Lucid, non-intimidating presentation of propositional logic, propositional calculus and predicate logic by Russian scholar. Topics of concern in a variety of fields, including computer science, systems analysis, linguistics, etc. Accessible to high school students; valuable review of fundamentals for professionals. Exercises (no solutions). Preface. Three appendices. Indices. Bibliogaphy. 14 figures.

According to ‘Excluders’, descriptive uncertainty – but not normative uncertainty – matters to what we ought to do. Recently, several authors have argued that those wishing to treat normative uncertainty differently from descriptive uncertainty face a dependence problem because one's descriptive uncertainty can depend on one's normative uncertainty. The aim of this paper is to determine whether the phenomenon of dependence poses a decisive problem for Excluders. I argue that existing arguments fail to show this, and that, while stronger ones (...) can be found, Excluders can escape them. (shrink)

In the debate over clinicians’ conscience, there is a greater ethical, legal, and scholarly focus on negative, rather than positive, claims of conscience. This asymmetry produces a seemingly unjustified double standard with respect to clinicians’ conscience under the law. For example, a Roman Catholic physician working at a secular institution may refuse to provide physician-aid-in-dying on the basis of conscience, but a secular physician working at a Roman Catholic institution may not insist on providing physician-aid-in-dying on the basis of conscience. (...) This article outlines arguments against this asymmetry and critiques them for failing to distinguish between positive claims of conscience as positive or negative rights. I suggest the asymmetry debate should be focused on whether positive claims of conscience as positive rights ought to enjoy the same protections as negative claims of conscience. Clarifying the debate in this way helps elucidate some of the best reasons for the asymmetry, which these arguments have not addressed. This article does not take a definitive position on whether the asymmetry is justified, but attempts to bring some focus to the debate by directing arguments against the asymmetry to address the significant differences between positive claims of conscience as positive rights and negative claims of conscience. (shrink)

I take issue with several themes in Ted Toadvine’s lively paper, “Limits of the Flesh,” suggesting that he has significantly misread many of the arguments in The Spell of the Sensuous. I first engage his contention that I disparage reflection and denigrate the written word. Then I take up the assertion that I exclude the symbolic dimension of experience from my account, and indeed that I seek to eliminate the symbolic from our interactions with others. Finally, I refute his claim (...) that my ecophenomenological stance leaves no room for resistance, contradiction, and alterity—elements that are, in fact, central to my understanding of ethics. My reply leads directly into a discussion of one of the crucial concerns of my work: the manner in which the very style of our discourse—our way of wielding words—tacitly works to either enhance, or to stifle, the solidarity between the human community and the more-than-human earth. (shrink)

Our aim in this article is to bring some clarity to the clinical ethics expertise debate by critiquing and replacing the taxonomy offered by the Core Competencies report. The orienting question for our taxonomy is: Can clinical ethicists offer justified, normative recommendations for active patient cases? Views that answer “no” are characterized as a “negative” view of clinical ethics expertise and are further differentiated based on (a) why they think ethicists cannot give justified normative recommendations and (b) what they think (...) ethicists can offer, if they cannot offer recommendations. Views that answer “yes” to the orienting question are characterized as a “positive” view of clinical ethics expertise. Positive views are distinguished according to four additional questions. First (P1), how are those recommendations generated? Second (P2), what is the nature of the recommendations? Third (P3), we ask, how are the recommendations justified? And finally (P4), how are the recommendations communicated? (shrink)

This third edition of the bestselling An Introduction to Sociology: Feminist Perspectives confirms the ongoing centrality of feminist perspectives and research to the sociological enterprise and introduces students to the wide range of feminist contributions to key areas of sociological concern. This completely revised edition includes: · new chapters on sexuality and the media · additional material on race and ethnicity, disability and the body · many new international and comparative examples · the influence of theories of globalization and post-colonial (...) studies. The theoretical elements have also been fully rethought in light of recent developments in social theory. Written by three experienced academics, this book gives students of sociology and women's studies an accessible overview of the feminist contribution to all the key areas of sociological concern. (shrink)

A good number of people currently thinking and writing about reasons identify a reason as a consideration that counts in favor of an action or attitude.1 I will argue that using this as our fundamental account of what a reason is generates a fairly deep and recalcitrant ambiguity; this account fails to distinguish between two quite different sets of considerations that count in favor of certain attitudes, only one of which are the “proper” or “appropriate” kind of reason for them. (...) This ambiguity has been the topic of recent discussion, under the head “the wrong kind of reasons problem.”2 I will suggest that confusion about “the wrong kind of reason” will be dispelled by changing our account of what a reason is. While I agree both that reasons are considerations and that certain.. (shrink)

Many assume that we can be responsible only what is voluntary. This leads to puzzlement about our responsibility for our beliefs, since beliefs seem not to be voluntary. I argue against the initial assumption, presenting an account of responsibility and of voluntariness according to which, not only is voluntariness not required for responsibility, but the feature which renders an attitude a fundamental object of responsibility (that the attitude embodies one’s take on the world and one’s place in it) also guarantees (...) that it could not be voluntary. It turns out, then, that, for failing to be voluntary, beliefs are a central example of the sort of thing for which we are most fundamentally responsible. (shrink)

The popularity and profitability of American gridiron football is beyond dispute. Recent polls put football as the overwhelming favorite of people who follow at least one sport and huge revenues are reported at both the professional and the university level. We know, however, that what is the case tells us little about what ought to be the case, and it is to the latter question that this paper is directed. I offer a three-pronged attack on the ethical acceptability of American (...) football, both amateur and professional, based on harm to the players, objectification of the players, and harm to others done by the players, leading to the conclusion that the sport, as currently constituted, is morally unacceptable. (shrink)

I hope to show that, although belief is subject to two quite robust forms of agency, "believing at will" is impossible; one cannot believe in the way one ordinarily acts. Further, the same is true of intention: although intention is subject to two quite robust forms of agency, the features of belief that render believing less than voluntary are present for intention, as well. It turns out, perhaps surprisingly, that you can no more intend at will than believe at will.

Although theoretically rigorous, the book is comprehensible to the beginning qualitative researcher.

In honoring Carroll Izard’s contributions to emotion research, we discuss infant facial activity and emotion expression. We consider the debated issue of whether infants are biologically prepared to express specific emotions. We offer a perspective that potentially integrates differing viewpoints on infant facial expression of emotion. Specifically, we suggest that evolution has prepared infants with innate action readiness patterns, which are crucial for early infant–caregiver social interaction, and in the course of social interaction specific facial configurations acquire functional significance, becoming (...) associated with specific emotions. Research has not confirmed the presence of innate neurophysiological action patterns that map onto discrete emotions but evidence indicates that the possibility has not been ruled out. (shrink)

In a recent paper in Psychological Science, Kouider and Dupoux reported obtaining unconscious Stroop priming only when subjects had partial awareness of the masked distractor words . Kouider and Dupoux conjectured that semantic priming occurs only when such partial awareness is present. The present experiments tested this conjecture in an affective categorization priming task that differed from Kouider and Dupoux’s in using masked distractors that subjects had practiced earlier as visible words. Experiment 1 showed priming from practiced words when subjects (...) had no partial awareness of those words. Experiment 2 showed that, in the absence of partial awareness, practiced words yielded priming but not-practiced words did not. Experiment 3 corroborated Experiment 1 and 2s results using a different test of partial awareness. These results suggest that unconscious processing of subword elements drives masked semantic priming by practiced words. (shrink)

This paper is divided into three sections. The first presents some examples of the killing/letting die distinction. The second draws a further distinction between what I call negative and positive cases of acting or refraining. Here I argue that the moral significance of the acting/refraining distinction is different for positive and for negative cases. In the third section I apply the above distinction to euthanasia, and argue that mercy killing should be regarded as analogous to positive rather than negative cases. (...) On the basis of this, I then support active rather than passive euthanasia. (shrink)

In this paper I consider fairness of blaming a wrongdoer. In particular, I consider the claim that blaming a wrongdoer can be unfair because blame has a certain characteristic force, a force which is not fairly imposed upon the wrongdoer unless certain conditions are met--unless, e.g., the wrongdoer could have done otherwise, or unless she is someone capable of having done right, or unless she is able to control her behavior by the light of moral reasons. While agreeing that blame (...) has a characteristic force, I am skeptical of this charge of unfairness. My skepticism concerns itself less with the particular conditions of fairness proposed than with the idea that blame can be rendered unfair by its characteristic force. If to blame a person were simply to perform certain intentional actions, then, as we will see, blame could be rendered unfair by its force. But to blame a person is not just to act in certain ways. It is, at least in large part, to make certain judgments or adopt certain attitudes. However, it is unclear how these attitudes or judgments carry "force"? and also unclear whether they can be rendered unfair by their force. Examining these issues, I will suggest that much of the force of blame is found in a set of judgments--most centrally, the judgment that one person failed to show proper regard for others. But, I will argue, once it is granted that such judgments are true, their characteristic force cannot render them unfair. (shrink)

I first pose a challenge which, it seems to me, any philosophical account of forgiveness must meet: the account must be articulate and it must allow for forgiveness that is uncompromising. I then examine an account of forgiveness which appears to meet this challenge. Upon closer examination we discover that this account actually fails to meet the challenge—but it fails in very instructive ways. The account takes two missteps which seem to be taken by almost everyone discussing forgiveness. At the (...) end, I sketch an alternative account of forgiveness, one that I think meets the challenge and avoids the missteps. (shrink)

A common line of thought claims that we are responsible for ourselves and our actions, while less sophisticated creatures are not, because we are, and they are not, self-aware. Our self-awareness is thought to provide us with a kind of control over ourselves that they lack: we can reflect upon ourselves, upon our thoughts and actions, and so ensure that they are as we would have them to be. Thus, our capacity for reflection provides us with the control over ourselves (...) that grounds our responsibility. I argue that this thought is subtly, but badly, confused. It uses, as its model for the control that grounds our responsibility, the kind of control we exercise over ordinary objects and over our own voluntary actions: we represent to ourselves what to do or how to change things, and then we bring about that which we represent. But we cannot use this model to explain our responsibility for ourselves and our actions: if there is a question about why or how we are responsible for ourselves and our actions, it cannot be answered by appeal to a sophisticated, self-directed action. There must be some more fundamental account of how or why we are responsible. I replace the usual account with a novel but natural view: responsible mental activity can be modeled, not as an ordinary action, but as the settling of a question. This shift will require abandoning the tempting but troublesome thought that responsible activity involves discretion and awareness—which, I argue, we must abandon in any case. (shrink)

I argue to a conclusion I find at once surprising and intuitive: although many considerations show trust useful, valuable, important, or required, these are not the reasons for which one trusts a particular person to do a particular thing. The reasons for which one trusts a particular person on a particular occasion concern, not the value, importance, or necessity of trust itself, but rather the trustworthiness of the person in question in the matter at hand. In fact, I will suggest (...) that the degree to which you trust a particular person to do a particular thing will vary inversely with the degree to which you must rely, for the motivation or justification of your trusting response, on reasons that concern the importance, or value, or necessity of having such a response. (shrink)

This article examines a handful of recent creative works that reflect speculatively on transgender pasts. I argue that each of these creative texts uses ontological interventions to reimagine moments in trans activist history that scholars have narrated only in terms of the attenuation of sociality and of political participation. These works do this by ratifying trans activists’ relations of reciprocity with extraordinary entities that are not often supported by secular and anthropocentric historiographies. Instead of engaging accounts of coalition work with (...) extraterrestrials, nonhuman animals, and magical powers mainly as sites of “subjugated knowledges”, these creative works all consider the political capacitations afforded by trans collaborations with other-than-human agencies. In order to make this argument, I draw from the recent body of anthropological scholarship known as the “new animism,” and consider the absence of commentary on religion and secularism within the Anglo-American posthuman turn. Ultimately, beyond offering alternatives to historical declension narratives about trans activism, these works urge scholars to consider how relations with “subaltern” agentive forces have become increasingly important to disenfranchised communities’ efforts to negotiate the political debilitations of a post-neoliberal world. (shrink)

Because the goal of reducing violence is nearly universally accepted, the uniquely prescriptive character of peace and conflict studies is rarely scrutinized. However, prescriptive pacifism in social psychological peace research (SPPR) masks a diversity of opinion on whether nonintervention is more effective in promoting peace than intervention to punish aggression, restore stability, and/or prevent atrocity. SPPR’s skepticism is sharper in the post–9/11 era when states use public fear of terrorist threat to promote sometimes-unrelated domestic and geostrategic interests. The most frequently (...) proposed remedy for this kind of abuse is some form of international legal positivism that permits the use of force only in self-defense, per strict interpretation of the United Nations Charter, or not at all—a position the author calls ‘prescriptive pacifism." This project critically examines the metaethical premises of prescriptive pacifism, positivism, and realism, how these animate the moral and political skepticism of peace studies, psychology, and international relations, respectively, and meet in SPPR. After comparing the intellectual development of these fields and just war theory, I present influential psychologist Albert Bandura’s social cognitive theory (SCT) of moral judgment and aggression as a case study. I present evidence of the problematic nature of Bandura and others’ formulation of moral engagement and disengagement, tracing their contradictions to the named premises. In brief, I argue that SCT’s underlying skepticism of individual moral judgment implies elite or consensus-driven models of social and political change whose institutional gradualism contradicts these authors’ and SPPR’s stated progressive aims, and whose utilitarian ethos undermines the egalitarian individualism that underpins both the liberal conception of the rule of law and the international human rights regime. Finally, I present an alternative model of moral reasoning and engagement based on a Kantian constructivist understanding of international ethics, and the theory of the just war. I outline two instruments inspired by these related normative frameworks that in addition to being more internally coherent, operationalize moral engagement and disengagement in a manner more consonant with political liberalism, existing international humanitarian law, and the emergent norm known as Responsibility to Protect. Intended for use in the collection and coding of qualitative responses to survey research of public opinion on morally ambiguous issues in international politics such as intervention and territorial integrity, these instruments avoid the tendency of existing SPPR frameworks toward false positives of militarism and pacifism. Their presentation also makes mutually comprehensible the often-confusing professional idioms of international relations, political theory, moral philosophy, and social psychology, standing to make a contribution to each. (shrink)

Moral pluralism poses a foundational problem for secular clinical ethics: How can ethical dilemmas be resolved in a context where there is disagreement not only on particular cases, but further, on...

Descartes’s arguments about the certainty of mathematics in the Rules for the Direction of the Mind cannot be understood independently of his attack on the authority of ancient authors. The author maintains this view by reading Descartes’s claims about mathematics through the lens of status theory, a framework for disputation revived by Renaissance dialecticians. Within status theory, “certainty” was closely associated with consensus. The essay shows how Descartes used status to attack the authority of the ancient authors and elevate mathematics (...) as an alternative. Descartes’s arguments about the certainty of mathematics are colored by his effort to make mathematics satisfy the demands of status-based disputation. Specifically, in order to elevate the status of mathematics, Descartes portrayed it as more common—prone to consensus—than he really believed it was. (shrink)

It has seemed to many philosophers—perhaps to most—that believing is not voluntary, that we cannot believe at will. It has seemed to many of these that this inability is not a merely contingent psychological limitation but rather is a deep fact about belief, perhaps a conceptual limitation. But it has been very difficult to say exactly why we cannot believe at will. I earlier offered an account of why we cannot believe at will. I argued that nothing could qualify both (...) as having been done “at will,” in the relevant sense, and as a belief. Thus, no believer could believe at will. If my arguments are correct, our inability to believe at will reveals no genuine lack in our powers of mind, any more than an inability to draw a square circle reveals a lack of artistic skill. My account has been recently criticized by Kieran Setiya, who has provided an account of his own. Here I revisit and defend my account, hopefully in a way that will both make my thought clearer and illumine some of the broader differences between Setiya’s approach and my own. I then briefly consider Setiya’s own argument, in part to further develop the contrast. (shrink)

The paper presents evidence in bacteria for the utility of Godfrey-Smith’s environmental complexity thesis, using certain kinds of signal transduction systems as proxies for cognitive/behavioral complexity. Microbiologists already accept that the number of signal transduction proteins in a bacterial genome indicates the level of ecological complexity to which the organism is subject: the more signalling proteins, the greater the complexity. Sheer numbers are not always a reliable indicator of behavioral complexity, however. The paper proposes a new, ECT-based procedure for identifying, (...) from genomic sequence and signalling repertoire, novel bacterial candidates likely to exhibit behavioral complexity in response to a complex ecological niche. (shrink)

Donald Davidson opens ‘Actions, Reasons, and Causes’ by asking, ‘What is the relation between a reason and an action when the reason explains the action by giving the agent's reason for doing what he did?’ His answer has generated some confusion about reasons for action and made for some difficulty in understanding the place for the agent's own reasons for acting, in the explanation of an action. I offer here a different account of the explanation of action, one that, though (...) minimal and formal, preserves the proper role for the agent's own reasons for acting. (shrink)