In this paper I present a limitation to what may be called strictly-interventionistic causal-model semantic theories for subjunctive conditionals. And I offer a line of response to Briggs’ counterexample to Modus Ponens—given within a strictly-interventionistic framework—for the subjunctive conditional. The paper also contains some discussion of backtracking counterfactuals and backtracking interpretations. The limitation inherent to strict interventionism is brought out via a class of counterexamples. A causal-model semantics is strictly interventionistic just in case the procedure it gives for evaluating a (...) subjunctive conditional requires making the values of the variables implicated in the antecedent independent from the values of the parents of these antecedent variables. Most causal-model semantic theories that have gained attention are strictly interventionistic. (shrink)

A counterlegal is a counterfactual conditional containing an antecedent that is inconsistent with some set of laws. A backtracker is a counterfactual that tells us how things would be at a time earlier than that of its antecedent, were the antecedent to obtain. Typically, theories that evaluate counterlegals appropriately don’t evaluate backtrackers properly, and vice versa. Two cases in point: Lewis’ ordering semantics handles counterlegals well but not backtrackers. Hiddleston’s :632–657, 2005) causal-model semantics nicely handles backtrackers but not counterlegals. Taking (...) Hiddleston’s account as a starting point, I offer steps toward a theory capable of handling both counterlegals and backtrackers. The core contribution of this paper is a means for evaluating counterlegals relative to minimally-illegal models. (shrink)

Some of Quine’s critics charge that he arrives at a behavioristic account of linguistic meaning by starting from inappropriately behavioristic assumptions (Kripke 1982, 14; Searle 1987, 123). Quine has even written that this account of linguistic meaning is a consequence of his behaviorism (Quine 1992, 37). I take it that the above charges amount to the assertion that Quine assumes the denial of one or more of the following claims: (1) Language-users associate mental ideas with their linguistic expressions. (2) A (...) language-user can have a private theory of linguistic meaning which guides his or her use of language. (3) Language learning relies on innate mechanisms. Call an antecedent denial of one or more of these claims illicit behaviorism. In this paper I show that Quine is prepared to grant, if only for the sake of argument, all three of the above claims. I argue that his claim that there is nothing in linguistic meaning beyond what is to be gleaned from overt behavior in observable circumstances is unscathed by these allowances (Quine 1992, 38). And I show that the behaviorism which Quine does assume should be viewed as a largely uncontroversial aspect of his evidential empiricism. I conclude that if one sets out to dismiss Quine’s arguments for internal-meaning skepticism, this dismissal should not be motivated by the charge that his conclusions rely on the illicitly behavioristic assumptions that some have suggested that they do. (shrink)

Dagfinn Føllesdal: “Developments in Quine's Behaviorism”: Quine insisted throughout his life that he was a behaviorist. He began briefly as an “ontological behaviorist,” that is, he held that there is nothing mental. However, very early he switched to evidential behaviorism: the view that behavior provides the only evidence we have for the mental and its properties. Ultimately, Quine's behaviorism springs from his empiricism. All knowledge about the world around us and about other people reaches us through our senses: “Behaviorism, as (...) far as I'm concerned, is only an intersubjective empiricism.” Quine applied this to language and communication. His acute problem awareness led him from the discussion of stimuli in Word and Object to a much more refined behaviorism in his latest works, in which full‐fledged perception and the individuation of the world into objects play a crucial role. (shrink)

A provocative view has it that word meanings are underdetermined and dynamic, frustrating traditional approaches to theorizing about meaning. Peter Ludlow’s Living Words provides some of the philosophical reasons and motivations for accepting one such view, develops some of its details, and explores some of its ramifications. We critically examine some of the arguments in Living Words, paying particular attention to some of Ludlow’s views about the meanings of predicates, preservation of bivalence and the T-schema, and methods of modulating meaning.

As the premier early modern advocate of an Epicurean alternative to the prevailing neo-Scholastic framework of Aristotelianism, Pierre Gassendi promoted not only ancient but also innovative reasoning on behalf of atomism, probabilism, empiricism, psychological hedonism, social contractarianism, and a range of other stances associated with the philosophy of the Garden. Much commentary has focused on the extent to which Gassendi ‘baptizes’ Epicurean thought. Beyond this aspect of his Epicureanism are questions as to whether, and how, Gassendi is true to core (...) Epicurean thinking, and what he preserves and promotes as valuable to philosophical and natural investigations of his time. Indeed, much subsequent modern philosophy builds on or reacts to an Epicurean legacy bequeathed by Gassendi, comprising his adjustments to, constraints on, or corrections of, the canonical views. Yet, for all his amendments, he retains as a primary philosophical motivation the Epicurean goal of striving for ataraxia. In this, he signals his firm commitment to philosophy in the tradition of the canonical Epicurean views. And, as with Epicurus’ own notion, his account of the centrality of attaining tranquility directs us to a better understanding of our nature and that of the world around us; amenable, in Gassendi’s framework, to Christian thought and contemporary natural philosophical investigations. (shrink)

This volume consists of selected essays on the art and aesthetics of the avantgarde, contemporary art, and postsocialist culture by the internationally renowned Slovenian philosopher and art theorist Aleš Erjavec.

The volume's essays, divided into four main topical groups question critically the key problem of context, connecting it to the problem of time.

Can the Hippocratic and Judeo-Christian traditions be synthesized with contemporary thought about practical reason, virtue and community to provide real-life answers to the dilemmas of healthcare today? Bishop Anthony Fisher discusses conscience, relationships and law in relation to the modern-day controversies surrounding stem cell research, abortion, transplants, artificial feeding and euthanasia, using case studies to offer insight and illumination. What emerges is a reason-based bioethics for the twenty-first century; a bioethics that treats faith and reason with equal seriousness, that (...) shows the relevance of ancient wisdom to the complexities of modern healthcare scenarios and that offers new suggestions for social policy and regulation. Philosophical argument is complemented by Catholic theology and analysis of social and biomedical trends, to make this an auspicious example of a new generation of Catholic bioethical writing which has relevance for people of all faiths and none. (shrink)

Ahighly successful guide to encourage classroomdiscussion fordeveloping children's thinking, learning and literacy skills containsmaterial on the latest trends in teaching thinking, including dialogic teaching, creativity and personalized learning. This sourcebook of ideas is essential reading for anyone seeking to develop children's minds, to build their self-esteem or to improve the quality of teaching and learning in schools.

In this paper, we review recent neuroimaging investigations of disorders of consciousness and different disciplines' understanding of consciousness itself. We consider potential tests of consciousness, their legal significance, and how they map onto broader themes in U.S. statutory law pertaining to advance directives and surrogate decision-making. In the process, we outline a taxonomy of themes to illustrate and clarify the variance in state-law definitions of consciousness. Finally, we discuss broader scientific, ethical, and legal issues associated with the advent of neuroimaging (...) for disorders of consciousness and conclude with policy recommendations that could help to mitigate confusion in this realm. (shrink)

This is a book about the aesthetics of wonder, about wonder as it figures in our relation to the visual world and to rare or new experiences.

This paper provides an account of truth in interactive fiction. Interactive fiction allows the audience to make choices, resulting in many different possible fictions within each interactive fiction, unlike in literary fiction where there is just one. Adequately capturing this feature of interactive fiction requires us to address familiar issues regarding impossible fiction and the nature of time in fiction. Truth in interactive fiction thus requires a complex account to capture its multitude of fictions. It is argued that a full (...) account of truth in interactive fiction requires distinguishing two works for each interactive fiction, which contain distinct fictional truths. The actual work encompasses what is in fact represented as fictional (hence mistakes can be fictionally true in this work), whilst in the implied work, truth in fiction is governed by authorial intention, hence mistakes are not fictionally true. This dual account best captures our aesthetic evaluation of interactive fictions, for which we often need to distinguish how the work actually is from how it was intended to be. (shrink)

This new and expanded edition of The Logic of Real Arguments explains a distinctive method for analysing and evaluating arguments. It discusses many examples, ranging from newspaper articles to extracts from classic texts, and from easy passages to much more difficult ones. It shows students how to use the question 'What argument or evidence would justify me in believing P?', and also how to deal with suppositional arguments beginning with the phrase 'Suppose that X were the case.' It aims to (...) help students to think critically about the kind of sustained, theoretical arguments which they commonly encounter in the course of their studies, including arguments about the natural world, about society, about policy, and about philosophy. It will be valuable for students and their teachers in a wide range of disciplines including philosophy, law and the social sciences. (shrink)

Background: Recent research demonstrates that people sometimes make different medical decisions for others than they would make for themselves. This finding is particularly relevant to end-of-life decisions, which are often made by surrogates and require a trade-off between prolonging life and maintaining quality of life. We examine the impact of decision role, patient age, decision maker age and multiple individual differences on these treatment decisions. Methods: Participants read a scenario about a terminally ill cancer patient faced with a choice between (...) an aggressive chemotherapy regimen that will extend life by two years and palliative treatments to control discomfort for one remaining month. Participants were randomly assigned to one of three decision roles (patient, physician, or an abstract other) and the scenario randomly varied whether the patient was described as 25 or 65-years old. Results: When deciding for a 65-year old patient, approximately 60% of participants selected aggressive chemotherapy regardless of decision role. When deciding for a 25-year old patient, however, participants were more likely to select chemotherapy for a patient (physician role) or another person (abstract other) than for themselves (70%, 67%, and 59%, respectively). In addition, confidence that powerful others (eg, physicians) control one’s health, as well as respondents’ age and race, consistently predicted treatment choices. Conclusions: Patient age appears to influence medical decisions made for others but not those that we make for ourselves. These findings may help to explain the discord that often occurs when younger cancer patients refuse life-extending treatments. (shrink)

Hermeneutic theory and the study of Jewish theology : toward a new model of Jewish theological language -- Jewish theology as a religious and doxastic practice -- Forms of theological language in Mekhilta of Rabbi Ishmael -- Forms of theological language in Franz Rosenzweig's The star of redemption.

This essay discusses Walter Benjamin's development of 'dream' as a model for understanding 19th- and 20th-century urban culture. Following Bergson and surrealist poetics, Benjamin used 'dream' in the 1920s as an heuristic analogy for investigating child hood memories, kitsch art and literature; during the early 1930s, he also developed it into an historiographic concept for studying 19th- century Parisian culture. Benjamin's interpretative use of the dream cuts across Ricoeur's distinction between the hermeneutics of 'recol lection' and the hermeneutics of 'suspicion'. (...) The political dream analyst seeks to discharge the 'fatal powers' of the ideological dream, while at the same time fostering the experience of waking in which dream elements may recollectively be grasped. Benjamin extends this dialectic of dreaming, interpreting and waking to the relation between historical epochs and the tasks of the materialist historian. Puzzling out the recent past's dreamlike rebuses may serve in the task of a present historical awakening. Key Words: Walter Benjamin • city • dream • hermeneutics • surrealism. (shrink)

The concept of retro-avant-garde was first advanced by artists working in the late socialist and post-socialist contexts of Eastern Europe, Central Europe, and the territories of the ex-Yugoslavia. In general, its semantic field has been defined by a range of post-modern and mostly post-socialist art practices that draw formal, philosophical, and social inspiration from the politicized, powerfully utopian avant-gardes of the early decades of the twentieth-century, especially in the USSR and East-Central Europe. However, its paradoxical reference forward and backward in (...) time highlights the temporal dimensions of period concepts such as modernity, postmodernity, and avant-garde in ways that make retro-avant-garde worthy of theoretical reflection. I explore the nature of period concepts, which serve not only as historical metrics, but also as designations of basic characteristics of historicity, the configuration of the dimensions of past, present, and future in a given historical context and the limits and possibilities of historical experience and representation. I go on to explore the applicability to historiography of Gilles Deleuze's distinction, developed in his cinema theory, between "movement images" and "time images." In the case of historical thought, the distinction lies in whether the representation of time is thought to be a function of historical change or, on the contrary, whether the representation of historical change is qualified by the mode of time. I conclude by suggesting that if the avant-garde has primarily been conceptualized under the figure of "movement," retro-avant-garde reveals the degree to which classical avantgardism was dependent on an image of time: time itself as material to be artistically crafted and shaped into an historical experience appropriate to the modern age. (shrink)

Instalada na Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul (UFRGS) logo após o golpe civil-militar 1964, a Comissão Especial de Investigação Sumária (Ceis) teve como objetivo investigar ações consideradas subversivas, envolvendo professores, funcionários e estudantes. A presente pesquisa buscou saber como tal acontecimento é hoje relembrado por alguns estudantes da época, diretamente envolvidos naquele contexto. Para a busca de dados, optou-se pela História Oral, coletando narrativas de cinco sujeitos, além de pesquisa documental: atas, fichas de informações, ofícios e matérias no (...) jornal Correio do Povo. Para fundamentar a análise, foram utilizados referenciais advindos de Alistair Thompson, entre outros. Além de abordar situações da repressão instalada na universidade, o texto também apresenta alguns desdobramentos acerca do processo de pesquisa que adota a memória como fonte a ser considerada no processo analítico. (shrink)

Although underappreciated in his own day, Catholic convert John Henry Newman was remarkably prophetic about the challenges that lay ahead for the Catholic faith. In his 1873 sermon titled, ‘The Infidelity of the Future’, Newman warned of a time when the Church would face not only the cold indifference of agnosticism but also the targeted hostility of those opposed to both God and religion. Yet Newman was not without hope or wisdom for the future Church. This essay examines Newman's insistence (...) upon the need to cultivate an ‘ecclesiastical spirit’ and an ‘intelligent faith’. It specifically explores how Catholic institutions of higher education can respond to Newman's call and assist in bringing about a renewal in the evangelical mission of the Church, providing a much-needed alternative to the wisdom of the world. (shrink)

Introduction: Major terms, their classification, and their relation to the book's objective -- The problem of analogous forms -- Natural logic, categories, and the individual -- Shift to individual categories, dynamics, and a psychological look at identity form versus function -- What is the difference between the logic governing a figure of speech and the logic that is immature or unconscious? -- What are the role and function of the self vis-à-vis consciousness? -- Development in the logic from immature to (...) mature modes -- Pathological and defensive logical forms -- The "I," identity, and the part-whole resolutions -- The "I," entropy, and the trope. (shrink)

Objective: To audit doctors’ knowledge of informed consent.Design: 10 consent scenarios with “true”, “false”, or “don’t know” answers were completed by doctors who care for children at a large district general hospital. These questions tested clinicians’ knowledge of who could give consent in different clinical situations.Setting: Royal United Hospital, Bath, UK.Results: 51 doctors participated . Paediatricians scored higher than other clinicians . Only 36% of paediatricians and 8% of other clinicians realised that the biological father of a child born before (...) 1 December 2003 needed a court order or a parental responsibility agreement to acquire parental responsibility, and thus be able to consent on behalf of his child, if he was not married to the child’s mother. Non-paediatric clinicians were unsure or incorrect when tested on situations where people with parental responsibility do not agree, or where young people , who are Fraser competent do not want to consult their parents. Most clinicians did not know that the parents of a 20-year-old man with severe learning difficulties are unable to consent to surgery on his behalf, and many non-paediatricians were unclear on who could give consent when a child lived with foster parents.Conclusion: Clinicians who obtain consent for the treatment of children need to increase their knowledge on who is able to give informed consent to ensure best practice. (shrink)

Do moral facts exist? What would they be like if they did? What does it mean to say that a moral claim is true? What is the link between moral judgement and motivation? Can we know whether something is right and wrong? And is morality a fiction? " Metaethics : An Introduction" presents a very clear and engaging survey of the key concepts and positions in what has become one of the most exciting and influential fields of philosophy. Free from (...) technicality and jargon, this book covers the main ideas that have shaped metaethics from the work of G. E. Moore to the latest thinking. Written specifically for beginning students, this book assumes no prior philosophical knowledge. This book highlights ways to avoid common errors, offers hints and tips on learning the subject, includes a glossary of core terms, and provides guidance for further study. (shrink)

This third edition offers increased coverage of sustainability and more chances for illustration and discussion of ethics in the messy day to day practicalities ...

We examined whether midazolam impairs short-term/working memory processes. We hypothesize that prior dissociations in midazolam’s effects on short-term/working memory tasks and episodic memory tasks arise because midazolam has a larger effect on episodic memory processes than on short-term/working memory processes. To examine these issues, .03 mg/kg of participant’s bodyweight of midazolam was administered in a double-blind placebo-controlled within-participant design. Performance on the digit span and category generation/recall tasks was examined. The results of Experiment 1 demonstrated that: midazolam impaired performance on (...) the digit span task; midazolam did not impair performance on the category generation task; midazolam impaired performance on the category recall task; and midazolam’s effect on category recall was four times as large as its effect on digit span. The results of Experiment 2 demonstrated that midazolam did not impair digit span performance when the digit span task was administered at a later time. These results suggest that midazolam can impair short-term/working memory processes, but these effects are substantially smaller than midazolam’s effect on episodic memory processes. Moreover, they demonstrate that conscious awareness of materials during study is not sufficient to produce episodic memory. (shrink)

Mark Fisher - Notes and Fragments - Journal of the History of Philosophy 45:3 Journal of the History of Philosophy 45.3 502-503 Muse Search Journals This Journal Contents Reviewed by Mark Fisher Pennsylvania State University Immanuel Kant. Notes and Fragments. Edited by Paul Guyer. Translated by Chris Bowman, Paul Guyer, and Frederick Rauscher. The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Immanuel Kant. Cambridge-New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005. Pp. xxx + 663. Cloth, $140.00. The latest volume in the (...) Cambridge Edition of the works of Immanuel Kant contains the first extensive set of translated passages from Kant's handschriftliche Nachlaß, i.e., the hand-written notes that Kant made on loose sheets of paper, in margins, and on the blank pages that were interleaved into.. (shrink)

in press, Psychonomic Bulletin & Review.

BackgroundJunior medical doctors have a key role in discussions and decisions about treatment and end-of-life care for people with dementia in hospital. Little is known about junior doctors’ decision-making processes when treating people with dementia who have advance care directives, or the factors that influence their decisions. To describe among junior doctors in relation to two hypothetical vignettes involving patients with dementia: their legal compliance and decision-making process related to treatment decisions; the factors influencing their clinical decision-making; and the factors (...) associated with accurate responses to one hypothetical vignette. MethodA cross-sectional survey of junior doctors, including trainees, interns, registrars and residents, on clinical rotation in five public hospitals located in one Australian state. The anonymous, investigator-developed survey was conducted between August 2018 and June 2019. Two hypothetical vignettes describing patients with dementia presenting to hospital with an ACD and either: bacterial pneumonia; or suspected stroke were presented in the survey. Participants were asked to indicate whether they would commence treatment, given the ACD instructions described in each vignette.ResultsOverall, 116 junior doctors responded. In Vignette 1, 58% of respondents selected the legally compliant option. Participants who chose the legally compliant option perceived ‘following patient wishes’ and ‘legal requirements to follow ACDs’ as equally important reasons for complying with the ACD. The most common reason for not selecting the legally compliant option in Vignette 1 was the ‘ACD is relevant in my decision-making process, but other factors are more relevant’. In Vignette 2, 72% of respondents indicated they would commence treatment and 18% selected they would not commence treatment.. Similar reasons influenced participant decision-making in Vignette 2, a less legally certain scenario.ConclusionsThere are critical gaps in junior doctors’ compliance with the law as it relates to the implementation of ACDs. Despite there being differences in relation to the legal answer and its certainty, clinical and ethical factors guided decision-making over and above the law in both vignettes. More education and training to guide junior doctors’ clinical decision-making and ensure compliance with the law is required. (shrink)