The current dominant perspective on addiction as a brain disease has been challenged recently by Marc Lewis, who argued that the brain-changes related to addiction are similar to everyday changes of the brain. From this alternative perspective, addictions are bad habits that can be broken, provided that people are motivated to change. In that case, autonomous choice or “free will” can overcome bad influences from genes and or environments and brain-changes related to addiction. Even though we concur with Lewis that (...) there are issues with the brain disease perspective, we also argue that pointing to black swans can be important, that is: there can be severe cases where addiction indeed tips over into the category of brain disease, but obviously that does not prove that every case of addiction falls into the disease category, that all swans are black. We argue that, for example, people suffering from Korsakoff’s syndrome, can be described as having a brain disease, often caused by alcohol addiction. Moreover, the brain changes occurring with addiction are related to choice-behaviour, habit formation and insight, hence essential mental abilities to break the addiction. We argue for a more graded perspective, where both black swans and white swans are rare, and most cases of addiction come as geese in different shades of gray. (shrink)

Exploring the Illusion of Free Will and Moral Responsibility is an edited collection of new essays by an internationally recognized line-up of contributors. It is aimed at readers who wish to explore the philosophical and scientific arguments for free will skepticism and their implications.

This article aims to further test the cognitive claims of the so-called subjectivity account of causal events and their linguistic markers, causal connectives. We took Mandarin Chinese, a language that is typologically completely different from the usual western languages, as a case to provide evidence for this subjectivity account. Complementary to the commonly used corpora analyses, we employed crowdsourcing to tap native speakers’ intuitions about causal coherence, focusing on four result connectives kějiàn ‘therefore’, suǒyǐ ‘so’, yīncǐ ‘so/for this reason’ and (...) yúshì ‘thereupon/as a result’. The analysis shows systematic differences regarding the use of connectives in relations that differ in terms of subjectivity, demonstrating that native speakers make use of subjectivity to encode and decode different types of causal relations in discourse. Moreover, our study evidences that a comprehensive model of subjectivity should include the epistemic dimension of certainty about the subjectivity scale that might be indicated by other linguistic elements. In-depth analyses of the test items revealed that the presence/absence of modality words in the result segments are related to different preferential patterns for the connectives. There is a trade-off between the epistemic dimension of certainty and the expression of subjectivity in the four connectives involved. (shrink)

Offering clear and reliable guidance to the ideas of philosophers from antiquity to the present day and to the major philosophical systems around the globe, he Oxford Companion to Philosophy is the definitive philosophical reference work for readers at all levels. For ten years the original volume has served as a stimulating introduction for general readers and as an indispensable guide for students and scholars. A distinguished international assembly of 249 philosophers contributed almost 2,000 entries, and many of these have (...) now been considerably revised and updated in this major new edition; to these are added over 300 brand-new pieces on a fascinating range of current topics such as animal consciousness, cloning, corporate responsibility, the family, globalization, terrorism . Here is, indeed, a world of thought, with entries on idealism and empiricism, epicureanism and stoicism, passion and emotion, deism and pantheism. The contributors represent a veritable who's who of modern philosophy, including such eminent figures as Isaiah Berlin, Sissela Bok, Ronald Dworkin, John Searle, Michael Walzer, and W. V. Quine. We meet the great thinkers--from Aristotle and Plato, to Augustine and Aquinas, to Descartes and Kant, to Nietzsche and Schopenhauer, right up to contemporary thinkers such as Richard Rorty, Jacques Derrida, Luce Iragaray, and Noam Chomsky. There are short entries on key concepts such as personal identity and the mind-body problem, major doctrines from utilitarianism to Marxism, schools of thought such as the Heidelberg School or the Vienna Circle, and contentious public issues such as abortion, capital punishment, and welfare. In addition, the book offers short explanations of philosophical terms (qualia, supervenience, iff), puzzles (the Achilles paradox, the prisoner's dilemma), and curiosities (the philosopher's stone, slime). Almost every entry is accompanied by suggestions for further reading, and the book includes both a chronological chart of the history of philosophy and a gallery of portraits of eighty eminent philosophers. An indispensable guide and a constant source of stimulation and enlightenment, The Oxford Companion to Philosophy will appeal to everyone interested in abstract thought, the eternal questions, and the foundations of human understanding. (shrink)

Ted Sider aptly and concisely states the self-visitation paradox thus: 'Suppose I travel back in time and stand in a room with my sitting 10-year-old self. I seem to be both sitting and standing, but how can that be?' (2001, 101). I will explore a relativist resolution of this paradox offered by, or on behalf of, endurantists.1 It maintains that the sitting and the standing are relative to the personal time or proper time of the time traveler and is intended (...) to yield the result that Ted is sitting at a certain initial personal/proper time but is not standing relative to that time. Similarly, it is also supposed to yield that Ted is standing relative to a later personal/proper time, but not sitting relative to that .. (shrink)

The genetic stability of living cells is continuously threatened by the presence of endogenous reactive oxygen species and other genotoxic molecules. Of particular threat are the thousands of DNA single-strand breaks that arise in each cell, each day, both directly from disintegration of damaged sugars and indirectly from the excision repair of damaged bases. If un-repaired, single-strand breaks can be converted into double-strand breaks during DNA replication, potentially resulting in chromosomal rearrangement and genetic deletion. Consequently, cells have adopted multiple pathways (...) to ensure the rapid and efficient removal of single-strand breaks. A general feature of these pathways appears to be the extensive employment of protein–protein interactions to stimulate both the individual component steps and the overall repair reaction. Our current understanding of DNA single-strand break repair is discussed, and testable models for the architectural coordination of this important process are presented. BioEssays 23:447–455, 2001. © 2001 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. (shrink)

This is Chapter 5 of my Commonsense Consequentialism: Wherein Morality Meets Rationality. In this chapter, I argue that those who wish to accommodate typical instances of supererogation and agent-centered options must deny that moral reasons are morally overriding and accept both that the reason that agents have to promote their own self-interest is a non-moral reason and that this reason can, and sometimes does, prevent the moral reason that they have to sacrifice their self-interest so as to do more to (...) promote the interests of others from generating a moral requirement. Furthermore, I argue that given that an act’s deontic status of both moral and non-moral reasons, the consequentialist must adopt dual-ranking act-consequentialism. I then defend dual-ranking act-consequentialism against a number of objections. (shrink)

This essay explores a modern American poem—its verse form, imagery, diction, and rhythm, and, in particular, its cultural echoes, resonances, and overtones. I examine the poem’s explicit invocation of Apelles and crow mythology, but I also show that the implicit context from which it arises, and the one that allows it to speak with the great- est fullness and power, is work that Shakespeare wrote or published between 1606 and 1609. This context allows us to see that, at the heart (...) of the poem, lies the Shakespearean and Platonic analogy between the creation of children and the creation of intellectual work. (shrink)

Oxford Studies in Metaphysics is dedicated to the timely publication of new work in metaphysics, broadly construed. These volumes provide a forum for the best new work in this flourishing field. They offer a broad view of the subject, featuring not only the traditionally central topics such as existence, identity, modality, time, and causation, but also the rich clusters of metaphysical questions in neighbouring fields, such as philosophy of mind and philosophy of science. This book is the eighth volume in (...) the series. It contains essays by Cian Dorr and John Hawthorne, Maya Eddon, Shamik Dasgupta, Bill Dunaway, Cody Gilmore, Ted Sider, Aaron Cotnoir, Katherine Hawley, Frabrice Correia and Sven Rosencrantz, David Braddon-Mitchell, and Ross Cameron. (shrink)

Jan W. Wojcik - The Works of Robert Boyle - Journal of the History of Philosophy 40:4 Journal of the History of Philosophy 40.4 543-545 Book Review The Works of Robert Boyle Robert Boyle. The Works of Robert Boyle. 14 vols. Edited by Michael Hunter and Edward B. Davis. London: Pickering & Chatto, 1999, 2000. Cloth, $1,950. This is the first edition of Boyle's oeuvre since that of Thomas Birch , and is the first scholarly edition ever. It is a (...) masterful achievement by Michael Hunter and Ted Davis, informed as it is by a total of approximately forty years of experience with the Boyle archive housed at the Royal Society of London. What began in 1980 as an attempt to catalogue the archive has led to this new, and most welcome, edition—one that includes not only Boyle's published work, but also two volumes of previously unpublished archival material. Despite its many defects, Birch's 1772 edition, in its reprint of edition of 1965 , has been popular with scholars living far from access to large collections of seventeenth-century works. The first thing to note about this new edition is that the editors have repaired the defects in Birch's edition. In selecting.. (shrink)

This review roundtable discusses Ted McCormick’s Human Empire: Mobility and Demographic Thought in the British Atlantic World, 1500–1800, an ambitious study charting the transformation of early mod...

In "Stanley Cavell and the Limits of Appreciation," Ted Cohen restates his hatred of Richard Wagner's music. Cohen hears something "very nasty" in Wagner's music, "an element of Nazism," to borrow Thomas Mann's phrase for what Mann, too, found disturbing in Wagner.1 Whereas Mann was still able to value Wagner's music, Cohen despises listening to it. Cohen realizes that his revulsion sets him apart not only from Mann but also from W. H. Auden, who praised Wagner's "consummate skill" in creating (...) heroes and heroines who exhibit the irrationality and self-destructiveness of human nature "in all its formidable enchantment."2 Cohen notes how another eminent listener, Arturo Toscanini, also thought Wagner's music worth... (shrink)

This paper articulates a way to ground a relatively high prior probability for grand explanatory theories apart from an appeal to simplicity. I explore the possibility of enumerating the space of plausible grand theories of the universe by using the explanatory properties of possible views to limit the number of plausible theories. I motivate this alternative grounding by showing that Swinburne’s appeal to simplicity is problematic along several dimensions. I then argue that there are three plausible grand views—theism, atheism, and (...) axiarchism—which satisfy explanatory requirements for plausibility. Other possible views lack the explanatory virtue of these three theories. Consequently, this explanatory grounding provides a way of securing a nontrivial prior probability for theism, atheism, and axiarchism. An important upshot of my approach is that a modest amount of empirical evidence can bear significantly on the posterior probability of grand theories of the universe. (shrink)

Things and Their Place in Theories Our talk of external things, our very notion of things, is just a conceptual apparatus that helps us to foresee and ...

The coherence of independent reports provides a strong reason to believe that the reports are true. This plausible claim has come under attack from recent work in Bayesian epistemology. This work shows that, under certain probabilistic conditions, coherence cannot increase the probability of the target claim. These theorems are taken to demonstrate that epistemic coherentism is untenable. To date no one has investigated how these results bear on different conceptions of coherence. I investigate this situation using Thagard’s ECHO model of (...) explanatory coherence. Thagard’s ECHO model provides a natural representation of the evidential significance of multiple independent reports. (shrink)

In The Struggle for Democracy, Christopher Meckstroth looks at history and context in the development of democratic theory to provide a principled way of sorting out deep conflicts over who has the right to speak for the democratic people. He tests this theory by applying it to contemporary debates over same-sex marriage, military intervention, and gun control.

Few philosophers have been as widely misunderstood as Nietzsche. His detractors and followers alike have often fundamentally misinterpreted him, distorting his views and intentions and criticizing or celebrating him for reasons removed from the views he actually held. Now available in paper, Nietzsche assesses his place in European thought, concentrating upon his writings in the last decade of his productive life. Nietzsche emerges in this comprehensive study as a philosopher of considerable sophistication who diverged sharply from traditional and ordinary ways (...) of thinking, but whose criticism, departures, and alternative views and strategies deserve to be given the most serious attention by philosophers. (shrink)

Ted T. Aoki, the most prominent curriculum scholar of his generation in Canada, has influenced numerous scholars around the world. Curriculum in a New Key brings together his work, over a 30-year span, gathered here under the themes of reconceptualizing curriculum; language, culture, and curriculum; and narrative. Aoki's oeuvre is utterly unique--a complex interdisciplinary configuration of phenomenology, post-structuralism, and multiculturalism that is both theoretically and pedagogically sophisticated and speaks directly to teachers, practicing and prospective. Curriculum in a New Key: The (...) Collected Works of Ted T. Aoki is an invaluable resource for graduate students, professors, and researchers in curriculum studies, and for students, faculty, and scholars of education generally. (shrink)

Kant’s theory of international politics and his right of hospitality are commonly associated with expansive projects of securing human rights or cosmopolitan governance beyond state borders. This article shows how this view misunderstands Kant’s criticism of the law of nations tradition as handed down into the eighteenth century as well as the logic of his radical alternative, which was designed to explain the conditions of possibility of global peace as a solution to the Hobbesian problem of a war of all (...) against all in the state of nature. I resolve longstanding confusion over the meaning and justification of Kant’s right of “hospitality” by showing how it functions not as a freestanding positive claim demanding enforcement but as a way of ruling out specious justifications for war against those the traditional law of nations permitted one to label “enemies.” This poses important questions for contemporary theories of global justice. (shrink)

The field of Astroethics addresses moral and societal issues arising out of speculation regarding terrestrial contact with extraterrestrial life in both its intelligent and non-intelligent forms. This chapter tackles 15 ethical quandaries, 12 of which are associated with space exploration within the solar system plus 3 with exoplanet communication. Within our solar ghetto, scientists expect at best to find only microbial life, leaving intelligent life to exoplanets elsewhere in our galaxy. The intra-solar system quandaries are these: What does planetary protection (...) mean? Does microbial life have intrinsic value? Should space explorers invoke the Precautionary Principle? Should we clean up our space junk? What should we do about satellite surveillance? Should we weaponize space? Should scientific research take priority over commercial space ventures? Should we terraform Mars? Should we colonize Mars? Should we prepare for bombardment of Earth by asteroids? Should we rely upon a single planetary community of moral deliberation? Should we pursue the good of the galactic commons? The extra-solar quandaries deal with three degrees of extraterrestrial intelligent creatures: those with less intelligence than us Homo sapiens, our Extraterrestrial Intelligent creatures peers in intelligence, and ETI who are superior to us in intelligence. To each quandary we ask: What is our terrestrial moral responsibility toward extraterrestrial life? Our answer is grounded in an appeal to a galactic common good. (shrink)

The historically rich and diverse tradition of phenomenology has contributed broadly to the emergence of environmental thought across the humanities and social sciences and is increasingly influential on environmental ethics and philosophy. Emphasizing the primacy of experience and inquiry into the epistemological and ontological assumptions that inform the historical and contemporary relationship with nature, phenomenology takes a critical distance from metaphysical naturalism and the instrumental framing of environmental problems in resourcist, technological, economic, and managerial terms. The tradition’s distinctive contributions to (...) environmental ethics include its focus on the epistemic and ontological revindication of experience, its critique of metaphysical and modernist assumptions, and its aim to articulate a post-metaphysical conception of the self-world relation and an alternative ethos appropriate to our experience of nature. Key concepts that inform current phenomenological research in environmental ethics include the lifeworld, the earth and elements, the chiasm, and poetic dwelling. (shrink)

We are often uncertain how to behave morally in complex situations. In this controversial study, Ted Lockhart contends that moral philosophy has failed to address how we make such moral decisions. Adapting decision theory to the task of decision-making under moral uncertainly, he proposes that we should not always act how we feel we ought to act, and that sometimes we should act against what we feel to be morally right. Lockhart also discusses abortion extensively and proposes new ways to (...) deal with the ethical and moral issues which surround it. (shrink)

Art history on the edge : iconology, media, and visual culture -- Four fundamental concepts of image science -- Image science -- Image X text -- Realism and the digital image -- Migrating images : totemism, fetishism, idolatry -- The future of the image : Rancière's road not taken -- World pictures : globalization and visual culture -- Media aesthetics -- There are no visual media -- Back to the drawing board : architecture, sculpture, and the digital image -- Foundational (...) sites and occupied spaces -- Border wars : translation and convergence in politics and media -- Art X environment -- The historical uncanny : phantoms, doubles, and repetition in the war on terror -- The spectacle today : a response to retort -- Coda : for a sweet science of images. (shrink)

Twenty philosophers offer new essays examining the form of reasoning known as inference to the best explanation - widely used in science and in our everyday lives, yet still controversial. Best Explanations represents the state of the art when it comes to understanding, criticizing, and defending this form of reasoning.

This paper investigates links between social capital and symbolic capital and responsible entrepreneurship in the context of small and medium enterprises (SMEs). The source of the primary data was 144 ‘Business Profiles’, written by the owner-managers of small businesses in application for a Small Business Awards competition in 2005. Included in each of these narratives were claims relating to the firms’ contributions to wider society, relationships with customers, employees and stakeholders. These narratives were coded and classified in a framework drawn (...) from Nahapiet and Ghoshal’s (1998, Academy of Management Review 23(2), 242–266) categorisation of social capital. The analysis revealed a range of strategic orientations towards the development of social and symbolic capital, along a conceptual continuum ranging from being responsible for oneself to being responsible for others. Overall, the evidence demonstrates the significance of the power inherent in the social relations of SMEs as a force for ethical behaviour, and suggests that normative theories of the development of social capital may provide ‘competitive advantage’ through responsible behaviour for small business in the global economy. (shrink)

In this paper, we compare and contrast two methods for the revision of qualitative beliefs. The first method is generated by a simplistic diachronic Lockean thesis requiring coherence with the agent’s posterior credences after conditionalization. The second method is the orthodox AGM approach to belief revision. Our primary aim is to determine when the two methods may disagree in their recommendations and when they must agree. We establish a number of novel results about their relative behavior. Our most notable finding (...) is that the inverse of the golden ratio emerges as a non-arbitrary bound on the Bayesian method’s free-parameter—the Lockean threshold. This “golden threshold” surfaces in two of our results and turns out to be crucial for understanding the relation between the two methods. (shrink)

Introduction There are (at least) two questions which readily arise in the minds of sociology students when they begin courses in the philosophy of social ...

Do you know who you are? If the question seems unclear, it might owe to the notion of ‘knowing-wh’ (knowing-who, knowing-what, knowing-when, etc.). Such knowledge contrasts with ‘knowing-that’, the more familiar topic of epistemologists. But these days, knowing-wh is receiving more attention than ever, and here we will survey three current debates on the nature of knowing-wh. These debates concern, respectively, (1) whether all knowing-wh is reducible to knowing-that (‘generalized intellectualism’), (2) whether all knowing-wh is relativized to a contrast proposition (...) (‘contrastivism about knowing-wh’), and (3) whether the context-sensitivity of knowing-wh is a semantic or purely pragmatic phenomenon (‘contextualism vs. invariantism about knowing-wh’). (shrink)