This deeply informed history traces the controversial record of "mercy-killing," a source of heated debate among doctors and laypeople alike. Dowbiggin examines evolving opinions about what constitutes a good death, taking into account the societal and religious values placed on sin, suffering, resignation, judgment, penance, and redemption. He also examines the bitter struggle between those who stress a right to compassionate and effective end-of-life care and those who define human life in terms of either biological criteria, utilitarian standards, a (...) faith in science, humane medical treatment, the principle of personal autonomy, or individual human rights. Considering both the influence of technological and behavioral changes in the practice of medicine and the public's surprising lack of awareness of death's many clinical and biological dimensions, this book raises profound personal and collective questions on the future of euthanasia. (shrink)

A person required to risk money on a remote digit of π would, in order to comply fully with the theory [of personal probability] have to compute that digit, though this would really be wasteful if the cost of computation were more than the prize involved. For the postulates of the theory imply that you should behave in accordance with the logical implications of all that you know. Is it possible to improve the theory in this respect, making allowance within (...) it for the cost of thinking, or would that entail paradox? (shrink)

A growing number of authors defend putative examples of knowledge from falsehood (KFF), inferential knowledge based in a critical or essential way on false premises, and they argue that KFF has important implications for many areas of epistemology (whether evidence can be false, the Gettier debate, defeasibility theories of knowledge, etc.). I argue, however, that there is no KFF, because in any supposed example either the falsehood does not contribute to the knowledge or the subject lacks knowledge. In particular, I (...) show that if the subject actually has knowledge in putative KFF cases, then there is always a veridical evidential path meeting the basing conditions that accounts for her knowledge; if there is no such path, then the subject is in a type of Gettier case. All the recent arguments that rely on KFF are therefore based on a mistake. (shrink)

Some evil actions are public. Maybe genocide is the most awful. Other evil actions are private, a matter of one person harming another or of self-inflicted injury. Child abuse, in our current reckoning, is the worst of private evils. We want to put a stop to it. We know we can’t do that, not entirely. Human wickedness won’t go away. But we must protect as many children as we can. We want also to discover and help those who have already (...) been hurt. Anyone who feels differently is already something of a monster.We are so sure of these moral truths that we seldom pause to wonder what child abuse is. We know we don’t understand it. We have little idea of what prompts people to harm children. But we do have the sense that what we mean by child abuse is something perfectly definite. So it comes as a surprise that the very idea of child abuse has been in constant flux the past thirty years. Previously our present conception of abusing a child did not even exist. People do many of the same vile things to children, for sure, that they did a century ago. But we’ve been almost unwittingly changing the very definitions of abuse and revising our values and our moral codes accordingly. Ian Hacking, a philosopher, teaches at the Institute for the History and Philosophy of Science and Technology in the University of Toronto. His latest book is entitled The Taming of Chance. (shrink)

My Representing and Intervening (1983) concludes with what it calls an experimental argument for scientific realism about entities. The argument is evidently inapplicable to extragalactic astrophysics, but leaves open the possibility that there might be other grounds for scientific realism in that domain. Here I argue for antirealism in astrophysics, although not for any particular kind of antirealism. The argument is conducted by a detailed examination of some current research. It parallels the last chapter of (1983). Both represent the methodological (...) opinion that abstract or semantic realism/antirealism debates are empty, and typically lead to confused or wrong conclusions because they pay so little attention to the details of a science. (shrink)

Many philosophers and cognitive scientists claim that our everyday or "folk" understanding of mental states constitutes a theory of mind. That theory is widely called "folk psychology" (sometimes "commonsense" psychology). The terms in which folk psychology is couched are the familiar ones of "belief" and "desire", "hunger", "pain" and so forth. According to many theorists, folk psychology plays a central role in our capacity to predict and explain the behavior of ourselves and others. However, the nature and status of folk (...) psychology remains controversial. (shrink)

Obviously we could have failed to be successful scientists. But a serious question lurks beneath the banal one stated in my title. If the results of a scientific investigation are correct, would any investigation of roughly the same subject matter, if successful, at least implicitly contain or imply the same results? Using examples ranging from immunology to high-energy physics, the paper presents the cases for both positive and negative answers. The paper is deliberately non-conclusive, arguing that the question is one (...) of the few serious philosophical issues that divides protagonists in the "science wars.". (shrink)

The theory of rationality has traditionally been concerned with the investigation of the norms of rational thought and behaviour, and with the reasoning pro‐cedures that satisfy them. As a consequence, the investigation of irrationality has largely been restricted to the behaviour or thought that violates these norms. There are, how‐ever, other forms of irrationality. Here we propose that the delusions that occur in schizophrenia constitute a paradigm of irrationality. We examine a leading theory of schizophrenic delusion and propose that some (...) delusions can be traced to a violation of a condition on thought we call egocentricity. We argue that the violation of egocen‐tricity leads to irrational states that cannot be explained by the traditional categories of irrationality and conclude, therefore, that these states belong in a new branch of the theory of irrationality, that of experiential irrationality. (shrink)

C. I. Lewis intended his systems S1–S5 as contributions to the study of “strict implication”, but in his formulation, strict implication is so thoroughly intertwined with other notions, such as possibility and negation, that it remains a problem, to separate out the properties of strict implication itself. I shall solve this problem for S2–5 and von Wright's M. The results for S3–5 are given below, while the implicative parts of S2 and M, which are rather more complicated, are given in (...) §5.In this presentation, ‘⊃’ stands for strict implication, and missing brackets for ‘⊃’ are restored by associationtothe right. Astrictformula is one of the form A ⊃ B. Axiom schemes are used throughout. (shrink)

He concludes with an assessment of democracy's strengths and limitations as the font of political legitimacy. The book offers a lucid and accessible introduction to urgent ongoing conversations about the sources of political allegiance.

b>—Several paradigms (e.g. change blindness, inattentional blindness, transsaccadic integra- tion) indicate that observers are often very poor at reporting changes to their visual environment. Such evidence has been used to suggest that the spatio-temporal coherence needed to represent change can only occur in the presence of focused attention. However, those studies almost always rely on explicit reports. It remains a possibility that the visual system can implicitly detect change, but that in the absence of focused attention, the change does not (...) reach awareness and consequently is not reported. To test this possibility, we used a simple change detection paradigm coupled with a speeded orien- tation discrimination task. Even when observers reported being unaware of a change in an item’s orientation, its nal orientation effectively biased their response in the orientation discrimination task. Both in aware and unaware trials, errors were most frequent when the changed item and the probe had incongruent orientations. These results demonstrate that the _nature _of the change can be represented in the absence of awareness. (shrink)

Many epistemologists have recently defended views on which all evidence is true or perceptual reasons are facts. On such views a common account of basic perceptual reasons is that the fact that one sees that p is one’s reason for believing that p. I argue that that account is wrong; rather, in the basic case the fact that p itself is one’s reason for believing that p. I show that my proposal is better motivated, solves a fundamental objection that the (...) received view faces, and illuminates the nature of reasons for belief. (shrink)

Introduction -- Leibniz, historicism, and the plague of Islam -- Kant, Islam, and the preservation of boundaries -- Herder's Arab fantasies -- Keeping the Turks out of islam : Goethe's Ottoman plan -- Friedrich Schlegel and the emptying of Islam -- Hegel and the disappearance of Islam -- Marx the Moor -- Nietzsche's peace with Islam.

This book examines a series of common metaphors in the works of Derrida and the Sufism of Muhyddin Ibn 'Arabi, considered to be of the most influential figures in Islamic thought. The author addresses the significant absence of attention on the relationship between Islam and Derrida and also provides a deconstructive perspective on Ibn 'Arabi.

In this exciting Handbook, Ian Jarvie and Jesús Zamora-Bonilla have put together a wide-ranging and authoritative overview of the main philosophical currents and traditions at work in the social sciences today. Starting with the history of social scientific thought, this Handbook sets out to explore that core fundamentals of social science practice, from issues of ontology and epistemology to issues of practical method. Along the way it investigates such notions as paradigm, empiricism, postmodernism, naturalism, language, agency, power, culture, and causality.

Yugoslavia-to Slovenia -- Enlightenment-with Hegel -- Psychoanalysis-from Lacan -- Politics-repeating Marx -- Culture-acting out.

We provide a canonical construction of conformal covers for finite hypergraphs and present two immediate applications to the finite model theory of relational structures. In the setting of relational structures, conformal covers serve to construct guarded bisimilar companion structures that avoid all incidental Gaifman cliques-thus serving as a partial analogue in finite model theory for the usually infinite guarded unravellings. In hypergraph theoretic terms, we show that every finite hypergraph admits a bisimilar cover by a finite conformal hypergraph. In terms (...) of relational structures, we show that every finite relational structure admits a guarded bisimilar cover by a finite structure whose Gaifman cliques are guarded. One of our applications answers an open question about a clique constrained strengthening of the extension property for partial automorphisms (EPPA) of Hrushovski, Herwig and Lascar. A second application provides an alternative proof of the finite model property (FMP) for the clique guarded fragment of first-order logic CGF, by reducing (finite) satisfiability in CGF to (finite) satisfiability in the guarded fragment, GF. (shrink)

We show that the loosely guarded and packed fragments of first-order logic have the finite model property. We use a construction of Herwig and Hrushovski. We point out some consequences in temporal predicate logic and algebraic logic.

Whether to do business with rights violating regimes is one of many dilemmas faced by socially responsible corporations. In this article the difficult case of Myanmar is considered. Ruled for decades by a closed and sometimes brutal military elite, the country has long been subject to informal and formal sanctions. However, as sanctions have failed to trigger political reform, it is necessary to review the policy options. The focus here is on the contribution socially responsible corporations might make to change. (...) The article sketches contextual features of the case, examines the recent history and present pattern of business links with Myanmar, and assesses whether current approaches can stimulate reform. Concluding that they cannot, it considers fresh possibilities for corporate engagement. The argument is that socially responsible corporations, committed to improving individual life chances through engagement with developing societies, should undertake collaborative and principled direct investment in Myanmar. The underlying strategy and problems of codification and implementation are all analyzed. To close, the article contends that, by doing business with Myanmar’s rights violating regime, multinational corporations can extend the frontiers of global corporate social responsibility. (shrink)

This book takes Edmund Husserl's phenomenology and applies it to help psychotherapy practitioners formulate complex psychological problems. The reader will learn about Husserl's system of understanding and its concepts that point to first-person lived experience, and about the work of Husserl scholars who have developed a way to be precise about the experiences that clients have. Through exploring the connection between academic philosophy of consciousness and mental health, themes of biopsychosocial treatment planning, psychopathology of personality and psychological disorders, and the (...) treatment of complex psychological problems become clear. The author shows that Husserlian phenomenology can be used in the design of interventions for clients in a process called formulation. Once the intentionality of consciousness is understood, by asking simple questions, it becomes possible to define problematic experiences. This is a means of creating informed consent for treatment and it makes it clear to clients what is happening for them, so helping them understand themselves and how they see the world. We also see how Husserl's phenomenology is a vehicle for psychotherapists to present their knowledge about the research literature of what has been found to be effective care. This volume applies the concepts and practices of phenomenology in a concrete way, relating them to the practice of therapy and showing the value of a qualitative approach to understanding mental processes and the nature of human beings as motivated by values, meanings and other conscious experiences. This is a readable text in simple language that condenses key aspects of Husserl's thinking in relation to the theory and practice of psychotherapy, and it is suitable for philosophers and practitioners of psychology, psychiatry, and the psychotherapies, including psychoanalysis. (shrink)

We prove decidability of satisfiability of sentences of the monodic packed fragment of first-order temporal logic with equality and connectives Until and Since, in models with various flows of time and domains of arbitrary cardinality. We also prove decidability over models with finite domains, over flows of time including the real order.

This chapter aims to contribute to the endeavour of investigating nonhuman animals as experiencing subjects in their own right with their own species-specific histories. Our focus is on the examination of pain experience in animals. We argue that there is need for more research in which pain experience in animals is accounted for in species-specific terms. Making use of empirical studies in the fields of neurobiology, evolutionary-developmental biology, comparative psychology, and cognitive ethology, we try to offer a phenomenological analysis of (...) indications and expressions of pain experience in animals. We attempt to show how different animals are capable of indicating and expressing specific and unique experiences of pain in terms of their particular species, evolution, and places of living in human and natural contexts. (shrink)

Ian James Kidd ABSTRACT: This paper presents two challenges faced by many initiatives that try to diversify undergraduate philosophy curricula, both intellectually and demographically. Trade-offs involve making difficult decisions to prioritise some values over others. Backfires involve unintended consequences contrary to the aims and values of diversity initiatives, including ….

Though the Earth, and all inferior Creatures be common to all Men, yet every Man has a Property in his own Person. This no Body has any Right to but himself. The Labour of his Body, and the Work of his hands, we may say, are properly his. Whatsoever then he removes out of the State that Nature hath provided, and left it in, he hath mixed his Labour with, and joyned it to something that is his own, and thereby (...) makes it his Property. It being by him removed from the common state Nature placed it in, hath by his labour something annexed to it, that excludes the common right of other Men. For this Labour being the unquestionable Property of the Labourer, no Man but he can have a right to what that is once joyned to, at least where there is enough, and as good left in common for others. John Locke, Second Treatise of Government, section 27. (shrink)

: The status of Ibn 'Arabi and Derrida as thinkers is examined: their disagreements with rational/metaphysical thought on the basis of différance and what Ibn 'Arabi calls al-haqq or the Real. Advantage is taken of the fact that both writers speak of emancipatory projects in their work-the freeing of writing from the shackles of logocentric thought and of the unthinkably Divine (the Real) from the constructs of philosophers and theologians. Just as Ibn 'Arabi believes that no thinker can provide ''a (...) definition of the Real [al haqq],'' Derrida insists that no thinker can escape the history of metaphysics. In the work of both, the reaffirmation of something vital, inconstant, and elusive that defeats all attempts to discuss it plays a common role and evolves according to a common structure. If différance and the Real do seem uncannily analogous-sharing, for example, features like namelessness, radical otherness, intangibility/invisibility/unthinkability, and atemporality, not to mention their paradoxically generative functions-there are also a number of significant differences. (shrink)

CHAPTER ONE IDEOLOGY AND CONFUSION Among political concepts none is more muddled or more fraught than ideology. This is not for the want of theories to ...