In this article, I explore the viability of a shamanist ontology. Through lens German philosopher Ludwig Klages (1872-1956), will address possibility outlining philosophical merits shamanism. was one last European philosophers to represent tradition which took seriously altered states consciousness. opposed destructive ‘Spirit’ (= Reason, Will) nourishing ‘Soul’ (=Life). His thinking can be cal...

In this paper we consider the emerging position in metaphysics that artifact functions characterize real kinds of artifacts. We analyze how it can circumvent an objection by David Wiggins (Sameness and substance renewed, 2001, 87) and then argue that this position, in comparison to expert judgments, amounts to an interesting fine-grained metaphysics: taking artifact functions as (part of the) e...

According to SR, Newton was more-or-less right about how objects move at ordinary speeds: that’s why his theory was successful for so long, and why it continues to be useful. But SR comes into its own when accounting for the surprising behaviour of objects moving near the speed of light (300 000 kilometres per second, or 186 000 miles per second). Despite ignoring gravity, SR in its turn is usu...

Let us stipulate at the outset that “omission” refers to any action or event that doesn’t occur. In contrast, one might use “omission” to denote exclusively intentional failures (my refraining from picking up the dry cleaning), exclusively agent-involving failures (the gardener’s failure to water the plant), or failures with an explicitly normative dimension (as in Billy not following through o...

It is a prima facie reasonable assumption that if a physical quantity is measurable, then it corresponds to a genuine physical property of the measured system. You can measure a person’s mass because human beings have such a property. You can measure the average mass of a group of people because groups of people have such a collective property. And so on. Now it would be truly surprising— mirac...

In “Imaging or Imagining? A Neuroethics Challenge Informed by Genetics,” Judy Illes and Eric Racine (see this issue) argue that “traditional bioethics analysis” (TBA), as developed in the field of genethics, is insufficient to deal with moral and metaphysical challenges endemic to recent developments in neuroscience. They claim that “the link between the brain and the self is far more direct th...