Elliot Sober has recently attempted to reformulate and defend a standard objection to fine-tuning arguments, the objection from the "weak anthropic principle". The key to his reformulated defense is his likelihoodist epistemology conjoined to a well-known "fishnet analogy". Although recent rebuttals from Weisberg and Monton fall short of exposing the flaws in Sober’s objection, I show that Sober’s likelihoodist epistemology and analogy serve instead to undermine weak anthropic principles and objections based upon them.

The process-dissociation procedure has been used in a variety of experimental contexts to assess the contributions of conscious and unconscious processes to task performance. To evaluate whether motivation affects estimates of conscious and unconscious processes, participants were given incentives to follow inclusion and exclusion instructions in a perception task and a memory task. Relative to a control condition in which no performance incentives were given, the results for the perception task indicated that incentives increased the participants' ability to exclude previously (...) presented information, which in turn both increased the estimate of conscious processes and decreased the estimate of unconscious processes. However, the results also indicated that incentives did not influence estimates of conscious or unconscious processes in the memory task. The findings suggest that the process-dissociation procedure is relatively immune to influences of motivation when used with a memory task, but that caution should be exercised when the process-dissociation is used with a perception task. (shrink)

An extended critical investigation of Plantinga's evolutionary argument against naturalism (EAAN). -/- I wrote this a couple of years ago as a way of thinking through the argument, but now lack the ambition to revise it into a paper. (It's too long to be a paper, too short and too narrowly focused on one person's argument to be a book.) Rather than let it age in private, I'm sharing it publicly for anyone interested in Plantinga's argument.

This compact and innovative book tackles one of the central issues in drug policy: the lack of a coherent conceptual structure for thinking about drugs. Drugs generally fall into one of seven categories: prescription, over the counter, alternative medicine, common-use drugs like alcohol, tobacco and caffeine; religious-use, sports enhancement; and of course illegal street drugs like cocaine and marijuana. Our thinking and policies varies wildly from one to the other, with inconsistencies that derive more from cultural and social values than (...) from medical or scientific facts. Penalties exist for steroid use, while herbal remedies or cold medication are legal. Native Americans may legally use peyote, but others may not. Penalties may vary for using different forms of the same drug, such as crack vs. powder cocaine. Herbal remedies are unregulated by the FDA; but medical marijuana is illegal in most states. Battin and her contributors lay a foundation for a wiser drug policy by promoting consistency and coherency in the discussion of drug issues and by encouraging a unique dialogue across disciplines. The contributors are an interdisciplinary group of scholars mostly based at the University of Utah, and include a pharmacologist, a psychiatrist, a toxicologist, a trial court judge, a law professor, an attorney, a diatary specialist, a physician, a health expert on substance abuse, and Battin herself who is a philosopher. They consider questions like the historical development of current policy and the rationales for it; scientific views on how drugs actually cause harm; how to define the key notions of harm and addiction; and ways in which drug policy can be made more consistent. They conclude with an examination of the implications of a consistent policy for various disciplines and society generally. The book is written accessibly with little need for expert knowledge, and will appeal to a diverse audience of philosophers, bioethicists, clinicians, policy makers, law enforcement, legal scholars and practitioners, social workers, and general readers, as well as to students in areas like pharmacy, medicine, law, nursing, sociology, social work, psychology, and bioethics. (shrink)

"In this fresh critique of Rawls’s political liberalism, Dostert offers a bold and stimulating account of the political potential of religion that actually enhances the prospects of a genuinely democratic public discourse. Drawing lessons from the civil rights movement to the Jubilee 2000 effort, _Beyond Political Liberalism_ presents a profoundly hopeful challenge to the ways of thinking about liberalism and religion that dominate both political science and religious studies today. Setting aside worn diatribes and tattered dichotomies, _Beyond Political Liberalism _constructs (...) a promising vision of religion's role in liberal society that will be of interest to anyone concerned about the future of contemporary western culture." —_Daniel M. Bell, Jr., Lutheran Theological Southern Seminary_ "This is a fine book. It is clearly written, accessible to a broad audience, and of special relevance now, both in academia and in the larger political and intellectual culture." —_Eldon Eisenach, University of Tulsa_ In _Beyond Political Liberalism,_ Troy Dostert offers a critical examination of political liberalism, the approach to liberal political theory advanced most forcefully in the later work of John Rawls. Political liberalism's defenders claim that an “overlapping consensus” of shared values holds out the strongest prospects for regulating democratic politics in light of our moral diversity. Dostert contends, however, that the attempt to establish such a consensus in fact works to restrict and control the presence of religious and other moral perspectives that can ennoble and invigorate public life. Dostert argues that there is a steep price to be paid for this conception of politics, for what results is a political vision characterized by a profound distrust and fear of citizens' comprehensive convictions—the animating source of many citizens' political activity. He suggests that a “post-secular” ethics is a more appropriate response to moral diversity than restricting and managing the presence of religion and other moral perspectives in public life. By drawing on the religious witness of the civil rights movement and the work of theologian John Howard Yoder, Dostert elucidates several core dialogic practices and illustrates their value through a consideration of the contemporary debates surrounding international debt relief and abortion. (shrink)

Preparing the Next Generation of Oral Historians is an invaluable resource to educators seeking to bring history alive for students at all levels. Filled with insightful reflections on teaching oral history, it offers practical suggestions for educators seeking to create curricula, engage students, gather community support, and meet educational standards. By the close of the book, readers will be able to successfully incorporate oral history projects in their own classrooms.

AN inquiry into the use of paradeigma in the Iliad must begin with Niobe. At 24. 602 Achilles introduces Niobe in order to encourage Priam to have some food. The dead body of the best of Priam's sons has now been placed on the wagon ready for its journey back to Troy. Achilles says , ‘Now let us eat. For even Niobe ate food, and she had lost twelve children. Apollo and Artemis killed them all; they lay nine days (...) in their blood and there was no one to bury them, because Zeus had turned the people into stone. On the tenth day the gods buried them. But she managed to eat some food, when she was tired of weeping. And now among the mountains, although turned into stone, she still broods over her sorrows. But come, let us also eat. You can weep for your son again later’. (shrink)

AN inquiry into the use of paradeigma in theIliadmust begin with Niobe. At 24. 602 Achilles introduces Niobe in order to encourage Priam to have some food. The dead body of the best of Priam's sons has now been placed on the wagon ready for its journey back to Troy. Achilles says, ‘Now let us eat. For even Niobe ate food, and she had losttwelvechildren. Apollo and Artemis killed them all; they lay nine days in their blood and there (...) was no one to bury them, because Zeus had turned the people into stone. On the tenth day the gods buried them. But she managed to eat some food, when she was tired of weeping. And now among the mountains, although turned into stone, she still broods over her sorrows. But come, let us also eat. You can weep for your son again later’. (shrink)

The issue of how race and genetics should interrelate goes to the heart of an unfinished discussion about race and racism in both the United States and around the world. The category of race is still powerful and dangerous, especially in scientific work. Addressing this issue is all the more important given the fact that race is still frequently essentialized and treated as biologically real. This tendency continues even as social and natural scientists such as Troy Duster and Charles (...) Mills largely agree that race is a social construction. Mills sees this racial construction as deeply rooted in the legal and constitutional orders of American society. Race is a modern category invented by white male scientists in the “era of modernity” and instantiated globally in the consciousness, social practices, and institutional interstices of Western European cultures, among countless others worldwide. Indeed, the pseudoscience of the period was highly informed by tales of difference brought back by explorers. (shrink)

When Andromache emerges from the inner chamber in Book 22, ascends the walls of Troy and looks out over the plain, she beholds a spectacle of ruthless brutality. She who has not been aware of the final combat, nor of the slaying of her husband, is suddenly confronted by the receding trail of utter defeat. Swift horses drag her husband's corpse into the distance, the cherished head disfigured as it is dragged, raking the dust of what was once their (...) homeland. The violence of the scene is forcefully conveyed by one word in particular. The swift horses drag Hektor κηδστως —without κδος without care, ‘sans soucier de, brutalement’. In itself the word κηδστως provides a definition of violence, one captured in Shakespeare's phrase ‘careless force’. Violence is, in its harsh brutality, specifically heedlessness, an absence of any form of care. When Achilles hurls the slain suppliant Lykaon into the river he utters the taunt, ‘the fish, κηδες, will lick clean your wound's blood’ . The discarded corpse is denied funeral rites: in place of the care that the relations of the dead traditionally bestow in tending, washing, enshrouding, lamenting, and burying the dead, here the heedless creatures of nature, fleeting visitors, will attend to the corpse, ‘clean’ it, but utterly without care, completely oblivious to the oblivion they create by destroying. In Book 24 Achilles will describe the gods themselves as κηδες. (shrink)

Since the first phase of the formal effort to sequence the human genome, geneticists, social scientists and other scholars of race and ethnicity have warned that new genetic technologies and knowledge could have negative social effects, from biologizing racial and ethnic categories to the emergence of dangerous forms of genetic discrimination. Early on in the Human Genome Project, population geneticists like Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza enthusiastically advocated for the collection of DNA samples from global indigenous populations in order to track the (...) history of human ancestry, migration, and languages, while social scientists like Troy Duster insisted that the new genetics was in danger of ushering in insidious practices of eugenics. The Human Genome Diversity Project's 1991 proposal to archive human genetic variation around the world quickly came under intense scrutiny by indigenous peoples and advocacy groups who worried that such measures could exploit indigenous groups as research populations and even resurrect racist taxonomies from the nineteenth century. (shrink)

The classical form of the romance (courtly romance or chivalrous romance, the epic, romance tale) was created in the 11th-13th centuries in different countries by an entire series of great poets and authors, among whom Thomas, Chrétien de Troyes, Wolfram von Eschenbach, Gottfried of Strasbourg, Nezâmi, Rustaveli and Murasaki Shikibu had considerable influence on the development of their respective families of literature.

The last chapter of Politian's first Miscellanea dealt with the amica silentia lunae through which the Greeks sailed back to Troy . He argued that the phrase should not be taken literally, as a statement that Troy fell at the new moon, but in an extended sense, as a poetic indication that the moon had not yet risen when the Greeks set sail. This reading had one merit: it explained how Virgil's moon could be silent while the Greeks (...) were en route but shine during the battle for the city . Yet Politian's effort to identify the phase of the moon described by Virgil was anything but clear: Non igitur aut sera fuerit aut pernox luna, tum nec lunae quidem omnino coitus, sed tempus arbitror potius quamdiu illa non luceret. Accordingly, though his arguments were sometimes repeated by commentators and teachers, they won little assent from scholars who occupied themselves seriously with the passage. In his Adversaria Turnebus took silentia lunae as referring ‘ad noctis taciturnitatem…non ad interlunium’. In the first chapter of his De rebus per epistolam quaesitis Giano Parrasio sharply criticised the fuzziness of Politian's explanation: ‘Ambages istae sunt, ambages’. More important, he quoted a line from the Little Iliad: νξ μν ην μέσση, λαμπρ δ' πέτελλε σελήνη. This he rendered ‘Nox erat intempesta, nitebat et aurea coelo Luna’, and inferred from it that the moon had been up when Troy fell. In his Virgilius collation scriptorum Graecorum illustratus, finally, Fulvio Orsini published a scholium on Euripides' Hecuba, one which quoted both the line from the Little Iliad and an analysis of it by the Peripatetic Callisthenes. He too took the line as refuting Politian. (shrink)

The last chapter of Politian's first Miscellanea dealt with the amica silentia lunae through which the Greeks sailed back to Troy. He argued that the phrase should not be taken literally, as a statement that Troy fell at the new moon, but in an extended sense, as a poetic indication that the moon had not yet risen when the Greeks set sail. This reading had one merit: it explained how Virgil's moon could be silent while the Greeks were (...) en route but shine during the battle for the city. Yet Politian's effort to identify the phase of the moon described by Virgil was anything but clear: Non igitur aut sera fuerit aut pernox luna, tum nec lunae quidem omnino coitus, sed tempus arbitror potius quamdiu illa non luceret. Accordingly, though his arguments were sometimes repeated by commentators and teachers, they won little assent from scholars who occupied themselves seriously with the passage. In his Adversaria Turnebus took silentia lunae as referring ‘ad noctis taciturnitatem…non ad interlunium’. In the first chapter of his De rebus per epistolam quaesitis Giano Parrasio sharply criticised the fuzziness of Politian's explanation: ‘Ambages istae sunt, ambages’. More important, he quoted a line from the Little Iliad: νξ μν ην μέσση, λαμπρ δ' πέτελλε σελήνη. This he rendered ‘Nox erat intempesta, nitebat et aurea coelo Luna’, and inferred from it that the moon had been up when Troy fell. In his Virgilius collation scriptorum Graecorum illustratus, finally, Fulvio Orsini published a scholium on Euripides' Hecuba, one which quoted both the line from the Little Iliad and an analysis of it by the Peripatetic Callisthenes. He too took the line as refuting Politian. (shrink)

Ancient commentators identify several passages in the Iliad as “epigrams.” This paper explores the consequences of taking the scholia literally and understanding these passages in terms of inscription. Two tristichs spoken by Helen in the teikhoskopia are singled out for special attention. These lines can be construed not only as epigrams in the general sense, but more specifically as captions appended to an image of the Achaeans encamped on the plain of Troy. Since Helen's lines to a certain extent (...) correspond to the function and style of catalogic poetry, reading them specifically as captions leads to a more nuanced understanding of both Homeric poetry and Homeric self-reference. By contrasting Helen's “epigrams” with those of Hektor, one can also discern a gender-based differentiation of poetic functions. (shrink)

Benardete paradoxes involve infinite collections of Grim Reapers, assassins, demons, deafening peals, or even sentences. These paradoxes have recently been used in arguments for finitist metaphysical theses such as temporal finitism, causal finitism, and discrete views of time. Here we develop a new _finite_ Benardete-like paradox. We then use this paradox to defend a companions in guilt argument that challenges recent applications of patchwork principles on behalf of the aforementioned finitist arguments. Finally, we develop another problem for those applications by (...) examining the notion of exact duplication. (shrink)

As computers became multi-component systems in the 1950s, handling the speed differentials efficiently was identified as a major challenge. The desire for better understanding and control of ‘concurrency’ spread into hardware, software, and formalism. This paper examines the way in which the problem emerged and was handled across various computing cultures from 1955 to 1985. In the machinic culture of the late 1950s, system programs called ‘monitors’ were used for directly managing synchronisation. Attempts to reframe synchronisation in the subsequent algorithmic (...) culture pushed the problem to a higher level of abstraction; Dijkstra’s semaphores were a reaction to the algorithms’ complexity. Towards the end of the 1960s, the culture of ‘structured programming’ created a milieu in which Dijkstra, Hoare, and Brinch Hansen (among others) aimed for a concurrency primitive which embodied the new view of programming. Via conditional critical regions and Dijkstra’s ‘secretaries’, the co-produced ‘monitor’ appeared to provide the desired encapsulation. The construct received embodiment in a few programming languages; this paper ends by considering Modula and Concurrent Pascal. (shrink)

Attempts to capture the distinction between categorical and dispositional states in terms of more primitive modal notions – subjunctive conditionals, causal roles, or combinatorial principles – are bound to fail. Such failure is ensured by a deep symmetry in the ways dispositional and categorical states alike carry modal import. But the categorical/dispositional distinction should not be abandoned; it underpins important metaphysical disputes. Rather, it should be taken as a primitive, after which the doomed attempts at reductive explanation can be transformed (...) into circular but interesting accounts. (shrink)

The following is not a successful skeptical scenario: you think you know you have hands, but maybe you don't! Why is that a failure, when it's far more likely than, say, the evil genius hypothesis? That's the question.<br><br>This is an earlier draft.

This study described the relationships between academic class and student moral sensitivity and reasoning and between curriculum design components for ethics education and student moral sensitivity and reasoning. The data were collected from freshman (n = 506) and senior students (n = 440) in eight baccalaureate nursing programs in South Korea by survey; the survey consisted of the Korean Moral Sensitivity Questionnaire and the Korean Defining Issues Test. The results showed that moral sensitivity scores in patient-oriented care and conflict were (...) higher in senior students than in freshman students. Furthermore, more hours of ethics content were associated with higher principled thinking scores of senior students. Nursing education in South Korea may have an impact on developing student moral sensitivity. Planned ethics content in nursing curricula is necessary to improve moral sensitivity and moral reasoning of students. (shrink)

Reductionists about dispositions must either say the natural properties are all dispositional or individuate properties hyperintensionally. Lewis stands in as an example of the sort of combination I think is incoherent: properties individuated by modal profile + categoricalism.

As part of the development of the Symbolic and Sub-symbolic Robotics Intelligence Control System, we have implemented a memory store to allow a robot to retain knowledge from previous exp...

Nathan Salmon, in his paper Trans-World Identification and Stipulation (1996) purports to give a proof for the claim that facts concerning trans-world identity cannot be conceptually reduced to general facts. He calls this claim ‘Extreme Haecceitism.’ I argue that his proof is fallacious. However, I also contend that the analysis and ultimate rejection of his proof clarifies the fundamental issues that are at stake in the debate between the reductionist and haecceitist solutions to the problem of trans-world identity. These issues (...) hinge on the ability of modal logic and possible worlds semantics to draw a hard and fast distinction between the logic and the metaphysics of modal logic. I shall claim that the considerations in this paper call into question the viability of such a distinction. (shrink)

This paper argues for a permissivism of personal rationality, a rationality concerning the epistemic evaluation of persons. I work from the perspective of virtue epistemology where the standards of evaluation are the intellectual character virtues. On this picture, an agent is personally rational in having a doxastic attitude when having it is the result of some exemplification of an intellectual virtue. Permissive cases arise when the emotional components of intellectual virtues conflict, making some potential conclusions both enabled and disabled for (...) the agent. The agent is left in a confusion needing resolution, but if each of these conflicting emotions are components of intellectual virtues, then she has multiple personally rational options. This grounds a potential case of a permissivism of personal rationality, but this should be interesting to epistemologists in general since opting for one of the sides of this conflict leads an agent to have different doxastic attitudes. (shrink)

"Something in between : on the nature of love" -- Love's blindness (1) : love's closed heart -- Love's blindness (2) : love's friendly eye -- Beyond comparison -- Commitments, values, and frameworks -- Valuing persons -- Love and morality -- Afterword. Between the universal and the particular.

Arithmetical definability has been extensively studied over the natural numbers. In this paper, we take up the study of arithmetical definability over finite structures, motivated by the correspondence between uniform AC0 and FO. We prove finite analogs of three classic results in arithmetical definability, namely that < and TIMES can first-order define PLUS, that < and DIVIDES can first-order define TIMES, and that < and COPRIME can first-order define TIMES. The first result sharpens the equivalence FO =FO to FO = (...) FO, answering a question raised by Barrington et al. about the Crane Beach Conjecture. Together with previous results on the Crane Beach Conjecture, our results imply that FO is strictly less expressive than FO = FO = FO. In more colorful language, one could say that, for parallel computation, multiplication is harder than addition. (shrink)

In the last few years, a great deal of attention has been paid to the effects that the achievements of the Human Genome Project will have on the confidentiality of medical information. The Genetic Privacy Act is an attempt to address the privacy, confidentiality, and property rights relating to obtaining, requesting, using, storing, and disposing of genetic material. The GPA grew out of concerns over the vast amount of genetic information that is a product of the Human Genome Project. The (...) central goals of the GPA are twofold: to define an individual's right to control access to their genetic material and the privilege to control the information derived therefrom; and to prevent potential and actual abuse of genetic information by third parties, such as insurance companies, employers, and government. The GPA is one of a group of proposals that seek to control the flow of medical information from the individual to health care professionals and to other persons. (shrink)