In this expanded edition, an accomplished physician and teacher of medicine discusses the importance of being a caring doctor, especially now that the focus of medicine is increasingly on technological innovation and health care costs. With wisdom and compassion, Dr. Jerome Lowenstein tells stories about relationships between medical students and their teachers, physicians and their patients. He reflects on what doctors learn from treating chronic illness; how they respond to patients' needs for reassurance; how they bear the burden of (...) treating patients with life-threatening or degenerative disease; whether the distinction between traditional and "alternative" medical treatment is ultimately beneficial or destructive; and many other issues. Dr. Lowenstein's ruminations on humanistic approaches to learning and practicing medicine will be treasured by physicians, medical students, and patients alike. (shrink)
Whether or not deflationism is compatible with truth-conditional theories of meaning has often been discussed in very broad terms. This paper only focuses on Davidsonian semantics and Brandom's anaphoric deflationism and defends the claim that these are perfectly compatible. Critics of this view have voiced several objections, the most prominent of which claims that it involves an unacceptable form of circularity. The paper discusses how this general objection applies to the case of anaphoric deflationism and Davidsonian semantics and evaluates different (...) ways of responding to it (Williams 1999, Horisk 2008 and Lance 1997). Then, three further objections to the compatibility of these theories are assessed and eventually dismissed (Horisk 2007, Patterson 2005 and Collins 2002). It is shown how these considerations shed light on core issues of the debate. (shrink)
Building on an existing framework concerning ethical intention, this research explores how Thai business people perceive the importance of ethics in various scenarios. This study investigates the relative influences of personal characteristics and the organizational environment underlying the Thai business people’s ethical perception. Corporate ethical values and idealism are shown to positively influence a Thai manager’s perceptions about the importance of ethics. While their ability to perceive the existence of an ethical problem is negatively influenced by relativism, it is positively (...) impacted by their existing perceptions about the importance of ethics. Results also suggest positive relationships between perceived importance of ethics and perceived ethical problems with ethical intention. These results extend research in understanding the relationship between the antecedents and consequences of perceived importance of ethics within an economically growing non-Western culture. (shrink)
State universities have grown to become monumental enterprises generating revenues of more than $124 billion a year in the sale and delivery of education and other services. They compete in a marketplace composed of private secular, nonsecular and for-profit higher education institutions. In addition, state universities in their own right engage in a number of traditionally for-profit "business" enterprises competing with the private sector. However, as the enterprise aspect of state universities grows; so too does the impact of a unique (...) competitive advantage enjoyed solely by state universities--that is, the ability of state universities to immune themselves from lawsuit in federal court under the guise of "sovereign immunity" for disputes arising under federal employment laws. Indeed, as a consequence of recent Supreme Court rulings, state agencies, including universities, are the only entities in the United States that are effectively exempt from the enforcement of federal employment laws in federal or state courts. This article reviews the condition of the "two faces" of the state university regarding federal employment law and the apparent new barriers to federal court access of employees to judicial review of employment disputes. (shrink)
Reflections on Medicine is a rich sampling of 70 essays from a collection of more than 300 essays Robert Massey wrote for Connecticut Medicine: The Journal of the Connecticut State Medical Society, between 1973 and 2005. It is an elegant buffet of the thoughts and observations of a remarkable man. In his foreword to the book, Sherwin Nuland writes: "he applied his massive erudition to so many [other] themes, universal and specific—he accepted the uncertainty of human wisdom and even knowledge, (...) recognizing that it is for each generation to look anew at dilemmas both modern and ancient" (p. ix). In fact, there are countless references to the writings of Albert Schweitzer, T. S. Eliot, Mark Twain, and Lewis Thomas .. (shrink)
(A) Larry Shiner address some central issues about architecturein particular, he is interested in the extent to which architectural beauty is dependent on, or independent of, various functions of buildings. What role does or should our knowledge of the functions of a building play in our aesthetic appreciation of it? I would say that a building may have various functions in addition to its aesthetic functions. One crucial question is over the way that the aesthetic and nonaesthetic functions may (...) be interwoven, so that there may be the “aesthetic expression” of nonaesthetic functions, which is also an aesthetic function of the building. I think that there are important unsolved and unresolved issues here, of great importance in aesthetics. What exactly is it to be beautiful as something with a function. What, exactly, is the aesthetic realization of a nonaesthetic function? I hoped to make a start on these matters by invoking the notion of “dependent beauty”, roughly as Kant described it, but perhaps with some recasting. I am pleased that Shiner appreciates the utility of the Kantian dependent beauty framework for thinking about certain substantive debates about architecture. A theoretical framework should have fruitful and illuminating application in particular cases. Recasting the form/function debates in architecture as debates about different kinds of function, I think, is helpful, especially because the framework allows for more or less aesthetically significant interaction between pure aesthetic and nonaesthetic functions. Shiner pursues some architectural debates in this frameworkhe is especially insightful on issues about the reuse of buildings. (B) In Aesthetic Creation, I raised a worry about how to specify exactly which functions are relevant to the aesthetic assessment of architecture. Architectural assessment is broader than aesthetic assessment; leaking roofs are an architectural defect but not (usually) an aesthetic defect of a building.. (shrink)
Larry Horn is justifiably famous for his work on the semantics of the English conjunction or and both its relationship to the formal logic truth functions ∨ and @ (“inclusive” and “exclusive” disjunction respectively1) and its relationship to the ways people employ or in natural discourse. These interests have been present since his 1972 dissertation, where he argued for a “scalar implicature-based” account of many of these relationships as opposed to a presuppositional account. They have surfaced in his “Greek (...) Grice” paper (Horn 1973) as well as in his Negation book (Horn 1989) and his recent “Border Wars” paper (Horn, forthcoming) where he defends the position that there are two types of implicatures at work here: Q- implicatures based on Grice’s first maxim of Quantity (“Say Enough”) and R-implicatures based on Grice’s second maxim of Quantity (“Don’t Say Too Much”). In a nutshell, the idea is that when a speaker employs a sentence with a disjunction, the meaning (that is, the semantic value) of the or is inclusive. With careful and judicious use of the Q- and R-implicatures, Larry’s theory allows the hearer (often) to infer that the speaker wanted to convey an exclusive disjunction. (shrink)
Abstract I am honoured that you asked me to give the Kohlberg Memorial Lecture and grateful for this occasion to remember Larry and speak about his work. For me, it means coming back into a conversation that I was intensely involved in a long time ago. I have not talked publicly about Larry or my relationship with him since the time of his death, and it has now been over 10 years. I want to say how I remember (...)Larry and also how it came to pass that I became involved in a conversation with him and how my work flowed through the area of moral development for a period of time. In doing so, I will bring my first?person voice into a place where I have tended to appear in the third person, as ?Gilligan?, I will talk about Carol and Larry and Kohlberg and Gilligan, but first I want to begin in the present, with where I am now and with an observation about boys that led me back to the beginning of Larry's theory. (shrink)
The aim of the paper is to reconstruct the essential content and main sources of Larry Laudan's position in the philosophy of science. A background for the reconstruction is provided by the controversy about the nature of changes in science and by the controversy about so called „scientific realism”.
Thirty years after the publication of Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, sharp disagreement persists concerning the implications of Kuhn’s "historicist" challenge to empiricism. I discuss the historicist movement over the past thirty years, and the extent to which the discourse between two branches of the historical school has been influenced by tacit assumptions shared with Rudolf Carnap’s empiricism. I begin with an examination of Carnap’s logicism --his logic of science-- and his 1960 correspondence with Kuhn. I focus on (...) problems in the analysis applied to the unit of metascientific study or appraisal, arguing for a reassessment of historicist treatment of the internal/external distinction and historiographic meta-methodology. The critique of objectivism and relativism that eventuates from this re-assessment is a double-edged blade, undercutting both objectivist and relativist treatments of cognitive evaluation and scientific change. I use it to cut across an otherwise diverse group of historicist-influenced writers, including Imre Lakatos, Larry Laudan, H. M. Collins, Stephen Stich. I. Introduction.. (shrink)
Ethicists and economists commonly assume that if A is all things considered better than B, and B is all things considered better than C, then A is all things considered better than C. Call this principle Transitivity. Although it has great conceptual, intuitive, and empirical appeal, I argue against it. Larry S. Temkin explains how three types of ethical principle, which cannot be dismissed a priori, threaten Transitivity: (a) principles implying that in some cases different factors are relevant to (...) comparing A to C than to comparing A to B or B to C; (b) principles of limited scope; (c) principles implying that morally relevant differences in degree can amount to differences in kind. My counterexamples employ a principle of type (c): pleasures and pains enormously different in intensity differ in kind. Temkin has also endorsed this type of counterexample, using arguments based on earlier drafts of this paper. (shrink)
The Chinese room argument is a thought experiment of John Searle (1980a) and associated (1984) derivation. It is one of the best known and widely credited counters to claims of artificial intelligence (AI)—that is, to claims that computers do or at least can (someday might) think. According to Searle’s original presentation, the argument is based on two key claims: brains cause minds and syntax doesn’t suffice for semantics. Its target is what Searle dubs “strong AI.” According to strong AI, Searle (...) says, “the computer is not merely a tool in the study of the mind, rather the appropriately programmed computer really is a mind in the sense that computers given the right programs can be literally said to understand and have other cognitive states” (1980a, p. 417). Searle contrasts strong AI with “weak AI.” According to weak AI, computers just simulate thought, their seeming understanding isn’t real understanding (just as-if), their seeming calculation is only as-if calculation, etc. Nevertheless, computer simulation is useful for studying the mind (as for studying the weather and other things). (shrink)
It has become something of a leitmotif among evangelical apologetes to argue that morality can have no objective foundation if there is no God. Using a strategy that appeals to many people's strong intuitions that there are objective rights and wrongs, they claim seek to convict atheists of being intellectually committed to moral relativism, subjectivism, or nihilism. Those are, of course, ethical positions that have been advocated by some atheists. But others share the intuition that there are objective moral norms, (...) and also that we can, on the whole, come to know what they are. (shrink)
This paper contains an overview of the essays contained in the Mind and morals anthology plus a critical discussion of certain themes raised in many of these essays concerning the bearing of recent work in cognitive science on the traditional project of moral theory. Specifically, I argue for the following claims: (1) authors like Virginia Held, who appear to be antagonistic toward the methodological naturalism of Owen Flanagan, Andy Clark, Paul Churchland, and others, are really in fundamental agreement with the (...) naturalists (at least once the naturalist view is suitably clarified); (2) the prototype theory of moral concepts that is inspired by recent work in cognitive science does not necessarily jeopardize the aim of systematization characteristic of traditional moral theory; (3) nor does it threaten certain widely accepted views about moral rationality that is part of traditional moral theorizing. Moreover, I speculate that (4) recent work in cognitive science can be expected to play a corroborative role in the justification of theories in ethics, but we should probably not expect this work to yield new insights and directions in ethics. Finally, (5) Fodor's recent critique of cognitive science makes clear the perils of methodological ethical naturalism. (shrink)
This paper explores the determiner corner of the ‘any’ land in Romanian, taking Lee and Horn 1994 and Horn 2000a as tour guides. The immediate interest of the task lies in the fact that the work done in English by the over-employed determiner any is carried out in Romanian by a host of more specialized (and, one fears, lower paid) morphemes, which I review in the rest of this section. My aim is to introduce the details of the Romanian facts (...) onto the scene and to show that an ‘indefinitist’ view that generalizes the scalar approach advocated in Horn’s work is useful in helping us understand the much more crowded Romanian field. The theory of any that serves as my starting point is summarized in Section 2. Section 3 proposes a generalization of the scalar view advocated by Horn in terms of an alternative-based approach in the spirit of Krifka 1995, Giannakidou 2001 and Kratzer and Shimoyama 2002, based on a novel way of defining alternatives. Section 4 looks at the consequences of the proposal, Section 5 considers ways of extending it, and Section 6 is a brief conclusion. The approach suggested here falls under what Horn calls quodlibetic theories. Its claim is that the unifying characteristic of both existentially and universally flavored free choice-like items is that they denote a maximal set of alternatives that verify the expression in which the item occurs. The scalar view is the important special case in which these alternatives form an implicational scale with respect to verifying the relevant expression. (shrink)
It seems philosophers often feel compelled to assess the continuing relevance of their chosen fields of specialization and/or their favorite philosophers. While this volume does not set out to prove that the philosophy of John Dewey is of continuing relevance (and it is difficult to imagine how one would prove such a thing), several of the included essays explicitly argue that Dewey's work provides resources to advance contemporary philosophical debates. The collection was assembled from essays presented at a June 2009 (...) conference at the University of Opole in southern Poland, held in honor of the 150th anniversary of Dewey's birth. The very fact that sesquicentennial conferences like this one were held all over .. (shrink)
