Background Empirical studies of surrogate decision-making tend to assume that surrogates should make only a 'substituted judgement'—that is, judge what the patient would want if they were mentally competent. Objectives To explore what people want in a surrogate decision-maker whom they themselves select and to test the assumption that people want their chosen surrogate to make only a substituted judgement. Methods 30 undergraduate students were recruited. They were presented with a hypothetical scenario about their expected loss of mental capacity in (...) the future and asked to answer some questions about their choice of surrogate. These data were analysed qualitatively using thematic content analysis. Results Most respondents talked about choosing someone who was caring and competent in certain ways, giving interesting evidence for their judgements. Surprisingly few highlighted how well they thought their chosen surrogate knew their preferences and would be able to make a substituted judgement. Moreover, few specified that their chosen surrogate had similar attitudes and values to their own and so would make a similar decision to theirs in the circumstances presented. Some respondents also referred to the social role of their chosen surrogate or the social dynamics of their situation which influenced their choices, as well as to ideas of reciprocity and characteristics of honesty and loyalty. Conclusion In the event that they lose mental capacity, many people will not select a surrogate to decide about medical treatments on their behalf solely on the basis that they expect their surrogate to make a substituted judgement. (shrink)

This book provides practical and research-based chapters that offer greater clarity about the particular kinds of teacher reflection that matter and avoids talking about teacher reflection generically, which implies that all kinds of reflection are of equal value.

J. L. Mackie distinguished himself in twentieth-century philosophy by presenting an important objection to the traditional free will explanation for why God would allow evil: If evil is due to the free choice of creatures, why wouldn’t an omnipotent God simply create free creatures who would choose better? Alvin Plantinga, in turn, distinguished himself with his critique of Mackie. Plantinga’s main point is that Mackie made a mistake in assuming that it is within the power of omnipotence fully to create (...) just any possible world. However, Mackie made a second questionable assumption which Plantinga does not critique, and which I aim to clarify in this article. Mackie assumes that a God, as construed by classical theistic belief, who could create either of two people—one of whom would freely choose right and the other of whom would freely choose wrong—must create the one who would freely choose right. This assumption motivates Plantinga’s own account of trans-world depravity, which suggests that every free creature God might have created would have sinned had God created them. I consider Plantinga’s suggestion highly improbable. More importantly, under Mackie’s assumption, if there is at least one possible creature who would choose rightly, then there is no possibility of God ever allowing any other creature to sin, which would seem to be incompatible with their having any free will. -/- This version of the paper does have the same pagination as the published version. Permission has been granted from the Editor of Philosophia Christi to upload this contribution according to Philosophy Documentation Center terms of use. Learn more about the Journal by going to wwwepsociety. org/philchristi. (shrink)

Demons have the power to cause temptations in us, and Christian materialism implies the supervenience of temptations on brain states. This in turn implies that demons bring about temptations by causally interfering with our brains. But if they have such an ability to affect the physical world, it is mysterious why they do not wreak more havoc than they do both to our brains and in the world more generally. Substance dualism provides an elegant solution: demonic temptation is not a (...) species of soul-to-brain causation, but soul-to-soul, and we don’t need to suppose demons have the power to directly affect the physical world. Materialist solutions, in contrast, are ad hoc. (shrink)

Steve Cowan had criticized my defense of theistic science on four grounds: (1) my critique of compatibilism attacks a straw man; (2) libertarianism cannot meet some of the conditions for responsible action; (3) attributing libertarian agency to God has the unacceptable implication that God can do evil; and (4) we don’t need libertarianism to provide a model of divine actions sufficient to justify the scientific detectability of miracles. I clarify and respond to these points in the order listed and conclude (...) that Cowan’s critique fails. (shrink)

J. L. Schellenberg has provided a rigorous and robust philosophical defense of religious skepticism through various modes of reasoning and employs an epistemic defeat strategy that appeals to unrecognized evidence. He contends on this framework that reason requires religious skepticism. This essay focuses on Schellenberg’s basic epistemic defeat strategy. I argue that his methodology is problematic because his key skeptical argument rests on an equivocation on the notion of total evidence, which makes it difficult to implement his epistemic defeat strategy (...) in favor of his claim that reason requires us to be religious skeptics. (shrink)

The natural name theory, recently discussed by Johnson (2018), is proposed as an explanation of pure quotation where the quoted term(s) refers to a linguistic object such as in the sentence ‘In the above, ‘bank’ is ambiguous’. After outlining the theory, I raise a problem for the natural name theory. I argue that positing a resemblance relation between the name and the linguistic object it names does not allow us to rule out cases where the natural name fails to resemble (...) the linguistic object it names. I argue that to avoid this problem, we can combine the natural name theory with a type-realist metaphysics of language, and hold that the name is natural because the name is an instance of the kind that it names. I conclude by reflecting on the importance of the metaphysics of language for questions in the philosophy of language. (shrink)

It has been a common assumption that words are substances that instantiate or have properties. In this paper, I question the assumption that our ontology of words requires posting substances by outlining a bundle theory of words, wherein words are bundles of various sorts of properties (such as semantic, phonetic, orthographic, and grammatical properties). I argue that this view can better account for certain phenomena than substance theories, is ontologically more parsimonious, and coheres with claims in linguistics.

Although the metaphysics of words remains a relatively understudied domain, one of the more discussed topics has been the question of how to account for the apparent sameness of words. Put one way, the question concerns what it is that makes two word- instances (or tokens) instances of the same word. In this paper, I argue that the existing solutions to the problems all fail as they take the problem of sameness of word to be a problem about how one (...) object relates to another. I propose an alternative solution to the problem of sameness of word which is instead focused on the intrinsic nature of the properties possessed by words. The result is a more thoroughgoing version of nominalism than is currently defended in the literature. (shrink)

What are words? What makes two token words tokens of the same word-type? Are words abstract entities, or are they (merely) collections of tokens? The ontology of words tries to provide answers to these, and related questions. This article provides an overview of some of the most prominent views proposed in the literature, with a particular focus on the debate between type-realist, nominalist, and eliminativist ontologies of words.

An ancient doctor who advocated the therapeutic benefits of wine and passive exercise was bound to be successful. However, Asclepiades of Bithynia did far more than reform much of traditional Hippocratic therapeutic practice; he devised an extraordinary physical theory which he used to explain all biological phenomena in uniformly simple terms. His work laid the theoretical basis for the anti-theoretical medical sect called Methodism. For his trouble he was despised by his intellectual progeny and, more importantly perhaps, by Galen. None (...) of his work survives intact, but copious ancient testimonia relating to him allow us to reconstruct many details of the theory. His ideas offer us a fascinating glimpse of how Hellenistic philosophy and medicine interacted, and provide an introduction to one of the most intriguing doctrinal disputes in Greek science. (shrink)

It has been widely argued that words are analogous to species such that words, like species, are natural kinds. In this paper, I consider the metaphysics of word-kinds. After arguing against an essentialist approach, I argue that word-kinds are homeostatic property clusters, in line with the dominant approach to other biological and psychological kinds.

ABSTRACT The idea that two words can be instances of the same word is a central intuition in our conception of language. This fact underlies many of the claims that we make about how we communicate, and how we understand each other. Given this, irrespective of what we think words are, it is common to think that any putative ontology of words, must be able to explain this feature of language. That is, we need to provide criteria of identity for (...) word-types which allow us to individuate words such that it can be the case that two particular word-instances are instances of the same word-type. One solution, recently further developed by Irmak, holds that words are individuated by their history. In this paper, I argue that this view either fails to account for our intuitions about word identity, or is too vague to be a plausible answer to the problem of word individuation. (shrink)

It is not intended as some sort of revelation on my part that Greenberg's cultural theory was originally Marxist in its stresses and, indeed in its attitude to what constituted explanation in such matters. I point out the Marxist and historical mode of proceeding as emphatically as I do partly because it may make my own procedure later in this paper seem a little less arbitrary. For I shall fall to arguing in the end with these essay's Marxism and their (...) history, and I want it understood that I think that to do so is to take issue with their strengths and their main drift.But I have to admit there are difficulties here. The essays in question ["Avant-Garde and Kitsch" and "Towards a Newer Lacoön"] are quite brief. They are, I think, extremely well written: it was not for nothing the Partisan Review described Clement Greenberg, when he first contributed to the journal early in 1939, as "a young writer who works in the New York customs house"—fine, redolent avant-garde pedigree, that! The language of these articles is forceful and easy, always straightforward, blessedly free from Marxist conundrums. Yet the price paid for such lucidity, here as so often, is a degree of inexplicitness—certain amount of elegant skirting round the difficult issues, where one might otherwise be obliged to call out the ponderous armory of Marx's concepts and somewhat spoil the low of the prose from one firm statement to another. The Marxism, in other words, is quite largely implicit; it is stated on occasion, with brittle and pugnacious finality, as the essay's frame of reference, but it remains to the reader to determine just how it works in the history and theory presented—what that history and theory depend on, in the way of Marxist assumptions about class and capital or even abase and superstructure. That is what I intend to do in this paper: to interpret and extrapolate from the texts, even at the risk of making their Marxism declare itself more stridently than the "young writer" seems to have wished. And I should admit straight away that there are several point in what follows where I am genuinely uncertain as to whether I am diverging from Greenberg's argument or explaining it more fully. This does not worry me overmuch, as long as we are alerted to the special danger in this case, dealing with such transparent yet guarded prose, and as long as we can agree that the project in general—pressing home a Marxist reading of texts which situate themselves within the Marxist tradition—is a reasonable one.22. This carelessness distinguishes the present paper from two recent studies of Greenberg's early writings, Serge Guilbaut's "The New Adventures of the Avant-Garde in America," October 15 , and Fred Orton and Griselda Pollock's "Avant-Gardes and Partisans Reviewed," Art History 3 I am indebted to both these essays and am sure that their strictures on the superficiality—not to say the opportunism–of Greenberg's Marxism are largely right. But I am nonetheless interested in the challenge offered to most Marxist, and non-Marxist, accounts of modern history by what I take to be a justified though extreme, pessimism as t the nature of established culture since 1870. That pessimism is characteristic, I suppose, of what Marxists call an ultraleftist point of view. I believe, as I say, that a version of some such view is correct and would therefore with to treat Greenberg's theory as if it were a decently elaborated Marxism of an ultraleftist kind, on which issues in certain mistaken views but which need not so issue and which might still provide, cleansed of those errors, a good vantage for a history of our culture.T. J. Clark, professor of fine arts at Harvard University, is the author of The Absolute Bourgeois: Artists and Politics in France, 1848-1851 and Image of the People: Gustave Courbet and the 1848 Revolution. His book on impressionist painting and Paris is forthcoming. (shrink)

Primitives are both important and unavoidable, and which set of primitives we endorse will greatly shape our theories and how those theories provide solutions to the problems that we take to be important. After introducing the notion of a primitive posit, I discuss the different kinds of primitives that we might posit. Following Cowling (2013), I distinguish between ontological and ideological primitives, and, following Benovsky (2013) between functional and content views of primitives. I then propose that these two distinctions cut (...) across each other leading to four types of primitive posits. I then argue that theoretical virtues should be taken to be meta-theoretical ideological primitives. I close with some reflections on the global nature of comparing sets of primitives. (shrink)

The intuitive difference between a system that choreographs the motion of its parts in the service of goals of its own formulation and a system composed of a collection of parts doing their own thing without coordination has been shaken by now familiar examples of self-organization. There is a broad and growing presumption in parts of philosophy and across the sciences that the appearance of centralized information-processing and control in the service of system-wide goals is mere appearance, i.e., an explanatory (...) heuristic we have evolved to predict behavior, but one that will eventually get swept away in the advancing tide of self-organization. I argue that there is a distinction of central importance here, and that no adequate science of complex systems can dispense with it. (shrink)

In a paper recently published in this Review, I tried to show that part of the formal beauty of the Hercules Furens is due to a subtle treatment of the familiar doctrine that the tyrant's wealth and power are of trifling value compared with Sophrosune, the gain that is really gain. Perhaps some further notes on the dramatic use made by Euripides of these familiar ideas may be of interest. One object with which I started was to observe the use (...) of the word τúραννος in Greek drama. Though the poets frequently enough use it merely as a convenient equivalent for βασιλεúσetc., popular feeling made it easy to suggest the meaning ‘tyrant,’ ‘bad King,’ or ‘Usurper’; and the poets use the ambiguity with great subtlety and in a manner which enables them to obtain fine effects of irony and scorn. What is more important is the fact that the notion of a tyrant with which we are acquainted in later Greek literature was already common-place in the fifth century, and that many dramatic effects depend on the recognition by the audience of the commonplace as such. Indeed, it is often the adaptation by the poet of the familiar ideas that lends formal beauty to compositions which, if we think simply of the plot, appear at first sight jerky or ‘epeisodic.’. (shrink)

Fluctuating asymmetry (FA) is small deviations from perfect symmetry in normally bilaterally symmetrical traits. We examined the relationship between FA of five body traits (ear height, length of three digits, and ankle circumference) and self-reported scores of physical and verbal aggression in a sample of 90 boys aged 10 to 15 years. The relationships between FA and scores of aggression (particularly physical aggression) were found to be negative; in other words, the most symmetrical boys showed highest aggression. One trait (ankle (...) circumference) showed the characteristics of “ideal” FA—parametric mean of zero and a normal distribution. Mean asymmetries calculated from six repeated measures of ankle FA in 30 subjects taken over a period of five months showed strong negative associations with scores of physical aggression which were independent of age, height, and weight.It is argued that soft tissue “cyclical” FA (as opposed to “fixed” bony FA) is dependent on the secretion of hormones: for example, cortisol. Causal associations between behavioral traits such as aggresion and hormones will lead to similar correlations between FA and behavior. (shrink)

The role of probability is one of the most contested issues in the interpretation of contemporary physics. In this paper, I’ll be reevaluating some widely held assumptions about where and how probabilities arise. Larry Sklar voices the conventional wisdom about probability in classical physics in a piece in the Stanford Online Encyclopedia of Philosophy, when he writes that “Statistical mechanics was the first foundational physical theory in which probabilistic concepts and probabilistic explanation played a fundamental role.” And the conventional wisdom (...) about quantum probabilities is that they are basic, not reducible to the types of probabilities we see in statistical mechanics. In the first section of this paper, I’ll argue that in fact classical physics was steeped in probability long before statistical mechanics came on the scene, specifically, that an objective measure over phase space is an indispensable component of any informative physical theory. In the next section, I’ll argue that this objective measure is the fundamental form of physical probability and that quantum probabilities can be defined in terms of it. In the last, I’ll raise some questions about the metaphysical status of the fundamental measure. (shrink)

There is a growing consensus in Britain on the importance of character, and on the belief that the virtues that contribute to good character are part of the solution to many of the challenges facing modern society. Parents, teachers and schools understand the need to teach basic moral virtues to pupils, such as honesty, self-control, fairness, and respect, while fostering behaviour associated with such virtues today. However, until recently, the materials required to help deliver this ambition have been missing in (...) Britain. The Knightly Virtues Programme, devised by the Jubilee Centre for Character and Virtues, aims to help solve this challenge. The programme, designed for 9 to 11 year olds, draws on selected classic stories to help teach moral character in schools. This approach has proved to be popular with children and teachers, with more than 5,000 pupils from one hundred schools having participated in the programme so far. Fifty-five of these schools and 3,272 pupils were directly involved in different stages of the research. Based at the University of Birmingham, the Jubilee Centre houses leading academics dedicated to researching the various ways in which good character, which underpins the building blocks of society, can be developed. Recent research from the Centre has shown that the qualities that make up character can be learnt and taught, and suggests that we need a new emphasis on their importance in schools and in professional education. This report from the Centre into the use of classic literature within schools sets out the ways in which the Knightly Virtues Programme is able to develop the virtue literacy of school pupils, and the extent to which an understanding and awareness of good moral character can make positive changes to behaviour. The impact of the programme has been tested using several rigorous research methods, detailed in this report alongside their findings, which provide substantial empirical evidence for the effectiveness of using stories to develop virtue literacy. (shrink)