In the literature on medical ethics, it is generally admitted that vulnerable persons or groups deserve special attention, care or protection. One can define vulnerable persons as those having a greater likelihood of being wronged – that is, of being denied adequate satisfaction of certain legitimate claims. The conjunction of these two points entails what we call the Special Protection Thesis. It asserts that persons with a greater likelihood of being denied adequate satisfaction of their legitimate claims deserve special attention, (...) care or protection. Such a thesis remains vague, however, as long as we do not know what legitimate claims are. This article aims at dispelling this vagueness by exploring what claims we have in relation to health care – thus fleshing out a claim-based conception of vulnerability. We argue that the Special Protection Thesis must be enriched as follows: If individual or group X has a greater likelihood of being denied adequate satisfaction of some of their legitimate claims to physical integrity, autonomy, freedom, social provision, impartial quality of government, social bases of self-respect or communal belonging, then X deserves special attention, care or protection. With this improved understanding of vulnerability, vulnerability talk in healthcare ethics can escape vagueness and serve as an adequate basis for practice. (shrink)

Permissivism is the thesis that, for some body of evidence and a proposition p, there is more than one rational doxastic attitude any agent with that evidence can take toward p. Proponents of uniqueness deny permissivism, maintaining that every body of evidence always determines a single rational doxastic attitude. In this paper, we explore the debate between permissivism and uniqueness about evidence, outlining some of the major arguments on each side. We then consider how permissivism can be understood as an (...) underdetermination thesis, and show how this moves the debate forward in fruitful ways: in distinguishing between different types of permissivism, in dispelling classic objections to permissivism, and in shedding light on the relationship between permissivism and evidentialism. (shrink)

What attitude should philosophers take toward their favorite philosophical theories? I argue that the answer is belief and middling to low credence. I begin by discussing why disagreement has motivated the view that we cannot rationally believe our philosophical theories. Then, I show why considerations from disagreement actually better support my view. I provide two additional arguments for my view: the first concerns roles for belief and credence and the second explains why believing one’s philosophical theories is superior to accepting (...) them. I close by addressing objections, including implications my view has for the Lockean thesis, the view that there is a normative connection between belief and high credence. (shrink)

Traditional theistic arguments conclude that God exists. Pragmatic theistic arguments, by contrast, conclude that you ought to believe in God. The two most famous pragmatic theistic arguments are put forth by Blaise Pascal (1662) and William James (1896). Pragmatic arguments for theism can be summarized as follows: believing in God has significant benefits, and these benefits aren’t available for the unbeliever. Thus, you should believe in, or ‘wager on’, God. This article distinguishes between various kinds of theistic wagers, including finite (...) vs. infinite wagers, premortem vs. postmortem wagers, and doxastic vs. acceptance wagers. Then, we’ll turn to the epistemic-pragmatic distinction, and discusses the nuances of James’ argument, and how views like epistemic permissivism and epistemic consequentialism provide unique “hybrid” wagers. Finally, we’ll cover outstanding objections and responses. (shrink)

edition (unseen), $12.95. traditions, bringing into being new modes of understanding. Paper Anthropology, and particularly ethnography, is torn between two quests, one to capture the diversity of social life and the other to discover universal principles structuring that diversity. Jackson examines these quests within the context of ethnographic fieldwork, focusing on the relationship between ethnographers and the people they study. He is concerned with defining the anthropological project as something more than the projection of the anthropologist's traditions and concerns (...) onto an alien culture. Rather, he would have the project open a genuine dialogue between people from different cultures or Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR. (shrink)

Credences are similar to levels of confidence, represented as a value on the [0,1] interval. This chapter sheds light on questions about credence, including its relationship to full belief, with an eye toward the empirical relevance of credence. First, I’ll provide a brief epistemological history of credence and lay out some of the main theories of the nature of credence. Then, I’ll provide an overview of the main views on how credences relate to full beliefs. Finally, I’ll turn to the (...) empirical, and suggest some ways that cognitive science does and could answer questions about credence, such as what credences one has, how credences relate to beliefs, and the extent to which we can control our credences. (shrink)

Gilbert Harman’s famous principle of Clutter Avoidance commands that “one should not clutter one’s mind with trivialities". Many epistemologists have been inclined to accept Harman’s principle, or something like it. This is significant because the principle appears to have robust implications for our overall picture of epistemic normativity. Jane Friedman (2018) has recently argued that one potential implication is that there are no genuine purely evidential norms on belief revision. In this paper, we present some new objections to a suitably (...) formulated version of the clutter principle qua norm on belief revision. Moreover, we argue that the clutter principle is best understood as a norm on non-doxastic stages of inquiry. In our view, it is a norm of asking and considering questions rather than a norm of settling on an answer to a question by forming a belief. (shrink)

Propelled by his own vengeance, N'Jadaka transforms into Erik Killmonger, CIA operative: a master of the weapons wielded by a colonial global empire, who wields these weapons himself in a quest to destroy the system that has oppressed people of color since ships set sail for the Caribbean over 500 years ago. Lorde, a Black lesbian feminist, was critiquing white feminism, suggesting that it failed to dismantle white supremacy (and she was doing this in the 1970s). Yet, her famous words (...) – “For the master's tools will never dismantle the master's house” – get reinterpreted through Killmonger, who has mastered the art of global colonial capitalism. Even Wakanda, whose power is greater than all the tools of the master's house put together, doesn't dismantle it. Wakanda sits on the world council but does nothing about colonial oppression. (shrink)

What can we learn about management ethics from other cultures and societies? In this textbook, cross-cultural management theory is applied and made relevant to management ethics. To help the reader understand different approaches that global businesses can take to operate successfully and ethically, there are chapters focusing on specific countries and regions. As well as giving the wider geographical, political and cultural contexts, the book includes numerous examples in every chapter to help the reader critique universal assumptions of what is (...) ethical. By taking a closer look at the way we view other cultures and their values, the author challenges us to rethink commonly held assumptions and approaches in cross-cultural management, and to apply a more critical approach. (shrink)

How should we react to the contention that there is empirical evidence showing that many judge Gettier cases to be cases of knowledge, contrary to the verdict of most analytical philosophers about these cases? I argue that there is no single answer to this question. The discussion is set inside a view about how to view the role and significance of intuitive responses to some of philosophy's famous thought experiments. One take-home message is that experimental philosophy and conceptual analysis are (...) not as far apart as is often thought. (shrink)

Mistaken identities : the task of thinking in dark times -- Radical empiricism and the little things of life -- The witch as a category and as a person -- The new materialisms -- Words and deeds -- Critique of cultural fundamentalism -- Existential scarcity and ethical sensibility -- Identification and description : an essay on metaphor -- Islam and identity among the Kuranko -- In defense of existential anthropology.

This chapter contains sections titled: Property‐Owning Democracy Before Socialism: The Rise of Commercial Republicanism Property‐Owning Democracy at the Socialist High Tide (i): Progressive Conservative Origins Property‐Owning Democracy at the Socialist High Tide (ii): Liberals and Labour Revisionists Property‐Owning Democracy at the Socialist High Tide (iii): James Meade Property‐Owning Democracy After Socialism? Rawlsian and Neoliberal Lineages References.

__The Conduct of Inquiry in International Relations_ first edition was winner of the ISA-Northeast’s Yale H. Ferguson Award, and the ISA Theory Section’s Best Book of the Year award._ _The Conduct of Inquiry in International Relations_ provides an introduction to the philosophy of science issues and their implications for the study of global politics. The author draws attention to the problems caused by the misleading notion of a single unified scientific method, and proposes a framework that clarifies the variety of (...) ways that IR scholars establish the authority and validity of their empirical claims. Jackson connects philosophical considerations with concrete issues of research design within neopositivist, critical realist, analyticist, and reflexive approaches to the study of world politics. Envisioning a pluralist science for a global IR field, this volume organizes the significant differences between methodological stances so as to promote internal consistency, public discussion, and worldly insight as the hallmarks of any scientific study of world politics. In this second edition, Jackson has centralised the philosophical history of the ‘science question’ into a single chapter, providing a clearer picture of the connections between contemporary concerns about the status of knowledge and classic philosophical debates about the relationship between human beings and the world they inhabit. The central chapters feature more detailed and pedagogically useful illustrations of the methodological positions discussed, making the book even better suited to clarify the philosophical distinctions with respect to which a scientific researcher must locate herself. The second edition will continue to be essential reading for all students and scholars of International Relations, Political Science and Philosophy of Science. (shrink)

With contributions from leading scholars in constitutional law, this volume examines how carefully designed and limited doctrines of proportionality can improve judicial decision-making, how it is applied in different jurisdictions, its role on constitutionalism outside the courts, and whether the principle of proportionality actually advances or detracts from democracy. Contributions from some of the seminal thinkers on the development of scholarship on proportionality extend their prior work and engage in an important dialogue on the topic. Some offer substantial critiques, others (...) defend the doctrine and offer important clarifications and extensions of their prior work. Throughout, the authors engage not only with case law from around the world but also with existing scholarly treatments of the subject. Mathematical treatments are avoided, making the book accessible to readers from both 'soft' and hard' social science backgrounds. (shrink)

On the phenomenal view of evidence, seemings are evidence. More precisely, if it seems to S that p, S has evidence for p. Here, I raise a worry for this view of evidence; namely, that it has the counterintuitive consequence that two people who disagree would rarely, if ever, share evidence. This is because almost all differences in beliefs would involve differences in seemings. However, many literatures in epistemology, including the disagreement literature and the permissivism literature, presuppose that people who (...) disagree often do share evidence. I conclude that this is a reason to question the phenomenal view of evidence. (shrink)

Présenter un aperçu de la « mystique chrétienne médiévale » n’est possible qu’en la situant brièvement dans l’histoire de la « mystique » en Occident. Le terme n’est pas dénué d’ambiguïté. Apparaissant dans le contexte des religions à mystères, la mystique évolue vers une expérience silencieuse que les mots ne peuvent capter, avant de désigner des phénomènes anormaux décrits dans une rhétorique de l’étrange. Par rapport à la littérature moderne, les textes médiévaux sont très sobres. Faisant à écho à la (...) théologie mystique de Denys l’Aréopagite (ve-vie s.), ils présentent une voie d’union à l’Un en deçà des mots et des concepts. Il ne suffit pas de connaître (mathein) Dieu par un savoir notionnel, il faut en faire l’expérience, « en pâtir » (pathein). Ce « pâtir Dieu » sera repris par Maître Eckhart (1260-1328), le chef de file de la mystique rhénane. (shrink)

Recently, philosophers have been carrying out a certain amount of soul searching. In this context, the term “professionalism” gets thrown around. The thought is that too much of what we philosophers do looks inward at the work of colleagues instead of outwards at the issues. Sometimes it can seem that it is more important for one's career to demonstrates that one is on top of the literature rather than on top of the problems the literature is addressing. There is, however, (...) a kind of professionalism that we should applaud. It consists of being sufficiently on top of a range of different areas of philosophical inquiry to see key connections between different areas. Although progress in the sense of convergence in doctrines is nothing for philosophers to write home about, I think we are making progress in seeing connections. (shrink)

Epistemic paternalism is the practice of interfering with someone’s inquiry, without their consent, for their own epistemic good. In this chapter, I explore the relationship between epistemic paternalism and two other epistemological theses: epistemic permissivism and standpoint epistemology. I argue that examining this relationship is fruitful because it sheds light on a series of cases in which epistemic paternalism is unjustified and brings out notable similarities between epistemic permissivism and standpoint epistemology.

Why does something please us? Is there right and wrong in aesthetics? What is the value of art? What do philosophical and aesthetic problems have in common? Wittgenstein worked intensively on these and other questions and wrote of the strange resemblance between aesthetics and philosophy. This study shows how Wittgenstein s arguments have substantially contributed to explaining systematic questions in aesthetics.".

Michael Jackson has spent much of his career elaborating his rich conception of lifeworlds, mining his ethnographic and personal experience for insights into how our subjective and social lives are mutually constituted. In How Lifeworlds Work, Jackson draws on years of ethnographic fieldwork in West Africa to highlight the dynamic quality of human relationships and reinvigorate the study of kinship and ritual. How, he asks, do we manage the perpetual process of accommodation between social norms and personal emotions, (...) impulses, and desires? How are these two dimensions of lived reality joined, and how are the dual imperatives of individual expression and collective viability managed? Drawing on the pragmatist tradition, psychology, and phenomenology, Jackson offers an unforgettable, beautifully written account of how we make, unmake, and remake, our lifeworlds. (shrink)

Comment les scientifiques peuvent-ils participer aux controverses dont font l’objet certains développements techniques? En injectant une sensibilité littéraire dans cette participation. Telle est la thèse de cet ouvrage. Au travers d’illustrations telles qu’un poème d’Henri Michaux ou une déclaration de faucheur volontaire d’OGM, Yves Citton examine comment les scientifiques peuvent participer aux débats publics et civils et contribuer à sortir de la confrontation des disciplines, des domaines et des opinions.

Que peut nous apporter aujourd’hui la lecture des Idéologues, ces penseurs qui ont reconfiguré le champ des savoirs au début du XIXe siècle? La mise au jour d’un moment idéologique. Ce moment est celui qui voit une radicalité des Lumières se scinder entre divers branchements disciplinaires, entre diverses conceptions de la subjectivité et de l’émancipation. Le moment idéologique est un moment de passage, mais surtout de décantation. On y voit émerger, quoiqu’encore entremêlés et solidaires, ce que nous sommes habitués à (...) distinguer : Lumières et romantisme, rationalisme et sentiment, radicalité et conservatisme, nécessité et volontarisme, colonialisme et soif d’altérité, science et littérature. Les dix chapitres de cet ouvrage ont en commun de visiter ce moment idéologique à partir de questions concrètes, analysées sur des objets textuels précisément circonscrits : une fausse polémique, un cours d’histoire, une analogie hydraulique, des théories de l’imagination, des épisodes de réminiscence involontaire, un voyage à Alexandrie, un projet d’alphabet universel, une explication de l’amitié, une réécriture romanesque de la folle « science des idées ». C’est à partir de ces cas particuliers que prend forme une image d’ensemble du moment idéologique, où se révèlent à la fois la reconfiguration des champs du savoir et ce que cette reconfiguration a occulté : l’inséparabilité de ce qui devient alors, d’un côté, « la littérature » et, de l’autre, « les sciences » (de l’homme) – le moment idéologique nous faisant voir que ce sont les deux faces d’une même pièce. (shrink)

Mental explanations of behaviour are physical explanations of a special kind. Mental events are physical events. Mental explanations of physical behaviour are not mysterious, they designate events with physical causal powers. Mentalistic terms differ from physicalistic ones in the way they specify events: the former cite extrinsic properties, the latter intrinsic properties. The nature of explanation in general is discussed, and a naturalistic view of intentionality is proposed. The author shows why epistemological considerations rule out the elimination of "mentalistic talk" (...) from explanations of behaviour. (shrink)

This paper surveys the epistemology of two attitudes: faith and hope. First, I examine descriptive questions about faith and hope. Faith and hope are resilient attitudes with unique cognitive and conative components; while related, they are also distinct, notably in that hope’s cognitive component is weaker than faith’s. I then turn to faith and hope's epistemic (ir)rationality, and discuss various ways that faith and hope can be rational and irrational. Finally, I discuss the relationship between faith, hope, and knowledge: while (...) it’s controversial whether faith is compatible with knowledge, hope is not compatible with knowledge. (shrink)

This essay is a defense of the social construction of racialism. I follow a standard definition of “racialism” which is the belief that “there are heritable characteristics, possessed by members of our species, that allow us to divide them into a small set of races, in such a way that all the members of these races share certain traits and tendencies with each other that they do not share with other members of any other race”. In particular I want to (...) defend the “radical” social-constructive thesis that holds “the concept of race is exclusively the product of historical and cultural causes. It claims that humans do not tend to classify people into races when groups with different phenotypes meet, save for particular historical circumstances”. The quoted position is the consensus view among historians, sociologists, anthropologists, and other social scientists who study racialism but has recently been criticized by philosophical defenders of cognitive/evolutionary psychological approaches to racialism. Drawing on developmental studies as well as historical and contemporary cross-cultural research, CEP philosophers point to similarities of racialism across time and space. They hold that social constructionist approaches to racialism cannot explain these similarities. I hold that SC approaches do explain these similarities and that such similarities actually pose a significant challenge to the proposed CEP research program on racialism. (shrink)

Whether in the form of testimonial injustice, hermeneutical injustice, or contributory injustice, epistemic injustice is characterised an injustice rather than simply an epistemic harm because it is often motivated by an identity prejudice and exacerbates existing social disadvantages and inequalities. I argue that epistemic injustice can also be utlised against some members of privileged social identity groups in order to preserve the dominant status of the group as a whole. As a case-study, I analyze how the harms to male victims (...) of sexual violence is exacerbated by the failure of the law to recognise the rape of men as a crime and the failure of other people to recognise the testimony of male rape victims as credible. Analyzing shifts in the legal concept of rape and examples from Project Unbreakable, I uncover how these failures of recognition undermine the victims’ status as legal, moral, and epistemic subjects and inflict epistemic injustice against them. (shrink)

Comment sommes-nous devenus humains? Quelle est la place de l'homme dans le vivant au XXIe siècle, vers quoi tend son devenir? Fort de son expérience de paléoanthropologue, mais aussi d'homme ancré dans son siècle et curieux de tout, le découvreur de Lucy interroge les grands enjeux de demain : l'écologie, la démographie, et bien sûr l'éthique. Etre humain et le rester est une aventure, une énigme, un défi qui nous concernent tous. Yves Coppens nous convie à un voyage dans (...) le temps et l'espace, à la découverte d'une matière en perpétuelle évolution : l'Homme. Chacun de ses invités, en livrant le récit de ses expériences et de ses recherches dans des domaines aussi variés que la philosophie, les sciences sociales ou la génétique, propose une vision singulière de l'humain en déroulant le fil lumineux de son devenir. (shrink)

This book explores the relation between agape (or Christian charity) and social justice. Timothy Jackson defines agape as the central virtue in Christian ethical thought and action and applies his insights to three concrete issues: political violence, forgiveness, and abortion. Taking his primary cue from the New Testament while drawing extensively from contemporary theology and philosophy, Jackson identifies three features of Christian charity: unconditional commitment to the good of others, equal regard for others' well-being, and passionate service open (...) to self-sacrifice for the sake of others. Charity, prescribed by Jesus for his disciples and named by Saint Paul as the "greatest" theological virtue, is contrasted with various accounts of justice. Jackson argues that agape is not trumped by justice or other goods. Rather, agape precedes justice: without the work of love, society would not produce persons capable of merit, demerit, and contract, the elements of most modern conceptions of justice. Jackson then considers the implications of his ideas for several questions: the nature of God, the relation between Christian love and political violence, the place of forgiveness, and the morality of abortion. Arguing that agapic love is to be construed as a gift of grace as well as a divine commandment, Jackson concludes that love is the "eternal life" that makes temporal existence possible and thus the "first" Christian virtue. Though foremost a contribution to Christian ethics, Jackson's arguments and the issues he takes up will find a broader readership. (shrink)

Par-delà les effets de mode et les motifs politiques qui ont pu aider ou nuire à sa réception, l’œuvre de Gilles Deleuze semble plus que jamais mobilisée et retravaillée dans des domaines étonnamment divers de la pensée contemporaine. Notre ouvrage s’inscrit dans ce contexte vivant par une série d’études et de dialogues critiques centrés sur trois aspects fondamentaux : les propositions deleuziennes pour une philosophie de la nature, ses propositions sur le statut et le propre de la pensée et, enfin, (...) les horizons politiques d’une œuvre protéiforme. Trois aspects par lesquels cet esprit classique qu’était aussi Deleuze retrouvait peu ou prou la tripartition stoïcienne de la philosophie. Mais trois aspects désormais traversés par une même intuition et une même visée : l’élaboration systématique de cette pensée de la différence qui hante notre époque.--Résumé de l'éditeur. (shrink)