apart from commissioned editing. The sources of the essay are three letters and three typescripts. The letters are from Rhees to M. O'C. Drury, who was a student of Wittgenstein's and a friend of Rhees's. They are (...) dated 21 March 1959, 21 July 1963, and 30 September 1964. (Readers familiar with Rhees's Without Answers will recognize certain expressions which occur in this essay. Chapter 17 of that book was draw from the 1963 letter to Drury.)One of the typescripts is dated 17 October 1965; the other two are undated, but I would guess they were written at about the same time. The title and footnotes are my own. T. T. (shrink)

Supra-Bayesianism is the Bayesian response to learning the opinions of others. Probability pooling constitutes an alternative response. One natural question is whether there are cases where probability pooling gives the supra-Bayesian result. This has been called the problem of Bayes-compatibility for pooling functions. It is known that in a common prior setting, under standard assumptions, linear pooling cannot be nontrivially Bayes-compatible. We show by contrast that geometric pooling can be nontrivially Bayes-compatible. Indeed, we show that, under certain assumptions, geometric and (...) Bayes-compatible pooling are equivalent. Granting supra-Bayesianism its usual normative status, one upshot of our study is thus that, in a certain class of epistemic contexts, geometric pooling enjoys a normative advantage over linear pooling as a social learning mechanism. We discuss the philosophical ramifications of this advantage, which we show to be robust to variations in our statement of the Bayes-compatibility problem. (shrink)

The autonomous right of competent adults to decide what happens to their own body and the corresponding right to consent to or refuse medical treatment are cornerstones of modern health care. For minors the situation is not so clear cut. Since the well-known case of Gillick, mature children under the age of 16 can agree to proposed medical treatment. However, those under the age of 18 do not enjoy any corresponding right to refuse medical treatment. Can this separation of the (...) right to agree to treatment and the right to refuse treatment for those under 18, regardless of capacity, be justified? This paper evaluates the key cases in this area of the law. Changes to the current law are then proposed which aim to make the law more consistent and reasonable. (shrink)

Ran is one of the most abundant and best conserved of the small GTP binding and hydrolyzing proteins of eukaryotes. It is located predominantly in cell nuclei. Ran is a member of the Ras family of GTPases, which includes the Ras and Ras‐like proteins that regulate cell growth and division, the Rho and Rac proteins that regulate cytoskeletal organization and the Rab proteins that regulate vesicular sorting. Ran differs most obviously from other members of the Ras family in both its (...) nuclear localization, and its lack of sites required for post‐translational lipid modification. Ran is, however, similar to other Ras family members in requiring a specific guanine nucleotide exchange factor (GEF) and a specific GTPase activating protein (GAP) as stimulators of overall GTPase activity. In this review, the multiple cellular functions of Ran are evaluated with respect to its known biochemistry and molecular interactions. (shrink)

Rhees draws on wittgenstein's writings and on several conversations with him to discuss wittgenstein's views on, Among other things, The separation of judgments of value from statements of fact, The nature of an ethical rule, The ways in which people work out their ethical problems, And the multifariousness of the phenomena we consider under the heading of ethics. (staff).

Featuring fourteen new essays from an international team of renowned contributors, this volume explores the key issues, debates and questions in the metaphysics of logic. The book is structured in three parts, looking first at the main positions in the nature of logic, such as realism, pluralism, relativism, objectivity, nihilism, conceptualism, and conventionalism, then focusing on historical topics such as the medieval Aristotelian view of logic, the problem of universals, and Bolzano's logical realism. The final section tackles specific issues such (...) as glutty theories, contradiction, the metaphysical conception of logical truth, and the possible revision of logic. The volume will provide readers with a rich and wide-ranging survey, a valuable digest of the many views in this area, and a long overdue investigation of logic's relationship to us and the world. It will be of interest to a wide range of scholars and students of philosophy, logic, and mathematics. (shrink)

When in May 1930, the Council of Trinity College, Cambridge, had to decide whether to renew Wittgenstein's research grant, it turned to Bertrand Russell for an assessment of the work Wittgenstein had been doing over the past year. His verdict: The theories contained in this new work... are novel, very original and indubitably important. Whether they are true, I do not know. As a logician who like simplicity, I should like to think that they are not, but from what I (...) have read of them I am quite sure that he ought to have the opportunity to work them out, since, when completed, they may easily prove to constitute a whole new philosophy. (shrink)