This article reviews the seven “visions” of evolution proposed by Depew and Weber , concluding that each posited relationship between natural selection and self-organization has suited different aims and approaches. In the second section of the article, we show that these seven viewpoints may be collapsed into three fundamentally different ones: natural selection drives evolution; self-organization drives evolution; and natural selection and self-organization are complementary aspects of the evolutionary process. We then argue that these three approaches are not mutually exclusive, (...) since each may apply to different stages of development of different systems. What emerges from our discussion is a more encompassing view: that self-organization proposes what natural selection disposes. (shrink)

Dr. Floyd-Thomas’s paper brings nuance to the discussion of pride and the hubris brought by the Westernized Enlightenment across disciplines. As much as I have the impulse to throttle others or shout or spit with the onslaught of mis-truths and ‘alternative facts’, this would not be a wise moment to conclude inquiry as an oral historian, or a Christian ethicist. I ask, can we decolonize ourselves, our syllabi, the canon, and thus our students with grace, understanding, even forgiveness so as (...) not to repeat the trespasses? (shrink)

En este capítulo, analizo a qué se refiere Kuhn cuando habla de metáfora en las Conferencias Notre Dame, pero sobre todo a explorar a qué no se refiere. En la primera sección, analizo por qué Kuhn usa el término “metáfora” para referirse al proceso de aprendizaje de lenguaje científico, en particular, los paralelismos que encuentra entre ambos fenómenos. En la segunda sección, se presentan algunos aspectos centrales de dos teorías influyentes sobre la metáfora: la teoría del mapeo estructural y la (...) teoría de las metáforas conceptuales. Luego, en la sección III, vuelvo a Kuhn para ver las diferencias cruciales que encontramos entre los procesos metafóricos y el proceso de ostensión del que habla el autor. Finalmente, presento una noción del segundo Wittgenstein, la idea de figura, para ofrecer una nueva forma de interpretar la idea de que el cambio revolucionario involucra un cambio en la metáfora central. (shrink)

We call systematic disputes that are particularly hard to resolve deep disagreements. We can divide most theories of deep disagreements in analytic epistemology into two camps: the Wittgensteinian view and the fundamental epistemic principles view. This essay analyzes how both views deal with two of the most pressing issues a theory of deep disagreement must address: their source and their resolution. After concluding that the paradigmatic theory of each camp struggles on both fronts, the essay proceeds to show that, despite (...) their differences, these theories share some core assumptions and think of deep disagreements similarly: as grounded in fundamental epistemic differences between the parties. This underlying conception of deep disagreements the author calls “the fundamental model.” The essay provides reasons to be wary of this conception, and hence, mainstream epistemologists’ treatment of the issue. (shrink)

The introduction to the topic of this issue is an overview of the research articles authored by Russian, Lithuanian, and Indian scholars on various problems of Mahayana Buddhist philosophy. While explaining the status of the terms “Mahāyāna” and “Hīnayāna,” the author emphasizes that since they are represent the apologetic conceptualizations of Mahayanists, the appellation “Hīnayāna” (“Lesser Vehicle”, etc.) is not recognized either by those Buddhists who are supposed to be characterized by it, or by scholars striving for a neutral appellation. (...) This creates difficulties, including the need for a generally accepted designation for this Buddhist tradition. However, despite the apologetic nature of the Mahāyāna - Hīnayāna opposition, the difference between the two is captured very plausibly. The first one teaches about the individual way of achieving liberation from the cycle of endless rebirths (saṃsāra) through a personal, individual self-perfection (the path of the arhat) leading to enlightenment (bodhi) and nirvāṇa (extinction of passions). The second one develops a full-fledged religion with its own pantheon and rituals, in which nirvāṇa and individual liberation, while remaining, more or less theoretically, the ultimate goal, are pushed to a distant plane. At the same time, the idea of compassion and the ideal of bodhisattva who, having taken a vow to help all living beings to get rid of sufferings, continues to remain in saṃsāra, is put forward in the center. However, despite this major difference a Buddhist discipline known as Abhidharma which consists in analysis and classification of discrete states of consciousness (dharmas), identified in meditation, remains a reference point in both traditions. Three authors touch upon it (Helen Ostrovskaya, Pradeep Gokhale, and Vladimir Korobov). Two of them (Ostrovskaya and Gokhale) focus on the problems of murder and death, and the third one (Korobov) dwells on the methodology of Abhidharma. Vladimir Ivanov offers a new interpretation of the structure of Śāntarakṣita’s treatise “Tattva-saṃgraha” with Kamalaśīla’s “Pañjikā” commentary. Yangutov and Lepekhov explore the specificity of Buddhism reception in China, Tibet, Mongolia, and Russia. Nesterkin publishes for the first time B. Baradiin’s theses for Agvan Dordjiev’s lecture, which exemplifies the Buryat Buddhist Renovationists’ interpretation of Buddhism. Burmistrov analyzes the views of Indian historians of philosophy on the history of Buddhism, Volkova - the concepts of Buddhist ethics in contemporary analytical philosophy. (shrink)

This book selectively examines a range of ideas and arguments drawn from the philosophical traditions of South and East Asia, focusing on those that are especially relevant to the philosophy of religion. The book introduces key debates about the self and the nature of reality that unite the otherwise highly diverse philosophies of Indian and Chinese Buddhism, Hinduism, and Jainism. The emphasis of the book is analytical rather than historical. Key issues are explained in a clear, precise, accessible manner, and (...) with a view to their relevance to contemporary philosophical debates. (shrink)

An urgent call for everyone to find inventive ways to question the ethics of sexuality.

The figure of the mistress is undoubtedly controversial provoking intense reactions, ranging from fear, to disgust and revulsion, to excitement and titillation, to sadness and perhaps to some, love. The mistress is conventionally depicted as a threat to moral living and someone whose sexuality is 'defective' and 'toxic'. Of course, she is a woman that you would not have as your friend, and certainly not your wife, since her 'ethical sense', if she even has one, is dubious at best. This (...) book subverts these traditional judgements offering an unflinching look at the lived experience of the mistress and recasts her as a potentially loving, free, intimate 'other' woman. Drawing upon feminist philosophy, contemporary sexual ethics and the current cultural moment of #MeToo, Mistress Morality moves beyond a narrative of 'infidelity', conventional judgment, the safeguarding of monogamy and conventional heterosex that permeates our society. It asks what happens when we let go of our insecurities, judgments and moralistic relationship philosophies and opt, instead, for an ethics of kindness. A kindness underpinned by engaging with those deemed 'other' and learning from mistresses, both straight and queer, new ways of thinking about ethics and sex, meaning we have better sex, and can be better to each other. (shrink)

Eastern Philosophy: The Basics is an essential introduction to major Indian and Chinese philosophies, both past and present. Exploring familiar metaphysical and ethical questions from the perspectives of different Eastern philosophies, including Confucianism, Daoism, and strands of Buddhism and Hinduism, this book covers key figures, issues, methods and concepts. Questions discussed include: What is the ‘self’? Is human nature inherently good or bad? How is the mind related to the world? How can you live an authentic life? What is the (...) fundamental nature of reality? Throughout the book the relationships between Eastern Philosophy, Western Philosophy and the questions reflective people ask within the contemporary world are brought to the fore. With timelines highlighting key figures and their contributions, a list of useful websites and further reading suggestions for each topic, this engaging overview of fundamental ideas in Eastern Philosophy is valuable reading for all students of philosophy and religion, especially those seeking to understand Eastern perspectives. (shrink)

Victoria Camps analiza en estas páginas la fragilidad de una ética que nace y se desarrolla con el triunfo del pensamiento liberal. La defensa de las libertades individuales, de donde emanan los derechos humanos, potencia los intereses privados frente al interés público. Desde esta perspectiva, una ética liberal es tolerante y laica, carece de dogmas, se nutre de principios abstractos, aceptados en teoría, pero con escasa incidencia en la práctica, como lo muestran la impotencia frente a la corrupción y (...) las dificultades para educar cívicamente y construir una moralidad pública. Como es habitual en otras publicaciones de la autora, su interés parte de las teorías filosóficas que han estructurado el pensamiento moral contemporáneo pero no se limita a elaborar un discurso circunscrito al debate académico. Le importa mostrar la relevancia de la filosofía para abordar las debilidades ético-políticas de nuestro tiempo. (shrink)

:Empirical work has shown that patients and physicians have markedly divergent understandings of treatability statements in the context of serious illness. Patients often understand treatability statements as conveying good news for prognosis and quality of life. In contrast, physicians often do not intend treatability statements to convey improvement in prognosis or quality of life, but merely that a treatment is available. Similarly, patients often understand treatability statements as conveying encouragement to hope and pursue further treatment, though this may not be (...) intended by physicians. This radical divergence in understandings may lead to severe miscommunication. This paper seeks to better understand this divergence through linguistic theory—in particular, H.P. Grice’s notion of conversational implicature. This theoretical approach reveals three levels of meaning of treatability statements: the literal meaning, the physician’s intended meaning, and the patient’s received meaning. The divergence between the physician’s intended meaning and the patient’s received meaning can be understood to arise from the lack of shared experience between physicians and patients, and the differing assumptions that each party makes about conversations. This divergence in meaning raises new and largely unidentified challenges to informed consent and shared decision making in the context of serious illness, which indicates a need for further empirical research in this area. (shrink)

Some patients who are dependent on extracorporeal membrane oxygenation (ECMO) are alert and retain capacity to participate in decision-making, including decisions regarding whether to continue life...

Over three decades, Gillian Howie wrote at the forefront of philosophy and critical theory, before her untimely death in 2013. This interdisciplinary collection uses her writings to explore the productive, yet often resistant, interrelationship between feminism and critical theory, examining the potential of Howie's particular form of materialism. The contributors also bring to this debate a serious engagement with Howie's late turn towards philosophies of mortality, therapy and 'living with dying'. The volume considers how differently embodied subjects are positioned within (...) public institutions, discourses and spaces, and the role of philosophy, art, film, photography, and literature, in facing situations such as sexual oppression and life-limiting illness. (shrink)

Where does theory come from in educational research - and how is it operationalized in diverse, interdisciplinary contexts and professional settings? This volume examines the places and spaces of theory in the work of nine pre- to post-doctoral scholars, whose narratives transport us across a wide range of interdisciplinary themes and fields of inquiry from Irigaray on mothering in higher education to Jamison among Danish engineering undergraduates; from Te Whariki in a New Zealand kindergarten to ren wen in contemporary China. (...) Drawing on a range of theorists such as Butler, Bhabah, Bourdieu, Freire, Foucault, Levi-Strauss and Žižek, the book provides numerous opportunities for debate and discussion on theory and the doctoral thesis and their interrelations with pedagogy and methodology in times of great insecurity across the globe. In doing so it develops new possibilities for pedagogies of change in and beyond our current educational systems and structures. (shrink)

This paper is divided into two parts. In Section 1, I explore and defend a “regulative view” of folk-psychology as against the “standard view”. On the regulative view, folk-psychology is conceptualized in fundamentally interpersonal terms as a “mind-making” practice through which we come to form and regulate our minds in accordance with a rich array of socially shared and socially maintained sense-making norms. It is not, as the standard view maintains, simply an epistemic capacity for coming to know about the (...) mental states and dispositions already there. Importantly, the regulative view can meet and beat the standard at its own epistemic game. But it also does more. In Section 2, I show how the regulative view makes progress on two other problems that remain puzzling on the standard view: the problem of “first-person authority” – accounting for the special features of self-knowledge; and the problem of “reactive.. (shrink)

The medicalisation of pregnancy and childbirth has been encouraged by the continuing growth of technology that can be applied to the reproductive journey. Technology now has the potential to fully separate reproduction from the human body with the prospect of ectogenesis—the gestation of a fetus outside of the human body. This paper considers the issues that have been caused by the general medicalisation of pregnancy and childbirth and the impact that ectogenesis may have on these existing issues. The medicalisation of (...) pregnancy and childbirth is criticised for its impact on the relationship between doctors and pregnant women and the way in which doctors treat fetuses. It is argued that ectogenesis may cause more imbalance in the doctor and intended parent relationship and may result in an increased lack of clarity regarding a doctor’s duty to the fetus. This paper finds that extensive guidance and revised legislation will be necessary to minimise the impact of ectogenesis on the existing issues caused by the medicalisation of reproduction. (shrink)

This paper examines the methodological claim made famous by P.F. Strawson: that we understand what features are required for responsible agency by exploring our attitudes and practices of holding responsible. What is the presumed metaphysical connection between holding responsible and being fit to be held responsible that makes this claim credible? I propose a non-standard answer to this question, arguing for a view of responsible agency that is neither anti-realist (i.e. purely 'conventionalist') nor straightforwardly realist. It is instead ‘constructivist’. On (...) the ‘Scaffolding View’ I defend, reactive attitudes play an essential role in developing, supporting, and thereby maintaining the capacities that make for responsible agency. While this view has relatively novel implications for a metaphysical understanding of capacities, its chief virtue, in contrast with more standard views, is providing a plausibly defensible account of how so-called responsible agents genuinely deserve to be treated as such. (shrink)

Philosophers and social scientists have focussed a great deal of attention on our human capacity to trust, but relatively little on the capacity to hope. This is a significant oversight, as hope and trust are importantly interconnected. This paper argues that, even though trust can and does feed our hopes, it is our empowering capacity to hope that significantly underwrites—and makes rational—our capacity to trust.

This paper addresses a number of important issues regarding the ethical practices and recent behaviour of large Australian firms in nine industries. These issues include whether firms have a written code of ethics, whether firms have a forum for the discussion of ethics, whether managers consider that their firm's activities have an environmental impact and whether there are any statistical relationships between the size, industry class, ownership, international involvement and location of the firm and its ethical management practices. These questions (...) are examined by using data collected from a sample of 136 large firms operating in Australia. (shrink)

Perhaps the central focus of American bioethics has been to push against medical paternalism on the grounds that it impedes the autonomy of patients—that is, their ability to make choices of their...

This paper argues that our folk-psychological expertise is a special case of extended and enculturated cognition where we learn to regulate both our own and others’ thought and action in accord with a wide array of culturally shaped folk-psychological norms. The view has three noteworthy features: it challenges a common assumption that the foundational capacity at work in folk-psychological expertise is one of interpreting behaviour in mentalistic terms, arguing instead that successful mindreading is largely a consequence of successful mindshaping; it (...) argues that our folk-psychological expertise is not only socially scaffolded in development, it continues to be socially supported and maintained in maturity, thereby presenting a radically different picture of what mature folk-psychological competency amounts to; it provides grounds for resisting a recent trend in theoretical explanations of quotidian social interaction that downplays the deployment of sophisticated mentalizing resources in understanding what others are doing. (shrink)

In Building Better Beings, Vargas develops and defends a naturalistic account of responsibility, whereby responsible agents must possess a feasibly situated capacity to detect and respond to moral considerations. As a preliminary step, he also offers a substantive account of how we might justify our practices of holding responsible—viz., by appeal to their efficacy in fostering a ‘valuable form of agency’ across the community at large, a form of agency that precisely encompasses sensitivity to moral considerations. But how do these (...) accounts relate to one another? Though I find much that is appealing in Vargas’s general approach, I challenge his insistence that these accounts should be treated as ‘conceptually independent’, arguing that this generates an objectionable “justification gap”: on his analysis, someone could remain an appropriate target of our responsibility practices and yet fail to be a morally responsible agent. In closing, I offer a potential solution to this problem, though it means re-visioning how the account of moral responsibility is conceptually tied to the justification of our responsibility practices. (shrink)

This book helps children to develop critical thinking and debating skills. It examines the topic of animal rights in a lively and accessible way. Information is presented to help readers deliberate, debate, and decide for themselves. The book looks at animal rights: what the current situation is, how far animal rights should go, and how far should they go in the future. The book covers eating meat, animals in sport, animals in medical testing, and the alternatives we could consider.