Significant disagreement remains in ethics about the duties we have towards wild animals. This paper aims to mediate those disagreements by exploring how they are supported by, or diverge from, the common-sense ethical principles of non-maleficence, beneficence, autonomy and justice popular in medical ethics. We argue that these principles do not clearly justify traditional conservation or a ‘hands-off ’ approach to wild-animal welfare; instead, they support natural negative duties to reduce the harms that we cause as well as natural positive (...) duties to promote the welfare of wild animals. (shrink)

In this eye-opening look at the doctor-patient decision-making process, physician and law professor Jay Katz examines the time-honored belief in the virtue of silent care and patient compliance. Historically, the doctor-patient relationship has been based on a one-way trust -- despite recent judicial attempts to give patients a greater voice through the doctrine of informed consent. Katz criticizes doctors for encouraging patients to relinquish their autonomy, and demonstrates the detrimental effect their silence has on good patient care. Seeing (...) a growing need in this age of medical science and sophisticated technology for more honest and complete communication between physician and patients, he advocates a new, informed dialogue that respects the rights and needs of both sides. In a new foreword to this edition of The Silent World of Doctor and Patient , Alexander Morgan Capron outlines the changes in medical ethics practice that have occurred since the book was first published in 1984, paying particular attention to the hotly debated issues of physician-assisted suicide and informed consent in managed care. (shrink)

Over the years, phenomenology has provided illuminating descriptions of discrimination, with its mechanisms and effects being thematised at the most basic levels of embodiment, (dis)orientation, selfhood, and belonging. What remains somewhat understudied is the lived experience of the discriminator. In this paper I draw on Husserl's phenomenological account of normality to reflect on the ways in which we discriminate at the prereflective levels of perceptual experience and bodily being. By critically reflecting on the intentional structures undergirding discriminatory practices, I argue (...) that discrimination is characteristic of a naïve normalising attitude which is habitually interested in securing a familiar experience of a static normality. I first demonstrate how this attitude problematically tends to reproduce, enforce, and further sediment discriminatory and exclusionary norms. Further, I provide an internal critique which problematises discrimination—without recourse to external normative standards—on three fronts: as epistemically unproductive, experientially obscuring, and normatively non-instantiating. In discriminatory acts we see an abnormal refusal to enrich, revise, and genetically establish new normative commitments, new ways of seeing, and a new normality. (shrink)

This article analyzes the question of how the size of bribes should impact criminal sanctions. In contrast to the commonly held view that punishment should increase with the size of the bribe, we argue to the contrary: that the punishment of the bribee should decrease with the size of the bribe. Our conclusion is based both on a philosophical argument and an economic argument. We argue that all else being equal, as an agent’s reservation price for selling public interests decreases, (...) the culpability of the agent willing to receive a bribe increases. In addition, from an economic perspective, the expected social harm of an official acting with a low reservation price for bribes is much greater than one acting with a high reservation price: both the susceptibility of being bribed as well as the potential for social harm is much greater when the reservation price is low. (shrink)

Cultural capital and hegemonic masculinity are two concepts that have received intense attention. While both have received serious consideration, critique and analysis, the context or field-specificity of each is sometimes ignored. They have been used in a diversity of ways. Using ethnographic and interview data from a US male bodybuilding community, this study highlights one useful employment. Hegemonic masculinity takes different shapes in different fields of interaction, acting as a form of cultural capital: gender capital. Inherent in this discussion are (...) the cultural contradictions apparent among individuals striving for either physical or ideological embodiments of gender capital. Individuals can attempt to embody hegemonic idealizations, but bodies are not only inscribed with gender, inscriptions are read, and read differently by different social actors and in different settings. The capacity of gender capital to remain elusive is precisely what enables gender practices and projects like bodybuilding to retain passionate participation. (shrink)

Yeshayahu Leibowitz (1903–1994) was an Israeli philosopher and scientist. For decades, his thinking and persona were the embodiment of a Judaism in Israel. Getting to know him is getting to know a great Israeli thinker and also invites a window into the life of Israel and its problems.

Viewing emotion from an evolutionary perspective, researchers have argued that simple responses to affective stimuli can be triggered without mediation of cognitive processes. Indeed, findings suggest that positively and negatively valenced stimuli trigger approach and avoidance movements automatically. However, affective stimulus–response compatibility phenomena share so many central characteristics with nonaffective stimulus–response compatibility phenomena that one may doubt whether the underlying mechanisms differ. We suggest an “affectively enriched” version of the theory of event coding (TEC) that is able to account for (...) both affective and nonaffective compatibility, and that can account for the observation that both types of compatibility seem to be modulated by goals and intentions. Predictions from the model are tested in an experiment where participants carried out approach and avoidance responses to either the valence or the orientation of emotionally charged pictures. Under affective instruction the positive-approach/negative-avoid mapping yielded faster responses than the positive-avoid/negative-approach mapping, but no such effect was observed under spatial instruction. Conversely, spatial compatibility effects were obtained under spatial, but not under affective instruction. We conclude that affective and nonaffective compatibility effects reflect the same mechanism. (shrink)

What is a thing? What is an object? Tristan Garcia decisively overturns 100 years of Heideggerian orthodoxy about the supposedly derivative nature of objects to put forward a new theory of ontology that gives us deep insights into the world and our place in it."e.

What happened to the theories of Europe developed by the Enlightenment? Following a pluridisciplinary perspective, this book examines the way in which the projects conceived in the 18th century were reinvested both in the founding texts of the European Union and in contemporary political theory.

Kosmopolitismus wird oft als elitäre Geisteshaltung angesehen. Diese Studie geht allerdings von der These aus, dass er auch ein gesellschaftliches und politisches Engagement begründet hat. Es wird untersucht, wie Weltbürger grenzüberschreitend gemeinsame Positionierungen entwickelten und umsetzten. Im Fokus steht der Umgang mit dem kosmopolitischen Erbe der Aufklärung im 19. und frühen 20. Jahrhundert zwischen Deutschland und Frankreich. 0Auf der Suche nach Transferphänomenen, Spannungen und Verflechtungen werden entscheidende Umbruchsphasen beleuchtet: die Debatten des Revolutionszeitalters, die Erneuerung des Internationalismus nach 1848/1849, das Wechselverhältnis (...) von Nationalismus und Universalismus um 1871, die Friedensbewegung vor 1914 und der Versuch, nach dem Krieg eine friedliche Weltordnung weltbürgerlich zu begründen. Die Aufarbeitung kosmopolitischer Einstellungen bietet Einsicht in einen deutsch-französischen Lernprozess, der die Durchsetzung einer geteilten Demokratieauffassung begünstigt hat. (shrink)

David de Dinant, dont les thèses ont été condamnées par le décret de 1210 de l’Université de Paris, est bien connu par les réfutations dont il a fait l’objet de la part d’Albert le Grand et Thomas d’Aquin. En se fondant sur ses Quaternuli, on se propose ici, non pas d’apporter des éléments biographiques nouveaux, mais de reconstituer les médiations qui ont conduit ce commentateur de la « philosophie naturelle » d’Aristote à défendre ses fameuses positions « panthéistes » et (...) « matérialistes », et à identifier Dieu à la matière et à la substance du tout. En marge des commentaires arabes, moyennant un contact direct avec les textes grecs du Stagirite, David propose une lecture toute problématique, mais parfaitement stimulante de l’articulation de la « philosophie naturelle » à la « philosophie première ». (shrink)

Dans cet article, nous proposons de lire la première des Méditations Métaphysiques de Descartes, non pas « selon l’ordre des raisons », mais du point de vue de sa vraisemblance clinique, comme le récit d’une expérience typique de désorganisation qui accompagne ordinairement l’éclosion des psychoses délirantes : depuis un sentiment d’étrangeté qui met en péril la croyance naïve dans la réalité du monde jusqu’au délire d’influence qui organise l’hypothèse du « malin génie ». Dans cette perspective, l’argument de la folie (...) n’est qu’un moment. Nous proposons de faire l’hypothèse que l’on peut mettre ce récit en regard de l’expérience singulière et traumatique de novembre 1619, consignée, selon A. Baillet, dans le recueil des Olympica. (shrink)

Hydraulic fracturing ('fracking') has enabled the recovery of previously inaccessible resources and rendered new areas of the underground 'productive'. While a number of studies in the US and UK have examined public attitudes toward fracking and its various impacts, how people conceptualise the deep underground itself has received less attention. We argue that views on resources, risk and the deep underground raise important questions about how people perceive the desirability and viability of subterranean interventions. We conducted day-long deliberation workshops (two (...) in each country), facilitating discussions among diverse groups of people on prospective shale extraction in the US and UK. Themes that emerged in these conversations include seeing the Earth as a foundation; natural limits (a greater burden than the subsurface can withstand versus simply overuse of natural resources); and ideas about the fragility, instability and opacity of the deep underground. We find that concerns in both countries were not limited to specific, localised impacts but also addressed ecosystem links between surface and subsurface environments and broader questions about the use, identification and value of natural resources. (shrink)

Criteria of historical assessment are applied to the Turin Shroud to determine which hypothesis relating to the image formation process is the most likely. To implement this, a ‘Minimal Facts’ approach is followed that takes into account only physicochemical and historical data receiving the widest consensus among contemporary scientists. The result indicates that the probability of the Shroud of Turin being the real shroud of Jesus of Nazareth is very high; historians and natural theologians should therefore pay it increased attention.

Les logiciels d’aide à la décision basés sur des techniques d’intelligence artificielle sont de plus en plus utilisés dans le domaine de la justice. Or ces techniques nécessitent souvent d’accéder à de grandes quantités d’informations personnelles afin de réaliser un apprentissage de qualité. En France, le cadre légal semble aujourd’hui favorable à l’ouverture des jugements, pourvu que la vie privée des personnes concernées soit respectée. Cependant, la protection des données personnelles destinées à être publiées reste difficile techniquement. Cet article a (...) pour objectif de décrire une attaque minimaliste qui a été réalisée en 2014 sur un jeu de données protégé par l’application d’un algorithme de pseudonymisation. L’originalité de cette attaque réside dans sa simplicité de fonctionnement – elle ne nécessite pas d’accès à un jeu de données auxiliaire – et dans sa cible – l’algorithme de pseudonymisation. Nous présentons la famille des algorithmes de pseudonymisation, décrivons et analysons l’attaque, et concluons sur la place de la pseudonymisation dans le Règlement Général sur la Protection des Données personnelles. (shrink)

Political philosophy was once dominated by discussion of the virtues of character and their importance to the good life and the good society. Contemporary political philosophers, however, following the towering influence of John Rawls, have primarily focused on a single virtue of institutions: justice, while largely avoiding controversial claims about the good life. As a result, political philosophy lacks a unified account of the virtues of institutions and the virtues of character. More importantly, we lack an understanding of the connection (...) between the just society and the good life. This book begins to mend this broken seam, which, on reflection, lies at the heart of our deepest political problems. The book’s central argument is that the virtues of character require institutions, while good institutions enable persons to live together virtuously. Political institutions are a necessary precondition for the moral agency exhibited by the virtues. But good institutions enable virtue to grow, while helping to constrain the excesses of vice. On this view, justice emerges primarily as a virtue of character, not institutions. The just person balances conformity to existing institutional norms with practically wise reforms. Ultimately, this book concludes that the just society and the good life are linked through the common good of virtuous activity within the shared institutions of a political community. (shrink)

The Shroud of Turin is one of the most studied and controversial artifacts. To better understand the reasons for this impossible consensus, we focus on a specific point in the ongoing historical debate: the alleged relationship between the Shroud of Turin and the Pray Codex, the first illuminated manuscript in Hungarian named after the eighteenth-century Jesuit György Pray (1723–1801). Scholars have often compared the characteristics of a miniature in the Pray Codex, commonly dated circa 1192–1195, with the features of the (...) Turin Shroud. The comparison of the Pray Codex with the Shroud of Turin makes the position that the Turin Shroud has absolutely no direct or indirect link with the Pray Codex untenable. It can be said with confidence that the miniaturist of the Pray Codex probably had a direct or indirect link with the Shroud of Turin. (shrink)

I argue that the unthought philosophical bias in favor of seriousness and sense rather than nonsense and joking blocks the path to reality. Because of this bias we obsess over significant signs and forget to consider what signs are signs of; we lose sight of the forest because there are so many interesting trees. Through a thoroughgoing interrogation of signs or appearances, we can reveal what it is that all signs present or represent: the underlying real joke. Once the “sensible (...) bias” of philosophy is overcome and the sense of nonsense restored, we can reveal the object of ontology—the Kantian noumenon—and, therefore, understand the necessary order of signification or representation. In this way, I argue, we can come to be equally amused by all appearances, recognizing that their deceptive character is necessitated by the playful nature of the real thing which, qua joke, provokes amusement. (shrink)

In this chapter, Dahan Katz defends relational conceptions of retribution and desert. She clarifies the ways in which such relational conceptions avoid major worries associated with retributive theory, while addressing further worries that arise distinctively with respect to such an approach. In doing so, Dahan Katz provides further defense of the response-retributive theory of punishment that she has proposed elsewhere, while defending a wider set of views within the retributive tradition.

This paper offers a response retributive theory of punishment, taking the role of the punisher as well as the relations between the parties to punishment to be central to retributive justification. It proposes that punishment is justified in terms of the ethics of appropriate response, and more precisely, in terms of the duty agents have to dissociate from the devaluation inherent in the culpable wrongdoing of others. The paper demonstrates that on such account, while the harm and suffering involved in (...) punishment are rightly imposed, they are not good, grounding a further duty to mitigate our retributive practices. The result is a moderate vision of retributive justification, which has the resources to justify, not only criminal punishment, but punishment as imposed across a wide variety of relations: private, institutional and political. (shrink)

This paper examines an ideology I call techno-colonialism. I argue that techno-colonialism represents an attempt to selectively reproduce settler colonial practices adjusted to twenty-first century realities. This argument has implications for contemporary settler colonialism, the radical right, and climate change politics. In what follows, I discuss the techno-colonial doctrines of Nick Land, Curtis Yarvin, Peter Thiel, and Patri Friedman. These figures articulate a political theory about exploiting new technologies to escape the state and found new societies. To explore techno-colonial ideology, (...) I focus on Seasteading—the practice of creating floating city-states to colonize the ocean––as an attempted realization of techno-colonial ideals. As I claim, techno-colonialism attempts to humanize the politics of settlement. But I argue that techno-colonialism's ambitions fail, and techno-colonialism fails to create a harmless politics of settlement. I conclude that we should be attentive to the relations of political and economic power in which such exit projects are embedded. Moreover, this paper also promotes our understanding of climate change and the radical right's politics. While scholars most naturally associate the radical right with climate change denialism, the techno-colonists illustrate another possibility. They welcome catastrophe, and see rising-sea levels as an opportunity to start society afresh. (shrink)

In this paper, I address the theory of excuse, or more precisely, exculpatory excuse, and the question of what it is that justifies the category of excuse. I address different potential grounds for the law of excuse, which are often run together in ways that confound rather than clarify, focusing on the role of blamelessness and unfairness of expectations in the theory of excuse.

We develop an evidence-based theoretical account of how widely shared cultural beliefs about gender, race, and class intersect in interpersonal and other social relational contexts in the United States to create characteristic cultural “binds” and freedoms for actors in those contexts. We treat gender, race, and class as systems of inequality that are culturally constructed as distinct but implicitly overlap through their defining beliefs, which reflect the perspectives of dominant groups in society. We cite evidence for the contextually contingent interactional (...) “binds” and freedoms this creates for people such as Asian men, Black women, and poor whites who are not prototypical of images embedded in cultural gender, race, and class beliefs. All forms of unprototypicality create “binds,” but freedoms result from being unprototypical of disadvantaging rather than advantaging statuses. (shrink)

In a topic as controversial as the Turin Shroud, it is always surprising to note that there remains a large area of consensus among scholars who hold opposite opinions on the origin of this piece of fabric. According to the consensus view, neither science nor history can prove that the Turin Shroud shows signs of the Resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth. However, the reasons provided for this important claim are not convincing, especially in light of recent developments in historiography and (...) analytic philosophy. (shrink)

Journal of Social Philosophy, EarlyView.

Gillian Russell has recently proposed counterexamples to such elementary argument forms as Conjunction Introduction and Identity. These purported counterexamples involve expressions that are sensitive to linguistic context—for example, a sentence which is true when it appears alone but false when embedded in a larger sentence. If they are genuine counterexamples, it looks as though logical nihilism—the view that there are no valid argument forms—might be true. In this paper, I argue that the purported counterexamples are not genuine, on the grounds (...) that they equivocate. Having defused the threat of logical nihilism, I argue that the kind of linguistic context sensitivity at work in Russell’s purported counterexamples, if taken seriously, far from leading to logical nihilism, reveals new, previously undreamt-of valid forms. By way of proof of concept I present a simple logic, Solo-Only Propositional Logic, designed to capture some of them. Along the way, some interesting subtleties about the fallacy of equivocation are revealed. (shrink)

This paper argues that attribution of the words iube ergo adire to Milphidippa at Plautus, ‘miles gloriosus’ 1268 is wrong, and that they ought to be spoken by Pyrgopolinices.

The question of man -- Time and the will -- Receptivity and spatiality -- Distance and concealment -- Art and difference -- The 'speaking' of language -- Human nature and sensus communis -- Inspiration and genius -- Thought and expression -- A history of truth and truthfulness -- Being and the hidden God.

Chomsky's criticism of Bloomfieldian structuralism's conception of linguistic reality applies equally to his own conception of linguistic reality. There are too many sentences in a natural language for them to have either concrete acoustic reality or concrete psychological or neural reality. Sentences have to be types, which, by Peirce's generally accepted definition, means that they are abstract objects. Given that sentences are abstract objects, Chomsky's generativism as well as his psychologism have to be given up. Langendoen and Postal's argument in (...) The Vastness of Natural Languages to show that there are more than denumerably many sentences is flawed. But, with the view that sentences are abstract objects, the flaws can be corrected. Once psychologism and generativism are abandoned, the revolution against Bloomfieldian structuralism can be brought to completion and linguistics can be put on a sound philosophical basis. (shrink)

Heidegger argues that for being x to count as ‘alive’ it must satisfy three metaphysical conditions. It must be capable of engaging in active behaviour with a form of intentional directedness that offers to us a “sphere of transposition” into which we can intelligibly “transpose ourselves.” Heidegger’s discussion of these conditions, as they apply to the being of animals, is well-known. But, if his argument is sound, they ought also to apply to the being of plants. Heidegger, unfortunately, does not (...) supply this part of his ontology of life in any systematic detail. However, my thesis is that it is possible to interpret the nature and activities of plants, along the lines of –, and thus to make good on Heidegger’s omission. The key to this reconstruction is a reconceptualization of plant movements as constituted by a form of representationally blind, motor-intentionality. (shrink)