Offering philosophical insights into the popular morning brew, _Coffee -- Philosophy for Everyone_ kick starts the day with an entertaining but critical discussion of the ethics, aesthetics, metaphysics, and culture of coffee. Matt Lounsbury of pioneering business Stumptown Coffee discusses just how good coffee can be Caffeine-related chapters cover the ethics of the coffee trade, the metaphysics of coffee and the centrality of the coffee house to the public sphere Includes a foreword by Donald Schoenholt, President at Gillies Coffee Company.

Covering interesting and varied philosophical terrain, _Cycling - Philosophy for Everyone_ explores in a fun but critical way the rich philosophical, cultural, and existential experiences that arise when two wheels are propelled by human energy. Incorporates or reflects the views of high-profile and notable past-professional cyclists and insiders such as Lennard Zinn, Scott Tinley, and Lance Armstrong Features contributions from the areas of cultural studies, kinesiology, literature, and political science as well as from philosophers Includes enlightening essays on the varieties (...) of the cycling experience, ranging from the ethical issues of success, women and cycling, environmental issues of commuting and the transformative potential of cycling for personal growth Shows how bicycling and philosophy create the perfect tandem Includes a foreword by Lennard Zinn, author and owner of Zinn Cycles Inc. (shrink)

Written with insight and humor, _College Sex - Philosophy for Everyone_ investigates a broad array of philosophical issues relating to student sex. Examines the ethical issues of dating, cheating, courtship, homosexual experimentation, and drug and alcohol use Considers student-teacher relationships, sexual experimentation, the meaning of sex in a college setting and includes two essays based on influential research projects on ‘friends with benefits’ Many of the authors teach classes that explore the philosophy of love and sex, and most are scholars (...) from the Society of the Philosophy of Sex and Love. (shrink)

_Fatherhood - Philosophy for Everyone_ offers fathers wisdom and practical advice drawn from the annals of philosophy. Both thought-provoking and humorous, it provides a valuable starting and ending point for reflecting on this crucial role. Address the roles, experiences, ethics, and challenges of fatherhood from a philosophical perspective Includes essays on Confucius, Socrates, the experience of African fatherhood, and the perspective of two women writers Explores the changing role of fatherhood and investigates what it means to be a father An (...) ideal complement to _Motherhood - Philosophy for Everyone_. (shrink)

Corporate Reputation (CR) has become an increasingly important topic in the social responsibility literature. In this exploratory study we relate reputation to crisis management by implementing an experimental survey in which respondents indicate how strongly they feel about a potential crisis. Findings reported here indicate that respondents’ reactions to the potential crisis varied according to the industry in which the firm operated.

This is the first book to offer the best essays, articles, and speeches on ethics and intelligence that demonstrate the complex moral dilemmas in intelligence collection, analysis, and operations. Some are recently declassified and never before published, and all are written by authors whose backgrounds are as varied as their insights, including Robert M. Gates, former Director of the Central Intelligence Agency; John P. Langan, the Joseph Cardinal Bernardin Professor of Catholic Social Thought at the Kennedy Institute of Ethics, Georgetown (...) University; and Loch K. Johnson, Regents Professor of Political Science at the University of Georgia and recipient of the Owens Award for contributions to the understanding of U.S. intelligence activities. Creating the foundation for the study of ethics and intelligence by filling in the gap between warfare and philosophy, this is a valuable collection of literature for building an ethical code that is not dependent on any specific agency, department, or country. (shrink)

Noam Chomsky’s well-known claim that linguistics is a “branch of cognitive psychology” has generated a great deal of dissent—not from linguists or psychologists, but from philosophers. Jerrold Katz, Scott Soames, Michael Devitt, and Kim Sterelny have presented a number of arguments, intended to show that this Chomskian hypothesis is incorrect. On both sides of this debate, two distinct issues are often conflated: (1) the ontological status of language and (2) the relation between psychology and linguistics. The ontological issue is, (...) I will argue, not the relevant issue in the debate. Even if this Chomskian position on the ontology of language is false, linguistics may still be a subfield of psychology if the relevant methods in linguistic theory construction are psychological. Two options are open to the philosopher who denies Chomskian conceptualism: linguistic nominalism or linguistic platonism. The former position holds that syntactic, semantic, and phonological properties are primarily properties, not of mental representations, but rather of public languagesentence tokens; The latter position holds that the linguistic properties are properties of public language sentence types. I will argue that both of these positions are compatible with Chomsky’s claim that linguistics is a branch of psychology, and the arguments that have been given for nominalism and platonism do not establish that linguistics and psychology are distinct disciplines. (shrink)

So-called evolutionary error theorists, such as Michael Ruse and Richard Joyce, have argued that naturalistic accounts of the moral sentiments lead us to adopt an error theory approach to morality. Roughly, the argument is that an appreciation of the etiology of those sentiments undermines any reason to think that they track moral truth and, furthermore, undermines any reason to think that moral truth actually exists. I argue that this approach offers us a false dichotomy between error theory and some (...) form of moral realism. While accepting the presuppositions of the evolutionary error theorist, I argue that contract-based approaches to morality can be sensitive to those presuppositions while still vindicating morality. Invoking Stephen Darwall’s distinction between contractualism and contractarianism, I go on to offer an evolutionary-based contractarianism. (shrink)

In response to Michael Gross (2008), this article explores the supposition that the goals of military medicine either are or should be characterized as returning wounded soldiers to duty and issues some comments on the negative part of Gross’s project (i.e., why military medicine does not have special obligations to soldiers who will not return to the battlefield).

Some writers, such as John Fischer and Michael McKenna, have recently claimed that an agent can be morally responsible for a wrong action and yet not be blameworthy for that action. A careful examination of the claim, however, suggests two readings. On one reading, there are further conditions on blameworthiness beyond freely and wittingly doing wrong. On another innocuous reading, there are no such further conditions. Despite Fischer and McKenna’s attempts to offer further conditions on blameworthiness in addition to (...) responsibility for wrongdoing, I argue that only the innocuous reading is plausible. Once we distinguish between blame being deserved and blame being all-things-considered appropriate, we need not appeal to further conditions on blameworthiness. This discussion has important upshots regarding how compatibilists respond to certain manipulation arguments and how proponents of derived responsibility respond to criticism that agents are responsible even for outcomes that are not reasonably foreseeable. (shrink)

Distortion of Scientific Terms by Supposed Modernizing Translations: The Example ‘orbis’ (sphere)/‘orbita’ (orbit). The use of modern terminology and thinking hinders to understand historic astronomical and physical texts and often misleads the reader, because between celestial physics from Aristotle and Ptolemy to Copernic on the one side and since Kepler and Newton on the other side a fundamental change of paradigm had taken place. The former started from the assumption that planets are indirectly moved by large equally rotating etherical spheres (...) combined with each other to form every kind of unequally apparent planetary motion as a resultant, whereas the later started from Kepler's idea that every motion of a planet is directly caused by two forces moulding his (naturally unequal) ‘orbit’. ‘orbita’ was Kepler's new specific term for the way of the planet coined in late 1604; in contrast, the Latin term of the elder paradigm has been ‘orbis’ (‘sphere’), on the one hand as concentric ‘orbis totalis’ of a planet (or the fixed stars), on the other hand as non‐concentric ‘orbes particulares’ (of the eccenters and epicycles) within the space of an ‘orbis totalis’. These terms were interpreted and translated in accordance with modern dynamic (as the supposed ‘true’) thinking as if they were ‘orbits’ (German: ‘Bahn’). But you cannot bring the two paradigms into line. As a result, the texts of seemingly ‘modern’ translations become incomprehensible, absurd and wrong. The study shows this on thinking (1st) about Aristotelian physics of former times using terms and ideas of modern dynamics, and on thinking (2nd) about the former explanation of apparent motions of heavenly bodies using these dynamics and ignoring the different special Aristotelian and Ptolemaic physics of ‘orbes’ (spheres). (shrink)

Review of Truth and Realism, edited by Patrick Greenough and Michael Lynch.

Review of New Waves in Metaethics, edited by Michael Brady; and New Waves in Truth, edited by Cory D. Wright and Nikolaj J.L.L. Pedersen.

This article was first published in MODERNISM / modernity, Volume 14, number 2, The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007, pp. 225–248. It can also be found online here. - 1er XXe siècle – Nouvel article.

In his book The Boundary Stones of Thought, Ian Rumfitt considers five arguments in favour of intuitionistic logic over classical logic. Two of these arguments are based on reflections concerning the meaning of statements in general, due to Michael Dummett and John McDowell. The remaining three are more specific, concerning statements about the infinite and the infinitesimal, statements involving vague terms, and statements about sets.Rumfitt is sympathetic to the premisses of many of these arguments, and takes some of them (...) to be effective challenges to Bivalence, the following principle: Each statement is either true or false.However, he argues that counterexamples to Bivalence do not immediately lead to counterexamples to Excluded Middle, and so do not immediately refute classical logic; here, Excluded Middle is taken to be the following principle: For each statement A, is true.Much... (shrink)

The main source of evidence for psychoanalytic theory comes from the clinical situation. Yet recent empirical studies in verbal conditioning and the social psychology of persuasion indicate that psychoanalysts and therapists of other schools are speciously validating their own theories by unwittingly influencing their patients' behavior. In the light of this evidence it is small wonder that psychoanalysts consistently 'validate' psychoanalytic theory in their clinical practice while therapists of other schools 'validate' their own theories in their clinical practice. Although Freud (...) was not unaware of the problems of 'suggestion' and the conflicting evidence of rival schools of psychotherapy, he never met these problems successfully. Contemporary psychoanalysts have added little to Freud's original position. One recent attempt, by Fritz Schmidl, to formulate new criteria for the correctness of psychoanalytic clinical interpretations, does not completely escape the problem of suggestion and has new problems of its own. (shrink)

Do cultural artifacts admit of only one single admissible interpretation? Or do they admit of several admissible interpretations? If so, do such multiple interpretations arise only in connection with the material world? And what is the relation between such ideals of interpretation and the ontology of their objects? in his searching book, Krausz explores and develops varieties of realism, constructivism, and constructive realism. Finally, Krausz extends the notions of singularism and mutliplism to directional life paths and projects. In the course (...) of his treatment Krausz considers such diverse examples as the paintings of Anselm Kiefer, Cristo's Wrapped Reichstag, Indian burial rites, Hindu and Buddhist soteriologies, as well as middle sized objects and sub-atomic particles. And he considers contributions of such thinkers as John Searle, Nelson Goodman, Rom Harre, Bernard Harrison and Patricial Hanna, Fritz Wallner, Hilary Putnam, Chhanda Gupta, Joseph Margolis, David Norton, and Martha Nussbaum. (shrink)

Name der Zeitschrift: Klio Jahrgang: 99 Heft: 1 Seiten: 290-294.

We appreciate Fritz’s thoughtful analysis of the asymmetry between legal protections for negative and positive conscience claims and are particularly interested in further exploring the conc...

According to the received account of guilt in the philosophical literature, one cannot feel guilt unless one takes oneself to have done something morally wrong. But ordinary people feel guilt in many cases in which they do not take themselves to have done anything morally wrong. In this paper, I focus on one kind of guilt without perceived wrongdoing, guilt about being merely causally responsible for a bad state-of-affairs. I go on to present a novel account of guilt that explains (...) guilt about mere causal responsibility, according to which guilt represents part of the self as bound up with what is bad. (shrink)

Excerpt from Die Ethik des Aristoteles: In Ihrer Systematischen Einheit und in Ihrer Geschichtlichen Stellung Untersucht 1. Die Tapferkeit. Keine systematische Anordnung der Tugenden Die sittliche Gesinnung als Motiv der Tapferkeit - die Tapferkeit als richtiges Masshalten. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing (...) imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.". (shrink)

Concepts and Cases in Nursing Ethics is an introduction to contemporary ethical issues in health care, designed especially for Canadian audiences. The book is organized around six key concepts: beneficence, autonomy, truth-telling, confidentiality, justice, and integrity. Each of these concepts is explained and discussed with reference to professional and legal norms. The discussion is then supplemented by case studies that exemplify the relevant concepts and show how each applies in health care and nursing practice. This new fourth edition includes an (...) added chapter on end-of-life issues, and it is revised throughout to reflect the latest developments on topics such as global health ethics, cultural competence, social media, and palliative sedation. (shrink)

Machine learning algorithms pervade contemporary society. They are integral to social institutions, inform processes of governance, and animate the mundane technologies of daily life. Consistently, the outcomes of machine learning reflect, reproduce, and amplify structural inequalities. The field of fair machine learning has emerged in response, developing mathematical techniques that increase fairness based on anti-classification, classification parity, and calibration standards. In practice, these computational correctives invariably fall short, operating from an algorithmic idealism that does not, and cannot, address systemic, Intersectional (...) stratifications. Taking present fair machine learning methods as our point of departure, we suggest instead the notion and practice of algorithmic reparation. Rooted in theories of Intersectionality, reparative algorithms name, unmask, and undo allocative and representational harms as they materialize in sociotechnical form. We propose algorithmic reparation as a foundation for building, evaluating, adjusting, and when necessary, omitting and eradicating machine learning systems. (shrink)

Our aim in this paper is to present the distinct ways in which Wolff, Baumgarten, and Kant understand the relationship between necessitation, constraint, and reluctant action in an effort to illustrate the subtle ways in which their conceptions of obligation differ from each another. Whereas Wolff conceives of natural or moral obligation as incompatible with constraint, Baumgarten holds that constraint and reluctant action are, in some instances, compatible with natural obligation. Kant departs from Baumgarten by conceiving of obligation as necessarily (...) involving constraint: as Kant’s reply to Schiller’s famous objection reveals, obligation must take on the character of constraint to reluctant action on account of the fact that human beings possess inclinations that always threaten to impel them in directions that oppose morality. (shrink)