In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Discover the Unknown Chekhov in Your ESL ClassroomNinah Beliavsky (bio)I was born in Moscow, ate aladushki, and listened to my mother read Chekhov in Russian. Kashtanka, a tale about a young, ginger-colored pup who gets lost, made me cry. And when I read about the death of Ivan Dmitrich Kreepikov, in The Death of a Civil Servant, I did not know whether to laugh or to cry. The poor (...) civil servant was sitting and watching an opera in a theater when all of a sudden he sneezed and spattered an old gentlemen, General Shpitzalov, in front of him. Now, as Chekhov writes, sneezing is not prohibited to any one or in any place; peasants sneeze, and even the chiefs of police sneeze. But, you see, the poor civil servant, being very much rank-conscious, could no longer live with himself after committing such a misconduct. He apologized profusely and went home, and without taking off his uniform, he lay down on the sofa, and... died.And what about Van'ka Zhukov, an orphan boy of nine apprenticed to a shoemaker who is being beaten and overworked. He writes a letter to his grandfather on Christmas Eve, begging him for the dear Lord's sake to take him away from his misery. After scratching his head and thinking for a moment, he dips his pen in ink and addresses his envelope: "The Village. To Grand Dad." He then dashes out into the street and pushes his precious letter through the opening of the postbox...The second part of my childhood I spent in Jerusalem; there I ate falafel with humus, was obsessed with perfecting the pronunciation of the Hebrew guttural "r," and read Miriam Yalan Shtekelis's children's poetry, which was filled with magical objects that laughed and cried. By the time I was in high school I was living in Milwaukee, eating fries and ice cream sundaes and reading O. Henry.The literature that one comes in contact with during childhood and young [End Page 101] adulthood is often deeply engraved on a person's psyche. It is similar to an adult craving sweets because of the psychological association with her childhood and a safe and protected environment. We tend to think back to the "good old days" because we find comfort in our past. Today, as an adult, a wife, and a mother, I often find refuge in my childhood memories. And, like most people, much of what I encounter and read today I tend to associate with my past. If I come across a story that I heard in my childhood, as I search for something new and amusing to give to my college English-as-a-Second-Language (ESL) students, I try to incorporate it into my curriculum. A few years ago I came across the story The Necklace by Guy de Mappassant and immediately recalled reading it in my adolescence. This story brought back the warm memories of home that I felt would be understood and identified with by my foreign students. Today, this story is one of my students' favorites. By using stories from my own past, I feel that I can bring to my class discussions a unique perspective—my own recollections and feelings and an interpretation not only academic in nature but also personal. Often, my international students will recall hearing or reading some of the same stories (that I bring to class) in their childhood, in their native tongues, and thus these stories will not seem out of context anymore because there will be a sense of connection.I teach ESL to college students—reading and writing at the intermediate and advanced levels. Aside from following the standard curriculum of using grammar and writing textbooks, I bring to my ESL classes music, opera, art, young adult novels by American writers, and short stories by both international and American writers. For instance, my students enjoy reading O. Henry's "The Christmas Present," "The Last Leaf," and "The Two Thanksgiving Day Gentlemen." These stories are about real people—just like my students—they are about everyday events, they are humorous and tragic in nature, and they have an unexpected twist... (shrink)

When phylogenetic trees constructed from morphological and molecular evidence disagree (i.e. are incongruent) it has been suggested that the differences are spurious or that the molecular results should be preferred a priori. Comparing trees can increase confidence (congruence), or demonstrate that at least one tree is incorrect (incongruence). Statistical analyses of 181 molecular and 49 morphological trees shows that incongruence is greater between than within the morphological and molecular partitions, and this difference is significant for the molecular partition. Because the (...) level of incongruence between a pair of trees gives a minimum bound on how much error is present in the two trees, our results indicate that the level of error may be underestimated by congruence within partitions. Thus comparisons between morphological and molecular trees are particularly useful for detecting this incongruence (spurious or otherwise). Molecular trees have higher average congruence than morphological trees, but the difference is not significant, and both within- and between-partition incongruence is much lower than expected by chance alone. Our results suggest that both molecular and morphological trees are, in general, useful approximations of a common underlying phylogeny and thus, when molecules and morphology clash, molecular phylogenies should not be considered more reliable a priori. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Journal of Aesthetic Education 39.3 (2005) 44-57 [Access article in PDF] Literary Biography: The Cinderella of Literary Studies Michael Benton There are no prizes for guessing who are the two ugly sisters: Criticism, the elder one, dominated literary studies for the first half of the twentieth century; theory, her younger sister, flounced to the fore in the second half. Meanwhile, 'Cinders,' who had been doing the (...) chores for centuries, has been magically transformed in recent times, decked out in new clothes by Richard Holmes, Claire Tomalin, Juliet Barker, Peter Ackroyd et al., and, as the millennium approached, celebrated and admired on all sides. At the start of the new century, literary biography remains in vogue. The bibliography that carries it forward is rolling, and there is no sign of it turning into a pumpkin. Why is Cinderella so popular?One obvious if superficial answer might be that literary biography is where literary people go who find the contemporary preoccupation with theory to be personally undernourishing and critically unenlightening; they would rather stay with the literary works themselves and with the lives, the minds, and the times that produced them. Yet it is not only literary biography that is thriving; life writing in general is the fastest-growing area of mainstream publishing, evidence for which can be seen in Waterstone's flagship store in London's Piccadilly, which devotes its prime ground-floor site to thousands of biographies. This commercial high profile is responding to an evident, if unfocused, need to look at other lives and understand them. Individual reasons for the popularity of biography range from prurient interest and hero worship to a, perhaps unrecognized, search for coherence and purpose in an age that is often disinclined either to accept institutional values or to respect traditional authority. The motives for this search usually include the desire for recognizable success, to which end the invention of a convincing identity is essential. Biographies offer models of how others live, face challenges, and cope with change; they are prime sites for studying ourselves. Curiously, this justification for biography as providing [End Page 44] a model for living was felt most strongly when this literary genre first emerged in the eighteenth century. The difference today is that the model has changed: Biography as a moral exemplum based upon Christian principles has been replaced in today's celebrity culture by the demand for models of success provided by public personalities. Nonetheless, whatever the range of satisfactions readers seek in biography, life writing offers, in one form or another, detailed pictures of widely different ways of living and amid these, perhaps, some clues to how an individual sense of identity might be shaped.Literary biographies (i.e., biographies of writers, not biographies with a particular literary quality) are a significant and, in some respects, a unique subgenre since they purport to offer access to the creative imagination. They have a long and distinguished history from Johnson and Boswell to the present day; they are sometimes written by other novelists (Elizabeth Gaskell on Charlotte Bronte, Peter Ackroyd on Dickens); and autobiographical writing may take the form of poetry (Wordsworth) or fiction (Joyce).1 Furthermore recent writing in this field has increasingly introduced elements of metabiography in books by Adam Sisman2 and Lucasta Miller.3 It is evident, therefore, that literary biography offers a rich and varied area of study that raises issues about the relationships among biography, history, fiction, and poetry that are fundamental to aesthetic education.Yet despite this promise, it has become a truism to declare that biography has failed to establish any theoretical foundations upon which to build. Backscheider quotes Ira Nadel's remark on the absence of "a sustained theoretical discussion of biography incorporating some of the more probing and original speculations about language, structure, and discourse that have dominated post-structuralist thought."4 She goes on to lament the poverty of criticism; the absence of a cultivated readership; the failure to engage even with the practical questions of selection, organization, or presentation; and indicates that readers of biography are too easily... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reading BiographyMichael Benton (bio)Biographer, Biography, and the ReaderBiography is a hybrid. It is history crossed with narrative. The biographer has to present the available facts of the life yet shape their arbitrariness, untidiness, and incompleteness into an engaging whole. The readerly appeal lies in the prospect both of gaining documentary information, scrupulously researched and plausibly interpreted, and of experiencing the aesthetic pleasure of reading a well-made work of (...) art with a continuous life story and a satisfying closure. "In the family of literature," one of its most respected practitioners asserts, "biography seems to be the product of a strange coupling between old-fashioned history and the traditional novel."1 The invitation of biography is thus a dualistic one; the aesthetic experience it offers stems from the twofoldness of its nature and from the stance that this imposes upon the reader. Literary biographies of poets and novelists offer a particularly fruitful area of study since their subjects have a special concern for aesthetic experience and the biographers' main interest lies in the relationship between the life and the works. Though much of what follows has a wider application, the focus of this article is on biographies of writers. By triangulating the roles of the biographer, the biographee within the biographical text, and the reader we can conceptualize the elements that make up the invitation of the genre.First, the biographer. Richard Holmes characterizes the process he experiences with two keywords: it is a "pursuit" and it is a "haunting." They are two sides of the same phenomenon. The pursuit is a "tracking of the physical trail of someone's path through the past, a following of footsteps," an effort "to write about the pursuit of that fleeting figure in such a way as to bring it alive in the present."2 The haunting occurs when this revivification succeeds and the biographee is brought imaginatively alive. Then the biographer turns from pursuer to pursued. While the subject does not take [End Page 77] him over, as it might in some Gothic fantasy, it does exercise the power of the past upon the present and haunt the biographer's imagination. Holmes goes on to explain the two main elements as "closely entwined strands":The first is the gathering of factual materials, the assembling in chronological order of a man's "journey" through the world—the actions, the words, the recorded thoughts, the places and faces through which he moved: the "life and letters." The second is the creation of a fictional or imaginary relationship between the biographer and his subject; not merely a "point of view" or an "interpretation," but a continuous living dialogue between the two... It is fictional, imaginary, because of course the subject cannot really, literally, talk back; but the biographer must come to act and think of his subject as if he can.3Not every biographer would necessarily subscribe to this particular description, but there is ample evidence in the recent spate of books about the genre4 that the biographer's capacity for imaginative empathy is continuously interacting with the verifiable historical data. The present operates upon the past in other ways, too. Earlier biographers who are more or less contemporary with their subjects (for example, Boswell, Forster, Mrs. Gaskell)5 stand in different relationships with them and the available data about them compared with present-day biographers who may inherit a whole bibliography of "lives" laid down in stratified layers on top of the life they are trying to recover. The modern reader, like the modern biographer, has to be a literary archaeologist. Dickens's "lives," for example, are constructed on a bedrock of his friend Forster's biography and on the novelist's own writings, neither of which subsequent biographers can afford to ignore. Later "lives" also have to be sifted through: our inherited Dickens is compounded from a series of accounts from, among a host of others, the Victorian memoirs of his daughter6 and his reading manager,7 via Edwardian enthusiasts8 and 1930s revelations about Dickens's private life,9 to those of modern academics and writers in our own time.10 In such cases, bringing the subject... (shrink)

In these compositions, the subjects that will both entertain and improve the mind, bid fair to be of the greatest public utility.From toddlers to teenagers, children are everywhere in Hogarth’s pictures. There are children of the drawing room and children of the streets; “little angels” shown putting on a play, “little devils” shown torturing animals; portraits of the sons and daughters of minor aristocrats and the upwardly mobile professional classes and gangs of youngsters gambling at cards on the pavements of (...) St. James’s Street. Biblical images may lend gravitas or satirical point to the messages of the pictures: for example, in the theme of abandonment that lies behind the painting of the infant Moses Brought... (shrink)

The conventional description of biography as a form of nonfiction narrative begs questions about the stories biographies tell, the facts that constitute their raw material, and the language in which they are cast. These questions are seen as central for students of the arts and humanities and are addressed as three interrelated issues as exemplified in literary biography. First, it is argued that biographies have a cellular structure that derives from the imposition of a master narrative over the subject’s life, (...) one that creates continuity and coherence from the heterogeneous accumulation of mininarratives found in the biographer’s sources. The factual status of these sources is shown to be complex due to the ambiguous nature of the subject’s literary works considered as data; to be unstable due to unavoidable features such as archival gaps, and the selectivity, speculation, and error that are inherent in the biographical process; and to be malleable because of the particular agenda that motivates every biography. Finally, the “literariness” of biographical language is shown to be fundamental in the rhetorical evocation of the subject. Art and artifice combine in a genre that provokes questions about the relationship between the life stories biographers construct and the narratives by which we make sense of life. (shrink)

Biography is an ancient literary genre. First of all—chronologically and logically it is a part of historiography. Whether we think of biography as more like history or more like fiction, what we want from it is a vivid sense of the person. The cover illustration of the fortieth anniversary edition of E. H. Carr’s What is History?1 is a close-up of an eye with fluffy white clouds against a blue iris and a dramatic black pupil in the center. Magritte called (...) this painting The False Mirror, an apt image for the untrustworthy nature of our perceptions of the world and, in its use here, for the uncertainties surrounding definitions of history in the past half century. Confusion has often accompanied.. (shrink)

Strangers to Nature brings together many of the leading scholars who are working to redefine and expand the discourse on animal ethics. This volume will engage both scholars and lay-people by revealing the breadth of theorizing about the human/non-human animal relationship that is currently taking place.

The debate between legal constitutionalists and critics of constitutional rights and judicial review is an old and lively one. While the protection of minorities is a pivotal aspect of this debate, the protection of disenfranchised minorities has received little attention. Policy-focused discussion—of the merits of the Human Rights Act in Britain for example—often cites protection of non-citizen migrants, but the philosophical debate does not. Non-citizen residents or ‘denizens’ therefore provide an interesting test case for the theory of rights as trumps (...) on ordinary representative politics. Are they the ultimate success story of the human rights framework? Or was Michael Walzer correct to describe government of denizens by citizens as a modern form of ‘tyranny’? This paper argues that neither liberal rights theorists nor democratic republicans provide a coherent response to the existence of denizens. Liberal rights theorists overstate the extent to which a politically powerless status can secure individual rights, while democratic republicans idealise the political process and wrongly assume that all those affected by laws are eligible for political participation. The paper outlines an alternative model for assessing the accountability of states to their non-citizen population, informed by the republican ideal of non-domination. It identifies gaps in state accountability to denizens–such as where there is inadequate diplomatic protection—and argues that these gaps are particularly troubling if their exit costs of leaving the state are high. (shrink)

The history of evolutionary thought / Michael Ruse -- The origin of life / Jeffrey L. Bada and Antonio Lazcano -- Paleontology and the history of life / Michael Benton -- Adaptation / Joseph Travis and David N. Reznick -- Molecular evolution / Francisco J. Ayala -- Evolution of the genome / Brian Charlesworth and Deborah Charlesworth -- The pattern and process of speciation / Margaret B. Ptacek and Shala J. Hankison -- Evolution and development / Gregory (...) A. Wray -- Social behavior and sociobiology / Daniel J. Rubenstein -- Human evolution / Henry M. McHenry -- Evolutionary biology of disease and Darwinian medicine / Michael F. Antolin -- Beyond the Darwinian paradigm : understanding biological forms / Brian Goodwin -- Philosophy of evolutionary thought / Kim Sterelny -- Evolution and society / Manfred D. Laubichler and Jane Maienschein -- Evolution and religion / David N. Livingstone -- American antievolutionism : retrospect and prospect / Eugenie C. Scott. (shrink)

Biologists study life in its various physical forms, while philosophers of biology seek answers to questions about the nature, purpose, and impact of this research. What permits us to distinguish between living and nonliving things even though both are made of the same minerals? Is the complex structure of organisms proof that a creative force is working its will in the physical universe, or are existing life-forms the random result of an evolutionary process working itself out over eons of time? (...) What moral and social questions arise regarding modern advances in biotechnology? What is more relevant to human nature: genetics or sociocultural influences? Is Darwinism the death-knell of God? These are just some of the vital questions addressed by a distinguished group of philosophers and scientists which includes: Aristotle, Francisco J. Ayala, , Michael Benton, Tom Bethell, Joe Cain, David Castle, Charles Darwin, Richard Dawkins, Michael Denton, A.G.N. Flew, Stephen Jay Gould, J.B.S. Haldane, John F. Haught, D. W. E. Hone, James W. Kirchner, James Lovelock, Jane Maienschein, Ernst Mayr, Gregory M. Mikkelson, Leslie Orgal, William Paley, the Prince of Wales, Christopher Pynes, Richard A. Richards, Mark Ridley, Holmes Rolston III, Michael Ruse, Lee Silver, Elliott Sober, Kim Sterelny, Derek Turner, and Edward O. Wilson. This second edition contains material on design without selection, testing macroevolutionary claims, recent biotechnological issues, key ecological concerns, the Gaia hypothesis, genetically modified foods, and the so-called intelligent design movement. (shrink)

What is it to know someone? Epistemologists rarely take up this question, though recent developments make such inquiry possible and desirable. This paper advances an account of how such interpersonal knowledge goes beyond mere propositional and qualitative knowledge about someone, giving a central place to second-personal treatment. It examines what such knowledge requires, and what makes it distinctive within epistemology as well as socially. It assesses its theoretic value for several issues in moral psychology, epistemic injustice, and philosophy of mind. (...) And it offers an account of the complex content in play if interpersonal knowledge is to be understood in terms of its mental states and their functions. (shrink)

What is the relationship between lying, belief, and knowledge? Prominent accounts of lying define it in terms of belief, namely telling someone something one believes to be false, often with the intent to deceive. This paper develops a novel account of lying by deriving evaluative dimensions of responsibility from the knowledge norm of assertion. Lies are best understood as special cases of vicious assertion; lying is the anti-paradigm of proper assertion. This enables an account of lying in terms of knowledge: (...) roughly, lying is telling someone something you know ain't so. (shrink)

This book examines a main theme in religious epistemology, namely, the possibility of knowledge of God. Most often philosophers consider the rationality or justification of propositional belief about God, particularly beliefs about the existence and nature of God; and they will assess the conditions under which, if there is a God, such propositional beliefs would be knowledge, particularly in light of counter-evidence or the availability of religious disagreement. This book surveys such familiar areas, then turns toward newer and less-developed terrain: (...) interpersonal epistemology, namely what it is to know another person. It then explores the prospects for understanding what it might take to know God relationally, the contours of which are significant for many theistic traditions. (shrink)

Recent decades have seen a fertile period of theorizing within mainstream epistemology which has had a dramatic impact on how epistemology is done. Investigations into contextualist and pragmatic dimensions of knowledge suggest radically new ways of meeting skeptical challenges and of understanding the relation between the epistemological and practical environment. New insights from social epistemology and formal epistemology about defeat, testimony, a priority, probability, and the nature of evidence all have a potentially revolutionary effect on how we understand our epistemological (...) place in the world. Religion is the place where such rethinking can potentially have its deepest impact and importance. Yet there has been surprisingly little infiltration of these new ideas into philosophy of religion and the epistemology of religious belief. -/- Knowledge, Belief, and God incorporates these myriad new developments in mainstream epistemology, and extends these developments to questions and arguments in religious epistemology. The investigations proposed in this volume offer substantial new life, breadth, and sophistication to issues in the philosophy of religion and analytic theology. They pose original questions and shed new light on long-standing issues in religious epistemology; and these developments will in turn generate contributions to epistemology itself, since religious belief provides a vital testing ground for recent epistemological ideas. (shrink)

Assertion is governed by an epistemic norm requiring knowledge. This idea has been hotly debated in recent years, garnering attention in epistemology, philosophy of language, and linguistics. This chapter presents and extends the main arguments in favor of the knowledge norm, from faulty conjunctions, several conversational patterns, judgments of permission, excuse, and blame, and from showing how. (Paired with a chapter by Peter J. Graham and Nikolaj J. L. L. Pedersen, "Knowledge is Not Our Norm of Assertion.").

Previous research has shown that emotionally-valenced words are given higher judgements of learning (JOLs) than are neutral words. The current study examined potential explanations for this emotional salience effect on JOLs. Experiment 1 replicated the basic emotionality/JOL effect. In Experiments 2A and 2B, we used pre-study JOLs and assessed memory beliefs qualitatively, finding that, on average, participants believed that positive and negative words were more memorable than neutral words. Experiment 3 utilised a lexical decision task, resulting in lower reaction times (...) (RTs) for positive words than for neutral words, but equivalent RTs for negative and neutral words, suggesting that processing fluency may partially account for higher JOLs for positive words, but not for negative words. Finally, we conducted a series of moderation analyses in Experiment 4 which assessed the relative contributions of fluency and beliefs to JOLs by measuring both factors in the same participants, showing that RTs made no significant contribution to JOLs for either positive or negative words. Our findings suggest that although positive words may be more fluently processed than neutral words, memory beliefs are the primary factor underlying higher JOLs for both positive and negative words. (shrink)

In this paper, I argue that AI literacy should be added to the list of primary goods developed by political philosopher John Rawls. Primary goods are the necessary resources all citizens need to exercise their two moral powers, namely their sense of justice and their sense of the good. These goods are advantageous for citizens since without them citizens will not be able to fully develop their moral powers. I claim the lack of AI literacy impacts citizens’ ability to exercise (...) their sense of justice and their sense of the good. Without citizens having the ability to understand how AI technology works – including being aware of the social and political implications and the limits and possibilities of this technology broadly speaking – this could impact their ability to participate in a free, equal and fair society and their ability to carry out their conception of the good. Thus this paper is a call for AI literacy to be regarded as a basic good in a liberal constitutional democracy in order for citizens to be able to exercise their freedom and equality. (shrink)

One of the predominant debates in AI Ethics is the worry and necessity to create fair, transparent and accountable algorithms that do not perpetuate current social inequities. I offer a critical analysis of Reuben Binns’s argument in which he suggests using public reason to address the potential bias of the outcomes of machine learning algorithms. In contrast to him, I argue that ultimately what is needed is not public reason per se, but an audit of the implicit moral assumptions of (...) societies within which algorithms are built and applied. Public justification is appealing since it offers us the possibility to align the decision-making outcomes of the algorithm with the core moral values of stakeholders within a constitutional democratic society. My concern is that the common moral principles that form the foundation of public reason are not necessarily neutral, as they still express specific moral ideals and normative standards even if there is moral agreement by society as a whole, or among different stakeholders within society. Appealing to such normative standards may thus still lead to algorithmic outcomes being biased as common moral values may very well still be discriminatory even though they are formed from a consensus, and even if public reason is applied as a kind of filter for potential algorithmic outcomes. Hence, I argue that these implicit moral norms within society that we take as a given in public reasoning, need to be audited from generation to generation in order to effectively mitigate potential algorithmic bias. (shrink)

This dissertation offers a critical discussion of the prioritisation of ‘the right’ in John Rawls’s theory of justice. Rawls’s theory of justice – ‘justice as fairness’ – is arguably one of the best illustrations of the prioritisation of ‘the right’ in current political literature. However, his theory has been criticised by a diversity of thinkers for its implied structural relation between ‘the right’ and ‘the good’. Some theorists argue that conceptually ‘the good’ can never be derived from ‘the right’; others (...) argue that, even if it were possible, the social implications of such a conceptualisation would devastating as it would result in a so-called “community of strangers” (Rorty 1988, 273). In this dissertation, I argue that be on the one hand, theories that prioritise ‘the right’– such as ‘justice as fairness’ – enable the attractive possibility of the multiple coexistence of ‘comprehensive goods’. This is attractive as it upholds the liberating ethos: ‘I have the freedom to determine my own ends’. This possibility is attributed to the fact of neutrality, which characterises the priority of ‘the right’. The claim of neutrality is embedded in the ideal that political principles can be developed prior to and independently of any content of ‘the good’. This is then supposed to justify the claim that political principles are non-reliant on comprehensive moral ideals. In this way, the prioritisation of ‘the right’, as evident in ‘justice as fairness’, supposedly enables citizens to construct impartial universal principles that govern their society. Yet, on the other hand, I question the degree of neutrality present in ‘justice as fairness’. I argue that ‘justice as fairness’, although its justification is independent of a singular moral truth, is not neutral concerning ‘the good’. In fact, the moral values encapsulated in the priority of ‘the right’, I argue, set the conditions of justification of all doctrines of ‘the good’ because any idea of ‘the good’ that embodies contradictory values to those encapsulated in the priority of ‘the right’ would necessarily be excluded from a Rawlsian society. Therefore, I argue that Rawls’s theory of justice cannot be said to take into account “a diversity of conflicting and irreconcilable yet reasonable comprehensive doctrines” (Rawls 2001, 34); as moral values are already implied in the prioritising of ‘the right’. In light of how Rawls’s theory of justice is simultaneously neutral and prescriptive regarding ‘the good’, I suggest a re-problematisation of the debate on the relationship between ‘the right’ and ‘the good’. The literature on theories that prioritise ‘the right’ or ‘the good’ seems to imply such theories either embody the one or the other methodological approach. I argue that this debate has been presented as a false dichotomy and, as such, the debate itself seems to be exhausted, because it creates a kind of natural impasse. Therefore, I suggest recasting the debate in terms of representing ‘the right’ and ‘the good’ as two methodological positions on a continuum, that are at the same time both more or less gradually similar and divergent from one another. The purpose of this continuum is to demonstrate that notions such as neutrality, objectivity and comprehensiveness are not clear-cut. (shrink)

With a focus on end-of-life discussion in aging and chronically ill populations, this book offers insight into the skill of communicating in complex and emotionally charged discussions. This text is written for all clinicians and professionals in the fields of healthcare and public health who are faced with questions of ethical deliberation when a patient's illness turns from chronic to terminal. This skill is required to manage care well in an age of advanced technology, and numerous autonomous choices. With a (...) palliative care and ethics focus, the manuscript provides case studies illustrating issues which occur in the acuity and chronicity of end of life. Clear tools for clinicians, such as scripting and "the advance care planning video library" are included. The book focuses on the unique concept of outpatient ethics, including readmission prevention and shortened length of stay through good communication for clinicians who will be required to conduct this discussion with patients. The ethical undertone in this text provides a perfect opening for application in healthcare ethics classes, both in fields of public health and healthcare. Medical scholars and physicians, nurse practitioners and physician's assistants, as well as social workers, both in practice and training, will benefit from this text. (shrink)

A common criticism of punctuated equilibria as an evolutionary theory is that it erects a straw man by characterizing the modern synthesis as being devoid of mechanisms that bring about rapid speciation and abrupt changes in morphology. Thompson supports this view and argues that the modern synthesis does not entail gradualism, all-pervasive adaptationism, or extrapolationism and that punctuationists have mischaracterized the theory on all these points; properly understood the synthetic theory is hierarchical and able to explain phenomena at all levels (...) of the hierarchy, thus rendering macroevolutionary theories, such as punctuated equilibria, unnecessary. I argue in this paper that Thompson's approach is overly dependent upon rational reconstruction in the style of the logical empiricists, and as such ignores important sociological and historical factors that when taken into account justify punctuational criticism of the synthetic theory. (shrink)

The architects of punctuated equilibrium and species selection as well as more recent workers (Vrba) have narrowed the original formulation of species selection and made it dependent upon so-called emergent characters. One criticism of this narrow version is the dearth of emergent characters with a consequent diminution in the robustness of species selection as an important evolutionary process. We argue that monomorphic species characters may at times be the focus of selection and that under these circumstances selection at the organism (...) level is by-passed due to the absence of critical variance. Selection therefore shifts to the species level where variability reemerges in a clade. The absence of critical variance among organisms prevents effect macroevolution from operating. If species-wide properties are important in macroevolutionary processes, as we contend, systematists should pay more attention to their elucidation. (shrink)

I claim that the revisions John Rawls made to his theory of justice—as seen in his political conception of justice as fairness in the revised edition of Political Liberalism and Justice as Fairness: A Restatement—result in him being able to secure justice for all persons even in their private lives. Thus, I defend his theory against common communitarian and feminist criticisms, viz the lack of moral community and inability to secure justice for individuals in the private domain. I demonstrate that (...) justice is secured from the categorical requirement that all associational life and moral doctrines must adhere to the constraints of justice, by (what Rawls terms) the indirect application of the first principle of justice. The implications of and necessity for this indirect application are precisely what I interrogate in this thesis. I suggest that this indirect application requires unconditional acknowledgement and internalisation of the values of liberty and equality (political values of the first principle) into all aspects of civil society. I claim that Rawls realised this necessity for the congruence between the moral powers of persons, the spheres of society, and the right and the good and, as such, developed a complementary relation between these three features. Coherence between these three aspects is essential; without coherence, citizens would have a split moral personality, the public and the non-public spheres would be in conflict, and the political values and the moral doctrines of individuals would undermine one another. The significance of this strict coherence is that it can ensure the adequate development of individuals’ capacity for citizenship during the three stages of moral development. This results in citizens being able to form bonds of civic friendship necessary for justice as reciprocity to be realised. Thus, in this thesis, I position my argument against theorists such as Nancy Rosenblum, who argue for a more relaxed congruence between political institutions and civil society, as according to her illiberal forms of associational life can help form the necessary bonds of love and care needed for mutual cooperation in a liberal society. In opposition to this, I claim that strict congruence is necessary; without it, a stable liberal society is not possible as the citizens would not be able to able to respect one another on free, equal, and mutually beneficial terms. I rely on Hochschild’s sociological evidence to demonstrate that civic friendship has not been developed, due to a lack of reciprocity, impacting the negative development of one’s sense of justice. I then illustrate how this lack of reciprocity is amplified by digital and artificial intelligence (AI) technologies. The significance of this thesis is that I claim, firstly, Rawls’s last revisions and works before his death demonstrate that justice is a collective non-comprehensive good that results by constraining individuals’ associational life and their partial comprehensive doctrines to Rawlsian demands of justice. Thus, Rawls takes seriously the feminist and communitarian critiques he received. Secondly, I claim that this interpretation of Rawls’s theory of justice cannot be conceptualised in terms of a binary presentation of the priority of the right versus the good debate and, instead, I argue for a reconceptualisation of the priority of the right versus the good as ranges on a continuum of structural relations between the right and the good. (shrink)

This book defends a form of ethical intuitionism, according to which (i) there are objective moral truths; (ii) we know some of these truths through a kind of immediate, intellectual awareness, or "intuition"; and (iii) our knowledge of moral truths gives us reasons for action independent of our desires. The author rebuts all the major objections to this theory and shows that the alternative theories about the nature of ethics all face grave difficulties.