We discuss in this essay the alternative techniques proposed for the isolation of human embryonic stem cells (hESCs) that attempt to satisfy moral issues surrounding killing embryos but show that these techniques are either redundant or do not achieve their intended aim. We discuss the difficulties associated with defining a human embryo and how the lack of clarity on this issue antagonises the ethical debate and impedes hESC research. We present scientific evidence showing that isolation of hESCs does not necessarily (...) "kill" human embryos. In addition, we argue that even those who accord inviolable moral status to the embryo should agree that hESC research is morally obligatory, as it is beneficial to the developmental potential of the embryo and society as a whole. (shrink)

Essays honoring the work of Catholic ethicist James F. Keenan.

Between Sickness and Health is about illness rather than disease, and recovery rather than cure. The book argues that illness is an experience, represented by the feeling that 'I am not myself'. From the book's phenomenological point of view, feelings of illness cannot be 'unreal' or 'fake', whatever their biological basis, nor need they be categorised as 'physical', 'psychosomatic' or 'psychiatric'. The book challenges the disease-centred ethos of medicine and medical education. It demonstrates that a clearer conception of illness, as (...) distinct from disease, is therapeutic. The feeling that 'I am once again myself' can return, in some degree, whatever state the body is in. Resilience becomes more available when it is seen as a set of personal skills that can be developed, rather than as an inborn trait. Possibilities of wellness are enhanced by recognising that medical and other therapies can either support or impede recovery, as can human relationships and the socio-political environment. The book's many clinical examples are drawn from the author's broad experience as a neurologist, rehabilitation physician and systemic family therapist. Between Sickness and Health will be useful for students, practitioners and academics, and also for anyone who has been or might one day be ill. (shrink)

Kant’s Transcendental Ideal (TI) is presented in a notoriously obscure section of the Critique of Pure Reason. Many readers know that Kant’s principal purpose in the TI is to show how reason fallaciously derives its concept of God from its idea of the world. But this argument is clothed in a language that is unfamiliar even to skilled commentators on Kant’s work. In this essay, I present the historical context of the proof, conduct a detailed exegesis of the proof, and (...) argue that Kant formulated the Transcendental Ideal in such a way as to avoid Spinozism—a point Kant later seems to have doubted could be avoided. I develop my case in light of some comments made in a lesser-known essay that Kant wrote for the 1795 contest of the Royal Academy of Sciences in Berlin. (shrink)

This essay is intended to explore relations between work and subjectivity (that is, what concerns the individual subject: his or her suffering, pleasure, personal development, and so on). To this end, we shall draw on a body of theory and clinical practice that has been developing in France for some twenty years under the name of the `psychodynamics of work' and ask the three following questions. What is work? This question might seem trivial, but the clinical analysis of the relationship (...) between work and subjectivity shows that work is inseparable from suffering. Working inevitably means experiencing failure—in terms of one's know-how, technique and control of the work process. Is suffering simply an unfortunate consequence of work? We shall attempt to show that in fact it is also at the origin of intelligence and ingeniousness. Which subjectivity? Assuming that we recognise what work owes to subjectivity, we must also reverse the question and ask ourselves what subjectivity (individual development) owes to work. We shall attempt to show that work constitutes a decisive challenge for subjectivity, one that can enhance that subjectivity (self-fulfilment) or, conversely, destroy it (mental pathology). Here, we shall evoke the questions raised by mental pathologies generated by the new forms of work organisation. Subjectivity between work and action? Work is not simply an individual experience. We always work for someone. Working always means encountering others in social relations, or in other words, relations of domination and servitude. Under what conditions do men and women who work agree to cooperate with each other? What conditions allow us to ward off the violence threatening to emerge from the social relations of work? Work offers what is perhaps the most ordinary opportunity to learn about living together (in Aristotle's sense) and democracy. But it can also give rise to the worst—the instrumentalisation of human beings and barbarity. (shrink)

Forthcoming in U. Feest (ed.), Historical Perspectives on Erkl.

first-order HMM, the current tag t0 is predicted based on the previous tag t−1 (and the current word).1 The back- We present a new part-of-speech tagger that ward interaction between t0 and the next tag t+1 shows demonstrates the following ideas: (i) explicit up implicitly later, when t+1 is generated in turn. While unidirectional models are therefore able to capture both use of both preceding and following tag con-.

Upon entering clinical medicine in the 1940s, antibiotic therapy seemed to complete a transformation of hospitals that originated in the late nineteenth century. Former death sinks had become harbingers of therapeutic progress. Yet this triumph was short-lived. The arrival of pathologies caused by resistant bacteria, and of nosocomial infections whose spread was helped by antibiotic therapies, seemed to be intimately related to modern anti-infective therapy. The place where such problems culminated were hospitals, which increasingly appeared as dangerous environments where attempts (...) to combat infectious diseases had instead created hothouses of disease evolution. This paper will focus on one aspect of that history. It caused clinical medicine and hospital hygiene in particular to pay attention to a dimension of infectious disease it had previously paid little attention to thus far: The evolution of infectious disease—previously a matter of mostly theoretical interest—came to be useful in explaining many phenomena observed. This did not turn hospital hygienists into geneticists, though it did give them an awareness that the evolution of infectious disease in a broad sense was something that did matter to them. The paper advances its argument by looking at three phases: The growing awareness of the hospital as a dangerous environment in the 1950s, comprehensive attempts at improving antibiotic therapy and hospital hygiene that followed from the 1960s and lastly the framing of such challenges as risk factors from the 1970s. In conclusion, I will argue that hospital hygiene, being inspired in particular by epidemiology and risk factor analysis, discussed its own specific version of disease emergence and therefore contributed to the 1980s debates around such topics. Being loosely connected to more specialized studies, it consisted of a re-interpretation of infectious disease centred around the temporality of such phenomena as they were encountered in day-to-day dealings of clinical wards. (shrink)

Upon entering clinical medicine in the 1940s, antibiotic therapy seemed to complete a transformation of hospitals that originated in the late nineteenth century. Former death sinks had become harbingers of therapeutic progress. Yet this triumph was short-lived. The arrival of pathologies caused by resistant bacteria, and of nosocomial infections whose spread was helped by antibiotic therapies, seemed to be intimately related to modern anti-infective therapy. The place where such problems culminated were hospitals, which increasingly appeared as dangerous environments where attempts (...) to combat infectious diseases had instead created hothouses of disease evolution. This paper will focus on one aspect of that history. It caused clinical medicine and hospital hygiene in particular to pay attention to a dimension of infectious disease it had previously paid little attention to thus far: The evolution of infectious disease—previously a matter of mostly theoretical interest—came to be useful in explaining many phenomena observed. This did not turn hospital hygienists into geneticists, though it did give them an awareness that the evolution of infectious disease in a broad sense was something that did matter to them. The paper advances its argument by looking at three phases: The growing awareness of the hospital as a dangerous environment in the 1950s, comprehensive attempts at improving antibiotic therapy and hospital hygiene that followed from the 1960s and lastly the framing of such challenges as risk factors from the 1970s. In conclusion, I will argue that hospital hygiene, being inspired in particular by epidemiology and risk factor analysis, discussed its own specific version of disease emergence and therefore contributed to the 1980s debates around such topics. Being loosely connected to more specialized studies, it consisted of a re-interpretation of infectious disease centred around the temporality of such phenomena as they were encountered in day-to-day dealings of clinical wards. (shrink)

La notion catholique d'universalité hésite entre une conception spatiale, très ancienne, et une visée symbolique, confirmée par Vatican II, mais volontiers réinterprétée de nos jours en termes juridiques. Une lecture globale des Écritures, inspirée de l'Épître aux Éphésiens, a produit, après un modèle « intégraliste » de catholicité de la foi, une lecture eschatologique de la « récapitulation » de toute l'humanité dans l'Église corps du Christ, qui offre un échange réciproque entre toutes les cultures du monde et la vérité (...) évangélique. Propre à favoriser l'entrée du christianisme dans le processus de mondialisation, cette vision n'échappe pourtant pas au soupçon de dissimuler une violence dominatrice. Pour y parer, l'Église doit revenir au messianisme évangélique et le prendre pour forme d'un universel concret affranchi de tout exclusivisme, car, dans le Christ, Dieu communique sa sainteté à la multitude humaine et chacun est engendré unique en lien avec les autres à la façon dont le Christ est unique. Cet universalisme messianique est avant tout d'ordre pratique et créatif : c'est un style de vie qui repousse la violence des normes institutionnelles en situant les chrétiens aux frontières du lien qui tient ensemble les individus et les sociétés, par-delà toute idolâtrie et tout désenchantement. The Roman Catholic idea of universality hesitates between a spatial conception, very ancient, and a symbolical perspective, confirmed by Vatican II, but freely reinterpretated today in juridical terms. A global reading of the Scriptures, inspired by the Epistle to the Ephesians, has produced, after an “ integral” model of the catholicity of faith, an eschatological reading of the « recapitulation » of all humanity into the Church-body of Christ, which offers a reciprocal change between all cultures of the world and evangelical truth. This vision, proper for favoring the entrance of Christianity into the process of globalization, does not escape, however, a suspicion that it dissimulates a dominating violence. To ward this off, the Church should return to evangelical messianism and take it in the form of a concrete universal, free from all exclusivity, for in Christ, God communicates his holiness to the human multitude. Each one is engendered uniquely, in connection with others in the way that Christ is unique. This messianic universalism is, above all, of a practical and creative order It is a style of life that wards off the violence of institutional norms in situating Christians at the frontier of the connection that holds together individuals and societies, beyond all idolatry and disenchantment. (shrink)

As Plato’s tripartite division of the soul, Descartes’s criterion of clear and distinct ideas, and Kant’s notion of the categorical imperative attest, philosophy has traditionally been wedded to rationalism and its “intellectualist” view of persons. In this book Christopher Williams seeks to wean his fellow philosophers away from an overly rationalistic self-understanding by using resources that are available within the philosophical tradition itself, including some that anticipate strands of Nietzsche’s thought. The book begins by developing Hume’s critique of rationalism, (...) with reference especially to the section of the _Treatise_ that deals with the continuing existence of bodies and to his neglected essay “The Sceptic” where Hume reveals the importance of our embodiment through a comic portrayal of philosophers’ efforts to “correct our sentiments.” Then it moves on to ward off charges of irrationalism by showing that, although our powers of self-correction are more limited than the rationalist thinks they are, a Humean position is able both to sustain a commitment to reflection and to sensitize us to a version of irrationalism, manifest in monotheistic theologies, that is otherwise difficult to detect. The book concludes, more speculatively, with a comparison of persons to artworks in order to show how our aesthetic dimension is the source of some of the normative work previously assigned to rationalist reason. Ranging as it does across subfields from epistemology and history of philosophy to ethics and aesthetics, _A Cultivated Reason_ should appeal to a wide audience of philosophers and to scholars in other fields as well. (shrink)

As the editors fully perceived, the new critical edition of the so-called commentary of Bernardus Silvestris on the Aeneid of Vergil was but a stage in the development of a basic knowledge of this important work. We could not, with the data available to us, solve certain major problems relating to author and text. We could not, for example, confidently name the author, nor could we adequately describe the genesis of the work. Recently, two studies have appeared — the first (...) by E. R. Smits, the second by Christopher Baswell — which seek to address these questions. The present article will in the main be a critique of these studies. In my view the two scholars perform a valuable service in bringing forward new material to which others may react, but the principal suggestion of Smits must be rejected and the conclusions of Baswell require modification. (shrink)

ZUSAMMENFASSUNGDie Auseinandersetzung mit der Praxis des Bittgebets stellt keine Randthematik bei der Reflexion des theistischen Glaubens dar, sondern ist von erheblicher systematischer und existentieller Bedeutung. Eine rege Debatte über die Sinnhaftigkeit des Bittgebets ist gegenwärtig in der angelsächsischen Religionsphilosophie in Gang. Die Untersuchung präsentiert und würdigt kritisch die aktuellen Entwürfe zum Bittgebet von Eleonore Stump und Keith Ward. Beide Autoren erachten die traditionelle Konzeption des Bittgebets bei Thomas von Aquin für unbefriedigend und entwickeln ihre eigenen Entwürfe in Absetzung vom (...) Aquinaten. Da weder Stump noch Ward eine detaillierte Analyse des Bittgebets bei Thomas vorlegen, wird dieses in einem ersten Schritt vorgestellt. In einem zweiten Schritt erfolgt die Auseinandersetzung mit den von Stump und Ward vorgebrachten Einwänden. Abschließend werden Stärken und Schwächen des thomanischen Entwurfs erhoben.SUMMARYWhat petitionary prayer is about is not a marginal topic for theism but bears considerable systematic and existential value. A lively debate about the meaningfulness of petitionary prayer is under way in contemporary angloamerican philosophy of religion. The paper presents and discusses the accounts of petitionary prayer put forward by Eleonore Stump and Keith Ward. Both scholars consider the traditional account of petitionary prayer proposed by Thomas Aquinas as unsatisfactory and develop their own outlines in opposition to Aquinas. Regrettably neither Stump nor Ward provide us with a detailed analysis of Aquinas's understanding of petitionary prayer. Therefore the paper first presents at length the account of Aquinas. Then the objections Stump and Ward put forward against Aquinas are examined. Finally, strengths and weaknesses of Aquinas's understanding of petitionary prayer are worked out. (shrink)

erative clustering. First, we show formally that the common heuristic agglomerative clustering algorithms – Ward’s method, single-link, complete-link, and a variant of group-average – are each equivalent to a hierarchical model-based method. This interpretation gives a theoretical explanation of the empirical behavior of these algorithms, as well as a principled approach to resolving practical issues, such as number of clusters or the choice of method. Second, we show how a model-based viewpoint can suggest variations on these basic agglomerative algorithms. (...) We introduce adjusted complete-link, Mahalanobis-link, and line-link as variants, and demonstrate their utility. (shrink)

In an age where issues like climate change and the unintended consequences of technological innovation are high on the ethical and political agenda, questions about the nature and extent of our responsibilities to future generations have never been more important, yet simultaneously so difficult to answer. This book takes a unique approach to the problem by drawing on diverse traditions of thinking about care (including developmental psychology, phenomenology and feminist ethics) to explore the nature and meaning of our relationship with (...) the future. Demonstrating that many influential perspectives on intergenerational ethics, including positions advanced by John Rawls, Brian Barry, and Ulrich Beck are undermined by problems relating to uncertainty, it shows that an approach based on care ethics can confront the uncertain future successfully and give a viable account of the nature and scope of future-oriented responsibilities. (shrink)

Introduction: Conversion and the practice of transformation -- The philosophical structure of Jonathan Edwards's religious affections -- Habit, habit change, and conversion in C.S. Peirce -- Reconstructing faith : religious overcoming in Dewey's pragmatism -- Transforming obligation in William James -- Dwelling in absence: the reflective origin of conversion -- Creative transformation : the work of conversion -- The evasion of conversion in recent American philosophy.

Throughout her work, Audre Lorde maintains that her self-preservation in the face of oppression depends on acting from the recognition and valorization of her feelings as a deep source of knowledge. This claim, taken as a portrayal of agency, poses challenges to standard positions in ethics, epistemology, and moral psychology. This article examines the oppositional agency articulated by Lorde’s thought, locating feeling, poetry, and the power she calls “the erotic” within her avowed project of self-preservation. It then explores the implications (...) of taking seriously Lorde’s account, particularly for theorists examining ethics and epistemology under nonideal social conditions. For situations of sexual intimacy, for example, Lorde’s account unsettles prevailing assumptions about the role of consent in responsibility between sexual partners. I argue that obligations to solicit consent and respect refusal are not sufficient to acknowledge the value of agency in intimate encounters when agency is oppositional in the way Lorde describes. (shrink)

Discussions of sexual ethics often focus on the wrong of treating another as a mere object instead of as a person worthy of respect. On this view, the task of sexual ethics becomes putting the other’s subjectivity above their status as erotic object so as to avoid the harms of objectification. Ward and Anderson argue that such a view disregards the crucial, moral role that erotic objecthood plays in sexual encounters. Important moral features of intimacy are disclosed through the (...) experience of being an erotic object for another, as well as in perceiving another as an erotic object. Drawing on phenomenology, especially the insights of Simone de Beauvoir, Ward and Anderson argue that erotic encounters are shaped by the human condition of ambiguity, where being an object for others is intertwined with bodily agency. Because sexual agency is complex in this way, theories of sexual ethics and responsibility must widen their focus beyond transparent communication and authoritative expressions of will. (shrink)

This book is available either individually, or as part of the specially-priced Arguments of the Philosphers Collection.

Suppose we believe that God created the world. Then surely we want it to be the case that he intended, in some sense at least, to create THIS world. Moreover, most theists want to hold that God didn't just guess or hope that the world would take one course or another; rather, he KNEW precisely what was going to take place in the world he planned to create. In particular, of each person P, God knew that P was to exist. (...) Call this the "standard" conception. Most theists find the standard conception appealing. Unfortunately, the view seems to conflict with the equally appealing idea — call it "temporal actualism" — that there are no "future" individuals beyond those that already exist in the present moment. For, on this view, for any historical person P, prior to creation, there was no such person as P and hence nothing about P for God to know. Hence, in particular, God couldn't have known that P was to exist. This is of course not a new problem. But past solutions to it are highly problematic. In this paper, after canvassing previous approaches, I will propose a solution that seems to preserve both temporal actualism and a suitably robust form of the standard conception while avoiding the pitfalls of the past. (shrink)

It is often thought that the correct metaphysics and epistemology of reasons will be broadly unified across different kinds of reason: reasons for belief, and reasons for action. This approach is sometimes thought to be undermined by the contrasting natures of belief and of action: whereas belief appears to have the ‘constitutive aim’ of truth (or knowledge), action does not appear to have any such constitutive aim. I develop this disanalogy into a novel challenge to metanormative approaches by thinking about (...) disagreement. The constitutive aim of belief can play a role in adjudicating epistemic disagreements for which there is no analogue in practical disagreements. Consequently, we have more reason, all else being equal, to expect convergence in epistemic judgment than in practical judgment. This represents a prima facie challenge to the metanormative theorist because the extent of (suitably specified) disagreement in an area of thought is of prima facie significance for the metaphysics of that area of thought. (shrink)

Aristotle attaches particular significance to the homonymy of many central concepts in philosophy and science: that is, to the diversity of ways of being common to a single general concept. His preoccupation with homonymy influences his approach to almost every subject that he considers, and it clearly structures the philosophical methodology that he employs both when criticizing others and when advancing his own positive theories. Where there is homonymy there is multiplicity: Aristotle aims to find the order within this multiplicity, (...) and believes that doing so is crucial to scientific inquiry and philosophical progress.Christopher Shields investigates and evaluates Aristotle's approach to questions about homonymy, characterizing the metaphysical and semantic commitments necessary to establish the homonymy of a given concept. Then, in a series of case-studies, Shields examines in detail some of Aristotle's principal applications of homonymy--to the body, sameness and oneness, life, goodness, and being. Shields's aim is not only to give a fuller understanding of Aristotle's methodology and to illuminate his specific doctrines in a variety of areas, but to show that this methodology remains fruitful today. (shrink)

An important volume connecting classical studies with feminism, Feminism and Ancient Philosophy provides an even-handed assessment of the ancient philosophers' discussions of women and explains which ancient views can be fruitful for feminist theorizing today. The papers in this anthology range from classical Greek philosophy through the Hellenistic period, with the predominance of essays focusing on topics such as the relation of reason and the emotions, the nature of emotions and desire, and related issues in moral psychology. The volume contains (...) some new, ground-breaking essays on Plato, Aristotle, and the Stoics, as well as previously published pieces by established scholars like Martha Nussbaum and Julia Annas. It promises to be of interest to an interdisciplinary audience including those working in classics, ancient philosophy, and feminist theory. (shrink)

A dominant strand of philosophical thought holds that natural kinds are clusters of objects with shared properties. Cluster theories of natural kinds are often taken to be a late twentieth-century development, prompted by dissatisfaction with essentialism in philosophy of biology. I will argue here, however, that a cluster theory of kinds had actually been formulated by William Whewell (1794-1866) more than a century earlier. Cluster theories of kinds can be characterized in terms of three central commitments, all of which are (...) present in Whewell’s work on classification. Like contemporary cluster theorists, Whewell claims that kinds are united by similarity, that many kinds do not have essences, and that there are “gaps” between kinds. Moreover, Whewell advises taxonomists to look for consilience (roughly, convergence) between different classificatory schemes, a recommendation that reinforces the identification of natural classes with property clusters. Thus Whewell was not only an early cluster theorist, but one with important insights into what a cluster theory of kinds means for the practice of classification. (shrink)

Christopher Hookway presents a series of studies of themes from the work of the great American philosopher and pragmatist, Charles S. Peirce (1839-1913). These themes center on the question of how we are to investigate the world rationally. Hookway shows how Peirce's ideas about this continue to play an important role in contemporary philosophy.

A short definitive account of Keith Ward's theology, based on the philosophy of Personal Idealism. It records Ward's views about God, revelation, the kingdom of God, life after death, the incarnation, atonement, and Trinity. In summary, it is a concise and clear account of most central Christian doctrines, formed in the light of modern science and Idealist philosophy.

What is required for an individual to entertain a singular thought about an object they have encountered before but that is currently no longer within their perceptual range? More specifically, does the individual have to think about the object as having been encountered in the past? I consider this question against the background of the assumption that non-human animals are cognitively ‘stuck in the present’. Does this mean that, for them, ‘out of sight is out of mind’, as, e.g., Schopenhauer (...) seems to have thought? I suggest an alternative answer, also drawing on some empirical work on animal cognition. (shrink)

Moral error theories are often rejected by appeal to ‘companions in guilt’ arguments. The most popular form of companions in guilt argument takes epistemic reasons for belief as a ‘companion’ and proceeds by analogy. I show that this strategy fails. I claim that the companions in guilt theorist must understand epistemic reasons as evidential support relations if her argument is to be dialectically effective. I then present a dilemma. Either epistemic reasons are evidential support relations or they are not. If (...) they are not, then the companions in guilt argument fails. If they are, then a reduction of epistemic reasons to evidential support relations becomes available and, consequently, epistemic reasons cease to be a viable ‘companion’ for moral reasons. I recommend this structure of argument over existing strategies within the literature and defend my claims against recent objections from companions in guilt theorists. (shrink)

Nietzsche and Freud saw Christianity as metaphysical escapism, with Nietzsche calling the religion a "Platonism for the masses" and faulting Paul the apostle for negating more immanent, material modes of thought and political solidarity. Integrating this debate with the philosophies of difference espoused by Gilles Deleuze, Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Jacques Lacan, and Pier Paolo Pasolini, Ward Blanton argues that genealogical interventions into the political economies of Western cultural memory do not go far enough in relation to the imagined (...) founder of Christianity. Blanton challenges the idea of Paulinism as a pop Platonic worldview or form of social control. He unearths in Pauline legacies otherwise repressed resources for new materialist spiritualities and new forms of radical political solidarity, liberating "religion" from inherited interpretive assumptions so philosophical thought can manifest in risky, radical freedom. (shrink)

This original new book argues for a reassessment of Plato's challenge to the arts. Plato was the first great figure in Western philosophy to assess the value of the arts; he argued in the Republic that traditionally accepted forms of poetry, drama, and music are unsound. While this view has been widely rejected, Janaway argues that Plato's hostile case is a more coherent and profound challenge to the arts than has sometimes been supposed. Denying that Plato advocates "good art" in (...) any modern sense, Janaway seeks both to understand Plato's critique in the context of his own philosophy and to locate him in today's philosophy of art, showing how issues in aesthetics arise from responses to his charges. (shrink)

Blanton Ward traces the current critical engagement of Agamben, Derrida and Zizek, among others, back to the 19th and early 20th century philosophers of early Christianity.

Global Media Ethics is the first comprehensive cross-cultural exploration of the conceptual and practical issues facing media ethics in a global world. A team of leading journalism experts investigate the impact of major global trends on responsible journalism. The first full-length, truly global textbook on media ethics; Explores how current global changes in media promote and inhibit responsible journalism; Includes relevant and timely ethical discussions based on major trends in journalism and global media; Questions existing frameworks in media ethics in (...) light of the impact of global media; Contributors are leading experts in global journalism and communication. (shrink)