Neurotechnologies that promise to dampen (via pharmacologicals), disassociate (via electro-convulsive therapy), erase (via deep brain stimulation), and replace (via false memory creation) unsavory episodic memories are no longer the subject of science fiction. They have already arrived, and their funding suggests that they will not disappear anytime soon. In light of their emergence, this essay examines the neurostructure of normative morality to clarify that memory manipulation, which promises to take away that which is bad in human experience, also removes that (...) which enables human beings to be good. Concepts such as free will, moral responsibility, and the neurobiological basis of moral reasoning are explored to underscore the fundamental hubris inherent to the memory manipulation enterprise. (shrink)

Neurotechnologies that promise to dampen (via pharmacologicals), disassociate (via electro-convulsive therapy), erase (via deep brain stimulation), and replace (via false memory creation) unsavory episodic memories are no longer the subject of science fiction. They have already arrived, and their funding suggests that they will not disappear anytime soon. In light of their emergence, this essay examines the neurostructure of normative morality to clarify that memory manipulation, which promises to take away that which is bad in human experience, also removes that (...) which enables human beings to be good. Concepts such as free will, moral responsibility, and the neurobiological basis of moral reasoning are explored to underscore the fundamental hubris inherent to the memory manipulation enterprise. (shrink)

Neurotechnologies that promise to dampen (via pharmacologicals), disassociate (via electro-convulsive therapy), erase (via deep brain stimulation), and replace (via false memory creation) unsavory episodic memories are no longer the subject of science fiction. They have already arrived, and their funding suggests that they will not disappear anytime soon. In light of their emergence, this essay examines the neurostructure of normative morality to clarify that memory manipulation, which promises to take away that which is bad in human experience, also removes that (...) which enables human beings to be good. Concepts such as free will, moral responsibility, and the neurobiological basis of moral reasoning are explored to underscore the fundamental hubris inherent to the memory manipulation enterprise. (shrink)

Scientists engaged in global health research are increasingly faced with barriers to access and use of human tissues from the developing world communities where much of their research is targeted. In part, the problem can be traced to distrust of researchers from affluent countries, given the history of 'scientific-imperialism' and 'biocolonialism' reflected in past well publicized cases of exploitation of research participants from low to middle income countries. To a considerable extent, the failure to adequately engage host communities, the opacity (...) of informed consent, and the lack of fair benefit-sharing have played a significant role in eroding trust. These ethical considerations are central to biomedical research in low to middle income countries and failure to attend to them can inadvertently contribute to exploitation and erode trust. A 'tissue trust' may be a plausible means for enabling access to human tissues for research in a manner that is responsive to the ethical challenges considered. Preventing exploitation and restoring trust while simultaneously promoting global health research calls for innovative approaches to human tissues research. A tissue trust can reduce the risk of exploitation and promote host capacity as a key benefit. (shrink)

When a Jehovah’s Witness patient is traumatically injured, the lack of uniform professional consensus guidelines and the cultural knowledge deficit of many clinicians adds an additional layer of legal and ethical complexity to the inherent difficulty of managing a critically ill patient. We present here the case of an incapacitated Jehovah's Witness patient with severe traumatic hemorrhagic shock. We go on to discuss the historical and contemporary case law on proxy refusal of blood transfusion for the incapacitated adult, as well (...) as the ethics of self-determination and the application of the principle of proportionate reason in the management of the critically injured Jehovah's Witness patient. (shrink)

In this paper I sketch an account of moral blame and blameworthiness. I begin by clarifying what I take blame to be and explaining how blameworthiness is to be analyzed in terms of it. I then consider different accounts of the conditions of blameworthiness and, in the end, settle on one according to which a person is blameworthy for φ-ing just in case, in φ-ing, she violates one of a particular class of moral requirements governing the attitudes we bear, and (...) our mental orientation, toward people and other objects of significant moral worth. These requirements embody the moral stricture that we accord to these others a sufficient level of respect, one that their moral worth demands. This is a familiar theme which has its roots in P. F. Strawson’s pioneering views on moral responsibility. My development of it leads me to the conclusion that acting wrongly is not a condition of blameworthiness: violating a moral requirement to perform, or refrain from performing, an action is neither necessary nor sufficient for being blameworthy. All we are ever blameworthy for, I will argue, are certain aspects of our mental bearing toward others. We can be said to be blameworthy for our actions only derivatively, in the sense that those actions are the natural manifestations of the things for which we are strictly speaking blameworthy. (shrink)

We study the proof-theoretic strength and effective content of the infinite form of Ramsey's theorem for pairs. Let RT n k denote Ramsey's theorem for k-colorings of n-element sets, and let RT $^n_{ denote (∀ k)RT n k . Our main result on computability is: For any n ≥ 2 and any computable (recursive) k-coloring of the n-element sets of natural numbers, there is an infinite homogeneous set X with X'' ≤ T 0 (n) . Let IΣ n and BΣ (...) n denote the Σ n induction and bounding schemes, respectively. Adapting the case n = 2 of the above result (where X is low 2 ) to models of arithmetic enables us to show that RCA 0 + IΣ 2 + RT 2 2 is conservative over RCA 0 + IΣ 2 for Π 1 1 statements and that $RCA_0 + I\Sigma_3 + RT^2_{ , is Π 1 1 -conservative over RCA 0 + IΣ 3 . It follows that RCA 0 + RT 2 2 does not imply BΣ 3 . In contrast, J. Hirst showed that $RCA_0 + RT^2_{ does imply BΣ 3 , and we include a proof of a slightly strengthened version of this result. It follows that $RT^2_{ is strictly stronger than RT 2 2 over RCA 0. (shrink)

It was a little over ten years ago, 1967–8, that H. D. Lewis delivered the first series of Gifford lectures, The Elusive Mind, in the University of Edinburgh. It was my privilege that year to be an auditor in the Seminar at King's College that Professor Lewis was conducting with his students in the area of this topic. I had already read the works in which, in the midst of neo-orthodox and existentialist religious movements, he had devoted himself to critical (...) valuation of those doctrines - witness his Morals and the New Theology, and Morals and Revelation. This earlier work prepared for a comprehensive interpretation of religious experience in his book in 1960: Our Experience of God. (shrink)

There is a debate in normative ethics about whether or not our moral obligations depend solely on either our evidence concerning, or our beliefs about, the world. Subjectivists maintain that they do and objectivists maintain that they do not. I shall offer some arguments in support of objectivism and respond to the strongest argument for subjectivism. I shall also briefly consider the significance of my discussion to the debate over whether one’s future voluntary actions are relevant to one’s current moral (...) obligations. (shrink)

I am, however, not interested in rescuing words. My underlying concern is so to distinguish between "person" and "personality" that the relation of each to the other and to environment is adequately clear. After indicating why the theory of personality development in the social sciences requires the reintroducing of the person, I shall outline a conception of the person that eases theoretical difficulties both in the philosophy of the person and of personality.

In this paper I argue that, while there are real tensions between phenomenology and critique, it makes a significant difference what we understand phenomenology to be, and that on a good understanding there is room for a project that is genuinely both critical and phenomenological. I will focus on four areas of tension: the eidetic character of phenomenology as opposed to the concrete character of critique; the transcendental orientation of phenomenology as opposed to social and political orientation of critique; the (...) descriptive nature of phenomenology as opposed to the normative nature of critique; and the possibly “naïve” character of phenomenology with respect to the shaping of phenomena by social forces. In each case, I will not try to show that there is no space between phenomenology and critique; rather, I suggest that the tension between the two can be mitigated to allow for a critical phenomenology. (shrink)

While I cannot conclude that Langer is successful so far in this formidable undertaking, I find myself not only resonating to much that she sets out but also applauding the attempt to develop a philosophy of mind in a new key. Surely, to decide what we mean by mind without reference to the mind-in-art is myopic philosophizing. No systematic metaphysician can but be grateful for the attempt to show that in the nature of feeling as found in art there is (...) a kind of organization that will enable us to get beyond the persistent frustrations created by a dualistic view of mind and body, and will possibly give us a clue even to the dynamics of physical beings. (shrink)

Since my childhood I have given up several conceptions of God. Each time there was quite a wrench, for, in my own limited way, I had been walking with my ‘living’ God. In my philosophical and theological studies, I have been impressed by the fact that one deep-souled thinker found the living God of another ‘dead’. And then I realised that a God is ‘living’ or ‘dead’ insofar as ‘He’ answers questions that are vital to the given believer.

“Know thyself!” This dictum in the Upanishads is also that of the Greeks 2000 years later. But what is meant by “know” and by “self” is different. The Biblical counsel, “Know thyself as created in the image of God,” also reminds us that man’s conception of himself is influenced by his conception of his relation to his ultimate environment. In fundamental terms, there is no East and West when reflective men ask: What is the essence of man? I cannot in (...) this paper pay adequate respect to certain historic approaches to the answer, but they are in mind as I develop a personalistic, temporalistic view of man. (shrink)

“Know thyself!” This dictum in the Upanishads is also that of the Greeks 2000 years later. But what is meant by “know” and by “self” is different. The Biblical counsel, “Know thyself as created in the image of God,” also reminds us that man’s conception of himself is influenced by his conception of his relation to his ultimate environment. In fundamental terms, there is no East and West when reflective men ask: What is the essence of man? I cannot in (...) this paper pay adequate respect to certain historic approaches to the answer, but they are in mind as I develop a personalistic, temporalistic view of man. (shrink)

1. Introduction. Nowadays metaphysics is so far out of fashion, with scientists at any rate, that a few words of justification may be required for putting it in relation with science, as in this paper.Metaphysics is nothing occult, nor is it necessarily dogmatic or allied to theology. Strictly, it is a science itself, the science of being. But since a large section of being—even the whole of it, according to some metaphysics—consists of phenomena, and since the ostensible business of natural (...) science is with phenomena, a distinction has to be made. The use of ‘metaphysics’ in this paper is restricted to the non-phenomenal mode of being. More explicitly, it is restricted to formal and general things, such as category, class, variable, relation, order. General words, which I take to be all the words except certain proper names, are, accordingly, metaphysical signs; and the metaphysical matrix is by no means limited to science but extends to all discourse in which there are general terms. (shrink)

I wish this essay to be a tribute to Edwin A. Burtt. He stands for a quality of intellectual and spiritual hospitality that is all the more inspiring because it stems from widespread scholarly analysis and a moral passion for catholicity and civility. Like Kant, he has given much of his acute philosophical ability to the task of understanding the foundations of scientific, moral, and religious beliefs. If anything, he goes a step further than Kant. Persons, he argues, win truth (...) only as love unifies all their efforts. (shrink)

I wish this essay to be a tribute to Edwin A. Burtt. He stands for a quality of intellectual and spiritual hospitality that is all the more inspiring because it stems from widespread scholarly analysis and a moral passion for catholicity and civility. Like Kant, he has given much of his acute philosophical ability to the task of understanding the foundations of scientific, moral, and religious beliefs. If anything, he goes a step further than Kant. Persons, he argues, win truth (...) only as love unifies all their efforts. (shrink)

Since my childhood I have given up several conceptions of God. Each time there was quite a wrench, for, in my own limited way, I had been walking with my ‘living’ God. In my philosophical and theological studies, I have been impressed by the fact that one deep-souled thinker found the living God of another ‘dead’. And then I realised that a God is ‘living’ or ‘dead’ insofar as ‘He’ answers questions that are vital to the given believer.

In the time at my disposal I limit myself to tenets distinctive of a system of idealism founded by Borden P. Bowne. Two years before his death, in 1908, Bowne wrote Personalism, a condensed epitome of works that in themselves are worthy of a distinctive place in late nineteenth and early twentieth century philosophy. Bowne’s system was to be powerfully elaborated by Edgar S. Brightman, the first holder of the Borden Parker Bowne Chair in Philosophy in Boston University, which I (...) was to hold from 1953 to 1975, and followed by John N. Findlay since 1978. Professor J. Cook Wilson of Oxford, writing four years after Bowne’s death, said that he “always urged ‘the study of Bowne as the most important of the modern American philosophers.’” This is not the place to record the admiration of William James and of William E. Hocking, among other admirers in America and abroad, or to identify contemporaries and recent scholars as well as pupils of Bowne and Brightman. But Bowne’s disciple, Ralph Tyler Flewelling, who founded The Personalist, and Robert N. Beck, Brightman’s pupil, who established Idealistic Studies, cannot go unmentioned. (shrink)

The building and maintaining of a tolerant society requires both a general policy of toleration on the behalf of the state, as well as a minimal number of acts of intolerance by individual citizens towards their fellow citizens. It is this second area of citizen‐citizen relations that is of most interest for education policy. There are those who argue that the best way to achieve a tolerant society is by encouraging, or even requiring, the respect and appreciation of difference amongst (...) a citizenry. In this paper I argue that using education to encourage the respect and appreciation of difference is deeply problematic for both adults and children. I argue that it is a poor servant of those whose differences it is meant to protect, and crucially that it cannot be justified on the key liberal premise of protecting the freedom of individuals to live their (non‐harming) lives as they see fit. I conclude by putting forward the educational alternative of respecting the basic rights of citizens irrespective of your view of their differences. (shrink)

The building and maintaining of a tolerant society requires both a general policy of toleration on the behalf of the state, as well as a minimal number of acts of intolerance by individual citizens towards their fellow citizens. It is this second area of citizen‐citizen relations that is of most interest for education policy. There are those who argue that the best way to achieve a tolerant society is by encouraging, or even requiring, the respect and appreciation of difference amongst (...) a citizenry. In this paper I argue that using education to encourage the respect and appreciation of difference is deeply problematic for both adults and children. I argue that it is a poor servant of those whose differences it is meant to protect, and crucially that it cannot be justified on the key liberal premise of protecting the freedom of individuals to live their (non‐harming) lives as they see fit. I conclude by putting forward the educational alternative of respecting the basic rights of citizens irrespective of your view of their differences. (shrink)

David Lewis has offered a reply to the standard argument for the claim that the truth of determinism is incompatible with anyone’s being able to do otherwise than she in fact does. Helen Beebee has argued that Lewis’s compatibilist strategy is untenable. In this paper I show that one recent attempt to defend Lewis’s view against this argument fails and then go on to offer my own defense of Lewis’s view.

Through extensive textual analysis, this book concludes that the prevailing opinion about the nature of modern and contemporary philosophy is wrong. It maintains that almost all modern and contemporary philosophy is deconstructed, secularized, Augustinian theology, not philosophy. The work is divided into eight chapters, a guest Foreword by Herbert I. London notes, bibliography, and an index. Chapter 1 considers Cartesian thought, Hobbes, and Newton. Chapter 2 examines Locke, Berkeley, and Hume. Chapter 3 investigates Lessing and Rousseau. Chapters 4 and 5 (...) treat Kant. Chapters 6 and 7 deal with Hegel. Chapter 8 concludes that a lack of philosophical and historical experience coupled with a widespread inability to read philosophical texts according to the intention of the author causes us to mistake secularized theology for philosophy and is a main cause for the decline of contemporary universities. (shrink)

Measurement of scientific productivity is difficult. The measures used (impact factor of the journal, citations to the paper being measured) are crude. But these measures are now so universally adopted that they determine most things that matter: tenure or unemployment, a postdoctoral grant or none, success or failure. As a result, scientists have been forced to downgrade their primary aim from making discoveries to publishing as many papers as possible—and trying to work them into high impact factor journals. Consequently, scientific (...) behaviour has become distorted and the utility, quality and objectivity of articles has deteriorated. Changes to the way scientists are assessed are urgently needed, and I suggest some here. (shrink)

In the last few years, the U.S. health care system has seemingly been gripped by “back to the nineties” fever. But there is a notable change in professional debates about how to better control health care costs. Discussion of health care rationing, which was hotly debated in the nineties, has become much more muted.Is health care rationing passé? I contend that debates about health care rationing have waned not because the need to ration has dwindled nor because ethical debates about (...) how or whether to ration have been resolved. They have declined because the word “rationing,” and unrelated concepts such as cost‐effectiveness analysis, have been replaced by terms—“parsimony,” “value,” and “CER”—that are not burdened by emotional and historical baggage.Sometimes the best way to promote healthy moral debate is to turn to new words that don't carry the burden of past debates. (shrink)

In the criminal law of many jurisdictions complicity, though not itself a substantive crime but a way of committing a crime, is a doctrine that determines when one person is legally liable for a criminal offense that was committed by another person, typically by being an accomplice. That doctrine has a number of troubling moral implications with respect to responsibility, particularly when complicity is employed as a devise to capture one agent as morally accountable for the actions of another agent (...) and/or the consequences of those actions. I focus on the issue of responsibility for consequences and actus reus and mens rea difficulties with complicity as a moral concept in the light of two cases in which complicity is the basis for ascriptions of moral and criminal responsibility to someone who was not the primary wrongdoer. The book on the topic by Chiara Lepora and Robert E. Goodin provokes my discussion. (shrink)

The Mind Argument is an argument for the incompatibility of indeterminism and anyone's having a choice about anything that happens. Peter van Inwagen rejects the Mind Argument not because he is able to point out the flaw in it, but because he accepts both that determinism is incompatible with anyone's having a choice about anything that happens and that it is possible for someone to have a choice about something that happens. In this paper I first diagnose and clear (...) up a confusion in recent discussions of the Mind Argument and then go on to show why it is a bad argument. (shrink)

In this paper, I take for granted that, today, something is radically wrong metaphysically with Western culture. I maintain that this problem arises, as Marcelsays, from the very depths of our being. This paper’s purpose is to consider some aspects of Marcel’s metaphysical teaching, especially about our need tostart philosophizing in the concrete, not the abstract, situation, to battle against the spirit of abstraction, and use these reflections for the practical purpose ofconsidering what sorts of steps we need to take (...) at the present moment to recover philosophical practice in the postmodern age. Within the context of this paper,I argue that Marcel is a realist humanist in the tradition of Plato and Aquinas whose battle against the spirit of abstraction is fundamentally a fight againstnominalism and sophistry. (shrink)

I argue that Fischer’s attempts to undermine the “Ought” Implies “Can” principle (OIC) fail. I argue both against his construal of the natural motivation for OIC and against his argument for the falsity of OIC. I also consider some attempts to salvage Fischer’s arguments and argue that they can work only if the true moral theory is motive determinative--i.e., it is such that, necessarily, any action performed from a motive which renders one of the blame emotions appropriate is morally impermissible, (...) no matter what other features it has. But, as motive-determinative moral theories are implausible, Fischer’s arguments are not salvageable. (shrink)

ABSTRACT Is what we’re morally permitted to do grounded in our subjective situation? Subjectivists maintain that it is. Objectivists deny this. I shall offer two arguments for Objectivism about moral permissibility.

Numbers Skeptics deny that when faced with a choice between saving some innocent people from harm and saving a larger number of different, though equally innocent, people from suffering a similar harm you ought to save the larger number. In this article, I aim to put pressure on Numbers Skepticism.

In physics, the temporal dimension has units of infinitesimally brief duration. Given this, how is it possible to perceive things, such as motion, music, and vibrotactile stimulation, that involve extension across many units of time? To address this problem, it is proposed that there is what is termed an “information construct of happening” (ICOH), a simultaneous representation of recent, temporally differentiated perceptual information on the millisecond time scale. The main features of the ICOH are (i) time marking, semantic labeling of (...) all information in the ICOH with ordinal temporal information and distance from what is informationally identified as the present moment, (ii) vector informational features that specify kind, direction, and rate of change for every feature in a percept, and (iii) connectives, information relating vector informational features at adjacent temporal locations in the ICOH. The ICOH integrates products of perceptual processing with recent historical information in sensory memory on the subsecond time scale. Perceptual information about happening in informational sensory memory is encoded in semantic form that preserves connected semantic trails of vector and timing information. The basic properties of the ICOH must be supported by a general and widespread timing mechanism that generates ordinal and interval timing information and it is suggested that state‐dependent networks may suffice for that purpose. Happening, therefore, is perceived at a moment and is constituted by an information structure of connected recent historical information. (shrink)

ABSTRACT Is what we’re morally permitted to do grounded in our subjective situation? Subjectivists maintain that it is. Objectivists deny this. I shall offer two arguments for Objectivism about moral permissibility.

The comparative utility argument holds that the descendants of African slaves in America are not owed any compensation because they have not been harmed by slavery. Rather, slavery in America was beneficial to the descendants of slaves because they are now able to live in a country that is considerably richer today than any of the African countries from which slaves were taken. In this paper, I show that the comparative utility argument is a red herring with no bearing whatsoever (...) on the question of slave reparations because it conflates two separate wrongs: slavery and forced immigration. The fact that the descendants of slaves now live in America is a consequence of the latter, but not the former. As such, it has no bearing on the legitimacy reparations for slavery. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Without Buddha I Could not Be a ChristianPeter A. HuffWithout Buddha I Could not Be a Christian. By Paul F. Knitter. Oxford: Oneworld, 2009. xvii + 240 pp.Paul Knitter’s contributions to interfaith dialogue and Christian theologies of religions are well known and widely appreciated. Even critics of Christian theories of pluralism, most prominently Pope Benedict XVI, have acknowledged the significance of Knitter’s strategic integration of perspectives from liberation (...) theology into what is sometimes an overly abstract field of inquiry. Colleagues active in Buddhist-Christian studies hold Knitter in especially high esteem as a writer, teacher, translator, [End Page 211] editor, self-described interreligious theologian, and unapologetic person of faith. This book, his first major publication since accepting the Paul Tillich chair at Union Theological Seminary, offers a uniquely first-person reflection on the spiritual fruits of a career profoundly and provocatively shaped by two religious traditions.Written for a popular audience, the book, the author says, has been in the works “for the past forty years” (p. xv). The reader gains valuable insight into the professional and private life of a remarkable “dialogical theologian” (p. xv), whose experience includes a rather conventional upbringing in working-class Midwestern Catholicism, some twenty years of service as a seminarian and missionary priest with the Society of the Divine Word, graduate education in Europe with the likes of Bernard Lonergan (1904–1984) and Karl Rahner (1904–1984) during the revolutionary years of the Second Vatican Council (1962–1965), and nearly four decades of pioneering work as a productive scholar-activist in mainstream academic theology. At times Knitter even quotes from his unpublished journals in an effort to document fully his unscripted intellectual and spiritual development.Though highly personal, the book is not primarily an autobiography or conversion narrative. Instead, it is an introspective analysis of the internal dialogue that virtually all participants in interreligious affairs recognize as the heart of the global ecumenical encounter. Knitter’s book serves as something of an apologia for what is known today as dual religious belonging or hyphenated religious identity. The author concludes his text with this intriguing but not surprising spiritual self-portrait: both lifelong baptized Christian and “card-carrying Buddhist” (p. 216). The challenge of accounting for this “both /and” orientation grants the book its distinctive character and its reason for being.Knitter borrows his method from the twentieth-century minor classic The Way of All the Earth: Experiments in Truth and Religion (1978). In that work, Notre Dame theology professor and Holy Cross priest James Dunne suggested that the path to holiness in the contemporary West leads inevitably through intimate engagement with the ancient wisdom traditions of the East. Even a casual review of the spiritual history of the last century or so will confirm how earnest seekers in modernity’s secular city have renewed, rediscovered, or critically redefined their native faith commitment through life-changing contact with the ideas and values of Asian religious traditions. It is a story familiar to anyone acquainted with the extraordinary religious pilgrimages of interfaith saints such as Martin Luther King, Jr. (1929–1968), Thomas Merton (1915–1968), and Bede Griffiths (1906–1993).Dunne dubbed this experience the “spiritual adventure of our time” (p. 2); Knitter passionately agrees. He applies Dunne’s dialectical method and his special terminology to his own spiritual odyssey, “passing over” from Christian questions and problems to possible answers and solutions in the Buddhist tradition and then “passing back” to Christian belief and practice with enhanced purpose and a fresh sense of integrity.The starting point for Knitter’s project is cognitive, moral, even emotional dissatisfaction with some of the fundamental structures of the historic Christian worldview: God as transcendent creator and lord of history, Jesus Christ as incarnate Logos and [End Page 212] universal savior, and salvation as the survival of human personality after death and the eschatological redemption of all finite reality. In essence, Knitter claims, traditional theism and the core myth of Christianity as expressed in scripture, creed, and liturgy appear painfully ineffective and to a large extent incoherent in the context of modern life and the international interface of world religions. What especially drives the... (shrink)

It would be useful to have a category of extensive-form games whose isomorphisms specify equivalences between games. Since working with entire games is too large a project for a single paper, I begin here with preforms, where a “preform” is a rooted tree together with choices and information sets. In particular, this paper first defines the category \, whose objects are “functioned trees”, which are specially designed to be incorporated into preforms. I show that \ is isomorphic to the full (...) subcategory of \ whose objects are converging arborescences. Then the paper defines the category \, whose objects are “node-and-choice preforms”, each of which consists of a node set, a choice set, and an operator mapping node-choice pairs to nodes. I characterize the \ isomorphisms, define a forgetful functor from \ to \, and show that \ is equivalent to the full subcategory of \ whose objects are perfect-information preforms. The paper also shows that many game-theoretic entities can be derived from preforms, and that these entities are well-behaved with respect to \ morphisms and isomorphisms. (shrink)

I. On the morning of 28 November 1979 flight TE-901, a DC-10 operated by Air New Zealand Limited, took off from Auckland, New Zealand, on a sightseeing passenger flight over a portion of Antarctica. The pilot in command was Captain Collins. The following are paragraphs from the official Report of the Royal Commission that inquired into the events surrounding that flight.

There is a moral phenomenon of “Secondary Permissibility” in which an otherwise morally impermissible option is made morally permissible by the presence of another option. In this paper I explain how this phenomenon works and argue that understanding how it works suggests a new model for the structure of the ethics of harming.

A term and its contradictory exhaust the universe of discourse, but when examined for their relation to each other, I believe they are seen to exhaust that universe in a more particular respect than may have come into notice. They seem to exhaust or annul one of the leading notions of mathematical logic. This notion is the one concerning the whereabouts of the null class.

Boettke and Butkevich argue that a vibrant society is an entrepreneurial society. Entrepreneur- ial effectiveness is a function of the free movement of economic actions – their alertness to opportunities for mutual gain, and their sense of when and where to enter and exit a market. Boettke and Butkevich focus not so much on the behavior of entrepreneurship, but the institutional conditions within which entrepreneurship takes place. They argue that policies which hinder the above ground legitimate expression of entrepreneurial discovery (...) must be eliminated for the further development of the Russian economy towards a market system and away from the current “virtual economy”. Institutions of governance must be established which reduce political uncertainty and encourage individuals to be willing to bet on their ideas and find the financing to bring those bets to life.Boettke et Butkevich suggèrent que l’activité entrepreneuriale est la force motrice d’une société. L’efficacité de l’activité entrepreneuriale dépend de la libre circulation des acteurs économiques – leur vigilance à l’égard des opportunités de gains mutuels, et leur jugement concernant les moment et lieu opportuns pour entrer sur un marché ou en sortir. Les auteurs mettent l’accent, pas tant sur le comportement des entrepreneurs, que sur les aménagements institutionnels à l’intérieur desquels l’activité entrepreneuriale a lieu. Ils considèrent que les politiques qui font obstacle aux manifestations légitimes de découverte entrepreneuriale doivent être éliminées pour accompagner le développement de l’économie russe vers une économie de marché, distincte de l’actuelle “économie virtuelle”. Des institutions de gouvernance qui réduisent l’incertitude politique doivent être établies. Ces institutions devraient aussi encourager les individus à parier sur leurs idées et à trouver des sources de financement pour instaurer ces idées. (shrink)

Gaunilo assumes that there is no greatest conceivable island, and most philosophers have followed him in this assumption. But the option was open for Anselm (and remains open for us) to bite the bullet and ‘give him his island.’ I argue that such a response is perfectly reasonable for a Platonist like Anselm, and that even a theist who isn’t a Platonist can tolerate the island as a fairly minor addition his or her ontology.

For more than 100 years, metaethicists have overlooked the best version of G. E. Moore’s Open Question argument. This despite the fact that it appears on the same page of Principia Ethica as his other, weaker versions of the argument. This better Open Question Argument does not rely on introspection of the meanings of ethical terms, and so does not fall to the standard criticisms of Moore. In this paper, I present this ‘new’ Open Question Argument and show that Moore (...) has done to naturalistic ethics something like what Plato’s Euthyphro does to supernaturalistic ethics. (shrink)

A recursively enumerable splitting of an r.e. setAis a pair of r.e. setsBandCsuch thatA=B∪CandB∩C= ⊘. Since for such a splitting degA= degB∪ degC, r.e. splittings proved to be a quite useful notion for investigations into the structure of the r.e. degrees. Important splitting theorems, like Sacks splitting [S1], Robinson splitting [R1] and Lachlan splitting [L3], use r.e. splittings.Since each r.e. splitting of a set induces a splitting of its degree, it is natural to study the relation between the degrees of (...) r.e. splittings and the degree splittings of a set. We say a setAhas thestrong universal splitting property if each splitting of its degree is represented by an r.e. splitting of itself, i.e., if for degA=b∪cthere is an r.e. splittingB, CofAsuch that degB=band degC=c. The goal of this paper is the study of this splitting property.In the literature some weaker splitting properties have been studied as well as splitting properties which imply failure of the SUSP. (shrink)