Physician Assisted Suicide is illegal in Rhode Island. The Lila Manfield Sapinsley Compassionate Care Act would make PAS legal if passed into law and it was reintroduced in 2021 in the General Assembly of Rhode Island. This letter by SCSS Board of Directors member Dr. Peter Colosi of Salve Regina College in Rhode Island was written in response to that and was published in The Newport Daily News in Newport, Rhode Island, on March 18, 2021, and is reprinted (...) in the Review with permission. (shrink)

Physician Assisted Suicide is illegal in Rhode Island. The Lila Manfield Sapinsley Compassionate Care Act would make PAS legal if passed into law and it was reintroduced in 2021 in the General Assembly of Rhode Island. This guest editorial was published in The Rhode Island Catholic in Newport, Rhode Island, on May 20, 2021.

There is a pedagogical method of bringing undergraduate students to conceive the body–soul question. Similarly, there is a simple philosophical argument in defense of the existence of the soul via contemporary autobiographical stories, recent neuroscientific literature, and Socrates’s distinction between condition and cause in Plato’s Phaedo. This method has proved helpful in enabling students to gain access to the mystery and grandeur of the body–soul question and its foundational importance with respect to ethics and, indeed, to the meaning of life. (...) There must be a revival of collaboration between neuroscientists and philosophers to coauthor papers that explicitly challenge the materialist assumptions in the fields of neuroscience and psychology. (shrink)

BackgroundThe current study set out to improve our understanding of the characteristics of individuals who are motivated to restrict their food intake yet who nevertheless fail to do so. We examined whether punishment sensitivity was related to restrained eating, and reward sensitivity to perceived dieting success. Additionally, it was examined whether executive control moderates the association between RS and perceived dieting success.MethodsFemale student participants completed questionnaires on restrained eating, perceived dieting success, RS and PS, and carried out a behavioral task (...) to index EC.ResultsPS was indeed positively related to restrained eating. RS was positively related to perceived dieting success, yet, EC did not moderate this association.ConclusionThe current study adds to the evidence that PS is related to individuals’ motivation to restrict their food intake. Furthermore, it shows support for the suggestion that RS may facilitate food restriction. (shrink)

The view advanced by Madole & Harden falls back on the dogma of a gene as a DNA sequence that codes for a fixed product with an invariant function regardless of temporal and spatial contexts. This outdated perspective entrenches the metaphor of genes as static units of information and glosses over developmental complexities.

Alan C. LoveDarwinian calisthenicsAn athlete engages in calisthenics as part of basic training and as a preliminary to more advanced or intense activity. Whether it is stretching, lunges, crunches, or push-ups, routine calisthenics provide a baseline of strength and flexibility that prevent a variety of injuries that might otherwise be incurred. Peter Bowler has spent 40 years doing Darwinian calisthenics, researching and writing on the development of evolutionary ideas with special attention to Darwin and subsequent filiations among scientists exploring (...) evolution . Therefore, we would expect that when Bowler engages in a counterfactual history—imagining a world without Darwin—he is able to avoid historical injury and generate novel insights. My assessment is that the results are mixed. Before we can see why, it is necessary to walk briskly through the main contours of his argument.Bowler begins with an apologia for a counterfactual appr .. (shrink)

Acknowledgments 1. Culture Is Essential 2. Culture Exists 3. Culture Evolves 4. Culture Is an Adaptation 5. Culture Is Maladaptive 6. Culture and Genes Coevolve 7. Nothing about Culture Makes Sense except in the Light of Evolution.

Impairments in cognitive coordination in schizophrenia are supported by phenomenological data that suggest deficits in the processing of visual context. Although the target article is sympathetic to such a phenomenological perspective, we argue that the relevance of phenomenological data for a wider understanding of consciousness in schizophrenia is not sufficiently addressed by the authors.

From the start, John Dewey's ideas about education have been prone to misunderstanding. One of the greatest casualties has been "experience," a term so routinely misappropriated that Dewey ultimately decided to abandon it. He wrote, "I would abandon the term 'experience' because of my growing realization that the historical obstacles which prevented understanding of my use of 'experience' are, for all practical purposes, insurmountable. I would substitute the term 'culture' because with its meanings as now firmly established it can fully (...) and freely carry my philosophy of experience" (1981, p. 361). Dewey evidently recognized that a main challenge to understanding experience was the conceptual weight the term had .. (shrink)

The epistemological premises and scientific viability of Stoffregen & Bardy's ecological perspective are evaluated by analyzing the concept of direct perception of global invariants vis-à-vis (1) behavioral evidence that perception is based on the integration of modal sources of information and (2) neurophysiological aspects of the integration of sensory signals.

The metaphysical status of the placenta has bearing on several ongoing discussions within Catholic moral theology. Numerous bioethicists and theologians have touched on this topic briefly, but to date no robust metaphysical argument appears in the literature. The authors aim to provide such an analysis. First, they provide an overview of the existing literature on the topic. Second, they briefly review the anatomy and physiology of the placenta. Third, they provide metaphysical and biological reasons why the placenta cannot be a (...) part of the fetus, a part of the mother, simultaneously a part of both, the border at which mother and fetus meet, or a separate individual substance. Finally, they provide reasons that support their claim that the placenta is a quasi-substance that exists in symbiosis with mother and child. National Catholic Bioethics Quarterly 14.2 : 295–333. (shrink)

Nutrition and hydration—including artificially delivered, or assisted, nutrition and hydration (ANH)—are typically considered ordinary or proportionate care in the Roman Catholic moral tradition. They are thus morally obligatory, except when the benefit to the patient does not justify the burden their administration places on the patient or when they no longer prolong life (e.g., in end-stage disease when death is imminent). A review of Church documents and the medical literature provides convincing evidence that there are cases in which ANH provides (...) little hope of benefit and may impose an excessive burden on the patient. This paper closely examines advanced dementia of the Alzheimer’s (DAT) type and shows how ANH can be properly considered extraordinary care and hence is not obligatory in patients with advanced DAT. National Catholic Bioethics Quarterly 8.2 (Summer 2008): 291–305. (shrink)

The authors offer a fresh look at the debate about the use of assisted nutrition and hydration in advanced dementia. The philosophical and ethical issues are presented. The importance of distinguishing basic care from medical acts is explained. A key question is addressed: Does ANH nourish and hydrate the patient with dementia? The ANH debate is placed in its cultural context and contrasted with the Catholic response. A clinical analysis of the evidence for benefit and harm of ANH in advanced (...) dementia is given. The authors point out the lack of hard evidence against ANH, discuss questions that need further clinical research, and argue that there is sufficient evidence for a presumption, in principle, in favor of ANH in patients with advanced dementia. National Catholic Bioethics Quarterly 14.1 : 53–63. (shrink)

Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, EarlyView.

Robert Audi’s Seeing, Knowing, and Doing argues that knowledge does not entail justification, given a broadly externalist conception of knowledge and an access internalist conception of justification, where justification requires the ability to cite one’s grounds or reasons. On this view, animals and small children can have knowledge while lacking justification. About cases like these and others, Audi concludes that knowledge does not entail justification. But the access internalist sense of “justification” is but one of at least two ordinary senses (...) of the term. On a broader or looser sense, “justification” means “being in the right” where that involves meeting a standard or norm. I argue that the beliefs of animals and small children can then meet standards or norms associated with truth and knowledge such that their beliefs may count as justified in this broader or looser sense. I then question whether knowledge fails to entail justification on this broader sense. (shrink)

Know-how has a distinctive, non-instrumental value that a mere reliable ability lacks. Some, including Bengson and Moffett Knowing how, Oxford University Press, Oxford, pp 161–195, 2011) and Carter and Pritchard :799–816, 2015b) have cited a close relation between knowhow and cognitive achievement, and it is tempting to think that the value of know-how rests in that relation. That’s not so, however. The value of know-how lies in its relation to the fundamental value of autonomy.

The accuracy-first program attempts to ground epistemology in the norm that one’s beliefs should be as accurate as possible, where accuracy is measured using a scoring rule. We argue that considerations of scientific progress suggest that such a monism about epistemic value is untenable. In particular, we argue that counterexamples to the standard scoring rules are ubiquitous in the history of science, and hence that these scoring rules cannot be regarded as a precisification of our intuitive concept of epistemic value.

This comprehensive and important volume includes contributions by activists, journalists, lawyers and scholars from twenty-one countries. The essays map the directions the movement for women's rights is taking--and will take in the coming decades--and the concomittant transformation of prevailing notions of rights and issues. They address topics such as the rapes in former Yugoslavia and efforts to see that a War Crimes Tribunal responds; domestic violence; trafficking of women into the sex trade; the persecution of lesbians; female genital mutilation; and (...) reproductive rights. (shrink)

Starmaking brings together a cluster of work published over the past 35 years by Nelson Goodman and two Harvard colleagues, Hilary Putnam and Israel Scheffler, on the conceptual connections between monism and pluralism, absolutism and relativism, and idealism and different notions of realism -- issues that are central to metaphysics and epistemology. The title alludes to Goodman's famous defense of the claim that because all true representations of stars and other objects are human creations, it follows that in an important (...) sense the stars themselves are made by us. More generally, the argument moves from the fact that our right representations are constructed by us to the claim that the world itself is similarly constructed. Starmaking addresses the question of whether this seeming paradox can be turned into a serious philosophical view. Goodman and Putnam are sympathetic; Scheffler is the critic. Although many others continue to write about pluralism, relativism, and constructionalism, Starmaking brings together the protagonists in the debate since its beginnings and follows closely its still developing form and substance, focusing sharply on Goodman's claim that "we make versions, and right versions make worlds.". (shrink)

Proper functionalism explicates epistemic warrant in terms of the function and normal functioning of the belief-forming process. There are two standard substantive views of the sources of functions in the literature in epistemology: God (intelligent design) or Mother Nature (evolution by natural selection). Both appear to confront the Swampman objection: couldn’t there be a mind with warranted beliefs neither designed by God nor the product of evolution by natural selection? Is there another substantive view that avoids the Swampman objection? There (...) are two. The first is the generalized selected-effects theory of functions. The second is the organizational theory of functions. Both, however, require some history to assign functions, for both are etiological theories of functions: past effects help explain current function. Swampman can then acquire functions, perhaps soon after creation, though he has none at the moment of inception. (shrink)

Jennifer Lackey argues that “testimony” in philosophy has one sense, but that sense—the concept expressed—is disjunctive. One disjunct she calls speaker-testimony and the other disjunct she calls hearer-testimony. A speaker then testifies simpliciter iff the speaker either speaker-testifies or hearer-testifies. Inadequate views of testimony, she argues, fail to recognize, distinguish and then disjoin these two “aspects” of testimony. I argue that her view about the semantics of “testimony” is mistaken and that her criticisms of two other views—mine included —are ineffective. (...) I argue that instead of one disjunctive concept, the word “testimony” expresses more than one concept; “testimony” means many things. In ordinary English, it names two distinct kinds of constative speech acts. In epistemology, it gets used a synonym for “assertion”. In epistemology, it also refers to the process whereby we form beliefs on the basis of comprehending assertions—to communication or interlocution. (shrink)

The case of very young children is a test case for the plausibility of reductionism about testimonial warrant. Reductionism requires reductive reasons, reductively justified and actively deployed for testimonial justification. Though nascent language-users enjoy warranted testimony based beliefs, they do not meet these three reductionist demands. This paper clearly formulates reductionism and the infant/child objection. Two rejoinders are discussed: an influential conceptual argument from Jennifer Lackey’s paper “Testimony and the Infant/Child Objection” and the growing empirical evidence from developmental psychology on (...) selective trust in children. Neither Lackey’s argument nor the empirical evidence vindicate reductionism. (shrink)

The norm of assertion, to be in force, is a social norm. What is the content of our social norm of assertion? Various linguistic arguments purport to show that to assert is to represent oneself as knowing. But to represent oneself as knowing does not entail that assertion is governed by a knowledge norm. At best these linguistic arguments provide indirect support for a knowledge norm. Furthermore, there are alternative, non-normative explanations for the linguistic data (as in recent work from (...) Van Elswyk). Direct arguments would rely on normative judgments about the permissibility or impermissibility of assertions with and without the speaker knowing the content asserted. John Turri's work experimental results purport to show that our norm of assertion is factive, and probably knowledge. But as a number of recent experimentalists (Kneer, Reuter and Broessel, Marsili and Wiegmann) have shown, Turri's results rely on the problemmatic use of 'should' as in 'Maria should assert that she owns a 1990 watch.' Correcting for this, these experimentalists provide strong evidence that our norm of assertion is not factive. The standard reply to evidence like this from the assertion of unlucky falsehoods is the excuse maneuver. But Marsili and Wiegmann, following Turri's protocol for testing for excuse validation, show that participants who judge that assertions unlucky falsehoods are permissible are not guilty of excuse validation. Given our current understanding of the experimental evidence, knowledge is not our norm of assertion. (shrink)

Realists and supporters of ‘democratic underlabouring’ have recently challenged the traditional separation between political theory and practice. Although both attack Jürgen Habermas for being an idealist whose philosophy is too removed from politics, I argue that this interpretation is inaccurate. While Habermas’s social and political theory is indeed oriented to truth and understanding, he has sought realize his communicative conception of democracy by increasing the quality of political debate as a public intellectual. Building on his approach, I argue that giving (...) the theorist a direct role in public policy undermines theory as an enterprise oriented towards truth while overlooking the contingency, participatory nature and complicated internal logics of social and political practice. My basic thesis is that Habermas’s understanding of the relationship between theory and practice overcomes these difficulties by providing an account of theory that is independent but simultaneously also allows philosophers to participate in politics as public intellectuals. (shrink)

These volumes conclude a series initiated in 1974, marking almost fifty years of effort by a huge cohort of scholars. This review is thus a valedictory for the whole series as well as an account of what we have learned from the most recent volumes about Darwin's final years (1879–82). The project was begun by Frederick Burckhardt, who shared the editorial role for the early volumes with Sydney Smith and a rolling sequence of assistant editors and advisers who eventually comprised (...) a significant fraction of the leading members of what used to be called the ‘Darwin industry’. Smith passed away in 1988 (volume 7 notes his legacy). Burkardt too left this world in 2007 – volume 16, part 1 includes an obituary, but his name has been retained and Cambridge University Press still ask that the series be cited as ‘Burkhardt et al.’ Duncan Porter took over for volumes 8–15, again with a sequence of fellow editors and assistants, after which James Secord became head of the project through its final years. The dedications of successive volumes record the efforts of individual scholars who have aided the teams and the involvement of the many institutions and foundations that have leant moral and material support over the years. For those of us with Cambridge connections, the University Library will not seem the same without the presence of the team it supported. (shrink)

Thinking through Kierkegaard is a critical evaluation of Søren Kierkegaard's vision of the normatively human, of who we are and might aspire to become, and of what Mehl calls our existential identity.

Alvin Plantinga argues by counterexample that no naturalistic account of functions is possible--God is then the only source for natural functions. This paper replies to Plantinga's examples and arguments. Plantinga misunderstands naturalistic accounts. Plantinga's mistakes flow from his assimilation of functional notions in general to functions from intentional design in particular.

What is good political judgment? Is it a science subject to strict standards of logic and inference, or is it more like an art, the product of intuition, feeling, or even chance? Peter J. Steinberger shows how the seemingly contradictory claims of inference and intuition are reconciled in the concept of political judgment. Resting his argument on the larger notion of judgment itself, Steinberger develops an original model of how political judgments are made and how we justify calling some (...) of them "good." His systematic analysis of such thinkers as Machiavelli, Kant, Gadamer, Wittgenstein, and Oakeshott introduces an original notion of judgment as "intelligent performance," incorporating both intuition and rational reconstruction. Steinberger's conclusion—that a coherent political society must also be a judgmental one—flies in the face of much contemporary thinking. (shrink)

A history of science text imagining how evolutionary theory and biology would have been understood if Darwin had never published his "Origin of Species" and other works.--publisher summary.

In a recent book, Anjan Chakravartty builds a case for a particular conception of the relationship of science to metaphysics. The main novel feature in his account of scientific ontology is his construction of a metaphysical distance measure. Some ontological claims are close to the science that informs those claims, and some are further away. The distance is a measure of the epistemic risk one takes in asserting the claim: the further from the empirical base, the greater the risk. But (...) conversely, claims far from the empirical base can serve explanatory and unificatory purposes regarding claims closer in. Since different philosophers have different attitudes towards epistemic risk, Chakravartty endorses a pluralism about scientific ontology. Chakravartty illustrates his arguments concerning scientific ontology by considering what we can infer from the Standard Model of particle physics concerning the ontological status of the structures and entities it describes. I argue that, while this case study initially appears to support Chakravartty’s arguments, on closer inspection it suggests a more deflationary approach to scientific ontology. (shrink)

The Causal Theory of Quantum Mechanics provides a better understanding of the fundamentals of quantum mechanics than is provided by Orthodox (i.e. Copenhagen) Quantum Theory by describing micro-phenomena in terms of entities and processes in space and time, thereby embracing causality at the quantum level. The book focuses especially on finding solutions to conceptual issues about the nature of energy, the conservation of energy, forces, and the Exclusion Principle within the context of the Causal Theory of Quantum Mechanics.

The dual inheritance or gene–culture coevolution theory of human evolution was developed in the 1970s and 80s. Early work built mathematical theories derived from then-current work in human development, sociolinguistics, and the diffusion of innovations. More recently it has included a considerable amount of new empirical work. The theory has always had critics in evolutionary biology and the social and behavioral sciences. Morin's book critiques the theory from an alternate epidemiological or attraction theory of cultural evolution that doubts that imitation (...) and adaptation play significant roles in cultural evolution. Lewens's book is a wide-ranging analysis of critiques of gene–culture coevolution theory that finds most of them in error or at least not fatal to the project. His book includes a chapter on critiques based on considerations of human nature, of which Morin's book is one variant, and which Lewens argues are faulty. That is also my conclusion. (shrink)

The problem of political action has its roots, arguably, in the sixth book of the Nicomachean Ethics, where Aristotle seeks to describe an intellectual virtue – phronêsis – that is different from the faculty of theoretical reason but that is nonetheless capable of producing genuinely objective, rational knowledge, i.e., knowledge of what is true. The problem, specifically, is to understand how such a thing is possible, and much of the recent literature appears to suggest that perhaps it’s not. Since rhetoric, (...) persuasion, interest and emotion are obviously central features of political life, it may seem that some kind of non-intellectualist and non-rationalist perspective must be the way to go. I argue, nonetheless, that any such account is, and cannot but be, deeply problematic; and I defend, by way of contrast, a decidedly intellectualistic understanding of political enterprise. (shrink)

How should we undertand the role of norms—especially epistemic norms—governing assertive speech acts? Mitchell Green (2009) has argued that these norms play the role of handicaps in the technical sense from the animal signals literature. As handicaps, they then play a large role in explaining the reliability—and so the stability (the continued prevalence)—of assertive speech acts. But though norms of assertion conceived of as social norms do indeed play this stabilizing role, these norms are best understood as deterrents and not (...) as handicaps. This paper explains the stability problem for the maintenance of animal signals, and so human communication, for we are animals too, after all; the mechanics of the handicap principle; the role of deterrents and punishments as an alternative mechanism; and the role of social norms governing assertion for the case of human communication. (shrink)

Spontaneous collapse theories provide a promising solution to the measurement problem. But they also introduce a number of problems of their own concerning dimensionality, vagueness, and locality. In response to these problems, advocates of collapse theories have proposed various accounts of the primitive ontology of collapse theories—postulated underlying entities governed by the collapse theory and underwriting our observations. The most prominent of these are a mass density distribution over three-dimensional space, and a set of discrete “flash” events at space-time points. (...) My argument here is that these primitive ontologies are redundant, in the sense that the structures exhibited by the primitive ontologies that allow them to solve the problems facing spontaneous collapse theories are also present in the wave function. But redundancy is not nonexistence; indeed, the fact that the relevant structures are already there in the wave function shows that the mass density ontology and the flash ontology exist whether they are explicitly postulated or not. By the same token, there is no need to decide between a wave function ontology, a mass density ontology and a flash ontology. (shrink)

Peter J. King; Lycan on Lewis and Meinong1, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Volume 93, Issue 1, 1 June 1993, Pages 193–202, https://doi.org/10.1093/ari.