Background Intestinal transplant in infants with severe short bowel syndrome (SBS) is an emerging therapy, yet without sufficient long-term data or established guidelines, resulting in possible variation in practice. Objectives To assess current attitudes and counselling practices among physicians regarding intestinal transplant in infants with SBS, and to determine whether counselling and management vary between subspecialists or centres. Methods A national sample of practicing paediatric surgeons and neonatologists was surveyed via the American Academy of Paediatrics listserves. Results were analysed by (...) physician subspecialty and again by presence or absence of intestinal transplant at respondent's centre. Results The survey was completed by 433 respondents, consisting of 363 neonatologists and 70 paediatric surgeons. Fifty-seven respondents (13.2%) practiced at a centre that performed intestinal transplants in children. The vast majority of respondents (91% for preterm, 95% for term neonates) felt that maintaining a neonate with SBS on total parenteral nutrition for intestinal transplant was ethically optional (neither impermissible nor obligatory), and that parents should be given an informed choice whether to pursue that option. However, only 33% indicated they often/always offer intestinal transplant as a treatment option to families in this situation. Conclusions There is a marked disparity between individual physicians’ beliefs regarding the acceptability of intestinal transplant for severe SBS and their reported practice. Wide variability exists among physicians with respect to their knowledge, beliefs and practice regarding severe SBS, raising concerns about transparency and justice. Survival data prior to transplant, currently unavailable, are essential to rational decision making and informed parental permission. (shrink)

The Accreditation Board of Engineering and Technology (ABET) has declared that to achieve accredited status, “engineering programs must demonstrate that their graduates have an understanding of professional and ethical responsibility.” Many engineering professors struggle to integrate this required ethics instruction in technical classes and projects because of the lack of a formalized ethics-in-design approach. However, one methodology developed in human-computer interaction research, the Value-Sensitive Design approach, can serve as an engineering education tool which bridges the gap between design and ethics (...) for many engineering disciplines. The three major components of Value-Sensitive Design, conceptual, technical, and empirical, exemplified through a case study which focuses on the development of a command and control supervisory interface for a military cruise missile. (shrink)

Wait, what? I've been fired?” I repeated, in the middle of morning rounds in the neonatal intensive care unit. Finally, the nurse who was taking care of our patient, Angela, responded, “Her parents fired you last night. They've already called Patient Relations. They want a new doctor.” My heart sank. Only days into my block of service time as the attending physician in the NICU and I was fired, axed, canned, rejected by a family. How could this have happened? On (...) my first day of service, I had introduced myself to Angela's parents, and I had then met with them daily to review results and the plan and to answer their questions. I thought we had connected well. I thought I had done everything right. I thought they trusted me to care for their daughter. (shrink)

With advancing rank in medical training comes increased academic and clinical responsibility, including education and supervision of trainees and junior staff. When I became a senior postdoctoral fellow sub‐specializing in neonatology, I assumed the role of co‐attending in the neonatal intensive care unit. At that point in my training, I felt well prepared for the challenging task. I would be in charge, make decisions independently with the team, and supervise, as well as teach, the junior fellows, residents, and practitioners. In (...) short, I would assume full responsibility for the care of the patients, their families, and the medical team. My mentor, an experienced attending, would discuss every patient with me each day, but would otherwise stand in the shadows, available for help and guidance when needed. On the very first day, one of the smaller premature babies on our service started having difficulty breathing, and it was soon clear that she would need to have her endotracheal tube reinserted. (shrink)

The growth of responsible innovation scholarship has been mirrored by a proliferation of RI definitions and practices, as well as a recognition of the importance of context for RI. This study investigates how researchers in the field of nanotechnology for food and agriculture define and practice RI, as well as what motivations they see for pursuing RI. We conducted 20 semi-structured interviews with nano-agrifood researchers from industry and academia in the USA, where we asked them to describe their RI definitions, (...) practices, and motivations. We analyzed the emergent themes from these interviews, including how the themes aligned with four prominent RI principles. We found that nano-agrifood researchers largely focused their descriptions of RI definitions, practices, and motivations around a narrow envisioning of the RI principle of anticipation — emphasizing product safety, efficacy, and efficiency. We also found noteworthy tensions surrounding the less frequently mentioned RI principles. For example, some researchers envisioned inclusion as a way to align products with industry interests while others saw it as a way to align products with the public good. Concerning motivations for RI, some researchers viewed RI as a way to protect one’s reputation and avoid lawsuits while others viewed it as a way to improve human well-being and solve societal problems. Given these findings, future efforts to foster RI within nano-agrifoods should promote discussions among researchers concerning what it means to responsibly innovate and what practices this could entail, particularly beyond ensuring product safety, efficacy, and efficiency. (shrink)

We force and construct a model in which level by level equivalence between strong compactness and supercompactness holds, along with a strong form of diamond and a version of square consistent with supercompactness. This generalises a result due to the first author. There are no restrictions in our model on the structure of the class of supercompact cardinals.

Protein‐carbohydrate interactions have been found to be important in many steps in lymphocyte recirculation and inflammatory responses. A family of carbohydrate‐binding proteins or lectins, termed selectins, has been discovered and shown to be involved directly in these processes. The three known selectins, termed L‐, E‐ and P‐selectins, have domains homologous to other Ca2+‐dependent (C‐type) lectins. L‐selectin is expressed constitutively on lymphocytes, E‐selectin is expressed by activated endothelial cells, and P‐selectin is expressed by activated platelets and endothelial cells. Here, we review (...) the nature of the carbohydrate determinants in tissues recognized by these selectins. The expression of specific sialylated, fucosylated and sulfated carbohydrates in activated endothelium and high endothelial venules promotes interactions with L‐selectin on leukocyte surfaces. In contrast, E‐ and P‐selectins recognize specific carbohydrate determinants related to sialyl Lex antigen on neutrophil and monocyte surfaces. The discovery of the selectins has generated excitemient among glycoconjugate researchers that other carbohydrate‐binding proteins and their cognate ligands will be found to function in regulating many types of cellular interactions. (shrink)

We discuss the relationship between various weak distributive laws and games in Boolean algebras. In the first part we give some game characterizations for certain forms of Prikry’s “hyper-weak distributive laws”, and in the second part we construct Suslin algebras in which neither player wins a certain hyper-weak distributivity game. We conclude that in the constructible universe L, all the distributivity games considered in this paper may be undetermined.

At its January 2017 meeting, the Executive Committee of the Peirce Society decided to plan a panel on "Charles S. Peirce and the Study of Religion" for the American Academy of Religion Annual Meeting in November, 2017, in Boston. The AAR accepted our proposal as a special meeting and I had the privilege of organizing and chairing it. We are pleased that the panel of papers will be published as a group in The Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society.Michael (...) L. Raposa's paper, "On Reading God's Great Poem: A Delayed Response to Christopher Hookway," picks up a long debate about the extent to which Peirce's late "Neglected Argument for the Reality of God" is continuous or discontinuous with his early work.Brandon... (shrink)

The late Joseph Grange is perhaps the most sharply focused and elegantly lucid of the group of North American philosophers to build new aesthetic metaphysical visions from the legacies of process philosophy and pragmatism. His peers include, among others, George Allan,1 Roger Ames,2 Chung-ying Cheng,3 Robert Corrington,4 Frederick Ferre,5 Warren Frisina,6 David L. Hall,7 Judith Jones,8 Elizabeth Kraus,9 Hugh P. McDonald,10 Steve Odin,11 Sandra Rosenthal,12 Robert Smid,13 David Weissman,14 and myself, along with our many students and colleagues. This group has (...) widely variant systems, yet what unites us is an emphasis on the aesthetic and a lack of the fear to enter deeply into metaphysics when relevant.. (shrink)

I defend a one category ontology: an ontology that denies that we need more than one fundamental category to support the ontological structure of the world. Categorical fundamentality is understood in terms of the metaphysically prior, as that in which everything else in the world consists. One category ontologies are deeply appealing, because their ontological simplicity gives them an unmatched elegance and spareness. I’m a fan of a one category ontology that collapses the distinction between particular and property, replacing it (...) with a single fundamental category of intrinsic characters or qualities. We may describe the qualities as qualitative charactersor as modes, perhaps on the model of Aristotelian qualitative (nonsubstantial) kinds, and I will use the term “properties” interchangeably with “qualities”. The qualities are repeatable and reasonably sparse, although, as I discuss in section 2.6, there are empirical reasons that may suggest, depending on one’s preferred fundamental physical theory, that they include irreducibly intensive qualities. There are no uninstantiated qualities. I also assume that the fundamental qualitative natures are intrinsic, although physics may ultimately suggest that some of them are extrinsic. On my view, matter, concrete objects, abstract objects, and perhaps even spacetime are constructed from mereological fusions of qualities, so the world is simply a vast mixture of qualities, including polyadic properties (i.e., relations). This means that everything there is, including concrete objects like persons or stars, is a quality, a qualitative fusion, or a portion of the extended qualitative fusion that is the worldwhole. I call my view mereological bundle theory. (shrink)

Critics of contemporary metaphysics argue that it attempts to do the hard work of science from the ease of the armchair. Physics, not metaphysics, tells us about the fundamental facts of the world, and empirical psychology is best placed to reveal the content of our concepts about the world. Exploring and understanding the world through metaphysical reflection is obsolete. In this paper, I will show why this critique of metaphysics fails, arguing that metaphysical methods used to make claims about the (...) world are similar to scientific methods used to make claims about the world, but that the subjects of metaphysics are not the subjects of science. Those who argue that metaphysics uses a problematic methodology to make claims about subjects better covered by natural science get the situation exactly the wrong way around: metaphysics has a distinctive subject matter, not a distinctive methodology. The questions metaphysicians address are different from those of scientists, but the methods employed to develop and select theories are similar. In the first section of the paper, I will describe the sort of subject matter that metaphysics tends to engage with. In the second section of the paper, I will show how metaphysical theories are classes of models and discuss the roles of experience, common sense and thought experiments in the construction and evaluation of such models. Finally, in the last section I will discuss the way these methodological points help us to understand the metaphysical project. Getting the right account of the metaphysical method allows us to better understand the relationship between science and metaphysics, to explain why doing metaphysics successfully involves having a range of different theories, to understand the role of thought experiments involving fictional worlds, and to situate metaphysical realism in a scientifically realist context. (shrink)

I summarize the main argument of Transformative Experience (OUP 2014). The book develops familiar examples from classical philosophical debates, as well as original examples, to argue that an agent’s decision to undergo a transformative experience—an experience constituted by radical personal and epistemic change for the agent—must either be authentic or irrational, but not both. The Precis of Transformative Experience walks the reader through the main ideas involved in epistemically and personally transformative experiences, the problems they pose for rational decision-making, and (...) discusses a number of key original examples of transformative experiences. (shrink)

I address two related questions: first, what is the best theory of how objects have de re modal properties? Second, what is the best defence of essentialism given the variability of our modal intuitions? I critically discuss several theories of how objects have their de re modal properties and address the most threatening antiessentialist objection to essentialism: the variability of our modal intuitions. Drawing on linguistic treatments of vagueness and ambiguity, I show how essentialists can accommodate the variability of modal (...) intuitions while holding that objects have their modal properties independently of contexts. (shrink)

This chapter offers an overview of the phenomenological approach to delusions, emphasizing what Karl Jaspers called the "true delusions" of schizophrenia. Phenomenological psychopathology focuses on the experience of delusions and the delusional world. Several features of this approach are surveyed, including emphasis on formal qualities of subjective life and questioning of standard assumptions about delusions as erroneous belief. The altered modalities of world-oriented and self-oriented experience that precede and ground delusions in schizophrenia, especially the experiences of revelation that Klaus Conrad (...) termed the outer and inner apophany, are then discussed. The chapter first considers the famous "delusional mood", then the role of ipseity-disturbance. In both cases it is explained how delusions can develop out of these distinctive alterations of perception and feeling. The classic question of the understandability or comprehensibility of schizophrenic delusion, together with the related issues of wish-fulfillment and rationalizing motives are then considered. The chapter addresses the crucial but neglected issue of the felt reality-status of delusions or the delusional world, discussing derealization, "double bookkeeping", and "double exposure". The chapter concludes by discussing delusions typically found in paranoid and affective psychoses, and monothematic delusions found in certain organic conditions. (shrink)

Bundle theory takes objects to be bundles of properties. Some bundle theorists take objects to be bundles of instantiated universals, and some take objects to be bundles of tropes. Tropes are instances of properties: some take instantiated universals to be tropes, while others deny the existence of universals and take tropes to be ontologically fundamental. Historically, the bundling relation has been taken to be a primitive relation, not analyzable in terms of or ontologically reducible to some other relation, and has (...) been variously characterized as, e.g., “compresence,” “concurrence,” or “consubstantiation.” Bertrand Russell (1940) defends compresence of universals, and Hector-Neri Castañeda (1974) defends consubstantiation of universals. John Bacon (1995) defends concurrent tropes and Keith Campbell (1990) defends compresent tropes. Jonathan Schaffer (2001) bucks this trend, endorsing compresence understood as co-location in spacetime, but this brings with it undesireable consequences such as the impossibility of distinguishing between objects (such as electrons or other microentities) with the same location. Mereological bundle theory improves upon traditional bundle theory by taking the primitive relation of bundling to be the more familiar relation of fusing or composing, such that objects are fusions of properties or fusions of property instances. Hence, mereological bundle theorists endorse a property mereology: a mereology where properties or property instances can be parts of objects. An advantage of the approach derives from the fact that standard mereologies take composition to be primitive or define it using a different primitive mereological notion (such as primitive parthood). Thus, taking the basic primitive of bundle theory to be composition can reduce the need for.. (shrink)

Among the difficulties in Propertius is the question whether to retain ‘cecinit’ in 3. 3. 7 or to adopt the conjecture ‘cecini’. Propertius dreamed that he was reclining upon Helicon in a grove by Hippocrene and that he was able to compose a Roman historical epic: Visus eram molli recubans Heliconis in umbra, Bellerophontei qua fluit umor equi, Reges, Alba, tuos et regum facta tuorum neruis hiscere posse meis, Paruaque tam magnis admoram fontibus ora Vnde pater sitiens Ennius ante bibit, (...) Et cecinit Curios fratres et Horatia pila Regiaque Aemilia uecta tropaea rate Victricesque moras Fabii pugnamque sinistram Cannensem et uersos ad pia uota deos Hannibalemque Lares Romana sede fugantes, Anseris et tutum uoce fuisse Iouem, Cum me Castalia speculans ex arbore Phoebus Sic ait… According to the paradosis 7–12 constitute a summary of Ennius' Annales. In that I case Propertius' failure to observe historical sequence is peculiar; nor is it defended securely by I supposedly parallel passages. More damaging, however, is that 8 must describe the triumph of L. Aemilius Paullus in 167, two years after the accepted date of Ennius' death. Hertzberg and Postgate claimed that it alludes to the defeat of Demetrius of I Pharos by a L. Aemilius Paullus in 219 ; this is unlikely for some of the same reasons as the rival theory of Butler and Barber, which has found many adherents, that it refers to the victory over Antiochus' navy by L. Aemilius Regillus at Myonnesus in 190. (shrink)

Abstract:In the immediate aftermath of the Haitian earthquake on January 12, 2010, the representative victim-survivor in multiple media sites appeared to the world in the face of the Haitian child-cum-orphan. This poignant image of loss and suffering lent urgency to a range of altruistic responses—or rather, paternalistic interventions—by white families in the U.S. I argue that in both narrative and practice, dominant constructions of normative (white) motherhood were exaggerated and made hypervisible, which propelled the actual lived experience of Haitian mothers (...) further into oblivion. In this article, I examine the discursive formations that produce Haitian women as “deviant black mothers” in transnational contexts. In similar ways, “the beggar mother” construct in the Dominican national media engenders powerful ideas about maternal neglect that link up with constructions of migrant illegality, criminality, and poverty. Drawing upon black and transnational feminist empirical analysis, I demonstrate how such discursive formations affectively circulate within transnational imaginaries and quotidian racial intimacies to effect forms of surveillance, objectification, and regulation of Haitian women and, by extension, their children who face an ever-greater risk of “statelessness.”. (shrink)

There are, by now, many rival, sophisticated philosophical accounts of causation that qualify as ‘metaphysically reductive’. This is a good thing: these collective efforts have vastly improved our understanding of causation over the last 30 years or so. They also put us in an excellent position to reflect on some central methodological questions: What exactly is the point of offering a metaphysical reduction of causation? What philosophical scruples ought to guide the pursuit of such a reduction? Finally, how should answers (...) to these latter questions affect one’s assessment of the main contemporary approaches? That’s what we investigate in this essay. Section 1 lays out our presuppositions. Section 2 reviews a sample of philosophical accounts. Then comes the main event: Section 3 looks in detail at the foregoing methodological questions, closing with a reconsideration of our sample accounts, in light of what we’ve found. (shrink)

This collection, with an agreeable proportion of new material and a sensible selection of old, is worth the money and ought to be on the shelf of anyone interested in recent work on language by philosophers, psychologists, and linguists. The section by linguists proper is the longer and more up to date but this seems quite in order: today neither work in philosophy nor psychology can provide a plausible center-of-attention that will take in the other and linguistics as flanking material. (...) For better and worse linguistics is the centerpiece: and the debate between "interpretive" and "generative" semanticists, here respectively represented by Chomsky and George Lakoff, is the center, most likely, of the centerpiece. The generative semanticists suggest that the base and semantic components ultimately come to the same: the distinction between syntactic rules and semantic rules is presumed as in the Chomskian position but it is thought that the algorithm of wellformedness will turn out to provide all the rules needed for semantic interpretation. The interpretive semantic alternative, here argued by Chomsky in a paper otherwise difficult to obtain except in mimeo, distinguishes semantic from base component by insisting, particularly in matters respecting reference and quantification, that transformations are not meaning-invariant, and that, hence, the semantic component is fed by both the base and surface structures independently. To put the interpretive view in terms of Tarski-cum-Davidsonian biconditionals, we would no longer have on the left side of the biconditional one ’structural-descriptive’ string but rather two separate strings, one surface and the other deep, that would jointly and independently determine meaning. The generative semanticists, following James McCawley, stress that their argument against autonomous deep syntax follows in form Morris Halle’s well-known argument against a phonemic level of description supposed intermediate between superficial surface syntax and systematic phonetics. The basic question one raises against this argument is whether logico-semantic form constitutes itself for linguistic science as one level of description and as an essentially linguistic level of description. One can see an obvious place for philosophers in these arguments, though one finds in this volume very little suggestion of philosophical-semantic work, in the Frege-Carnap tradition, that Donald Davidson, Richard Montague, John Wallace, etc., have been carrying on lately. There is a previously unpublished paper by David Wiggins in this vein, but though Wiggins is his usual brilliant and playfully convoluted self, this is too idiosyncratic and occasional a piece to represent what is by way of a movement. Indeed, aside from the Wiggins-Alston material, the philosopher’s section is solid but familiar material: H. P. Grice’s famous paper on meaning and Paul Ziff’s criticism of Grice’s theory; Gilbert Harman’s "Three Levels of Meaning"; late-1960s papers by Donnellan, Linsky, Quine, Strawson, Vendler, and Searle on reference. But this aside this volume vividly makes the point that philosophy and linguistics have never been more entangled with each other in a genuine working relationship. Chomsky’s arguments come in part from recent philosopher’s work. There is evident concern by linguists with presuppositions and performatives. "Fact," an important and not easily available paper by Paul and Carol Kilparski, sparks the philosophic imagination—as do new pieces on lexical entries, semantic features, and categories by Charles Fillmore, Manfried Bierwisch, and others. Almost enough to justify J. L. Austin’s hopes for a joint endeavor of linguists, philosophers, and psychologists: one sees in the footnotes and bibliographies, in the issue and vocabulary, that disciplines are joining and reflecting upon each other in day-to-day work. The psychology section also contains one large new piece: a splendidly energetic defense of linguistic behaviorism by Charles Osgood. One finds balance for this in Jerry Fodor’s "Could meaning be an rm?" And some good, current, and often not easily available material by George Miller, Eric Lennberg, and others. The "overviews" for the various sections are quite distinguished themselves: but this is only in keeping with general character of this reader.—J. L. (shrink)

The sports world has historically rejected the practice of tanking. I argue that this attitude is unwarranted. To do so, I introduce a concept called strategic suboptimal play (SSP), which is the practice of incurring the risk of a short-term competitive disadvantage to increase the chances of gaining a longer-term competitive advantage. Tanking is just an instance of SSP employed in higher-order games, i.e. games that are at least partially played by other games, like tournaments or seasons. Since SSP is (...) integral to every sport, there are currently no easy grounds for rejecting it outright. As such, the same is true of tanking. I will explore some possible reasons why tanking is wrongly thought objectionable, as well as some objections to and implications of my argument for competitive sports more broadly. (shrink)

The present state of ethical theory and practice is disquieting. Objectivism, in all its varieties, is unconvincing, and subjectivism, hedonic or emotive, is intellectually incredible and socially intolerable. No one is ethically content—except the dogmatist and the sceptic, who act willy nilly with the exponents of “might-cum-persuasion makes right.” Can we find a happier middle region between these inhospitable poles? Perhaps the very limitations of human valuation will provide the ground that ethics requires. Let us begin by considering the conditions (...) which must hold if ethical action is to be possible: 1. Only if the agent can provide a justifying reason for his choice of action can he claim to act ethically. For ethical action is a species of purposive action, and to act purposively entails the ability to give justifying reasons for one's choice of action. . Thus ethical action presupposes putatively grounded ethical judgment. 2. Justifying reasons must be acknowledgeable by all competent judges, i.e. by all persons who are acquainted with all relevant knowledge of the nature and consequences of the alternative courses of action, allow as far as possible for congenital, cultural and idiosyncratic bias, are capable of sane and serious reflection, and are able to make survey of their experience and to draw conclusions from it. For the judgment “the action A is ethically preferable to its alternatives B ” entails “A ought to be done” which in turn entails “every competent judge is capable of acknowledging the ground of the judgment ‘A is ethically preferable to B’ and consequently would be able to set himself to perform A as an ethical act, .” We can assure ourselves of this requirement of acknowledgeability by observing that whenever we resolve, and not merely settle, an ethical disagreement, we have achieved not only a factual, predictive, valuational and attitudinal agreement between the disputants, but a joint acknowledgment of the ground of the ethical judgment. Without this, the agreement could not be said to be ethical, whether the judgment be right or wrong or neither, but merely an agreement to disagree, ethically. Unless ethical disagreement is in principle resolvable, ethical judgment is impossible, for we should be unable to claim that our choice ought to be acted upon. (shrink)

The term fuzzy logic is used in this paper to describe an imprecise logical system, FL, in which the truth-values are fuzzy subsets of the unit interval with linguistic labels such as true, false, not true, very true, quite true, not very true and not very false, etc. The truth-value set, , of FL is assumed to be generated by a context-free grammar, with a semantic rule providing a means of computing the meaning of each linguistic truth-value in as a (...) fuzzy subset of [0, 1].Since is not closed under the operations of negation, conjunction, disjunction and implication, the result of an operation on truth-values in requires, in general, a linguistic approximation by a truth-value in . As a consequence, the truth tables and the rules of inference in fuzzy logic are (i) inexact and (ii) dependent on the meaning associated with the primary truth-value true as well as the modifiers very, quite, more or less, etc. (shrink)

Causation is at once familiar and mysterious. Neither common sense nor extensive philosophical debate has led us to anything like agreement on the correct analysis of the concept of causation, or an account of the metaphysical nature of the causal relation. Causation: A User's Guide cuts a clear path through this confusing but vital landscape. L. A. Paul and Ned Hall guide the reader through the most important philosophical treatments of causation, negotiating the terrain by taking a set of examples (...) as landmarks. They clarify the central themes of the debate about causation, and cover questions about causation involving omissions or absences, preemption and other species of redundant causation, and the possibility that causation is not transitive. Along the way, Paul and Hall examine several contemporary proposals for analyzing the nature of causation and assess their merits and overall methodological cogency.The book is designed to be of value both to trained specialists and those coming to the problem of causation for the first time. It provides the reader with a broad and sophisticated view of the metaphysics of the causal relation. (shrink)

Causation is a deeply intuitive and familiar relation, gripped powerfully by common sense. Or so it seems. As is typical in philosophy, however, that deep intuitive familiarity has not led to any philosophical account of causation that is at once clean, precise, and widely agreed upon. Not for lack of trying: the last thirty years or so have seen dozens of attempts to provide such an account, and the pace of development is, if anything, accelerating. (See Collins et al. [2003a] (...) for a comprehensive sampling of the latest work.). (shrink)

I explore some of the ways that assumptions about the nature of substance shape metaphysical debates about the structure of Reality. Assumptions about the priority of substance play a role in an argument for monism, are embedded in certain pluralist metaphysical treatments of laws of nature, and are central to discussions of substantivalism and relationalism. I will then argue that we should reject such assumptions and collapse the categorical distinction between substance and property.

Quarum causas in orbibus sub suppremo collocatis indagantes, in suppremo enim uniformitas semper cernitur, exploratum habuerunt id prouenire ex motibus giratiuis lulabinis appellatis, factis quidem a permistione motus orbis super suis polis cum motu eiusdem super polis alterius, itaque ex multis motibus simul collectis unus fit motus. Quae quidem theorica phisicis conformis rationibus cunctis ueteribus ad Aristotelem philosophorum principem usque uigebat, quin immo sui summi acie ingenii eam 2 de coelo textu commentario 35 teste Auerroe innuere non desinit. Qalo Qalonymos.

It seems natural to choose whether to have a child by reflecting on what it would be like to actually have a child. I argue that this natural approach fails. If you choose to become a parent, and your choice is based on projections about what you think it would be like for you to have a child, your choice is not rational. If you choose to remain childless, and your choice is based upon projections about what you think it (...) would be like for you to have a child, your choice is not rational. This suggests we should reject our ordinary conception of how to make this life-changing decision, and raises general questions about how to rationally approach important life choices. (shrink)