Sceptical Critique Research Articles

Human Brain Organoid Transplantation: Testing the Foundations of Animal Research Ethics

Alongside in vitro studies, researchers are increasingly exploring the transplantation of human brain organoids (HBOs) into non-human animals to study brain development, disease, and repair. This paper focuses on ethical issues raised by such transplantation studies. In particular, it investigates the possibility that they might yield enhanced brain function in recipient animals (especially non-human primates), thereby fundamentally altering their moral status. I assess the critique, raised by major voices in the bioethics and science communities, according to which such concerns are premature and misleading. I identify the assumptions underlying this skeptical critique, and mention some objections against them, followed by some possible replies. I proceed to argue that the skeptical position is ultimately implausible, because it presupposes an unreasonably high standard of full moral status. My argument appeals to David DeGrazia’s idea of a “borderline person”, and to the need for consistency with existing animal research regulations. I outline the practical implications of my view for the conduct of studies that might result in the development of full moral status in a transplanted animal. I also discuss some of the ethical implications of animal enhancement (particularly of rodents) below the threshold associated with full moral status. I conclude that far from being premature, further debate on these issues is urgently needed to help clarify the prospects that a neural chimera might attain full moral status in the foreseeable future, and the level of quality of life required to make it acceptable to knowingly create such a being via HBO transplantation.

La critica sestana ai numeri pitagorici

Abstract This article proposes a reconstruction of the Sextan critique against the Pythagorean conception of number as principle of all existing things. Taking into consideration all the parallel passages concerning the presentation and the polemic about the Pythagorean doctrine, the present article proposes a division of the sceptical critique into two sections, the first one presenting the Pythagorean reasons to consider the numbers as principle existing apart from numbered things, and the second one presenting the arguments that Sextus himself built against them. This paper will show that this structure is consistent with the sceptical method, which consists in pointing out the ἰσοσθένεια among different positions which leads to suspension of judgment. Regarding the Pythagorean doctrine that emerges from these passages, the present article discusses the way in which Sextus testified a juxtaposition between Pythagorean and Platonic doctrines, probably due to a Middle-Platonic or Neopythagorean elaboration, against which Sextus used Platonic concepts, adopting in original way arguments taken from the Parmenides and the Phaedo. Despite the ἐποχή about the nature of the number, this article will argue that Sextus did not avoid to use the number in practical daily life, in a way that is consistent with the sceptical practical criterion.

Die verwerwing van absolute wete as louterings-proses in Hegel se Fenomenologie van de Geest

Hierdie artikel ondersoek die absolute wete as sleutelbegrip in Hegel se Fenomenologie van de Geest (2013). Die vermyding, onderbeklemtoning en wanbegrip van die absolute wete in veral 20ste-eeuse interpretasies van Hegel se werk sal met behulp van sy eie uiteensetting bevraagteken word. Eerstens is die absolute wete nie 'n klaargemaakte bloudruk wat kritiekloos op die werklikheid toegepas kan word nie, maar 'n moeisame proses wat mens nie van 'n afstand kan betrag nie en waardeur 'n mens self moet werk. Tweedens word aangevoer dat die absolute wete slegs die resultaat kan wees van die strengste moontlike beproewing,1 in die vorm van 'n "sich vollbringende Skeptizismus"; en derdens gaan dít wat deur die beproewing opgehef word, steeds gekoppel bly aan die absolute as deel van die prosesmatige aard daarvan. Die proses dui daarop dat selfverlies in die vorm van die uitwys van tekortkominge en selfverowering as die selfbewuswording van die gees twee kante van dieselfde muntstuk verteenwoordig, naamlik wat Hegel as die "loutering tot gees" beskryf.

What the Victims of Tyranny Owe Each Other: On Judith Shklar’s Value Monism

What do the victims of tyranny owe each other? In this paper, I examine whether they can be condemned for betraying their friends, and I do so through a novel interpretation of Judith Shklar’s political thought. Shklar is a widely acknowledged and significant influence on non-ideal theory and political realism. However, there is also a previously unnoticed transformation between her early and mature work, for although she remains a sceptic her approach to moral conflict changes from value pluralism to value monism. In addition, it is only in her mature work, as a monist, she believes tyranny cancels obligations of justice. I argue here that Shklar’s monism fails, and this in turn has important implications for political realism and non-ideal theory. While attention has been focused on developing a sceptical critique of ideal theory, this interpretation of Shklar’s work illustrates that greater awareness is needed of the pitfalls of monist strands of scepticism.

Utopia and Pluralism: Demanding Too Much in the Name of Justice

ABSTRACTIn recent literature on utopianism, in particular non-ideal and realist work, the distinction between scepticism and non-scepticism has been to the fore. The main concern of this article, in contrast, is to show the importance of the distinction between pluralist and monist approaches. Firstly, pluralists can identify when utopian projects are guilty of demanding too much even when those projects are, all things considered, legitimate. Secondly, monists are unable to discern such prima facie wrongs, even when monism is combined with a sceptical critique of ideal theory. I advance this argument through a novel reading of Judith Shklar’s work, specifically her arguments concerning Rousseauian utopianism. In sharp contrast to the prevailing view in the literature, I maintain that the pluralism and scepticism of her early work is replaced by a monist scepticism in her mature work, a transformation that itself demonstrates the benefits of pluralism over (sceptical) monism.

The Specter of Skepticism in the Age of Enlightenment by Anton M. Matytsin

Reviewed by: The Specter of Skepticism in the Age of Enlightenment by Anton M. Matytsin Roger Maioli Anton M. Matytsin. The Specter of Skepticism in the Age of Enlightenment. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, 2016. Pp. xi + 361. $60. This book is an illuminating reappraisal of the two broad topics in its title: skepticism and Enlightenment. On the one hand, it revises a thesis made popular by Richard Popkin, rearticulating the impact of skepticism on eighteenth-century intellectual history. On the other, it opposes traditional accounts of the Enlightenment as an age of reason against faith, seeking to reintegrate religious thinkers into a progressive history of knowledge. Siding with Popkin on the historical importance of skepticism, Mr. Matytsin offers a more layered account of its reception and influence. To begin with, skepticism "was not always the cause, but often the result, of intense, mutually destructive debates among dogmatic philosophies." Between the sixteenth and the early eighteenth centuries, unending controversies in metaphysics, natural philosophy, and historiography fostered reticence regarding claims to certainty. This reticence, the book's argument goes, sets the stage for the spread of skepticism—especially in its Pyrrhonian variety, given currency through the rediscovery of Sextus Empiricus's Outlines of Pyrrhonism (1562; first French translation, 1725) and the publication of Pierre Bayle's Dictionnaire historique et critique (1697). Popkin and others have shown that responses to Pyrrhonism made concessions to doubt and replaced old metaphysical certainties with more modest claims to probable knowledge. But this "mitigated skepticism," according to Mr. Matytsin, was not the single-handed achievement of antireligious philosophers; it was also fully articulated by [End Page 158] Protestant and Catholic antiskeptics such as Jean-Pierre de Crousaz, Laurent-Josse Le Clerc, and Friedrich Wilhelm Bierling. In seeking to shield religion from the skeptical critique, they "were successful in promoting pragmatic solutions, such as the recourse to moral certainty and probability." Their arguments were then retooled by less pious writers, including the central figures of the French Enlightenment. The novelty of this argument resides less in its picture of skepticism than in its attention to antiskepticism, an uncoordinated international phenomenon involving less well-known figures whom Mr. Matytsin does much to revitalize. The book is especially valuable in its treatment of Crousaz, a Swiss logician and devout Huguenot whom Popkin dismisses as unimportant, but whose Examen du pyrrhonisme ancien et modern (1733) may have been the most extensive and sustained response to Pyrrhonism in the long eighteenth century. As Mr. Matytsin demonstrates, Crousaz's work inflected not only the historical skepticism of Gibbon but also the responses to Pyrrhonism at the Académie de Prusse, a fertile seedbed for Enlightenment materialism. In bringing the Huguenot diaspora as well as Jesuit intellectuals into the fold of the Enlightenment, Mr. Matytsin is joining the postsecular turn in Enlightenment studies—represented among others by J.G.A. Pocock, Karen O'Brien, and Thomas Ahnert—while acknowledging that to make the case for a religious Enlightenment also deflates "the Enlightenment" as a historical category. For his purposes, "the Age of Enlightenment" serves mostly as a chronological framework, with boundaries in 1697 (when Bayle's Dictionnaire brought the skeptical crisis into the limelight) and 1772 (when the Encyclopédie was completed), but the framework has no philosophical program and no body of central doctrines. In treating "the Enlightenment" as essentially another name for "eighteenth-century intellectual history," this book takes to task more essentialist accounts of the movement—whether by Paul Hazard and Peter Gay or by Jonathan Israel—on the grounds that they restrict their focus to premonitions of the French Revolution or of modern secular values. "By exploring the intellectual universe of the eighteenth century on its own terms," Mr. Matytsin states, "scholars might finally abandon the intellectual crutch provided by the increasingly meaningless phrase the Enlightenment and walk unaided toward previously unexplored avenues and unexpected connections." His study is a compelling example of where those avenues may lead. In calling for a more capacious conception of Enlightenment, Mr. Matytsin paradoxically also returns to a narrower view of the movement, one that scholars since Pocock have been especially invested in transcending. Here the Enlightenment means the Francophone Enlightenment, whether...

Aprendiendo de la pseudociencia

El pensamiento crítico y escéptico hacia las pseudociencias se ha movido tradicionalmente en un sentido excesivamente racionalista. En el texto se critica ese exceso de racionalismo para adecuarlo a las recientes investigaciones en neurociencia, psicología y economía conductual acerca de las emociones y la toma de decisiones. Desde esta perspectiva, se intenta explicar la pervivencia de las pseudociencias pese a la crítica escéptica, y apuntar alternativas para hacer más eficaz y eficiente la difusión del pensamiento crítico y científico.

Роль скептичної очевидності в Першій і Другій «Медитаціях». Стаття друга. Certitudo

The author argues that according to Sextus Empiricus, (a) the "sensual" nature of the phenomenon is a metaphorical notion, since it is indistinguishably extended both to sensuality and thinking; (b) the phenomenon manifest itself with irresistible force of impact, through a wide range of passive states of mind; (c) the impact of phenomena is always mediated by our ego, because all skeptic expressions are strongly correlated with the first person singular. The article proves that Descartes could not refute the “excess” of skeptical doubt and make an immanent critique of skepticism without borrowing the aforementioned statements of Sextus. Such borrowing (1) has created a common ground for discussion between Descartes and skeptics; (2) made it possible for the meditator to give persuasiveness to careful observation of his own internal experience. Descartes' search for certainty in "Meditations" is entirely based on [а] evidence of "phenomena", "states of mind", "passions"; [b] refusal to agree with the "non-evident" proclaimed by Sextus Empiricus.

Ceticismo ao valor e valor do ceticismo na interpretação do direito

O processo vivenciado na modernidade de complexificacao social e o surgimento do direito como sistema social autonomo mudam os termos da longa controversia entre direito e moral, na medida em que a pluralidade de visoes torna excentrica a defesa de um conteudo de justica valido em si mesmo, configurando a generalizacao social de um ceticismo em relacao aos valores. Na contramao desse fenomeno, teorias juridicas contemporâneas aglutinadas sob a insignia do “pos-positivismo” tem apostado na moralidade dos principios no sentido de alcancar uma resposta adequada ao ordenamento juridico. Diante desse cenario, o presente artigo procura identificar o papel que o ceticismo em torno dos valores adquire nas formulacoes teoricas sobre a interpretacao do direito, tendo como objeto, por um lado, a descricao feita pelas teorias positivistas classicas de Hans Kelsen e Herbert Hart sobre a interpretacao do direito e, por outro, a critica de Ronald Dworkin ao ceticismo e sua defesa da objetividade moral. Procurando responder sobre a possibilidade da verdade moral ser objetiva em sociedades complexas de maneira a limitar a interpretacao juridica, o trabalho procura desfazer algumas confusoes que tornam questoes de ponto de vista grandes desacordos teoricos. Por fim, aponta que o proprio ceticismo deve ser considerado um valor da pratica interpretativa do direito no Brasil.Palavras-chave: teoria do direito, hermeneutica, interpretacao do direito, ceticismo, valor.

La critique naturaliste du scepticisme humien chez Thomas Reid

Cet article montre comment le fait de la croyance irrépressible suffit, chez Reid, à la critique des doutes de Hume au sujet de la perception et de l’induction. Distinguant naturalisme psychologique descriptif et naturalisme épistémologique normatif, il montre comment le naturalisme humien peut être sceptique, pendant que celui de Reid en constitue la réfutation. Il défend l’idée que la critique naturaliste reidienne du scepticisme a une dimension purement épistémologique, indépendante de toute présupposition métaphysique.

Illustrating philosophy: Mel Bochner’s Wittgenstein drawings

In 1991, Arion Press published a limited edition of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s On Certainty. Included were the standard bilingual edition of Wittgenstein’s text, an introductory essay by Arthur C. Danto, and twelve prints by Mel Bochner, the well-known conceptual artist. Bochner created two new Range Drawings that formed end papers to the inside front and back covers of the book. The question that this edition of On Certainty poses is whether and, if so, in what sense any or all of Bochner’s drawings constitute illustrations of On Certainty. This article focuses on the Range Drawings. It argues that these two highly abstract images, consisting of sequences of the numerals 1 to 9 printed in two colors (red and black) and arranged in columns illustrate some central claims of On Certainty. In particular, it will be shown how these drawings enable us to understand Wittgenstein’s critique of skepticism for failing to understand the concept of doubt correctly. Because the drawings include two “errors,” they provide a concrete illustration of Wittgenstein’s claim that doubt only makes sense in the context of the possibility of an error. As this argument is made, some distinctions are also proposed among different types of illustrations and why a theory of illustration needs to pay attention to them is shown. The article also reflects more generally on how the abstract claims of philosophy can be illustrated at all.

The United Nations and Development Assistance in the Asia-Pacific Region

The United Nations at Work in Asia: An Envoy's Account of Development in China, Vietnam, Thailand and the South Pacific. By Roy D. Morey Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Co, 2014. 277 pp., $33.25 paperback (ISBN-13: 978-0-786-47871-2). The rather formal title of this book belies its rich, varied, and original content. Roy Morey takes the reader on his extraordinary life's journey from US Senate staffer; to junior academic in Granville, Ohio; to the Nixon White House as Ehrlichman's chief public opinion polling officer; to the Department of State as Deputy Assistant Secretary of State in the Bureau of International Organization Affairs; and finally, to the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), where a four-month consultancy expanded into a permanent career as UNDP resident representative in the Asia-Pacific region: in Thailand, Samoa and the “Microdots,” China, and Vietnam. Morey's final posting, as Director of the UNDP office in Washington, brings him full-circle, enabling him to look back and, with a wise and critical eye, assess the many strengths, and occasional weaknesses, of the United Nations and, particularly, the UNDP. He evaluates the contributions of these international organizations to each country to which he was posted, and enumerates the critical lessons gleaned from a lifetime's work in development assistance. The book also represents a journey in Morey's personal development, from self-described Republican and (continuing) admirer of Richard Nixon to thoughtful and cosmopolitan citizen of the world, asserting the values and virtues of the United Nations in the face of a skeptical Tea Party critique. Because of the fortuitous timing of his postings, Morey was present at some important turning points in international and developmental politics. Most dramatic was his appointment to China in 1988 and his first-hand experience of the 1989 Tiananmen crisis, when he assumed the critical role of expatriating UN personnel from Beijing. Prior to that time, from 1978, he was involved in …

Analogical Reasoning in the Common Law

Analogical reasoning is a pervasive feature of the common law, yet its structure and rational force is much disputed by legal theorists, some of whom are sceptical that it has any rational force at all. This article argues that part of the explanation for these disagreements lies in there being not one form of analogical reasoning in the common law, but three: classificatory analogies, close analogies and distant analogies. These three differ in their functions and rationale. Classificatory analogies involve the use of decided cases to help characterize novel fact situations, and are justified by the rule of law ideal of minimizing the dependence of judicial decisions on the individual views of decision-makers. Close analogies are used to help resolve unsettled issues by reliance on decisions from other branches of the same legal doctrine. They complement the doctrine of precedent, and rest on similar considerations. Distant analogies are also used to help resolve unsettled issues, but by reference to decisions from other legal doctrines. They are the most susceptible to sceptical critique: although they can serve to maintain coherence in the law, they deserve a more modest role in legal reasoning than they are often given. © The Author 2014. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved.

The Politics of Protestant Healing: Theoretical Tools for the Study of Spiritual Bodies and The Body Politic

Spirituality and healing are a potent combination that is as likely to provoke skeptical critique as convinced testimony. Claims that physical healing may occur as a result of spiritual conviction or influence have long been problematic for most medical institutions, while lucrative for some religious ones. In this paper, I argue that scholars of religion who seek to study the confluence of spirituality and healing ethnographically must attend carefully to this tension between skepticism and testimony. As concepts or claims, both spirituality and healing are not exact, fully quantifiable, or fully measureable. The question for the ethnographer, who seeks to set spirituality and healing within cultural and political contexts, then becomes: what forms of legitimation do those testifying to the healing powers of spirituality use to make sense of it, and what forms do skeptics use to render claims of spiritual healing literally incredible? Answering this question requires that any scholar studying the confluence of spirituality and healing attend to how political economies and social imaginaries shape the practices of legitimation that support and constrain spiritual healing. 1 At a broader level of interest for the readers of Spiritus, I hope to show that ethnographic approaches to the study of “Christian spirituality” must resist naturalizing the category of spirituality as an “authentic” expression of lay or lived religion. The Christians with whom we interact as ethnographers may privilege spirituality over religion by posing practice over prescription, or by explicitly framing spirituality as a more genuine form of human experience than the ossified, institutional structure that is religion. As scholars, however, we must acknowledge that the concept of religion and spirituality share twinned, Christian-inflected genealogies within contested national myths, colonial and postcolonial politics, and academic disciplines. Part of the work of ethnographers is to ask why people in particular times and places give accounts of themselves and their societies in the ways that they do, and to set competing accounts in comparative perspective. In North America in particular, spirituality and healing are both powerful tropes that Christians have used to imagine, discipline, and change their communities and their bodies; neither spirituality nor healing come to us as natural categories. 2

The Pragmatist Skepsis as a Social Practice

In this paper, I address the issue of the consistency of Richard Rorty’s multi-layered approach of skepticism, examining three successive steps of this approach: the genealogical critique of theoretical skepticism in Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, the surprising revival of a skeptical outlook in Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity and the promising sketch of a pragmatist skepsis emancipated from skepticism in the last works dedicated to the restatement of philosophy as “cultural politics.” According to some critical readers of Rorty, there is a tension, if not a contradiction, between Rorty’s early dismissal of the skeptical stance in the name of pragmatism and the return of a “neo-Humean” stance in his political writings of the 1980’s. The aim of this paper is to show that there is no such contradiction between these two orientations, provided one keeps in mind that according to Rorty, philosophy is about creating, strengthening and undermining various descriptions of human culture. Rorty’s pragmatist redescriptions include “conceptual characters” which have to be regarded as philosophical tools fulfilling specific tasks: from this perspective, the liberal ironist is not to be considered as the final word of Rorty on political philosophy, but rather as a transitory figure which allows the author of Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity to address the specific problem of the relation between philosophy and politics in a liberal (anti-foundational) society. Therefore, liberal ironism is not a naive commitment to skepticism which is inconsistent with the fallibilistic claims of pragmatism: the best way of understanding it is to view it from the perspective of Rorty’s last works, i.e. from the perspective of “cultural politics,” and to compare it to other philosophical figures fulfilling different tasks, such as the “prophetic feminist.”

Form and Violence in Trollope'sThe Macdermots of Ballycloran

Anthony Trollope's first novel, The Macdermots of Ballycloran (1847), is concerned with social and political conflict in rural Ireland; it is marked by episodes of extreme violence and by a generally episodic and ad hoc narrative form. In the early 1840s, when Trollope began writing, the form that had mastered the containment of violence was the historical novel, and Macdermots is clearly attempting to come to terms with the inheritance of Sir Walter Scott. It is equally preoccupied with the tradition of the Irish national tale, in particular with the models of national restoration promoted in the work of Maria Edgeworth. The national tale and the historical novel offered different but overlapping assessments of the colonial process in Celtic Britain, each relying on its own vision of economic and cultural development. Trollope's book applies a skeptical critique to these earlier generic formations, evaluating and rejecting the emerging liberal vision of history they each encode. But in rejecting the resolutions that Scott and Edgeworth proposed, Macdermots cancels out any possible resolution within its own form.

The Enlightenment: A (French) Restoration

A review of Dan Edelstein’s The Enlightenment: A Genealogy (University of Chicago Press, 2010).

FEISAL G. MOHAMED. Milton and the Post-Secular Present: Ethics, Politics, Terrorism

The series in which Mohamed’s book appears, Stanford University Press’s Cultural Memory in the Present, fosters approaches from innovative theoretical perspectives, and at first glance this seems an unlikely street address for a book on Milton. But on second glance, it is entirely right: Mohamed aims for a critique of current scepticism of anti-foundationalist philosophers through readings of Milton, and his highly original book offers critical reflection on both Milton and the theorists. This is, indeed, a captivatingly eclectic little book, engaging maturely with contemporary issues relevant to the humanities by way of Milton, and it has wide implications beyond Milton studies. Indeed, the book has already garnered a web presence—the author himself a blogger for the Huffington Post—with an excerpt available on The Immanent Frame, a website devoted to high theory on secularism, religion and the public sphere. Milton, Mohamed suggests, ‘asks questions of our moment’ (p. 43), a moment defined by its ‘post-secularity.’ To explain this term, Mohamed points to those theorists who have contributed most to its formulations: Alain Badiou, Jacques Derrida, John Milbank and Jürgen Habermas. ‘Post-secular’ is, rather than an entity to be defined, instead, a set of interests and arguments. It includes an ontology, with priority given to subjectivity; an ethics, with an interest in religious traditions and their metaphysics; and a view of modernity or a politics: an adjustment of liberal political thought in the growing awareness of religiosity. These aspects of ‘post-secularity’ echo with Milton’s ‘pre-secular’ thought, and the book explores the dissonance arising between the two. The book instigates a dialogue between the ‘post-secular’ thinkers and this major ‘pre-secular’ poet, on such topics as transcendent truth, ethics, political action and religious violence.

Skepticism and Post-Reformation Ethics: Richard Hooker's Galen

Closely examining Richard Hooker's rhetoric in book 4 of the Lawes , this essay shows how Hooker's notion of reformation was indebted to Galen's concept of neutrum and mixture over and above the Aristotelian notion of the mean. While Aristotle's moral philosophy led reformers like Thomas Cartwright to posit a reformation by contraries—that is, an exclusive and extremist church without any tolerance for religious hybridity—Galen offered Hooker a method of reform that allowed for a considerable synthesis between reason and experience, led to a more pragmatic ethics, and supported a church that was both reformed and inclusive. This essay reveals the limitations of Aristotelian moral philosophy for post-Reformation ethics and complicates Hooker's orthodoxy by highlighting his skeptical critique of normativity and by examining its effects on his attitude toward adiaphora and custom. Finally, this essay argues that one particularly significant outcome of Hooker's pragmatism is his recognition of atheism as a category of belief in late sixteenth-century England.

Must phenomenology remain Cartesian?

Husserl saw the Cartesian critique of scepticism as one of the eternal merits of Descartes’ philosophy. In doing so, he accepted the legitimacy of the very idea of a universal doubt, and sought to present as an alternative to it a renewed, specifically phenomenological concept of self-evidence, making it possible to obtain an unshakable foundation for the edifice of knowledge. This acceptance of the skeptical problem underlies his entire conceptual framework, both before and after the transcendental turn, and especially the immanence/transcendence distinction, i.e., the very basis of intentionality. In taking as its starting point an analysis of perception, the article puts forth a certain number of phenomenological arguments in order to put into question the validity of the skeptical problem and, therefore, of the Husserlian conceptual framework; it defends, in the first place, a disjunctive conception of perception and, in the second place, a holism of experience.