Bioethics is the study of ethical issues arising out of advances in the life sciences and medicine. Historically, bioethics has been associated with issues in research ethics and clinical ethics as a result of research scandals such as the Tuskegee Syphilis Study and public debates about the definition of death, medical paternalism, health care rationing, and abortion. As biomedical technologies have advanced, challenging new questions have arisen for bioethics and new sub-disciplines such as neuroethics and public health ethics have entered (...) the scene. This volume features ten original essays on five cutting-edge controversies in bioethics written by leading philosophers. I. Research Ethics: How Should We Justify Ancillary Care Duties? II. Clinical Ethics: Are Psychopaths Morally Accountable? III. Reproductive Ethics: Is There A Solution to the Non-Identity Problem? IV. Neuroethics: What is Addiction and Does It Excuse? V. Public Health Ethics: Is Luck Egalitarianism Implausibly Harsh? S. Matthew Liao and Collin O’Neil’s concise introduction to the essays in the volume, the annotated bibliographies and study questions for each controversy, and the supplemental guide to additional current controversies in bioethics give the reader a broad grasp of the different kinds of challenges in bioethics. (shrink)

This edited volume offers empirical, evaluative, and philosophical perspectives on the question of higher education as a human right in the Asia Pacific. Throughout the region, higher education has grown rapidly in a variety of ways. Price, accessibility, mobility, and government funding are all key areas of interest, which likely shape the degree to which higher education may be viewed as a human right. Although enrollments continue to grow in many higher education systems, protests related to fees and other equity (...) issues continue to grow. This volume will include scholarly perspectives from around the region for a more extensive understanding of higher education as a human right in the Asia Pacific. (shrink)

Despite an enormous amount of literature on St Augustine of Hippo, this work provides the first examination of what he taught about the resurrection of Jesus Christ. Augustine expounded Christ's resurrection in his sermons, letters, Answer to Faustus the Manichean, the City of God, Expositions of the Psalms, and the Trinity. Saint Augustine on the Resurrection of Christ: Teaching, Rhetoric, and Reception explores what Augustine held about the centrality of Christ's resurrection from the dead, the agency of Christ's resurrection, and (...) the nature of his risen existence. Leading scholar, Gerald O'Collins, investigates the impact of his resurrection on others and his mediatory role as the risen High Priest. O'Collins then unpicks Augustine's rhetorical justification for the resurrection of Christ: evidence from creation, human history, and the desires of all human beings. This groundbreaking study illustrates the enduring significance of Augustine's teaching on and apologetic for the resurrection, and updates, augments, and corrects what Augustine held. (shrink)

IN the Sixteenth Satire, the first topic Juvenal takes up in detail is the impossibility of obtaining satisfactory legal redress from the praetorians. The account has two divisions: you will have a bad time yourself in the military court, and what friend will come to support you?

Within contemporary philosophy of mind, it is taken for granted that externalist accounts of meaning and mental content are, in principle, orthogonal to the matter of whether cognition itself is bound within the biological brain or whether it can constitutively include parts of the world. Accordingly, Clark and Chalmers (1998) distinguish these varieties of externalism as ‘passive’ and ‘active’ respectively. The aim here is to suggest that we should resist the received way of thinking about these dividing lines. With reference (...) to Brandom’s (1994; 2000; 2008) broad semantic inferentialism, we show that a theory of meaning can be at the same time a variety of active externalism. While we grant that supporters of other varieties of content externalism (e.g., Putnam 1975 and Burge 1986) can deny active externalism, this is not an option for semantic inferentialists: On this latter view, the role of the environment (both in its social and natural form) is not ‘passive’ in the sense assumed by the alternative approaches to content externalism. (shrink)

Research suggests political identity has strong influence over individuals’ attitudes and beliefs, which in turn can affect their behavior. Likewise, firsthand experience with an issue can also affect attitudes and beliefs. A large survey of Americans was analyzed to investigate the effects of both political identity and personal impact on individuals’ reactions to the COVID-19 pandemic. Results show that political identity and personal impact influenced the American public’s attitudes about and response to COVID-19. Consistent with prior research, political identity exerted (...) a strong influence on self-reports of emotional distress, threat perception, discomfort with exposure, support for restrictions, and perception of under/overreaction by individuals and institutions. The difference between Democrats and Republican responses were consistent with their normative value differences and with the contemporary partisan messaging. Personal impact exerted a comparatively weaker influence on reported emotional distress and threat perception. Both factors had a weak influence on appraisal of individual and government responses. The dominating influence of political identity carried over into the bivariate relations among these self-reported attitudes and responses. In particular, the appraisal of government response divided along party lines, tied to opposing views of whether there has been over- or under-reaction to the pandemic. The dominance of political identity has important implications for crisis management and reflects the influence of normative value differences between the parties, partisan messaging on the pandemic, and polarization in American politics. (shrink)

The Proceedings of the National Summit on Legal Preparedness for Obesity Prevention and Control is based on a two-part conceptual framework composed of public health and legal perspectives. The public health perspective comprises the six target areas and intervention settings that are the focus of the obesity prevention and control efforts of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.This paper presents the legal perspective. Legal preparedness in public health is the underpinning of the framework for the four “assessment” papers and (...) the four “action” papers that are integral to the application of public health law to any particular health issue. In addition, this paper gives real-world grounding to the legal framework through examples that illustrate the four core elements of legal preparedness in public health that are at work in obesity prevention and control. (shrink)

The Proceedings of the National Summit on Legal Preparedness for Obesity Prevention and Control is based on a two-part conceptual framework composed of public health and legal perspectives. The public health perspective comprises the six target areas and intervention settings that are the focus of the obesity prevention and control efforts of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.This paper presents the legal perspective. Legal preparedness in public health is the underpinning of the framework for the four “assessment” papers and (...) the four “action” papers that are integral to the application of public health law to any particular health issue. In addition, this paper gives real-world grounding to the legal framework through examples that illustrate the four core elements of legal preparedness in public health that are at work in obesity prevention and control. (shrink)

An original argument about how scientific models often times distort reality rather than accurately reflect it. And it's this distortion that often gives scientific models their epistemic power.

New Blackfriars, Volume 103, Issue 1105, Page 322-325, May 2022.

The US neutrino community gathered at the Workshop on the Intermediate Neutrino Program at Brookhaven National Laboratory February 4-6, 2015 to explore opportunities in neutrino physics over the next five to ten years. Scientists from particle, astroparticle and nuclear physics participated in the workshop. The workshop examined promising opportunities for neutrino physics in the intermediate term, including possible new small to mid-scale experiments, US contributions to large experiments, upgrades to existing experiments, R&D plans and theory. The workshop was organized into (...) two sets of parallel working group sessions, divided by physics topics and technology. Physics working groups covered topics on Sterile Neutrinos, Neutrino Mixing, Neutrino Interactions, Neutrino Properties and Astrophysical Neutrinos. Technology sessions were organized into Theory, Short-Baseline Accelerator Neutrinos, Reactor Neutrinos, Detector R&D and Source, Cyclotron and Meson Decay at Rest sessions.This report summarizes discussion and conclusions from the workshop. (shrink)

La critique de la religion est pour l'essentiel terminée : voilà ce que Marx écrivait en 1843. Le début du XXIe siècle semble lui donner tort. Fondamentalistes de tous poils qui relèvent la tête veulent imposer leurs brigades des moeurs et réglementer la liberté de la parole, djihadistes qui font régner la terreur au Levant, terroristes qui manient la AK47 au nom d'Allah, camions qui foncent dans des foules pacifiques et tuent des dizaines de personnes : ceux qui pensaient que (...) nous étions définitivement entrés dans un monde désenchanté en sont pour leurs frais. Denis Collin s'inscrit dans cette tradition philosophique pour laquelle vivre sous la conduite de la raison, c'est s'émanciper de la servitude religieuse et défendre le libre esprit et le libre examen. Il s'agit donc ici de revenir aux principes afin d'examiner ce qu'il en est du fait religieux aujourd'hui et de proposer quelques lignes d'une bataille à mener sur le terrain des idées. (shrink)

This chapter describes some basic, often puzzling features of intentionality, with an eye to its role not so much in ordinary folk ascriptions but in serious psychological explanations, especially in many of Noam Chomsky's own presentations of his theory. It then considers Chomsky's censure of the notion, leading him to deny what would seem to be the explicit intentionalisms on which he seems to rely. Implicit in Chomsky's treatment of grammar is the idea that the positing of the language faculty (...) offers an “abstract” perspective on a physical system (the human brain) that implements the relevant features of the abstracta in ways we currently don’t understand. Two initial problems might be raised for this picture, one regarding inference and the other, generalization. The proposed model is effectively saying that theorists track states and generalizations of the linguistic system in an explicitly representational format, but what the theory is true of need not have such representational properties. (shrink)

This paper draws an earlier book (with Evans and Higgins) entitled _Bad Call: Technology’s Attack on Referees and Umpires and How to Fix It_ (hereafter _Bad Call_) and its various precursor papers. These show why it is that current match officiating aids are unable to provide the kind of accuracy that is often claimed for them and that sports aficianados have been led to expect from them. Accuracy is improving all the time but the notion of perfect accuracy is a (...) myth because, for example, lines drawn on sports fields and the edges of balls are not perfectly defined. The devices meant to report the exact position of a ball—for instance ‘in’ or ‘out’ at tennis—work with the mathematically perfect world of virtual reality, not the actuality of an imperfect physical world. Even if ball-trackers could overcome the sort of inaccuracies related to fast ball speeds and slow camera frame-rates the goal of complete accuracy will always be beyond reach. Here it is suggested that the purpose of technological aids to umpires and referees be looked at in a new way that takes the viewers into account. (shrink)

Noam Chomsky often appeals to the distinction between problems and mysteries. This chapter explains and evaluates Chomsky's remarks on these topics scattered throughout numerous texts. Next, it explains the p/m distinction via Chomsky's analogy of science with language. The chapter briefly discusses the topic of linguistic creativity. It focuses on the distinction itself, not what might fall under it. The chapter critically evaluates Chomsky's considerations in favor of the conception of the p/m distinction. A further suggestion from Chomsky is that (...) convergence is a key signature of a science‐forming faculty. Convergence on scientific theories requires explanation, for that there is convergence at all appears not to follow from the observational data, still less the socio‐cultural facts of scientific practice. (shrink)

BioShock begins simply with the text “1960 Mid‐Atlantic.” The player's horizon shifts to accommodate this fact, like not being so surprised that Jack can smoke in the airplane. What follows in BioShock is the development of a narrative where it is assumed that Jack is entering Rapture for the first time in his life. Later, it is revealed that he is not. When Andrew Ryan exposes Jack's real identity, Ryan is falsifying both the narrative of Jack coming to Rapture for (...) the first time and the meta‐narrative of the player operating a free agent as an avatar. Understanding how BioShock effectively manipulates players will take us through a variety of territories: cognitive science, philosophy of mind, philosophical hermeneutics, philosophy of video gaming, and philosophy of free will. It's all a testament to the brilliance of BioShock and a demonstration of how video games can teach us‐ even change us. (shrink)

Intersectionality has attracted substantial scholarly attention in the 1990s. Rather than examining gender, race, class, and nation as distinctive social hierarchies, intersectionality examines how they mutually construct one another. I explore how the traditional family ideal functions as a privileged exemplar of intersectionality in the United States. Each of its six dimensions demonstrates specific connections between family as a gendered system of social organization, racial ideas and practices, and constructions of U.S. national identity.

The use of upper limb vibration during exercise and rehabilitation continues to gain popularity as a modality to improve function and performance. Currently, a lack of knowledge of the pathways being altered during ULV limits its effective implementation. Therefore, the aim of this study was to investigate whether indirect ULV modulates transmission along spinal and corticospinal pathways that control the human forearm. All measures were assessed under CONTROL and ULV conditions while participants maintained a small contraction of the right flexor (...) carpi radialis muscle. To assess spinal pathways, Hoffmann reflexes elicited by stimulation of the median nerve were recorded from FCR with motor response amplitudes matched between conditions. An H-reflex conditioning paradigm was also used to assess changes in presynaptic inhibition by stimulating the superficial radial nerve 37 ms prior to median nerve stimulation. Cutaneous reflexes in FCR elicited by stimulation of the SR nerve at the wrist were also recorded. To assess corticospinal pathways, motor evoked potentials elicited by transcranial magnetic stimulation of the contralateral motor cortex were recorded from the right FCR and biceps brachii. ULV significantly reduced H-reflex amplitude by 15.7% for both conditioned and unconditioned reflexes. Therefore, ULV inhibits cutaneous and H-reflex transmission without influencing corticospinal excitability of the forearm flexors suggesting increased presynaptic inhibition of afferent transmission as a likely mechanism. A general increase in inhibition of spinal pathways with ULV may have important implications for improving rehabilitation for individuals with spasticity. (shrink)

We use recent developments within philosophy of science and within certain strands of linguistic research to throw light on each other. According to Ronald Giere's perspectivist philosophy of science, the scientific understanding of reality must proceed along different, mutually irreducible lines of approach. Giere's proposal, however, leaves unresolved the problem of how to integrate the ever‐growing multitude of highly diverse scientific accounts of what is, after all, one and the same world. We propose a technique for the alignment of different (...) perspectives that will permit cross‐perspectival explanation, and thus allow for a more holistic picture of reality to emerge. With respect to modern linguistics, however, Giere's perspectivism merely legalises a de facto state of affairs, as this discipline displays the peaceful coexistence of a multitude of different theoretical perspectives. Still, this makes it all the more important to show how the different aspects of language picked out by these different perspectives combine to form one single complex reality. During our investigation, a largely overlooked type of reduction within linguistics comes to light, prevalent in classical as well as current work within speech act theory and politeness theory. We suggest how a more holistic understanding of language can be attained through our technique for integrating different perspectives. (shrink)

This text brings together for the first time two complete key works from classical antiquity on the politics of Athens: Plato's Menexenus and Pericles' funeral oration.

A prominent approach to scientific explanation and modeling claims that for a model to provide an explanation it must accurately represent at least some of the actual causes in the event's causal history. In this paper, I argue that many optimality explanations present a serious challenge to this causal approach. I contend that many optimality models provide highly idealized equilibrium explanations that do not accurately represent the causes of their target system. Furthermore, in many contexts, it is in virtue of (...) their independence of causes that optimality models are able to provide a better explanation than competing causal models. Consequently, our account of explanation and modeling must expand beyond the causal approach. (shrink)

When Leviathan appeared as the third version of Thomas Hobbes' s civil science, it was notable in several respects: its rhetorical strategies, its political implications, and its appeal to an anglophone audience. There has been much scholarly attention paid to Hobbes's religious writing, but little specifically to his use of the phrase the “Christian Commonwealth.” Hobbes's first invocation of the notion of the Christian Commonwealth was found in his early Elements of Law. Hobbes's main concern was to secure the “obedience (...) to public authority” of Christians living in Christian polities, and the “Christian Commonwealth” found in the Elements was primarily distinguished from non‐Christian polities. The Christian Commonwealth of Leviathan was an absolute political entity achievable wherever a sovereign state espoused Hobbes's minimal theology. Bramhall's objection to Hobbes's pluralistic and minimal understanding of Christian polities, shorn of all clerical authority, would persist in high church and particularly Catholic ecclesiology. (shrink)

Temporal externalism (TE) is the thesis (defended by Jackman (1999)) that the contents of some of an individual’s thoughts and utterances at time t may be determined by linguistic developments subsequent to t. TE has received little discussion so far, Brown 2000 and Stoneham 2002 being exceptions. I defend TE by arguing that it solves several related problems concerning the extension of natural kind terms in scientifically ignorant communities. Gary Ebbs (2000) argues that no theory can reconcile our ordinary, practical (...) judgments of sameness of extension over time with the claim that linguistic usage determines word extensions. I argue that Ebbs shows at most that no theory other than TE can effect this reconciliation. Furthermore, while Ebbs’ argument undermines Jessica Brown’s solutions to two closely related problems about natural kind term extensions (Brown 1998), TE can solve both problems without difficulty. Some criticisms of TE are briefly addressed as well. (shrink)

A tort. Marcuse est d'abord un philosophe qui s'inspire de la grande tradition de la philosophie allemande, celle de Kant, Hegel et Marx. Commentateur scrupuleux de Hegel, Marcuse en produit une lecture critique vivifiante, loin des idées toutes faites sur ce maître éminent. Fidèle à Marx - mais pas aux marxisme standard, ce qui lui a valu l'hostilité de tous les gardiens du temple marxiste - il lie étroitement la critique sociale à la théorie analytique de Freud. Bref avec Marcuse, (...) c'est tout un pan de la culture moderne que nous sommes invités à reparcourir. Mais Marcuse est aussi l'un des penseurs de la théorie critique. Son objet, c'est la société industrielle avancée, la nôtre. On pourrait croire que ses oeuvres décrivent notre présent alors qu'elles ont été écrites voilà un demi-siècle et plus. La "désublimation répressive", l'utilisation du principe de plaisir au profit de la domination, c'est bien quelque chose qui a pris aujourd'hui une ampleur que l'on pouvait à peine soupçonner au moment où Marcuse écrit Eros et civilisation ou L'homme unidimensionnel. Comment ne pas voir que l'extension indéfinie du marketing et des techniques de la communication produisent cette uni-dimensionnalité de la pensée que Marcuse analyse et dénonce si vigoureusement? Enfin Marcuse est un philosophe de la culture. L'art et le sens du beau sont, pour lui, essentiellement libérateurs. S'il continue de penser nécessaires l'émancipation politique et la transformation des rapports sociaux, il sait que la libération humaine est celle de l'individu qui doit reprendre possession de lui-même en se débarrasser de l'aliénation. Il ne s'agit pas de dessiner un avenir plus rationnel mais surtout la perspective d'une vie plus libre et plus belle. (shrink)

This is a condensed version of an in-process book on the fine-tuning argument for God’s existence. In this 48,000 word essay, I first develop a probabilistic framework for articulating the argument, and then use this framework to answer in detail many of the objections commonly raised against it. Along the way, I present some of the fine-tuning evidence itself and consider major objections against the evidence; further, there are two major sections dealing with the multiverse objection, particularly that based on (...) inflationary cosmology. (shrink)

Noam Chomsky's engagement with contemporary philosophy from the 1960s onwards has involved lengthy discussion with critics and others on the significance of linguistics for traditional and contemporary philosophy. This chapter draws the background to generative linguistics and shows how Chomsky's real philosophical achievement in this area was to pose an explanatory question that had previously been neglected. Generative grammar as a research field was initiated by Chomsky in the 1950s. Chomsky's cognitive turn was revolutionary, not least because it went against (...) the philosophical grain vis‐a‐vis the role of formalism or logical analysis. P. Strawson had suggested that there is a Homeric struggle between those who favor a formal approach to natural language and those who favor a communicationintention approach. For Chomsky, the proper role of formalism in the realm of natural language is the framing of structural constraints on the consumption and production of language, both of which are cognitive capacities. (shrink)

Quel sens y a-t-il à faire de la philosophie et à l'enseigner? Si aujourd'hui la réponse à ces questions semble complexe, et peut-être même impossible à trouver, cette réflexion de haute volée propose des trajets dans la philosophie - de la philosophie première à la philosophie morale et politique - qui s'éloignent des pratiques actuelles parfois dénaturantes. Un ouvrage qui s'adresse à ceux qui voudraient se risquer à emprunter ce chemin escarpé et merveilleux de la connaissance : la philosophie.

Recently philosophers of science have begun to pay more attention to the use of highly idealized mathematical models in scientific theorizing. An important example of this kind of highly idealized modeling is the widespread use of optimality models within evolutionary biology. One way to understand the explanations provided by these models is as a censored causal explanation: an explanation that omits certain causal factors in order to focus on a modular subset of the causal processes that led to the explanandum. (...) In this paper, I first argue that the censored causal model approach fails to establish a permanent explanatory role for optimality models in biology and mischaracterizes the explanatory virtues of biological optimality modeling. In addition, I argue that many biological optimality explanations cannot be characterized as censored causal explanations. In response, I propose an alternative approach that analyzes optimality models’ reliance on synchronically representing a system’s constraints and tradeoffs as well as their employment of various kinds of idealization in order to provide equilibrium explanations. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: Two Views of Authenticity Being a Real Father Notes.

Changing Ideals in Modern Architecture revolutionized the understanding of modernism in architecture, pushing back the sense of its origin from the early twentieth century to the 1750s and thus placing architectural thought within the a broader context of Western intellectual history. This new edition of Peter Collins's ground-breaking study includes all seventy-two illustrations of the original hard cover edition, which has been out of print since 1967, and restores the large format.

Griffiths and Machery (2008) argue that innateness is a ?folk biological? notion, which, as such, has no useful reconstruction in contemporary biology. If this is so, not only is it wrong to identify the vernacular notion with the precise theoretical concept of canalization, but worse, it would appear that many of the putative scientific claims for particular competences and capacities being innate are simply misplaced. The present paper challenges the core substantive claim of Griffiths and Machery's position, namely, that innateness (...) understood on canalization lines as environment-independent development (somehow and to some degree) is a confused, outmoded notion. It will be contended that the modality-independence of language offers a prima facie case against Griffiths and Machery's general position. (shrink)