Western theology struggles with the rise of secularism and postmodernism. The Radical Orthodoxy sensibility asserts that the ancient principles of methexis (participation) and theosis (deification) presents an alternative metaphysical narrative to the narrative of secularism and the onto-theological tradition. This article addresses the problems of the onto-theological metaphysical tradition in Western theology by analyzing Radical Orthodoxy's rediscovery of the philosophical and theological principles of participation and theosis as articulated in the patristic tradition and in the thought of Thomas Aquinas. Using (...) historical and analytical methods, this article will survey the biblical and patristic literature on theosis, as well as John Milbank's understanding of methexis and theosis in Thomas Aquinas. The result of this study will be to offer theosis, rooted in participation in God, as not only a soteriological model to reclaim for the West, but also a core metaphysical principle for Christian ethics that contravenes both onto-theology and the materialistic reduction of ontology in secularism. (shrink)

Recent scholarship in intellectual humility (IH) has attempted to provide deeper understanding of the virtue as personality trait and its impact on an individual's thoughts, beliefs, and actions. A limitations-owning perspective of IH focuses on a proper recognition of the impact of intellectual limitations and a motivation to overcome them, placing it as the mean between intellectual arrogance and intellectual servility. We developed the Limitations-Owning Intellectual Humility Scale to assess this conception of IH with related personality constructs. In Studies 1 (...) (n= 386) and 2 (n = 296), principal factor and confirmatory factor analyses revealed a three-factor model – owning one's intellectual limitations, appropriate discomfort with intellectual limitations, and love of learning. Study 3 (n = 322) demonstrated strong test-retest reliability of the measure over 5 months, while Study 4 (n = 612) revealed limitations-owning IH correlated negatively with dogmatism, closed-mindedness, and hubristic pride and positively with openness, assertiveness, authentic pride. It also predicted openness and closed-mindedness over and above education, social desirability, and other measures of IH. The limitations-owning understanding of IH and scale allow for a more nuanced, spectrum interpretation and measurement of the virtue, which directs future study inside and outside of psychology. (shrink)

We present a new understanding of Christ’s real presence in the Eucharist on the model of Stump’s account of God’s omnipresence and Green and Quan’s account of experiencing God in Scripture. On this understanding, Christ is derivatively, rather than fundamentally, located in the consecrated bread and wine, such that Christ is present to the believer through the consecrated bread and wine, thereby making available to the believer a second-person experience of Christ, where the consecrated bread and wine are the way (...) in which she shares attention with him. The consecrated bread and wine are then, in a sense, icons of Christ. (shrink)

Introduction: Although deep brain stimulation often improves levodopa-responsive gait symptoms, robust therapies for gait dysfunction from Parkinson's disease remain a major unmet need. Walking speed could represent a simple, integrated tool to assess DBS efficacy but is often not examined systematically or quantitatively during DBS programming. Here we investigate the reliability and functional significance of changes in gait by directional DBS in the subthalamic nucleus.Methods: Nineteen patients underwent unilateral subthalamic nucleus DBS surgery with an eight-contact directional lead in the most (...) severely affected hemisphere. They arrived off dopaminergic medications >12 h preoperatively and for device activation 1 month after surgery. We measured a comfortable walking speed using an instrumented walkway with DBS off and at each of 10 stimulation configurations at the midpoint of the therapeutic window. Repeated measures of ANOVA contrasted preoperative vs. maximum and minimum walking speeds across DBS configurations during device activation. Intraclass correlation coefficients examined walking speed reliability across the four trials within each DBS configuration. We also investigated whether changes in walking speed related to modification of step length vs. cadence with a one-sample t-test.Results: Mean comfortable walking speed improved significantly with DBS on vs. both DBS off and minimum speeds with DBS on. Pairwise comparisons showed no significant difference between DBS off and minimum comfortable walking speed with DBS on. Intraclass correlations were ≥0.949 within each condition. Changes in comfortable walk speed were conferred primarily by changes in step length.Conclusion: Acute assessment of walking speed is a reliable, clinically meaningful measure of gait function during DBS activation. Directional and circular unilateral subthalamic DBS in appropriate configurations elicit acute and clinically significant improvements in gait dysfunction related to PD. Next-generation directional DBS technologies have significant potential to enhance gait by individually tailoring stimulation parameters to optimize efficacy. (shrink)

Late in 1990, the Center for the Study of Ethics in the Professions at Illinois Institute of Technology (lIT) received a grant of more than $200,000 from the National Science Foundation to try a campus-wide approach to integrating professional ethics into its technical curriculum.! Enough has now been accomplished to draw some tentative conclusions. I am the grant's principal investigator. In this paper, I shall describe what we at lIT did, what we learned, and what others, especially philosophers, can learn (...) from us. We set out to develop an approach that others could profitably adopt. I believe that we succeeded. (shrink)

Regular musical activity as a complex multimodal lifestyle activity is proposed to be protective against age-related cognitive decline and Alzheimer’s disease. This cross-sectional study investigated the association and interplay between musical instrument playing during life, multi-domain cognitive abilities and brain morphology in older adults from the DZNE-Longitudinal Cognitive Impairment and Dementia Study study. Participants reporting having played a musical instrument across three life periods were compared to controls without a history of musical instrument playing, well-matched for reserve proxies of education, (...) intelligence, socioeconomic status and physical activity. Participants with musical activity outperformed controls in global cognition, working memory, executive functions, language, and visuospatial abilities, with no effects seen for learning and memory. The musically active group had greater gray matter volume in the somatosensory area, but did not differ from controls in higher-order frontal, temporal, or hippocampal volumes. However, the association between gray matter volume in distributed frontal-to-temporal regions and cognitive abilities was enhanced in participants with musical activity compared to controls. We show that playing a musical instrument during life relates to better late-life cognitive abilities and greater brain capacities in OA. Musical activity may serve as a multimodal enrichment strategy that could help preserve cognitive and brain health in late life. Longitudinal and interventional studies are needed to support this notion. (shrink)

Limited strikes are arguably different from war insofar as they are more circumscribed, less destructive, and cost less in blood and treasure to employ. However, what they can achieve is also considerably more circumscribed than what is set out by the goals of war. How do we morally evaluate limited strikes? As part of the roundtable, “The Ethics of Limited Strikes,” this essay argues that we need to turn to the ethics of limited of force, orjus ad vim, to do (...) so. Two moral assumptions that are the keystone tojus ad vimcan shed light on the moral imperatives and ethical dilemmas of undertaking limited strikes. First, such strikes should be seen as an alternative to war, and not part of thejus ad bellumlast resort process. What I call the “Rubicon assessment” determines at what level force should be used: at the level of war, with all its costs and unpredictability, or at that of the more predictable and less costly limited force. Second, limited strikes should adhere to a “presumption against escalation”; that is, a moral commitment not to escalate to war. This essay highlights these moral principles in five different limited strike scenarios: “hot pursuit,” “red line,” “the last straw,” “the point of no return,” and “the right of retaliation.” The conclusion explores the notion of justice after limited strikes, or what I calljus post vim, to show that while what can be accomplished by limited strikes is inherently constrained, they can, if used morally and in tune with diplomacy, be of service in the quest for peace. (shrink)

Since the 1973 Supreme Court decision legalizing abortion, medical and scientific developments have focused greater public and professional attention on the status of the fetus. Their cumulative effect may influence legal, social, and moral thought and set the stage for a change in public opinion and a challenge to legalized abortion. There is as yet no inexorable convergence of medical data and legal opinion that would undermine the rationale of Roe v. Wade. But the prochoice movement must find room (...) for an open airing of the moral questions if abortion is to remain what it should be— a legally acceptable act. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:President’s Council on BioethicsEdmund D. Pellegrino (bio) and F. Daniel Davis (bio)Approximately two weeks before what was to have been its final meeting, the White House dissolved the President’s Council on Bioethics by terminating the appointments of its 18 members. The letters of dismissal, dated 10 June 2009, informed the members that their service on the Council would end with the close of business the next day.The Council’s (...) term was set to expire on 30 September 2009. After President Obama’s election in November and during the transition, we were advised to proceed on the assumption that the Council would be permitted to cease on that date. Reasons for the abrupt move to disband the Council are unknown. We have accepted the fact that we Council members served at the pleasure of the President and that he simply exercised his rightful prerogative. No explanation is therefore required.Some observers have speculated that the action was retaliatory. They related to the fact that several members of the Council disagreed with the President’s stem cell policy in a signed statement published in the Hastings Center’s Bioethics Forum. Others have speculated that the move was pre-emptive. At its final meeting, scheduled for 25–26 June, the Council was set to sign-off on two of its final publications. One was a comprehensive report on the ethics of organ transplantation, and the other a white paper entitled Health Care and the Common Good. The aim was immediately to release the latter as a contribution to the intensifying debate about health care reform. Health Care and the Common Good could well have aided rather than impeded the President’s drive to better control health care costs and achieve universal coverage. The Council report attempted to ground both goals in the ethical framework of, as the title indicates, the common good of all Americans.In his letter terminating the members’ appointments, Assistant to the President for Presidential Personnel Don Gips said that the President “recognizes the values of having a commission of experts in bioethical issues to provide objective and non-ideological bioethics advice to his administration.” Gips went on to say that the President is “currently rethinking the purposes and goals of such a bioethics commission, and is carefully considering a revitalized mission and mandate.” And, [End Page 309] responding to media enquiries, White House press officer Reid Cherlin explained that the President’s Council was terminated because it was a “philosophically leaning advisory group” and, according to a New York Times account by Nicholas Wade, “because it favored discussion over developing a shared consensus.” As for the ultimate outcome of the President’s “rethinking,” Cherlin indicated that President Obama will appoint a new commission with the mandate of offering “practical policy options” in bioethics.In the light of our experiences with the Council, we leave it with hopes that certain questions of national importance will be addressed. In light of the nature of federal advisory commissions, what is or are the proper roles of a national bioethics commission? If the aim is to provide advice and counsel to the President or, perhaps to the U. S. Congress, is that advice best rendered as a group consensus or as an in-depth exploration of the inevitably conflicting ethical perspectives on a given issue? How should such a commission be constituted—with what sorts of individuals? And what is the nature of the expertise that they individually and collectively bring to the commission’s functions? If the commission is to promote public debate and discussion, how exactly should it go about that task? And how is the efficacy of a commission to be assessed? Such questions inevitably lead us deep into contested territory, as the experience of this Council has shown: into the intersections of politics, religion, and science and into the relations between practice and theory—between policy and what some seem to deride as “philosophy.” Indeed, policy without an underlying philosophy is an edifice without a foundation; philosophy without policy is a foundation without an edifice.At the last meeting of the Council in March 2009, we launched a discussion of these questions with the... (shrink)

It is common to hear talk of the aim of belief and to find philosophers appealing to that aim for numerous explanatory purposes. What belief 's aim explains depends, of course, on what that aim is. Many hold that it is somehow related to truth, but there are various ways in which one might specify belief 's aim using the notion of truth. In this article, by considering whether they can account for belief 's standard of correctness and the epistemic (...) norms governing belief, I argue against certain prominent specifications of belief 's aim given in terms of truth, and advance a neglected alternative. (shrink)

Simon May has argued that the notion of a principled compromise is incoherent. Reasons to compromise are always in his view strategic: though we think that the position we defend is still the right one, we compromise on this view in order to avoid the undesirable consequences that might flow from not compromising. I argue against May that there are indeed often principled reasons to compromise, and that these reasons are in fact multiple. First, compromises evince respect for persons that (...) we have reason to think of as our epistemic peers, and acknowledgement of our own finitudes as moral reasoners. Second, compromises are often made morally necessary by the shortfalls that unavoidably separate democratic institutions from democratic ideals. Third, compromises express a desirable form of democratic community. And fourth, compromises are often justified from a consequentialist point of view, in that they allow for the realization of values that would not be realized as well by the failure to compromise. (shrink)

Plato's dialogues frequently criticize traditional Greek myth, yet Plato also integrates myth with his writing. Daniel S. Werner confronts this paradox through an in-depth analysis of the Phaedrus, Plato's most mythical dialogue. Werner argues that the myths of the Phaedrus serve several complex functions: they bring nonphilosophers into the philosophical life; they offer a starting point for philosophical inquiry; they unify the dialogue as a literary and dramatic whole; they draw attention to the limits of language and the limits (...) of knowledge; and they allow Plato to co-opt cultural authority as a way of defining and legitimating the practice of philosophy. Platonic myth, as a species of traditional tale, is thus both distinct from philosophical dialectic and similar to it. Ultimately, the most powerful effect of Platonic myth is the way in which it leads readers to participate in Plato's dialogues and to engage in a process of self-examination. (shrink)

This paper defends the epistemic account of the normativity of requests. The epistemic account says that a request does not create any reasons and thus does not have any special normative power. Rather, a request gives reasons by revealing information which is normatively relevant. I argue that compared to competing accounts of request normativity, especially those of David Enoch and James H.P. Lewis, the epistemic account gives better answers to cases of insincere requests, is simpler, and does a better job (...) incorporating the importance of relationships. I also defend the epistemic account from three objections: that requests are important because they constitute consent, that requests and wishes must be normatively different, and that some requests do not provide any new information. (shrink)

The U.S. election in November 2016 raised and amplified doubts about first-past-the-post (“plurality rule”) electoral systems. Arguments against plurality rule and for alternatives like preferential voting tend to be consequentialist: it is argued that systems like preferential voting produce different, better outcomes. After briefly noting why the consequentialist case against plurality rule is more complex and contentious than it first appears, I offer an expressive alternative: plurality rule produces actual or apparent dilemmas for voters in ways that are morally objectionable, (...) and avoidable under preferential voting systems. This expressive case against plurality rule is both simpler and more ecumenical than its consequentialist counterpart, and it provides strong reasons to prefer alternatives to plurality rule. Moreover, it suggests a distinct way of evaluating different alternatives like preferential voting. (shrink)

Supporters of open borders sometimes argue that the state has no pro tanto right to restrict immigration, because such a right would also entail a right to exclude existing citizens for whatever reasons justify excluding immigrants. These arguments can be defeated by suggesting that people have a right to stay put. I present a new form of the exclusion argument against closed borders which escapes this “right to stay put” reply. I do this by describing a kind of exclusion that (...) has not been discussed in depth, which I call “territorial exclusion.” Territorial exclusion is the process according to which the group that wishes to exclude current citizens secedes from the territory in which those citizens reside. I argue that the wrongness of territorial exclusion explains why there is no pro tanto right for a state to exclude immigrants, because otherwise there would be a pro tanto right for the state to kick people out by seceding from the territory they inhabit. Because kicking people out like this is typically wrong, borders cannot be closed. (shrink)

I ask you to X. You now have a reason to X. My request gave you a reason. How? One unpopular theory is the epistemic account, according to which requests do not create any new reasons but instead simply reveal information. For instance, my request that you X reveals that I desire that you X, and my desire gives you a reason to X. Peter Schaber has recently attacked both the epistemic account and other theories of the reason-giving force of (...) requests. Schaber defends a new theory of the reason-giving force of requests according to which request give reasons because it is valuable for requesters and requestees that requests have this power. In this paper I argue that Schaber's attack on the epistemic account fails, and that his own theory ought to be rejected because it faces compelling objections. (shrink)

Experience indicates that the questioning and democratic nature of the community of enquiry can be demanding and unsettling for teachers, present.

“X-Firsters” hold that there is some normative feature that is fundamental to all others (and, often, that there’s some normative feature that is the “mark of the normative”: all other normative properties have it, and are normative in virtue of having it). This view is taken as a starting point in the debate about which X is “on first.” Little has been said about whether or why we should be X-Firsters, or what we should think about normativity if we aren’t (...) X-Firsters. Hence the chapter’s two main goals. First, to provide a simple argument that one shouldn’t be an X-Firster about the normative domain, which starts with the observation that analogous views have dubious merits in analogous domains. Second, to offer an alternative view—taking normativity to be a determinable explained in terms of its determinates—that offers an interesting way to think about the structure and unity of normativity. (shrink)

Motion—and, in particular, local motion or change in location—plays a central role in Kenelm Digby’s natural philosophy and in his arguments for the immateriality of the soul. Despite this, Digby’s account of what motion consists in has yet to receive much scholarly attention. In this paper, I advance a novel interpretation of Digby on motion. According to it, Digby holds that for a body to move is for it to divide from and unify with other bodies. This is a view (...) of motion—as change in relations of parthood—that Alison Peterman attributes to Digby’s contemporary and acquaintance, Margaret Cavendish. Having shown that Digby’s presentation of the view predates Cavendish’s by more than a decade, I make a case that Digby’s work influenced Cavendish’s on this topic. In developing and defending my reading, I consider to what extent the Digbean account of motion and the arguments for it accord with the ideals of the mechanical philosophy emerging in the early modern period. (shrink)

I defend the cosmopolitan instrumentalist theory of secession, according to which a group has a right to secede only if this would promote cosmopolitan justice. I argue that the theory is preferable to other theories of secession because it is an entailment of cosmopolitanism, which is independently attractive, and because, unlike other theories of secession, it allows us to give the answers we want to give in cases like secession of the rich or secession that would make things worse for (...) minorities. I defend the view against the objections that it allows for colonialism and annexation, that it is not a distinct theory, and that it is impractical. (shrink)

Still the Heart of Darkness analyzes Richard Preston's best-selling account of an Ebola virus outbreak in Reston, Virginia in 1989. Through a textual examination of The Hot Zone, this essay demonstrates how Preston grounds his narrative about the threat of rare emerging viruses from the third world in terms of the colonialist discourse about Africa as the white man's grave, most notably Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness. By foregrounding previous outbreaks in Africa, Preston simultaneously darkens its landscape and inscribes the (...) Ebola filovirus as an external biological threat to Americans in a post-Cold War world with porous borders. (shrink)

We examine corruption across three Central and Eastern Europe countries through a social psychology framework which integrates social identity theory, social cognitive theory and moral disengagement mechanisms. We illustrate how various social identities influence individual and collective action in terms of ethical behavior and corruption, thereby creating, maintaining and perpetuating petty, grand and systemic public/private corruption through triadic co-determination via cognition, behavior and the environment. Despite growing research on corruption normalization, less is known about the cognitive and behavioral mechanisms in (...) ethical decision making, the cognitive workings of how individuals reconcile unethical behavior and the social psychological processes behind corruption in society and organizations. Expert interviews reveal internally conflicted multi-layered social identities perpetuating corruption, some embedded in nationalistic history and others tied to the European Union, which supports the divergent paths of CEE countries since the fall of communism. Some moral disengagement mechanisms are common across all three countries, while others are linked to specific circumstances. Social identity mechanisms feed into moral disengagement, which individuals draw upon to reconcile the conflict between unethical behavior and moral codes. Patterns of moral disengagement aggregate to the country level and explain normalization of corruption in CEE society and organizations. (shrink)

Abstract This paper offers an appraisal of Phillip Pettit's approach to the problem how a merely finite set of examples can serve to represent a determinate rule, given that indefinitely many rules can be extrapolated from any such set. I argue that Pettit's so-called ethnocentric theory of rule-following fails to deliver the solution to this problem he sets out to provide. More constructively, I consider what further provisions are needed in order to advance Pettit's general approach to the problem. I (...) conclude that what is needed is an account that, whilst it affirms the view that agents' responses are constitutively involved in the exemplification of rules, does not allow such responses the pride of place they have in Pettit's theory. (shrink)

This book is a study of the role of intellect in human action as described by Thomas Aquinas. One of its primary aims is to compare the interpretation of Aristotle by Aquinas with the lines of interpretation offered in contemporary Aristotelian scholarship. The book seeks to clarify the problems involved in the appropriation of Aristotle's theory by a Christian theologian, including such topics as the practical syllogism and the problems of akrasia. Westberg argues that Aquinas was much closer to Aristotle (...) than is often recognized, and he puts forward important new interpretations of the relation of intellect and will in the stages of intention, deliberation, decision, and execution. In the concluding section of the book, he shows how this new interpretation yields fruitful insights on a range of theological topics, including sin, law, love, and the moral virtues. (shrink)

Mandatory minimum sentencing provisions have been a feature of the U.S. justice system since 1790. But they have expanded considerably under the war on drugs, and their use has expanded considerably under the Trump Administration; some states are also poised to expand drug-related mandatory minimums further in efforts to fight the current opioid epidemic. In this paper I outline and evaluate three prominent arguments for and against the use of mandatory minimums in the war on drugs—they appeal, respectively, to proportionality, (...) consistency, and efficiency. I ultimately defend the view that the use of mandatory minimums in the war on drugs is unjust. -/- . (shrink)

This paper aims to understand Hegel’s claim in the introduction to his Philosophy of Mind that mind is an actualization of the Idea and argues that this claim provides us with a novel and defensible way of understanding Hegel’s naturalism. I suggest that Hegel’s approach to naturalism should be understood as ‘formal’, and argue that Hegel’s Logic, particularly the section on the ‘Idea’, provides us with a method for this approach. In the first part of the paper, I present an (...) interpretation of Hegel’s method in which life plays a central role. In the second part of the paper, I develop Hegel’s method by providing a reading of Hegel’s Subjective Spirit, focusing on the sections ‘Anthropology’ and ‘Phenomenology’ in particular, arguing that they display the dialectic between life and cognition outlined by Hegel’s Idea. (shrink)

This paper aims to understand Hegel’s claim in the introduction to his Philosophy of Mind that mind is an actualization of the Idea and argues that this claim provides us with a novel and defensible way of understanding Hegel’s naturalism. I suggest that Hegel’s approach to naturalism should be understood as ‘formal’, and argue that Hegel’s Logic, particularly the section on the ‘Idea’, provides us with a method for this approach. In the first part of the paper, I present an (...) interpretation of Hegel’s method in which life plays a central role. In the second part of the paper, I develop Hegel’s method by providing a reading of Hegel’s Subjective Spirit, focusing on the sections ‘Anthropology’ and ‘Phenomenology’ in particular, arguing that they display the dialectic between life and cognition outlined by Hegel’s Idea. (shrink)

The potential to collect brain data more directly, with higher resolution, and in greater amounts has heightened worries about mental and brain privacy. In order to manage the risks to individuals posed by these privacy challenges, some have suggested codifying new privacy rights, including a right to “mental privacy.” In this paper, we consider these arguments and conclude that while neurotechnologies do raise significant privacy concerns, such concerns are—at least for now—no different from those raised by other well-understood data collection (...) technologies, such as gene sequencing tools and online surveillance. To better understand the privacy stakes of brain data, we suggest the use of a conceptual framework from information ethics, Helen Nissenbaum’s “contextual integrity” theory. To illustrate the importance of context, we examine neurotechnologies and the information flows they produce in three familiar contexts—healthcare and medical research, criminal justice, and consumer marketing. We argue that by emphasizing what is distinct about brain privacy issues, rather than what they share with other data privacy concerns, risks weakening broader efforts to enact more robust privacy law and policy. (shrink)

Can a liberal state exclude illiberal immigrants in order to preserve its liberal status? Hrishikesh Joshi has argued that liberalism cannot require a commitment to open borders because this would entail that liberalism is committed to its own demise in circumstances in which many illiberal immigrants aim to immigrate into a liberal society. I argue that liberalism is committed to its own demise in certain circumstances, but that this is not as bad as it may appear. Liberalism’s commitment to its (...) own demise is merely a reflection of the fact that it must take into account the rights of outsiders, not just the rights of existing citizens, and of the fact that circumstances of injustice can sometimes leave liberal societies with no correct choice. (shrink)

This essay considers the critical response to Hegel's view of Socrates we find in Kierkegaard's dissertation, The Concept of Irony. I argue that this dispute turns on the question whether or not the examination of particular thinkers enters into Socrates’ most basic aims and interests. I go on to show how Kierkegaard's account, which relies on an affirmative answer to this question, enables him to provide a cogent defence of Socrates' philosophical practice against Hegel's criticisms.

People frequently report that, at times, their thought has a vocal character. Thinking commonly appears to be accompanied or constituted by silently ‘talking’ to oneself in inner speech. In this paper, we explore the specifically epistemic role of inner speech in conscious reasoning. A plausible position—but one I argue is ultimately wrong—is that inner speech plays asolelyfacilitative role that is exhausted by (i) serving as the vehicle of representation for conscious reasoning, and/or (ii) allowing one to focus on certain types (...) of objects or relations, e.g., causal relations, abstracta, counterfactuals, etc., or to consciously entertain structured propositional contents that it would be hard (or impossible) to focus on or entertain with representations in other (e.g., imagistic) formats. According to this position, inner speech doesn't figure as a justificatory element in our reasoning or as the partial epistemic basis of our conclusions—it merely facilitates reasoning through (i) and/or (ii). In contrast to the view that inner speech is amerefacilitator, I establish that (outside of potentially playing roles (i) and/or (ii)) the language we use itself serves as a crucial source of information in reasoning. In other words, we reason from propositions about the language we use in inner speech as opposed to exclusively reasoning from the semantic contents of the speech. My conclusion follows from how we use language as a cognitive tool to keep track of information, e.g., the contents of premises, lemmas, previous reasoning results, etc., in reasoning. (shrink)

Pezdek and Lam [Pezdek, K. & Lam, S. . What research paradigms have cognitive psychologists used to study “False memory,” and what are the implications of these choices? Consciousness and Cognition] claim that the majority of research into false memories has been misguided. Specifically, they charge that false memory scientists have been misusing the term “false memory,” relying on the wrong methodologies to study false memories, and misapplying false memory research to real world situations. We review each of these claims (...) and highlight the problems with them. We conclude that several types of false memory research have advanced our knowledge of autobiographical and recovered memories, and that future research will continue to make significant contributions to how we understand memory and memory errors. (shrink)

People frequently report that their thought has, at times, a vocal character. Thinking commonly appears to be accompanied or constituted by silently ‘talking’ to oneself in inner speech. In this paper, I argue that inner speech ‘utterances’ can constitute occurrent propositional attitudes, e.g., occurrent judgments, suppositions, etc., and, thereby, we can consciously reason through tokening a series of inner speech utterances in working memory. As I demonstrate, the functional role a mental state plays in working memory is determined in a (...) flexible and context sensitive manner by metacognitive monitoring and control procedures. An inner speech utterance functions as an occurrent judgment (and, thus, as a premise, lemma, or conclusion in a line of conscious reasoning) when it is experienced with a level of certainty that exceeds one’s threshold of confidence for acceptance. In virtue of an agent experiencing an inner speech utterance with a sufficient level of certainty, the utterance plays the functional role of an occurrent judgment through, e.g., terminating inquiry and causing overt actions (like overtly asserting the words rehearsed in inner speech). (shrink)

The US populace appears to be increasingly polarized on partisan lines. Political fissures bifurcate the country even on empirical matters like vaccine safety and anthropogenic climate change. There now exists an ever-expanding interdisciplinary research program in which theorists attempt to explain increases in political polarization and myriad other phenomena collected under the “post-truth” heading by appeal to social-epistemic structures, like echo chambers and epistemic bubbles, that affect the flow and uptake of information in various communities. In this paper, I critically (...) analyze C. Thi Nguyen’s important and popular analysis of echo chambers and epistemic bubbles. As I demonstrate, the explanatory mechanisms on which Nguyen focuses are, arguably, overly cognitive and obscure significant effects of social-epistemic structures on our affective lives. The broader lesson to draw from my discussion is the following: commonly used expressions intended to refer to social-epistemic problems, like “political polarization”, possess no univocal definition across theorists, and various ways of making the terms precise are differentially successful in characterizing verifiable phenomena. Theorizing about social-epistemic structures should be responsive to relevant empirical work on various phenomena that we have good reason to believe constitute real and substantive problems that result from the flow and uptake of information. (shrink)

Lovejoy (1873-1962) was America's foremost historian of ideas, a major participant in the philosophical debates of the twentieth century, and a prominent advocate of academic freedom. The product of an emotionally unsettled childhood and an evangelical father, Lovejoy reacted against his father by postulating the certainty of self-sufficient reason. He believed that only the principles of reason could order the world and so make our universe intelligible. Originally published in 1980. A UNC Press Enduring Edition -- UNC Press Enduring Editions (...) use the latest in digital technology to make available again books from our distinguished backlist that were previously out of print. These editions are published unaltered from the original, and are presented in affordable paperback formats, bringing readers both historical and cultural value. (shrink)

There have long been calls from industry for guidance in implementing strategies for sustainable development. The Circular Economy represents the most recent attempt to conceptualize the integration of economic activity and environmental wellbeing in a sustainable way. This set of ideas has been adopted by China as the basis of their economic development, escalating the concept in minds of western policymakers and NGOs. This paper traces the conceptualisations and origins of the Circular Economy, tracing its meanings, and exploring its antecedents (...) in economics and ecology, and discusses how the Circular Economy has been operationalized in business and policy. The paper finds that while the Circular Economy places emphasis on the redesign of processes and cycling of materials, which may contribute to more sustainable business models, it also encapsulates tensions and limitations. These include an absence of the social dimension inherent in sustainable development that limits its ethical dimensions, and some unintended consequences. This leads us to propose a revised definition of the Circular Economy as “an economic model wherein planning, resourcing, procurement, production and reprocessing are designed and managed, as both process and output, to maximize ecosystem functioning and human well-being”. (shrink)

In light of recent social psychological literature, I expand Miranda Fricker’s important notion of testimonial injustice. A fair portion of Fricker’s account rests on an older paradigm of stereotype and prejudice. Given recent empirical work, I argue for what I dub prescriptive credibility deficits in which a backlash effect leads to the assignment of a diminished level of credibility to persons who act in counter-stereotypic manners, thereby flouting prescriptive stereotypes. The notion of a prescriptive credibility deficit is not merely an (...) interesting conceptual addendum that can be appended to Fricker’s theory without need for further emendation. I develop the wider implications of prescriptive credibility deficits and argue that they pose a challenge to Fricker’s conception of the function of credibility assignments in conversational exchange and how a virtuous listener should respond to the potential threat of a prejudicial stereotype affecting her credibility assignments. (shrink)

According to ethical objectivism, what a person should do depends on the facts, as opposed to their perspective on the facts. A long-standing challenge to this view is that it fails to accommodate the role that norms play in guiding a person’s action. Roughly, if the facts that determine what a person should do lie beyond their ken, they cannot inform a person’s deliberations. This paper explores two recent developments of this line of thought. Both focus on the epistemic counterpart (...) to ethical objectivism, according to which what a person should believe depends on the facts, as opposed to their perspective on the facts. The suggestion in each case is that epistemic objectivism faces a distinctive problem in accommodating guidance. Insofar as objectivism concerning the epistemic domain stands or falls with objectivism concerning the ethical domain, this is a problem for objectivism more generally. In this paper, I show that those arguments are not successful. The upshot is that the objectivist – whether ethical or epistemic – need not reject the idea that norms serve a guiding function. (shrink)