Organizations have neither a right to the vote nor a weighty right to life. We need not enfranchise Goldman Sachs. We should feel few scruples in dissolving Standard Oil. But they are not without rights altogether. We can owe it to them to keep our promises. We can owe them debts of gratitude. Thus, we can owe some things to organizations. But we cannot owe them everything we can owe to people. They seem to have a peculiar, fragmented moral status. (...) What explains this? Individualistic views explain this in terms of individualistic notions alone. Such notions don’t invoke any distinctive features of organizations. They just invoke the features of individual members of organizations. Collectivistic views, instead, explain this in terms of collective notions alone. Such notions don’t invoke the features of individual members of organizations. They just invoke the features of those organizations. We argue that neither approach works. Instead, one needs to synthesize the two approaches. Some individual interests, we think, are distinctively collective. We, as individuals, have a distinctive interest in playing a part in successful collective action. From this, so we argue, flows the apparently peculiar, fragmented moral status of organizations. (shrink)

Thus Plotinus (what is his status in the history of metaphysics and in the "Platonic" era, if one follows Heidegger's reading?), who speaks of presence, that is, also of morphē, as the trace of nonpresence, as the amorphous (to gar ikhnos tou amorphous morphē). A trace which is neither absence nor presence, nor, in whatever modality, a secondary modality.In his reading of Heidegger in his 2003 seminar, published as The Beast and the Sovereign, Derrida is particularly troubled by one particular (...) aspect of Heidegger: Heidegger's "superabundant use" of the language of Walten.1 "As you see," Derrida writes of Heidegger's use of Walten, "late in my life of reading Heidegger, I have just discovered a word that seems to .. (shrink)

Neoliberal rationality eliminates what these thinkers termed the "good life" or the "true realm of freedom", by which they did not mean luxury, leisure, or indulgence, but rather the cultivation and expression of distinctly human capacities for ethical and political freedom, creativity, unbounded reflection, or invention.The legacy of Kant's political writings is uniquely duplicitous. This is because the space of the Kantian text is capable—as great philosophical works often are—of sustaining immense contradictions.1 On the one hand, as has long been (...) well known, Kant's universalist notion of reason provided justification for and implicitly sanctioned the violence of racist colonial civilizing... (shrink)

In 1929, Martin Heidegger announced a new fundamental term in his thinking: Wal- ten. Heidegger uses Walten to designate the primal ontological force of nature, but also brings it into connection with administration (Verwalten), specifically linking it to university administration. The article argues that in the Black Notebooks Heidegger develops a philosophical conception of administrative practice in the midst of his own administrative practice as university Rector in the era of Gleichschaltung.

ABSTRACT This article explores the gendered nature of speech and silence in ancient Greece by showing how women were denied the measure of moderation with regard to speech. Drawing on examples from Plato and Aristotle, it shows how the voice of Greek women was associated with irreducibly contradictory qualities of being too loud, yet never silent enough. Exploring these contradictions through Plato's chōra and Irigaray's Speculum of the Other Woman, it argues that Greek women were ultimately considered essentially atopos, or (...) out of place by virtue of their measurelessness, with great political consequences for the city. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:A Genealogy of SilenceChōra and the Placelessness of Greek WomenAdam KnowlesIsn’t excess that which the philosopher... must bring back, within measure?—Luce Irigaray, The Forgetting of Air in Martin HeideggerAnd if I must make some mention of the virtue of those wives who will now be in widowhood, I will indicate all with a brief word of advice. To be no worse than your proper nature [phuseōs], is a great (...) honor for you; and great honor is hers, whose reputation among males is least, whether for praise or for blame.—PericlesIntroductionPhilosophy in the twentieth century is mapped upon a terrain of silence. At the turn of the century Sigmund Freud sought to translate the silent language of the unconscious, as Friedrich Nietzsche heralded an untimely voice that could not yet be heard.1 Ludwig Wittgenstein and Martin Heidegger, foundational thinkers in analytic and continental philosophy respectively, each placed silence at the core of his most influential works.2 In the phenomenological tradition, Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Emmanuel Levinas prominently thematized silence,3 while the subsequent generation of poststructuralist, [End Page 1] deconstructionist, and feminist thinkers such as Hélène Cixous, Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Jean-François Lyotard, and Luce Irigaray all grappled with silence in various forms.4 Among these works, Lyotard’s theory of the differend, a term that describes an ontological gap of incommunicability, is now a standard term for addressing questions of silence, silencing, the ethics of sayability and trauma.5 Later, in queer theory, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s closet became a complex synonym for many forms of silence and silencing.6Beyond this philosophical concern for silence and silencing, a number of similar themes emerged in the art and literature of the twentieth century, demonstrating both the creative and destructive force of silence.7 In literature, dramatists such as Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter brought silence to the stage, while poets and novelists like Adrienne Rich and Virginia Woolf traced the presence of silence in language, each thematizing the power of silencing in unique ways.8 In music, John Cage famously utilized silence as an element of his compositions and filmmakers such as Ingmar Bergmann and Chantal Akerman likewise crafted silence to structure the cinematic spaces of their works.9 Silence became one of the most persistent themes of philosophy in the twentieth century, both implicitly and explicitly. Could one even go so far as to say that a certain silence haunted philosophy in the twentieth century?Amid this abundance of artistic and philosophical work on silence, “breaking the silence” became the watchword for emancipatory projects pursued by groups such as first-wave feminists, postcolonial scholars, race theorists, and campaigns for social justice.10 These emancipatory projects sought to disrupt processes of silencing by locating, recovering, and translating marginalized voices from the silencing of oppression and disenfranchisement. Though essential political interventions at the historical moment when they emerged, these projects of recovery soon met with the critique of the politics of representation best exemplified by thinkers such as Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak and Toril Moi.11 Spivak and Moi effectively argued that recovering and speaking for silenced and marginalized voices entails a further form of silencing. These critiques showed that projects of recovering silence from the archives, history, literature, art, culture, and everyday practices of living were constrained by the very concept of silence they employed. As a result, any naive politics of granting a voice and breaking silence became impossible after the 1980s. From this point onward the deconstructive critique of representation folded silence back into itself, destroying any simple binary of empowered speech and disempowered silence. Even despite this powerful deconstruction of the speech/silence binary, philosophy, to the extent that it still operates within representational schemes and a speech/silence binary, still remains haunted by the specter of silence—a silence that carries with it a deeply gendered heritage. Pursuing rigorous analyses of the manifold structures of silence and silencing remains an urgent ethical and political task for feminist philosophy. [End Page 2]This essay seeks to contribute to that task by arguing that, in order to critically engage with the many... (shrink)

Language’s intentional nature has been highlighted as a crucial feature distinguishing it from other communication systems. Specifically, language is often thought to depend on highly structured intentional action and mutual mindreading by a communicator and recipient. Whilst similar abilities in animals can shed light on the evolution of intentionality, they remain challenging to detect unambiguously. We revisit animal intentional communication and suggest that progress in identifying analogous capacities has been complicated by (i) the assumption that intentional (that is, voluntary) production (...) of communicative acts requires mental-state attribution, and (ii) variation in approaches investigating communication across sensory modalities. To move forward, we argue that a framework fusing research across modalities and species is required. We structure intentional communication into a series of requirements, each of which can be operationalised, investigated empirically, and must be met for purposive, intentionally communicative acts to be demonstrated. Our unified approach helps elucidate the distribution of animal intentional communication and subsequently serves to clarify what is meant by attributions of intentional communication in animals and humans. (shrink)

Intuitively, we lack the standing to blame others in light of moral norms that we ourselves don't take seriously: if Adam is unrepentantly aggressive, say, he lacks the standing to blame Celia for her aggressiveness. But why does blame have this feature? Existing proposals try to explain this by reference to specific principles of normative ethics – e.g. to rule‐consequentialist considerations, to the wrongness of hypocritical blame, or principles of rights‐forfeiture based on this wrongness. In this paper, I suggest (...) a fundamentally different approach. Employing Timothy Williamson's idea of ‘constitutive rules’ of speech acts, I argue that this feature of blame is simply constitutive of any essentially moral form of disapproval. So if Adam had the standing to disapprove of Celia's aggressiveness in some form, necessarily, this disapproval couldn't be blame. If I'm right, this proposal thus not only answers our main question, but also sheds an interesting novel light on the very nature of blame. If we didn't have a form of disapproval with that feature, we wouldn't have our practice of holding each other to moral norms. (shrink)

This article revisits Oman's idea that an intuitive felt knowledge of the divine underlies the articulate knowledge found in faith and theology. Such feeling, Oman claims, is analogous to ordinary perception and gives rise to the attempt to evaluate, understand, and respond to the divine. Theology is the formalized attempt to respond to the intuition of the divine. The article argues that Oman's emphasis on the experiential and experimental character of theology is helpful, but that his analysis of the logic (...) of faith requires reformulation.Send article to KindleTo send this article to your Kindle, first ensure [email protected] is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about sending to your Kindle. Find out more about sending to your Kindle. Note you can select to send to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be sent to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply. Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.John Oman on feeling and theologyVolume 49, Issue 1ADAM HOOD DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/S0034412512000108Your Kindle email address Please provide your Kindle [email protected]@kindle.com Available formats PDF Please select a format to send. By using this service, you agree that you will only keep articles for personal use, and will not openly distribute them via Dropbox, Google Drive or other file sharing services. Please confirm that you accept the terms of use. Cancel Send ×Send article to Dropbox To send this article to your Dropbox account, please select one or more formats and confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about sending content to Dropbox. John Oman on feeling and theologyVolume 49, Issue 1ADAM HOOD DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/S0034412512000108Available formats PDF Please select a format to send. By using this service, you agree that you will only keep articles for personal use, and will not openly distribute them via Dropbox, Google Drive or other file sharing services. Please confirm that you accept the terms of use. Cancel Send ×Send article to Google Drive To send this article to your Google Drive account, please select one or more formats and confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about sending content to Google Drive. John Oman on feeling and theologyVolume 49, Issue 1ADAM HOOD DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/S0034412512000108Available formats PDF Please select a format to send. By using this service, you agree that you will only keep articles for personal use, and will not openly distribute them via Dropbox, Google Drive or other file sharing services. Please confirm that you accept the terms of use. Cancel Send ×Export citation Request permission. (shrink)

Cell membranes experience frequent stretching and poking: from cytoskeletal elements, from osmotic imbalances, from fusion and budding of vesicles, and from forces from the outside. Are the ensuing changes in membrane tension localized near the site of perturbation, or do these changes propagate rapidly through the membrane to distant parts of the cell, perhaps as a mechanical mechanism of long‐range signaling? Literature statements on the timescale for membrane tension to equilibrate across a cell vary by a factor of ≈106. This (...) study reviews and discusses how apparently contradictory findings on tension propagation in cells can be evaluated in the context of 2D hydrodynamics and poroelasticity. Localization of tension in the cell membrane is likely critical in governing how membrane forces gate ion channels, set the subcellular distribution of vesicle fusion, and regulate the dynamics of cytoskeletal growth. Furthermore, in this study, it is proposed that cells can actively regulate the degree to which membrane tension propagates by modulating the density and arrangement of immobile transmembrane proteins. Also see the video abstract here https://youtu.be/T6K7AIAqqBs. (shrink)

Coral reefs have been challenged by the current rate and severity of environmental change that might outpace their ability to adapt and survive. Current research focuses on understanding how microbial communities and epigenetic changes separately affect phenotypes and gene expression of corals. Here, we provide the hypothesis that coral‐associated microorganisms may directly or indirectly affect the coral's phenotypic response through the modulation of its epigenome. Homologs of ankyrin‐repeat protein A and internalin B, which indirectly cause histone modifications in humans, as (...) well as Rv1988 histone methyltransferase, and the DNA methyltransferases Rv2966c, Mhy1, Mhy2, and Mhy3 found in coral‐associated bacteria indicate that there are potential host epigenome‐modifying proteins in the coral microbiome. With the ideas presented here, we suggest that microbiome manipulation may be a means to alter a coral's epigenome, which could aid the current efforts to protect coral reefs. Also see the video abstract here: https://youtu.be/CW9GbChjKM4. (shrink)

If we had more powerful minds would we be puzzled by less - because we could make better theories - or by more - because we could ask more difficult questions? This paper focuses on clarifying the question, with an emphasis on comparisons between actual and possible species of thinker. A pre-publication version of the paper is available on my website at http://www.fernieroad.ca/a/PAPERS/papers.html .

Mollie Adams; The Concept of Physical Education II, Journal of Philosophy of Education, Volume 3, Issue 1, 30 May 2006, Pages 23–35, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1.

Mollie Adams; The Concept of Physical Education II, Journal of Philosophy of Education, Volume 3, Issue 1, 30 May 2006, Pages 23–35, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1.

The historical context of body and tissue donation is deeply problematic, with patriarchal and colonial narratives. The contemporary context of molecular and genetic biology further complicates issues of bodily donation through narratives of abstraction and extraction. As practitioners working outside the conventional boundaries of scientific study learn the tools and techniques to extract and use bodily materials, they are also learning and challenging the procedures and processes. This article approaches questions of bodily donation through the edited transcript of a conversation (...) between artists who regularly use body fluids and cellular bodily materials in their practice, moderated by Louise Mackenzie and Ilke Turkmendag as part of the Taboo–Transgression–Transcendence in Art & Science Conference held online with the support of the University of Applied Arts, Vienna, 2020. The panel challenged the ethical and conceptual assumptions made in biotechnological research and reconsidered where the boundaries of the body lie, what ‘authority’ research carries and what choices researchers make when using the bodies of others. The transcribed conversation addresses taboos of the female body, specifically menstruation, the commodification of tissue from female human bodies, human milk politics and questions biopolitical treatment of the female body. The full, unedited panel conversation, including questions from the audience, and an accompanying video of edited interviews with panellists, is available online at https://www.loumackenzie.com/offering-the-body. (shrink)

Background: Cognitive Training may contribute to the maintenance and even enhancement of cognitive functions in healthy older adults. However, the question who benefits most from multi-domain CTs is still highly under-investigated.Objective: The goal is to investigate prognostic factors and models for changes in cognitive test performance in healthy older adults after a multi-domain CT.Methods: The data bases MEDLINE, Web of Science Core Collection, CENTRAL, and PsycInfo were searched up to July 2019. Studies investigating prognostic factors and/or models on cognitive outcomes (...) after conducting a multi-domain CT in healthy older adults were included. Risk of Bias was assessed using the QUIPS and the PROBAST tool.Results: 23 prognostic factor and model studies were included. Results indicate a high heterogeneity regarding the conducted multi-domain CTs, the investigated prognostic factors, the investigated outcomes, and the used statistical approaches. Age and neuropsychological performance at study entry were the most investigated predictors, yet they show inconsistent results.Conclusion: Data on prognostic factors and models of changes after multi-domain CT are still too rare and inconsistent to draw clear conclusions due to statistical shortcomings and low reporting quality. Approaches for future research are outlined.Registration:https://www.crd.york.ac.uk/prospero/, ID: CRD42020147531. (shrink)

D. D. Raphael; VI*—Hume and Adam Smith on Justice and Utility, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Volume 73, Issue 1, 1 June 1973, Pages 87–104, https://d.

D. D. Raphael; VI*—Hume and Adam Smith on Justice and Utility, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Volume 73, Issue 1, 1 June 1973, Pages 87–104, https://d.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the relationship between naturalism and morality and to assess their compatibility. Naturalism is defined as respect for science, for its methods and results. From this respect for science, one can infer two distinct philosophical naturalisms: the methodological and the metaphysical. The relationship between these forms of naturalism and morality depends on the correct conception of morality. This paper differentiates between objectively realistic conception and all other conceptions and argues that while other conceptions (...) can easily fit morality into a naturalistic worldview, objectively realistic conception faces theoretical challenges, including the challenge of explaining how moral facts and concepts play an explanatory role and the challenge of bridging the is/ought gap. The paper focuses on Railton's ethical naturalism as a prominent naturalistic theory of morality and evaluates its ability to overcome these challenges. The conclusion is that, so long as we consider a theory like Railton's, naturalism and realistically conceived morality are incompatible. (shrink)

entry for the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy at http://www.iep.utm.edu/s/smith.htm.

The foundation for a system of morals, this 1749 work is a landmark of moral and political thought. Its highly original theories of conscience, moral judgment, and virtue offer a reconstruction of the Enlightenment concept of social science, embracing both political economy and theories of law and government.

The New York Times-bestselling author offers a stirring defense of liberalism against the dogmatisms of our time Not since the early twentieth century has liberalism, and liberals, been under such relentless attack, from both right and left. The crisis of democracy in our era has produced a crisis of faith in liberal institutions and, even worse, in liberal thought. A Thousand Small Sanities is a manifesto rooted in the lives of people who invented and extended the liberal tradition. Taking us (...) from Montaigne to Mill, and from Middlemarch to the civil rights movement, Adam Gopnik argues that liberalism is not a form of centrism, nor simply another word for free markets, nor merely a term denoting a set of rights. It is something far more ambitious: the search for radical change by humane measures. Gopnik shows us why liberalism is one of the great moral adventures in human history--and why, in an age of autocracy, our lives may depend on its continuation. (shrink)

This paper proposes a new theory of the nature of hypocritical blame and why it is objectionable, arguing that hypocritical blame is a form of dishonest signaling. Blaming provides very important benefits: through its ability to signal our commitments to norms and unwillingness to tolerate norm violations, it greatly contributes to valuable norm-following. Hypocritical blamers, however, are insufficiently committed to the norms or values they blame others for violating. As allowing their blame to pass unchecked threatens the signaling system, our (...) strong interest in maintaining valuable norm-following by tracking who has what commitments justifies objecting to hypocritical blame. This theory has a number of strengths over competing accounts: it delivers intuitive verdicts about when blame is objectionable across a range of cases, it is a naturalistic explanation, it is consistent with a leading theory of the nature of blame, it explains why hypocritical pronouncements that don’t feature blame are similiarly objectionable, it does not rely on contentious analyses of the nature of ‘standing’, and it preserves the common intuition that hypocrites are in some way dishonest. (shrink)

The Significance Argument (SA) for the irreducibility of consciousness is based on a series of new puzzle-cases that I call multiple candidate cases. In these cases, there is a multiplicity of physical-functional properties or relations that are candidates to be identified with the sensible qualities and our consciousness of them, where those candidates are not significantly different. I will argue that these cases show that reductive materialists cannot accommodate the various ways in which consciousness is significant and must allow massive (...) vagueness in conscious experience. I also will argue that a nonreductive theory of the conscious-of relation can easily provide a very satisfying, unified explanation of the ways in which this relation is significant. (shrink)

Many favor representationalism about color experience. To a first approximation, this view holds that experiencing is like believing. In particular, like believing, experiencing is a matter of representing the world to be a certain way. Once you view color experience along these lines, you face a big question: do our color experiences represent the world as it really is? For instance, suppose you see a tomato. Representationalists claim that having an experience with this sensory character is necessarily connected with representing (...) a distinctive quality as pervading a round area out there in external space. Let us call it “sensible redness” to highlight the fact that the representation of this property is necessarily connected with the sensory character of the experience. Is this property, sensible redness, really co-instantiated with roundness out there in the space before you? (shrink)

This paper explores the intersection of time and relational economic sociology. Building on Viviana Zelizer’s relational framework, I argue that analyzing the temporal dimensions of exchange provides insight into how social ties gain meaning through economic practices. The paper shows time’s dual role as both an organizing structure bounding action, and a dynamic element that actors leverage to shape transactional contexts. As structure, time offers culturally-available templates like schedules and rhythms that facilitate coordination and signify predictable social meanings befitting particular (...) relational categories. Yet time also constitutes relational work itself; strategic timing, duration, pacing, and sequencing of interactions signal context, manage expectations, and sustain bonds amidst entanglements. Synchronization through temporal agency prevents mismatches between transactions and social contexts that could strain ties. This agency in time ranges from passive adherence to dominant structures to active assertions of power resistance, enabling both domination and defiance across economic contexts. Analyzing shared temporal infrastructure within circuits of commerce further illuminates how actors distinguish those spheres of exchange at various scale from the impersonal market. Ultimately, incorporating temporality strengthens relational economic sociology by identifying a key mechanism through which practices of exchange become relationally meaningful. (shrink)

Though the vegetarian movement sparked by Peter Singer’s book Animal Liberation has achieved some success, there is more animal suffering caused today due to factory farming than there was when the book was originally written. In this paper, I argue that there may be a technological solution to the problem of animal suffering in intensive factory farming operations. In particular, I suggest that recent research indicates that we may be very close to, if not already at, the point where we (...) can genetically engineer factory-farmed livestock with a reduced or completely eliminated capacity to suffer. In as much as animal suffering is the principal concern that motivates the animal welfare movement, this development should be of central interest to its adherents. Moreover, I will argue that all people concerned with animal welfare should agree that we ought to replace the animals currently used in factory farming with animals whose ability to suffer is diminished if we are able to do so. (shrink)

This handbook presents, in an unassuming format, an account of Philo's achievements.

What makes your life go well for you? In this paper, we give an account of welfare. Our core idea is simple. There are impersonally good and bad things out there: things that are good or bad period, not (or not only) good or bad for someone. The life that is good for you is the life in contact with the good. We’ll understand the relevant notion of ‘contact’ here in terms of manifestation: you’re in contact with a value when (...) it is manifest in parts of your life or parts of your life are manifest in it. So, the more the good is manifest in your life, or your life manifest in the good, the better for you. The more the bad is manifest in your life, or your life manifest in the bad, the worse for you. We’ll argue that this account is extensionally adequate: it explains the welfare value of achievements, friendships, knowledge, pleasures and virtues. Moreover, it has a number of explanatory virtues: it’s unified, elegant and explanatorily powerful. So, we’ll suggest, it’s an excellent account of welfare, and in many ways superior to its main competitors. (shrink)

How ought you to evaluate your options if you’re uncertain about which axiology is true? One prominent response is Expected Moral Value Maximisation, the view that under axiological uncertainty, an option is better than another if and only if it has the greater expected moral value across axiologies. EMVM raises two fundamental questions. First, there’s a question about what it should even mean. In particular, it presupposes that we can compare moral value across axiologies. So to even understand EMVM, we (...) need to explain what it is for such comparisons to hold. Second, assuming that we understand it, there’s a question about whether EMVM is true. Since there are many plausible rivals, we need an argument to defend it. In this paper, I’ll introduce a representation theorem for axiological uncertainty to answer these two questions. Roughly, the theorem shows that if all our axiologies satisfy the von Neumann–Morgenstern axioms, and if the facts about which options are better than which in light of your uncertainty also satisfy these axioms as well as a Pareto condition, then these facts have a relevantly unique expected utility representation. If I’m right, this theorem at once affords us a compelling way to understand EMVM—and specifically intertheoretic comparisons—and a systematic argument for its truth. (shrink)

Lyotard, Leach contrasts 'the myth of the "domus" ' , the phenomenon of home, with a more alienated model of city life in a contemporary 'age of the ...

I discuss a large number of emotions that are relevant to performance at epistemic tasks. My central concern is the possibility that it is not the emotions that are most relevant to success of these tasks but associated virtues. I present cases in which it does seem to be the emotions rather than the virtues that are doing the work. I end of the paper by mentioning the connections between desirable and undesirable epistemic emotions.

Fieldwork in Familiar Places challenges the misconceptions about morality, culture, and objectivity that support these skepticisms, to show that we can take ...

In this paper, I do a few things. I develop a (largely) empirical argument against naïve realism (Campbell, Martin, others) and for representationalism. I answer Papineau’s recent paper “Against Representationalism (about Experience)”. And I develop a new puzzle for representationalists.

Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, EarlyView.

Both law and science went through revolutionary changes in England in the first half of the seventeenth century, a period of pandemic, conflict, and climate change. The circle of Samuel Hartlib (c. 1600–62) sought a way to regenerate society through reform and innovation. One member of the circle was Sir Cheney Culpeper (1601–66), a barrister and landowner, whose correspondence shows an attempt to synthesize law and natural philosophy into a coherent vision of regeneration. He wrestled as much with how change (...) could be achieved as with what changes would be beneficial. He sought a mutually beneficial relationship between humanity and nature. He urged self-restraint to avoid the abuse of power, political and technological. His most practical and influential work was in agriculture. Paradoxically, however, the efforts of Culpeper and his circle to address the crises of their times have arguably created the very crises of ours. We are, moreover, in what Culpeper describes as a ‘crisis of time’. This essay poses the question as to whether, given the urgency of our situation, we might learn from Culpeper’s generation that regeneration requires revolution as well as reform. (shrink)

This chapter provides empirical evidence about everyday attitudes concerning euthanasia. These attitudes have important implications for some ethical arguments about euthanasia. Two experiments suggested that some different descriptions of euthanasia have modest effects on people’s moral permissibility judgments regarding euthanasia. Experiment 1 (N = 422) used two different types of materials (scenarios and scales) and found that describing euthanasia differently (‘euthanasia’, ‘aid in dying’, and ‘physician assisted suicide’) had modest effects (≈3 % of the total variance) on permissibility judgments. These (...) effects were largely replicated in Experiment 2 (N = 409). However, in Experiment 2, judgments about euthanasia’s moral permissibility were best predicted by the voluntariness of the treatment. Voluntariness was a stronger predictor than some demographic factors and some domain general elements of moral judgments. These results help inform some debates about the moral permissibility of euthanasia (e.g., the slippery slope argument) suggesting that some of the key premises of those arguments are unwarranted. (shrink)

This paper considers the possibility that ‘epistemic hypocrisy’ could be relevant to our blaming practices. It argues that agents who culpably violate an epistemic norm can lack the standing to blame other agents who culpably violate similar norms. After disentangling our criticism of epistemic hypocrites from various other fitting responses, and the different ways some norms can bear on the legitimacy of our blame, I argue that a commitment account of standing to blame allows us to understand our objections to (...) epistemic hypocrisy. Agents lack the epistemic standing to blame when they are not sufficiently committed to the epistemic norms they are blaming others for violating. This not only gives us a convincing account of epistemic standing to blame, it leaves us with a unified account of moral and epistemic standing. (shrink)

The normative mechanics of promising seem complex. The strength and content of promissory obligations, and the residual duties they entail upon being violated, have various prima facie surprising features. We give an account to explain these features. Promises have a point. The point of a promise to φ is a promise-independent reason to φ for the promisee’s sake. A promise turns this reason into a duty. This explains the mechanics of promises. And it grounds a nuanced picture of immoral promises, (...) an argument against promissory bare wrongings, and a constraint on theories of why we have promissory obligations at all. (shrink)

Politics is full of people who don’t care about the facts. Still, while not caring about the facts, they are often concerned to present themselves as caring about them. Politics, in other words, is full of bullshitters. But why? In this paper I develop an incentives-based analysis of bullshit in politics, arguing that it is often a rational response to the incentives facing different groups of agents. In a slogan: bullshit in politics pays, sometimes literally. After first outlining an account (...) of bullshit (Section 1), I discuss the incentives driving three different groups of agents to bullshit: politicians, the media, and voters (Section 2). I then examine several existing proposals to combat bullshit in politics, arguing that each will fail because they ignore the relevant underlying incentives (Section 3). I conclude somewhat pessimistically that a certain amount of bullshit in politics is inevitable (Section 4). (shrink)

This is a chapter from my introductory book *Perception* covering the representational view of experience. I use the Ramsey-Lewis method to define the theoretical term "experiential representation". I clarify and discuss various questions for representationalists, for instance, "how rich is the content of experience?" and "is the content of visual experience singular or general?" Finally, I address some objections to representationalism - in particular, that it cannot explain perceptual presence (John Campbell), and that it cannot explain the "laws of appearance" (...) (constraints on how things can appear). (shrink)