Over 50% of the world population will develop a psychiatric disorder in their lifetime.1 In the realm of psychiatric treatment, two primary modalities have been established: pharmacotherapy and psychotherapy. Yet, pharmacological interventions often take precedence as the initial treatment choice despite their comparable outcomes, severe side effects and disputed evidence of their efficacy. This preference for medication foregrounds a vital re-examination of what it means to be invasive in medical treatments, namely in psychiatric care. De Marco et al challenge the (...) standard account of invasiveness, presenting considerations that transcend the traditional criteria of physical intrusion.2 Through case studies centred on treatments for schizophrenia and depression, we aim to (1) reinforce De Marco et al ’s challenge to the standard account of invasiveness and (2) extend the dialogue to the moral imperative of redefining mental invasiveness. Our aims are to broaden the definition of mental invasiveness, aligning with De Marco et al ’s emphasis on context sensitivity, and to include the severity of side effects as a critical factor in this assessment. Redefining what is considered invasive in psychiatric treatment has profound implications for patient care and medical decision-making. Labelling treatments, namely medications, as invasive encourages both patients and healthcare providers to approach these options with a heightened level of scrutiny and care. This is …. (shrink)

This major new contribution to our understanding of European political theory will challenge the perspectives in which political thought is understood. Framed as a general account of the period between 1572 and 1651 it charts the formation of a distinctively modern political vocabulary, based on arguments of political necessity and raison d'etat in the work of the major theorists. While Dr. Tuck pays detailed attention to Montaigne, Grotius, Hobbes and the theorists of the English Revolution, he also reconsiders the (...) origins of their conceptual vocabulary in humanist thought--particularly skepticism and stoicism--and its development and appropriation during the revolutions in Holland and France. This book will be welcomed by all historians of political thought and those interested in the development of the idea of the state. (shrink)

This collection examines the question of nonhuman animal agency by shifting emphasis from the human perspective toward that of other animals, exploring modes of ...

"This reviewer had to be restrained from stopping people in the street to urge them to read it: They would learn something of the way science is done,...

Book synopsis: Vagueness is currently the subject of vigorous debate in the philosophy of logic and language. Vague terms-such as "tall", "red", "bald", and "tadpole"—have borderline cases ; and they lack well-defined extensions. The phenomenon of vagueness poses a fundamental challenge to classical logic and semantics, which assumes that propositions are either true or false and that extensions are determinate. Another striking problem to which vagueness gives rise is the sorites paradox. If you remove one grain from a heap of (...) sand, surely you must be left with a heap. Yet apply this principle repeatedly as you remove grains one by one, and you end up, absurdly, with a solitary grain that counts as a heap. This anthology collects papers in the field. After an introduction that surveys the field, the essays form four groups, starting with some historically notable pieces. The 1970s saw an explosion of interest in vagueness, and the second group of essays reprints classic papers from this period. The following group of papers represent current work on the logic and semantics of vagueness. The essays in the final group are contributions to the continuing debate about vague objects and vague identity. (shrink)

Elaborates the relationship between the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) and the cultural critic Walter Benjamin (1892-1940) through close readings of their respective texts as an example of the precariousness of cultural transmission in the present.

Debates over whether the discourse used to justify resistance during the American Revolution was "liberal" or "republican" often obscure the more central question of why and how early American thinkers were able to combine strands of political thought that many modern scholars find contradictory. The arguments the Americans used to justify resistance are better understood as falling into four types that were not understood to be mutually exclusive: Lockean, Biblical, legal/historical, and republican. Locke's ideas often provided an organizing framework within (...) which the other types of argument were used. (shrink)

Thomas Hobbes was the first great English political philosopher, and his book, Leviathan, was one of the first truly modern works of philosophy. This book looks at Hobbes in the context of his era, and examines the importance of his work.

Conditional judgements—judgements employing ‘if’—are essential to practical reasoning about what to do, as well as to much reasoning about what is the case. We handle them well enough from an early...

This classic, with a new introduction by Madeleine L'Engle, is by turns an entrancing mediation on language a piercing commentary on the nature of art and why so much of what we read, hear, and see falls short and a brilliant examination of the fundamental tenets of Christianity. The Mind of the Maker will be relished by those already in love with Dorothy L. Sayers and those who have not yet met her. A mystery writer, a witty and perceptive (...) theologian, culture critic, and playwright, Dorothy Sayers sheds new,unexpected light on a specific set of statements made in the Christian creeds. She examines anew such ideas as the image of God, the Trinity, free will, and evil, and in these pages a wholly revitalized understanding of them emerges. The author finds the key in the parallels between the creation of God and the human creative process. She continually refers to each in a way that illuminates both. (shrink)

"This book is very valuable. Today, there are too many books on the Work that are either deliberately impersonal and as a result are just a re-explaining of basic ideas which are already there in Ouspensky.

A legal obligation to conduct weapons reviews is a means by which the international community can ensure that States assess whether the use of new types of weapons in armed conflict would raise humanitarian concerns. The use of artificial intelligence in weapon systems greatly complicates the process of conducting reviews, particularly where a weapon system is capable of continuing to ‘learn’ on its own after being deployed on the battlefield. This paper surveys current understandings of the weapons review challenges presented (...) by in situ learning and outlines some concepts which may inform appropriate changes to existing weapons review processes. The main arguments made are that: a distinction should be drawn between learning capabilities that are limited to optimising existing behaviour and capabilities that extend to acquiring new behaviours; and the extent of a weapon system’s learning capabilities should be used as the basis for defining a schedule of weapons reviews. (shrink)

There has been a long debate on whether demonstratives are directly referential as Kaplan originally argued, or indirectly referential like a definite description. I propose a new analysis of demonstratives that combines intuitions from both direct and indirect approaches. The demonstrative is analyzed as an indirectly referential expression with a binary maximality operator that takes two arguments, where the second argument can be a deictic pointing, an anaphoric index, or a relative clause. Direct reference is encoded not in the meaning (...) of the demonstrative but in the meaning contributed by the pointing gesture, thus capturing both direct and indirect uses. I further propose that some pronouns in English function as demonstratives, realizing the binary structure and competing with the demonstrative. The main advantages of this proposal include (a) deriving the distribution of pronominal and adnominal demonstratives systematically; (b) capturing the unique interaction that demonstratives have with a pointing gesture; and (c) locating English demonstratives against a larger, cross-linguistic picture. (shrink)

Religious faith and medicine combine harmoniously in Buddhist views, each in its own way helping Buddhists enjoy a more fruitful existence. Health care providers need to understand the spiritual needs of patients in order to provide better care, especially for the terminally ill. Using a recently reported case to guide the reader, this paper examines the issue of medical futility from a Buddhist perspective. Important concepts discussed include compassion, suffering, and the significance of the mind. Compassion from a health professional (...) is essential, and if medical treatment can decrease suffering without altering the clarity of the mind, then a treatment should not be considered futile. Suffering from illness and death, moreover, is considered by Buddhists a normal part of life and is ever-changing. Sickness, old age, birth, and death are integral parts of human life. Suffering is experienced due to the lack of a harmonious state of body, speech, and mind. Buddhists do not believe that the mind is located in the brain, and, for Buddhists, there are ways suffering can be overcome through the control of one’s mind. (shrink)

This chapter provides the background to the American women philosophers’ works that are introduced and collected in Knowledge, Mind and Reality: An Introduction by Early Twentieth-Century American Women Philosophers. We describe the institutional context which made these works possible and their methodological and theoretical background. We also provide biographies for their authors.

The history of research on the genetics of intelligence is fraught with social bias. During the eugenics era, the hereditary theory of intelligence justified policies that encouraged the proliferation of favored races and coercively stemmed procreation by disfavored ones. In the 1970s, Berkeley psychologist Arthur Jensen argued that black students’ innate cognitive inferiority limited the efficacy of federal education programs. The 1994 controversial bestseller The Bell Curve, by Richard J. Herrnstein and Charles Murray, rehashed the claim that race and class (...) disparities stem from immutable differences in inherited intelligence, which could not be eliminated through social interventions. Today most scientists studying the genetics of intelligence distance themselves from this history of social bias by arguing that their research need not investigate intellectual differences between social groups. Rather, they argue, examining the heritability of intelligence can be socially neutral and may even help to reduce social inequities. I argue, however, that research on the genetics of intelligence cannot be socially neutral. Even if we divorce the heritability of intelligence from a eugenicist mission, measuring intelligence remains useful only as a gage of individuals’ appropriate positions in society. Research into the genetics of intelligence ultimately helps to determine individuals’ inherited capacity for particular social positions, even when researchers aim to modify the effects of inheritance. (shrink)

This book shows how political argument in terms of rights and natural rights began in medieval Europe, and how the theory of natural rights was developed in the seventeenth century after a period of neglect in the Renaissance. Dr Tuck provides a new understanding of the importance of Jean Gerson in the formation of the theories, and of Hugo Grotius in their development; he also restores the Englishman John Selden's ideas to the prominence they once enjoyed, and shows how (...) Thomas Hobbes's political theory can best be understood against this background. In general, the book enables us to understand more fully the characteristics of the natural rights theories available to the men of the Enlightenment, and thereby to appreciate the complexity and equivocal nature of modern right theories. (shrink)

The Rights of War and Peace is the first fully historical account of the formative period of modern theories of international law. Professor Tuck examines the arguments over the moral basis for war and international aggression, and links the debates to the writings of the great political theorists such as Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, and Kant. The book illuminates the presuppositions behind much current political theory, and puts into a new perspective the connection between liberalism and imperialism.

This paper provides a methodological schema for interpreting Hume's Dialogues concerning Natural Religion that supports the traditional thesis that Philo represents Hume's views on religious belief. To understand the complexity of Hume's ‘naturalism’ and his assessment of religious belief, it is essential to grasp the manner in which Philo articulates a consistently Humean position in the Dialogues.

This paper offers observations on people’s lived experience of the food system in Michigan during the early Covid-19 pandemic as an initial critical foray into the everyday pandemic food world. The Covid-19 crisis illuminates a myriad of adaptive food behaviors, as people struggle to address their destabilized lives, including the casual acknowledgement of the pandemic, then anxiety of the unknown, the subsequent new dependency, and the possible emergence of a new normal. The pandemic makes the injustices inherent in the food (...) system apparent across communities, demonstrating that food injustice destabilizes all members of the food system, regardless of their social location. The challenges of eating in a pandemic also reinforce the importance of building a sustainable food system; the challenges of food sovereignty and food sustainability are inextricably linked, and the pandemic lays this bare. (shrink)

There are differences in caregivers’ literacy and health literacy levels that may affect their ability to consent to children participating in clinical research trials. This study aimed to explore the effectiveness, and caregivers’ understandings, of the process of informed consent that accompanied their child’s participation in a dental randomized control trial (RCT). Telephone interviews were conducted with a convenience sample of ten caregivers who each had a child participating in the RCT. Pre-tested closed and open-ended questions were used, and the (...) findings were produced from an inductive analysis of the latter and a descriptive analysis of the former. Participants had limited understanding of the purpose of the RCT and rated the readability of the consent form more highly than they rated their understanding of the research. All felt that informed consent was vital, but some caregivers had not read the consent documents. Some caregivers enrolled their child in the RCT because they trusted the researchers, and the majority wanted to improve dental care for children. The informed consent process was not always effective despite high readability of the informed consent documents. Researchers must consider the health literacy of the study group, and actively engaging with caregivers to achieve meaningful informed consent may be challenging. Future research could explore participants’ perspectives of informed consent in populations with low health literacy and assess whether an underlying expectation not to comprehend health-related information may be a barrier to informed consent. (shrink)

Richard Tuck traces the history of the distinction between sovereignty and government and its relevance to the development of democratic thought. Tuck shows that this was a central issue in the political debates of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and provides a new interpretation of the political thought of Bodin, Hobbes and Rousseau. Integrating legal theory and the history of political thought, he also provides one of the first modern histories of the constitutional referendum, and shows the importance (...) of the United States in the history of the referendum. The book derives from the John Robert Seeley Lectures delivered by Richard Tuck at the University of Cambridge in 2012, and will appeal to students and scholars of the history of ideas, political theory and political philosophy. (shrink)