In 2017, Partridge et al. published remarkable experimental results concerning the use of a new artificial womb technology (AWT) with lambs, developed at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, called...

Bezüglich Lehre und Praxis der Kirche empfindet man vielfach einen Mangel an Barmherzigkeit, vor allem da, wo ein Handeln gemäss der traditionellen Lehre für die Betroffenen eine erhebliche Belastung bedeutet. Im Brennpunkt stehen dabei besonders wiederverheiratete und homosexuelle Menschen, denen sexuelle Enthaltsamkeit zugemutet wird. Da es für solche Zumutung aber starke Argumente geben müsste, sind die vor allem mit Rekurs auf die Bibel vorgebrachten Gründe zu überprüfen. Falls diese aber der Überprüfung nicht standhalten, geht es nicht um Barmherzigkeit, sondern um (...) Gerechtigkeit für die Betroffenen. In anderem Kontext kann der Ruf nach Barmherzigkeit der Bagatellisierung von Unrecht und Schuld dienen. Im Fall der kalabrischen Mafiosi hat Papst Franziskus diese für exkommuniziert erklärt, gegen Plädoyers für Barmherzigkeit von anderer Seite. Dabei umfasst die Rede von der Barmherzigkeit durchaus unterschiedliche Handlungsweisen, die jeweils einer gesonderten ethischen Beurteilung bedürfen. Auch das neuerdings vielfach bemühte Gesetz der Gradualität versucht, ethischen Rigorismus abzumildern und so auf diese Weise eine Art Barmherzigkeit zu ermöglichen, ohne eine 'Gradualität des Gesetzes' zu proklamieren. Sollte dieser Versuch freilich misslingen, ginge es auch hier eher um Gerechtigkeit"--Page 4 of cover. (shrink)

Reality is hierarchically structured, or so proponents of the metaphysical posit of grounding argue. The less fundamental facts obtain in virtue of, or are grounded in, the more fundamental facts. But what exactly is it for one fact to be more fundamental than another? The aim of this paper is to provide a measure of relative fundamentality. I develop and defend an account of the metaphysical hierarchy that assigns to each fact a set of ordinals representing the levels on which (...) it occurs. The account allows one to compare any two facts with respect to their fundamentality and it uses immediate grounding as its sole primitive. In the first section, I will set the stage and point to some shortcomings of a rival account proposed by Karen Bennett. The second section will present my own proposal and the third section will discuss how it can be extended to non-foundationalist settings. The fourth section discusses potential objections. (shrink)

One important challenge for contingentists is that they seem to be unable to account for the meaning of some apparently meaningful modal discourse that is perfectly intelligible for necessitists. This worry is particularly pressing for higher-order contingentists, contingentists who hold that it is not only contingent which objects there are, but also contingent which semantic values there are for higher-order variables to quantify over. Objections against higher-order contingentism along these lines have been presented in Williamson (Mind 119(475):657–748, 2010; Modal logic (...) as metaphysics, Oxford University Press, 2013, ch. 7), and Fritz and Goodman (Mind 126(504):1063–1108, 2017). This paper presents a way for contingentists to respond to these challenges. The upshot is that the contingentist can account for the meaningfulness of the problematic modal claims by pretending necessitism to be true, but in some cases it turns out to be indeterminate whether they are true. I defend this strategy against the objections against pretence-strategies presented in Fritz and Goodman (Mind 126(504):1063–1108, 2017, §4). Furthermore, I defend the plausibility of the resulting indeterminacy from the contingentist’s perspective. (shrink)

Trevor Teitel (2017) has recently argued that combining the assumption that modality reduces to essence with the assumption that possibly some objects contingently exist leads to problems if one wishes to uphold that the logic of metaphysical modality is S5. In this paper I will argue that there is a way for the essentialist to evade the problem described by Teitel. The proposed solution crucially involves the assumption that some propositions possibly fail to exist. I will show how this assumption (...) affords a motivated contingentist response to Teitel’s argument. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to introduce, elucidate and defend the usefulness of a variant of grounding, or metaphysical explanation, that has the feature that the grounds explain of some states of affairs that one of them obtains without explaining which one obtains. I will dub this variant arbitrary grounding. After informally elucidating the basic idea in the first section, I will provide three metaphysical hypotheses that are best formulated in terms of arbitrary grounding in the second section. The (...) third section will be concerned with the relation between arbitrary grounding and non-arbitrary grounding. The fourth section will compare arbitrary grounding to two extant proposals in the literature. (shrink)

Two major philosophical movements have sought to fundamentally rethink the relationship between humans and their environment(s): environmental ethics and enactivism. Surprisingly, they virtually never refer to or seek inspiration from each other. The goal of this analysis is to bridge the gap. Our main purpose, then, is to address, from the enactivist angle, the conceptual backbone of environmental ethics, namely the concept of intrinsic value. We argue that intrinsic value does indeed exist, yet its "intrinsicality" does not boil down to (...) being independent of the interests and needs of humans. Rather, it is brought forth by what we callshared enactionof an axiological domain. The latter is built upon such core posits of enactivism as autonomy, enaction, participatory sense-making as well as the most recent concept of loving as knowing proposed by Hanne De Jaegher. (shrink)

This book is the first major account of political thought in twentieth-century Europe, both West and East, to appear since the end of the Cold War. Skillfully blending intellectual, political, and cultural history, Jan-Werner Müller elucidates the ideas that shaped the period of ideological extremes before 1945 and the liberalization of West European politics after the Second World War. He also offers vivid portraits of famous as well as unjustly forgotten political thinkers and the movements and institutions they inspired. (...) Müller pays particular attention to ideas advanced to justify fascism and how they relate to the special kind of liberal democracy that was created in postwar Western Europe. He also explains the impact of the 1960s and neoliberalism, ending with a critical assessment of today's self-consciously post-ideological age. (shrink)

„Spiritualität heute“ – Unter diesem Titel hatte der Hildesheimer Literaturwissenschaftler Toni Tholen 2016 in einem Vortrag zum Nachdenken über Spiritualität angeregt und eingeladen. Er selbst verknüpfte dabei das Konzept der Selbstsorge mit dem Verständnis von literarischer Praxis als (eine zeitgemäße Form von) Spiritualität. Die in diesem Band versammelten Beiträge von Wissenschaftlerinnen und Wissenschaftlern aus ganz unterschiedlichen Fachrichtungen der Universität Hildesheim haben die Einladung Tholens auf sehr verschiedene Weise angenommen. Sie verbindet die Haltung, offen für eine argumentative Auseinandersetzung mit dem Thema (...) Spiritualität zu sein. Zugleich wählen sie in Inhalt und Form unterschiedliche Zugänge – so ist die Einladung zum Gespräch in doppeltem Sinne vielfältig aufgenommen. Einige Beiträge diskutieren die von Tholen vorlegte Konturierung von Spiritualität aus der Perspektive ihrer eigenen Disziplin. Andere fragen nach möglichen Einordnungen der Diskurse über Spiritualität. Wieder andere Beiträge erwägen die Frage, wie man die geistliche Suche mit wissenschaftlicher Suche verbinden kann. Mit der Antwort Tholens auf diese Texte entwickelt sich ein transdisziplinärer Dialog über das Thema Spiritualität. (shrink)

This paper develops the metaphysical hypothesis that there are irreducibly collective pluralities, pluralities of objects that do not have a singular object among them. A way to formulate this hypothesis using plural quantification will be proposed and the coherence of irreducibly collective existence will be defended. Furthermore, irreducibly collective existence will be shown to allow for bottomless scenarios that do not involve things standing in relations of parthood. This will create logical space for an anti-atomistic form of mereological nihilism.

d'avec: mutations, mutismes (ad Nancy) -- N'essance (ad Derrida) -- Das Nicht im Satz der Identität -- Le sans de l'etre (ad Derrida) -- Lingua amissa : Vorwort zur spanischen Ausgabe -- Lingua amissa : vom Messianismus der Warensprache -- Messianisches Nicht -- Ou, Séance, touche de Nancy, ici (I) -- Ou, Séance, touche de Nancy, ici (II).

This book is the first major account of political thought in twentieth-century Europe, both West and East, to appear since the end of the Cold War. Skillfully blending intellectual, political, and cultural history, Jan-Werner Müller elucidates the ideas that shaped the period of ideological extremes before 1945 and the liberalization of West European politics after the Second World War. He also offers vivid portraits of famous as well as unjustly forgotten political thinkers and the movements and institutions they inspired. (...) Müller pays particular attention to ideas advanced to justify fascism and how they relate to the special kind of liberal democracy that was created in postwar Western Europe. He also explains the impact of the 1960s and neoliberalism, ending with a critical assessment of today's self-consciously post-ideological age. (shrink)

In a recent paper in this journal, Jonathan Barker argues against the claim that grounded entities are ontologically innocent. In this paper I defend the ontological innocence of grounded entities against Barker's argument. I tease out an assumption that is crucial for the success of Barker's argument and I show that the defender of ontological innocence can deny this assumption in a motivated way.

According to an optimistic view, affective empathy is a route to knowledge of what it is like to be in the target person’s state (“phenomenal knowledge”). Roughly, the idea is that the empathizer gains this knowledge by means of empathically experiencing the target’s emotional state. The literature on affective empathy, however, often draws a simplified picture according to which the target feels only a single emotion at a time. Co-occurring emotions (“concurrent emotions”) are rarely considered. This is problematic, because concurring (...) emotions seem to support a sceptical view according to which we cannot gain phenomenal knowledge of the target person’s state by means of affective empathy. The sceptic concludes that attaining the epistemic goal of affective empathy is difficult, in practice often impossible. I accept the sceptic’s premises, but reject the conclusion, because of the argument’s unjustified, hidden premise: that the epistemic goal of affective empathy is phenomenal knowledge. I argue that the epistemic goal of affective empathy is phenomenal understanding, not knowledge. Attention to the under-explored phenomenon of concurring emotions clarifies why this is important. I argue that this is the decisive epistemic progress in everyday cases of phenomenal understanding of another person. (shrink)

The book introduces a conception of discourse ethics, an intersubjectivist version of Kantian ethics. Analyzing contributions from Jürgen Habermas, Karl-Otto Apel, Wolfgang Kuhlmann, Albrecht Wellmer, Robert Alexy, Klaus Günther, Rainer Forst, Marcel Niquet and others, it reconstructs critical discussions on the justification of the principle of morality (part I) and on the various proposals on how to apply it (part II). It defends an alternative model of how discourse ethics can provide guidance under non-ideal circumstances and avoid both arbitrariness and (...) rigorism. (shrink)

Corruption continues to be a considerable challenge for internationally active companies. In this article, we examine personal and socioenvironmental antecedents of corrupt behavior in organizations. In particular, we aim to illuminate the links between Machiavellianism, on-the-job experience with corrupt behavior at work, neutralization, and the attitude of business professionals toward corruption. The empirical analysis is based on the responses of 169 professionals. At first, a positive relationship between both Machiavellianism and on-the-job experience and the acceptance of corruption appears in the (...) model. However, an in-depth mediation analysis shows that neutralization is the keystone linking both Machiavellianism and on-the-job experience to the likelihood to condone corruption. Based on these results, we offer avenues for further research and implications for practitioners. (shrink)

Cet article présente et discute la méthodologie de construction d’un corpus plurilingue en diachronie longue (1681-1914). Puisqu’il n’existait pas de corpus alsacien significatif, un important travail de construction d’un corpus significatif a été mené afin de constituer un corpus documentant les contacts linguistiques dans les écrits des locuteurs-scripteurs alsaciens. Cette tâche a présenté un certain nombre de défis méthodologiques causés par le contact des langues, la variation sociolinguistique et diachronique, le manque de sources primaires et de documents numérisés. Parmi ces (...) défis entrent aussi en compte la complexité du contexte historico-politico-sociolinguistique et les rapports entre oralité et scripturalité. (shrink)

A prevailing view in the literature on Hegel’s dialectical method is that employing it involves advancing a false account and then modifying it to be closer to the truth. I will call this the Modification View. In this essay, I argue that the Modification View is incorrect. Hegel’s insight, I show, is that one can only explain the objective validity of a form of thought through employing that very form. Consequently, the dialectical method cannot relate to its subject matter as (...) something given to it, and so cannot involve advancing and then correcting errors in one’s account. (shrink)

According to contentful moral perception (CMP), moral properties can be perceived in the same sense as tables, tigers, and tomatoes. Recently, Heather Logue (2012) has distinguished between two potential ways of perceiving a property. A Kantian Property (KP) in perception is one in which a perceiver’s access involves a detection of the property via a representational vehicle. A Berkeleyan Property (BP) in perception is one in which a perceiver’s access to the property involves that property as partly constitutive of the (...) experience itself. In this paper, I set aside generalized arguments in favor of one view or another, and instead ask whether proponents of CMP have reasons to understand moral perception as Kantian or Berkeleyan. I explore three possible explanatory differences—(a) explaining the intrinsic motivating force of moral perceptions, (b) providing a metasemantics for moral properties, and (c) providing an epistemology of the normative authority of moral properties. (shrink)

This note defends the reduction of ordinals to pure sets against an argument put forward by Beau Madison Mount. In the first part I will defend the claim that dependence simpliciter can be reduced to immediate dependence and define a notion of predecessor dependence. In the second part I will provide and defend a way to model the dependence profile of ordinals akin to Mount’s proposal in terms of immediate dependence and predecessor dependence. I furthermore show that my alternative dependence (...) profile allows us to single out the reduction of ordinals to von Neumann ordinals as the only viable set-theoretic reduction. (shrink)

The global pesticide complex has transformed over the past two decades, but social science research has not kept pace. The rise of an enormous generics sector, shifts in geographies of pesticide production, and dynamics of agrarian change have led to more pesticide use, expanding to farm systems that hitherto used few such inputs. Declining effectiveness due to pesticide resistance and anemic institutional support for non-chemical alternatives also have driven intensification in conventional systems. As an inter-disciplinary network of pesticide scholars, we (...) seek to renew the social science research agenda on pesticides to better understand this suite of contemporary changes. To identify research priorities, challenges, and opportunities, we develop the pesticide complex as a heuristic device to highlight the reciprocal and iterative interactions among agricultural practice, the agrochemical industry, civil society-shaped regulatory actions, and contested knowledge of toxicity. Ultimately, collaborations among social scientists and across the social and biophysical sciences can illuminate recent transformations and their uneven socioecological effects. A reinvigorated critical scholarship that embraces the multifaceted nature of pesticides can identify the social and ecological constraints that drive pesticide use and support alternatives to chemically driven industrial agriculture. (shrink)

This paper targets the concept of enactment as a genuinely metaphysical idea. Its goals are two-fold. First, a reappraisal of enactment in its proper historical context, as well as an articulation of the core innovations enactment brings to traditional metaphysics. Here the idea of 'productive' cognition, as I provisionally term it, comes to the fore. The second goal is a reinterpretation of certain themes from traditional metaphysics, including the key question of why there is something rather than nothing, so as (...) to make it more open to insights originating from enactivism. For that, the concept of 'situated metaphysics' is introduced and elaborated upon. (shrink)

This paper concerns the question of which properties figure in the contents of perceptual experience. According to conservatives, only low-level properties figure in the contents of perceptual experience. Liberals, on the other hand, claim that high-level properties, such as natural kind properties, artifacts, and even moral properties, can figure in the contents of perceptual experience. I defend a novel argument in favor of liberalism, the Epistemic Argument, which hinges on two crucial claims. The first is that many perceptual experiences of (...) even neurotypical human beings can justify beliefs in high-level properties without providing justification for their low-level constituents. The second claim, roughly, is that any experience that alone provides (defeasible) justification for beliefs about some property p, other things being equal, has p as part of its content. In short, certain perceptual experiences represent high-level but not low-level properties, which entails that liberalism is true. (shrink)

In the 3rd Analogy, Kant claims that I can perceive that things coexist by synthesizing my perceptions in an order-indifferent way. Reigning orthodoxy holds that I first successively perceive different things, and then (through some further act) determine that the things I perceive coexist. Focusing on prominent examples of this approach, I argue that these accounts fail to do justice to the order-indifferent synthesis that Kant describes: Strawson explains the synthesis in a way which renders Kant’s argument in the 3rd (...) Analogy obviously unconvincing, Watkins makes the synthesis irrelevant to Kant’s argument, while Longuenesse and Allison make the unity of the synthesis obscure. The problems with these views, I contend, show that Kant thinks the rule for synthesizing my perceptions is already operative in the successive perceptions, such that the fundamental act of perception already involves ‘objective time-determinations.’ This connects with the recent dispute about whether Kant is a conceptualist: my argument provides additional evidence that Kant is a conceptualist, while also extending the conceptualist reading to the 3rd Analogy in a novel way. For those who think conceptualism is wrong, my argument serves as a critical notice that non-conceptualists have yet to offer a satisfying interpretation of the 3rd Analogy. (shrink)