Online research in philosophy

Two decades of research on euthanasia in the Netherlands have resulted into clear insights in the frequency and characteristics of euthanasia and other medical end-of-life decisions in the Netherlands. These empirical studies have contributed to the quality of the public debate, and to the regulating and public control of euthanasia and physician-assisted suicide. No slippery slope seems to have occurred. Physicians seem to adhere to the criteria for due care in the large majority of cases. Further, it has been shown (...) that the majority of physicians think that the euthanasia Act has improved their legal certainty and contributes to the carefulness of life-terminating acts. In 2005, eighty percent of the euthanasia cases were reported to the review committees. Thus, the transparency envisaged by the Act still does not extend to all cases. Unreported cases almost all involve the use of opioids, and are not considered to be euthanasia by physicians. More education and debate is needed to disentangle in these situations which acts should be regarded as euthanasia and which should not. Medical end-of-life decision-making is a crucial part of end-of-life care. It should therefore be given continuous attention in health care policy and medical training. Systematic periodic research is crucial for enhancing our understanding of end-of-life care in modern medicine, in which the pursuit of a good quality of dying is nowadays widely recognized as an important goal, in addition to the traditional goals such as curing diseases and prolonging life. (shrink)

This project continues our interdisciplinary research into computational and cognitive aspects of narrative comprehension. Our ultimate goal is the development of a computational theory of how humans understand narrative texts. The theory will be informed by joint research from the viewpoints of linguistics, cognitive psychology, the study of language acquisition, literary theory, geography, philosophy, and artificial intelligence. The linguists, literary theorists, and geographers in our group are developing theories of narrative language and spatial understanding that are being tested by the (...) cognitive psychologists and language researchers in our group, and a computational model of a reader of narrative text is being developed by the AI researchers, based in part on these theories and results and in part on research on knowledge representation and reasoning. This proposal describes the knowledge-representation and natural-language-processing issues involved in the computational implementation of the theory; discusses a contrast between communicative and narrative uses of language and of the relation of the narrative text to the story world it describes; investigates linguistic, literary, and hermeneutic dimensions of our research; presents a computational investigation of subjective sentences and reference in narrative; studies children’s acquisition of the ability to take third-person perspective in their own storytelling; describes the psychological validation of various linguistic devices; and examines how readers develop an understanding of the geographical space of a story. This report is a longer version of a project description submitted to NSF. This document, produced in May 2007, is a L ATEX version of Technical Report 89-07 (Buffalo: SUNY Buffalo Department of Computer Science, August 1989), with slightly.. (shrink)

This volume collects the notable published book reviews of Martha C. Nussbaum, a philosopher and high profile public intellectual who comments often on issues in philosophy, politics, gender equality, economics, and the law. Many of her engagements have been through the medium of the book review, which she has published prolifically in academic journals and in high profile venues like The New Republic and The New York Times for over 20 years. This volume collects 25 of what she considers to (...) be her key reviews. The reviews date from 1986 and range to the present, and engage with authors like Roger Scruton, Allan Bloom, Charles Taylor, Judith Butler, Richard Posner, Catherine MacKinnon, and other prominent intellectuals of our time. Throughout, her views defy ideological predictability, heralding interesting work from unlikely sources, deftly critiquing where it is deserved, and generally providing a compelling picture of how intellectuals might engage with broad social concerns. Nussbaum will provide a new introduction that explains her selection, and provides her view of the role of public intellectuals. (shrink)

Machine generated contents note: Part I. Introduction: 1. Personal epistemology in the classroom: a welcome and guide for the reader Florian C. Feucht and Lisa D. Bendixen; Part II. Frameworks and Conceptual Issues: 2. Manifestations of an epistemological belief system in pre-k to 12 classrooms Marlene Schommer-Aikins, Mary Bird, and Linda Bakken; 3. Epistemic climates in elementary classrooms Florian C. Feucht; 4. The integrative model of personal epistemology development: theoretical underpinnings and implications for education Deanna C. Rule and Lisa D. (...) Bendixen; 5. An epistemic framework for scientific reasoning in informal contexts Fang-Ying Yang and Chin-Chung Tsai; Appendices; 6. Who knows what and who can we believe? Epistemological beliefs are beliefs about knowledge (mostly) to be attained from others Rainer Bromme, Dorothe Kienhues, and Torsten Porsch; Part III. Students' Personal Epistemology, its Development, and Relation to Learning: 7. Stalking young persons' changing beliefs about belief Michael J. Chandler and Travis Proulx; 8. Epistemological development in very young knowers Leah K. Wildenger, Barbara K. Hofer, and Jean E. Burr; 9. Beliefs about knowledge and revision of knowledge: on the importance of epistemic beliefs for intentional conceptual change in elementary and middle school students Lucia Mason; 10. The reflexive relation between students' mathematics-related beliefs and the mathematics classroom culture Erik De Corte, Peter Op 't Eynde, Fien Depaepe, and Lieven Verschaffel; 11. Examining the influence of epistemic beliefs and goal orientations on the academic performance of adolescent students enrolled in high-poverty, high-minority schools P. Karen Murphy, Michelle M. Buehl, Jill A. Zeruth, Maeghan N. Edwards, Joyce F. Long, and Shinichi Monoi; 12. Using cognitive interviewing to explore elementary and secondary school students' epistemic and ontological cognition Jeffrey A. Greene, Judith Torney-Purta, Roger Azevedo, and Jane Robertson; Part IV. Teachers' Personal Epistemology and its Impact on Classroom Teaching: 13. Epistemological resources and framing: a cognitive framework for helping teachers interpret and respond to their students' epistemologies Andrew Elby and David Hammer; 14. The effects of teachers' beliefs on elementary students' beliefs, motivation, and achievement in mathematics Krista R. Muis and Michael J. Foy; Appendices; 15. Teachers' articulation of beliefs about teaching knowledge: conceptualizing a belief framework Helenrose Fives and Michelle M. Buehl; Appendices; 16. Beyond epistemology: assessing teachers' epistemological and ontological world views Lori Olafson and Gregory Schraw; Part V. Conclusion: 17. Personal epistemology in the classroom: what does research and theory tell us and where do we need to go next? Lisa D. Bendixen and Florian C. Feucht. (shrink)

A Hegelian reading of good and bad luck -- In Shakespearean drama (phen. of spirit, King Lear, Othello, Hamlet, a Midsummer night's dream) -- Tearing the fabric: Hegel's Antigone, Shakespeare's Coriolanus, and kinship-state conflict (phen. of spirit c. 6, Judith Butler's Antigone, Coriolanus) -- Aufhebung and anti-aufhebung: geist and ghosts in Hamlet (phen. of spirit, Hamlet) -- The problem of genius in King Lear: Hegel on the feeling soul and the tragedy of wonder (anthropology and psychology in the encyclopaedia, (...) Philosophy of mind, King Lear) -- Richard II's mirror and the alienation of the Universal Will (of the I that is a We) (Richard II, phen. of spirit c. 5) -- Falstaff and the politics of wit: negative infinite judgment in a culture of alienation (Henry IV parts I & II, phen. of spirit c. 6, philosophy of right) -- Henry V's unchangeableness: his rejection of wit and his posture of virtue reinterpreted in the light of Hegel's theory of virtue (philosophy of right, Henry V) -- Hegel's theory of crime and evil: (re)tracing the rights of the sovereign self (aesthetics, phen. of spirit, phil. of right, Richard II through to Henry V) -- Richard III, Hamlet, Macbeth and Henry V: conscience, hypocrisy, self-deceit and the tragedy of ethical life (phil. of right, Richard III, Hamlet, Macbeth, Henry V) -- Negation of the negative infinite judgment versus sublation of it: punishment vs. pardon (phil. of right, phen. of spirit c. 6 and Henry VIII) -- Universal wit : the absolute theater of identity (phen. of spirit c. 6 and 8, Pericles, the Tempest) -- Absolute infections and their cure (phen. of spirit c. 6, the Winter's tale). (shrink)

Metaethics is a perennially popular subject, but one that can be challenging to study and teach. As it consists in an array of questions about ethics, it is really a mix of (at least) applied metaphysics, epistemology, philosophy of language, and mind. The seminal texts therefore arise out of, and often assume competence with, a variety of different literatures. It can be taught thematically, but this sample syllabus offers a dialectical approach, focused on metaphysical debate over moral realism, which spans (...) the century of debate launched and framed by G. E. Moore's Principia Ethica. The territory and literature are, however, vast. So, this syllabus is highly selective. A thorough metaethics course might also include more topical examination of moral supervenience, moral motivation, moral epistemology, and the rational authority of morality. Authors Recommend: Alexander Miller, An Introduction to Contemporary Metaethics (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2003). This is one of the few clear, accessible, and comprehensive surveys of the subject, written by someone sympathetic with moral naturalism. David Brink, Moral Realism and the Foundations of Ethics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989). Brink rehabilitates naturalism about moral facts by employing a causal semantics and natural kinds model of moral thought and discourse. Michael Smith, The Moral Problem (Oxford: Blackwell, 1994). Smith's book frames the debate as driven by a tension between the objectivity of morality and its practical role, offering a solution in terms of a response-dependent account of practical rationality. Gilbert Harman and Judith Jarvis Thomson, Moral Relativism & Moral Objectivity (Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1996). Harman argues against the objectivity of moral value, while Thomson defends it. Each then responds to the other. Frank Jackson, From Metaphysics to Ethics (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998). Jackson argues that reductive conceptual analysis is possible in ethics, offering a unique naturalistic account of moral properties and facts. Mark Timmons, Morality without Foundations (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999). Timmons distinguishes moral cognitivism from moral realism, interpreting moral judgments as beliefs that have cognitive content but do not describe moral reality. He also provides a particularly illuminating discussion of nonanalytic naturalism. Philippa Foot, Natural Goodness (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2001). A Neo-Aristotelian perspective: moral facts are natural facts about the proper functioning of human beings. Russ Shafer-Landau, Moral Realism: A Defence (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2003). In this recent defense of a Moorean, nonnaturalist position, Shafer-Landau engages rival positions in a remarkably thorough manner. Terence Cuneo, The Normative Web (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2007). Cuneo argues for a robust version of moral realism, developing a parity argument based on the similarities between epistemic and moral facts. Mark Schroeder, Slaves of the Passions (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2007). Schroeder defends a reductive form of naturalism in the tradition of Hume, identifying moral and normative facts with natural facts about agents' desires. Online Materials: PEA Soup: http://peasoup.typepad.com A blog devoted to philosophy, ethics, and academia. Its contributors include many active and prominent metaethicists, who regularly post about the moral realism and naturalism debates. Metaethics Bibliography: http://www.lenmanethicsbibliography.group.shef.ac.uk/Bib.htm Maintained by James Lenman, professor of philosophy at the University of Sheffield, this online resource provides a selective list of published research in metaethics. Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy: http://plato.stanford.edu See especially the entries under 'metaethics'. Sample Syllabus: Topics for Lecture & Discussion Note: unless indicated otherwise, all the readings are found in R. Shafer-Landau and T. Cuneo, eds., Foundations of Ethics: An Anthology (Malden: Blackwell, 2007). (FE) Week 1: Realism I (Classic Nonnaturalism) G. E. Moore, Principia Ethica, 2nd ed. (FE ch. 35). W. K. Frankena, 'The Naturalistic Fallacy,'Mind 48 (1939): 464–77. S. Finlay, 'Four Faces of Moral Realism', Philosophy Compass 2/6 (2007): 820–49 [DOI: [DOI link]]. Week 2: Antirealism I (Classic Expressivism) A. J. Ayer, 'Critique of Ethics and Theology' (1952) (FE ch. 3). C. Stevenson, 'The Nature of Ethical Disagreement' (1963) (FE ch. 28). Week 3: Antirealism II (Error Theory) J. L. Mackie, 'The Subjectivity of Values' (1977) (FE ch. 1). R. Joyce, Excerpt from The Myth of Morality (2001) (FE ch. 2). Week 4: Realism II (Nonanalytic Naturalism) R. Boyd, 'How to be a Moral Realist' (1988) (FE ch. 13). P. Railton, 'Moral Realism' (1986) (FE ch. 14). T. Horgan and M. Timmons, 'New Wave Moral Realism Meets Moral Twin Earth' (1991) (FE ch. 38). Week 5: Antirealism III (Contemporary Expressivism) A. Gibbard, 'The Reasons of a Living Being' (2002) (FE ch. 6). S. Blackburn, 'How To Be an Ethical Anti-Realist' (1993) (FE ch. 4). T. Horgan and M. Timmons, 'Nondescriptivist Cognitivism' (2000) (FE ch. 5). W. Sinnott-Armstrong, 'Expressivism and Embedding' (2000) (FE ch. 37). Week 6: Realism III (Sensibility Theory) J. McDowell, 'Values and Secondary Qualities' (1985) (FE ch. 11). D. Wiggins, 'A Sensible Subjectivism' (1991) (FE ch. 12). Week 7: Realism IV (Subjectivism) & Antirealism IV (Constructivism) R. Firth, 'Ethical Absolutism and the Ideal Observer' (1952) (FE ch. 9). G. Harman, 'Moral Relativism Defended' (1975) (FE ch. 7). C. Korsgaard, 'The Authority of Reflection' (1996) (FE ch. 8). Week 8: Realism V (Contemporary Nonnaturalism) R. Shafer-Landau, 'Ethics as Philosophy' (2006) (FE ch. 16). T. M. Scanlon, What We Owe to Each Other (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998), ch. 1. T, Cuneo, 'Recent Faces of Moral Nonnaturalism', Philosophy Compass 2/6 (2007): 850–79 [DOI: [DOI link]]. (shrink)

∗Thanks to J. C. Beall, Alex Byrne, Jason Decker, Tyler Doggett, Paul Elbourne, Adam Elga, Warren Goldfarb, Delia Graff, Richard Heck, Charles Parsons, Mark Richard, Susanna Siegel, Jason Stanley, Judith Thomson, Carol Voeller, Brian Weatherson, Ralph Wedgwood, Steve Yablo, Cheryl Zoll, and an anonymous referee for valuable comments and discussions. Versions of this material were presented in my seminar at MIT in the Fall of 2000, and at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. Parts of this paper also derive (...) from my comments on a paper of Scott Soames at the ‘Liars and Heaps’ conference at the University of Connecticut in the Fall of 2002. I am grateful for the help of these audiences, and especially to Prof. Soames. (shrink)

Refuting the assumption that art is a representational practice, Bolt's striking argument engages with the work of Heidegger, Deleuze and Guattari, C.S.Peirce and Judith Butler to argue for a performative relationship between art and artist. Drawing on themes as diverse as the work of Cezanne and of Francis Bacon, the transubstantiation of the Catholic sacrament and Wilde's novel The Picture of Dorian Gray , she challenges the metaphor of light as enlightenment, reconceiving this revealing light as the blinding glare (...) of the Australian sun, and suggests that too much light may in fact reveal nothing. Finally she asks: how does an embodied practice fare within the culture of conceptual art? (shrink)

Judith Jarvis Thomson recently argued that it is impermissible for a bystander to turn a runaway trolley from five onto one. But she also argues that a trolley driver is required to do just that. We believe that her argument is flawed in three important ways. She fails to give proper weight to (a) an agent¹s claims not to be required to act in ways he does not want to, (b) impartiality in the weighing of competing patient-claims, and (c) (...) the role of patient-claims in determining agent-duties. All three of these failures can be understood in terms of what we call the Mechanics of Claims, an approach we develop for identifying and balancing competing claims in determining rights. Using that framework, one can see both why Thomson's most recent argument is mistaken, and how to think more clearly about deontological choices generally. (shrink)

Introduction -- Value theory : the nature of the good life -- Epicurus letter to Menoeceus -- John Stuart Mill, Hedonism -- Aldous Huxley, Brave new world -- Robert Nozick, The experience machine -- Richard Taylor, The meaning of life -- Jean Kazez, Necessities -- Normative ethics : theories of right conduct -- J.J.C. Smart, Eextreme and restricted utilitarianism -- Immanuel Kant the good will & the categorical imperative -- Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan -- Philippa Foot, Natural goodness -- Aristotle, Nicomachean (...) ethics -- W.D. Ross, What makes right acts right? -- Hilde Lindemann, What is feminist ethics? -- Metaethics : the status of morality -- David Hume, Moral distinctions not derived from reason -- J.L. Mackie, The subjectivity of values -- Gilbert Harman, Ethics and observation -- Mary Midgley, Trying out one's new sword -- Michael Smith, Rrealism -- Renford Bambrough, Pproof -- Moral problems -- Peter Singe, The Singer solution to world poverty -- Heidi Malm, Paid surrogacy: arguments and responses -- Ronald Dworkin, Playing God : genes, clones, and luck -- James Rachels, The morality of euthanasia -- John Harris, The survival lottery -- Peter Singer, Unsanctifying human life -- William F. Baxter, People or penguins : the case for optimal pollution -- Judith Jarvis, Tthomson a defense of abortion -- Don Marquis, Why abortion is immoral -- Jonathan Bennett, The conscience of Huckleberry Finn -- Michael Walzer, Terrorism : a critique of excuses -- David Luban, Liberalism, torture, and the ticking bomb -- Martin Luther King, Jr., Letter from Birmingham City Jail -- Igor Primoratz, Justifying legal punishment -- Stephen Nathanson, An eye for an eye -- Michael Huemer, America's unjust drug war -- John Corvino, Why shouldn't Tommy and Jimmy have sex? : a defense of homosexuality -- Bonnie Steinbock, Adultery -- Hugh Lafollette, Licensing parents -- Jane English, What do grown children owe their parents? (shrink)

In "Virtue and Right" Robert Johnson argues that virtue ethics that accept standards such as Virtuous Agent (A's x-ing is right in circumstances c iff a fully virtuous agent would x in c) are incomplete, since they cannot account for duties of moral self-improvement. This paper offers four solutions to the problem of incompleteness: the first discards Virtuous Agent and counts actions as wrong iff a vicious person would perform them; the second retains Virtuous Agent but counts self-improving actions as (...) countererogatory: wrong but nonetheless good to do; the third replaces Virtuous Agent with a standard appealing to the Mengzian virtue of righteousness, understood as situational appropriateness; the fourth replaces Virtuous Agent with a standard that holds an action right if it promotes the agent's virtue. Each solution accommodates duties of moral self-improvement, so a virtue ethics embracing any of them would not be incomplete. (shrink)

Most of us have certain intuitions about moral rights, at least partially captured by the ideas that: (A) rights carry special weight in moral argument; (B) persons retain their rights even when they are legitimately infringed; although (C) rights undoubtedly do conflict with one another, and are sometimes overridden as well by nonrights considerations. I show that Dworkin's remarks about rights allow us to affirm (A), (B), and (C), yet those remarks are extremely vague. I then argue that Feinberg's more (...) comprehensive and precise theory, designed to do justice to all three theses, cannot assure us of (A), that rights are not merely one consideration to be weighed in the balance with heterogeneous others. I show how Feinberg accepts (C) despite being drawn toward an alternative absolutist theory of rights and commits himself to (B) through his rejection of prima facie rights. But his promising distinction between recognition and enforcement of a right, which helps give some sense to (B) despite its tension with (C), undermines the force of rights in moral argument apparently intended by (A). We thus learn that Feinberg's and Dworkin's accounts of rights are incompatible, though each is correct in important ways. Contrasting their views allows us to clarify the implications and consistency of alternative theses about rights, one step toward meeting the challenge of developing a theory which shows more adequately how respect for rights is to be combined with other intuitions about rights and their relation to other values. (shrink)

Martha C. Nussbaum, Hiding from Humanity: Disgust, Shame, and the Law. Princeton Nf: Princeton University Press, 2004, xv #;pl 413 pp.

. This paper reports the preliminary results from a semester-long ethics project at an AACSB accredited, regional comprehensive undergraduate school. This project culminated in an Ethics Awareness Week, which highlight a case study (Part B of this Journal) of the controversial EverQuest® multi-player online game. Issues of project planning and design are outlined, the dynamics of a business program-wide approach to ethics are social responsibility are presented, student survey results are (...) presented and analyzed, and issues related to ongoing research are discussed. Nonparametric survey results indicate that the greatest effect in student’s self reported enhanced understanding and interest in issues of business ethics is present when multiple pedagogical methods, e.g., case studies, lectures, assignments, and an Oxford-style debate, are applied by a number of faculty members over an extended (semester) time period. The paper concludes with a discussion of future research issues as well as a series of prescriptions for planning, organizing, and implementing such an extended activity. (shrink)

The biological body has remained peripheral to much feminist theory which is the consequence of a legitimate critique of biologicaldeterminism. However, rejecting the biological body altogether runs the risk of treating the body as a sociopolitical effect. It is my argument that corporeal reality can be theorized without lapsing into the totalizing perspectives of essentialism or relativism. To do so Ipropose drawing upon Judith Butler’s analysis of the productive effect of power relations that materialize the body’s sex, and Margaret (...) Lock’s notion of local biology which introduces the notion that biological matter has dynamism of its own that is not reducible to discourse/power. Bringing together these two perspectives on the body holds the prospect of capturing the complex interrelationship between biology, culture, social structure, and power. (shrink)