Much attention has been focused in recent years on the ethical acceptability of physicians receiving gifts from drug companies. Professional guidelines recognize industry gifts as a conflict of interest and establish thresholds prohibiting the exchange of large gifts while expressly allowing for the exchange of small gifts such as pens, note pads, and coffee. Considerable evidence from the social sciences suggests that gifts of negligible value can influence the behavior of the recipient in ways the recipient does not always realize. (...) Policies and guidelines that rely on arbitrary value limits for gift-giving or receipt should be reevaluated. (shrink)

Much attention has been focused in recent years on the ethical acceptability of physicians receiving gifts from drug companies. Professional guidelines recognize industry gifts as a conflict of interest and establish thresholds prohibiting the exchange of large gifts while expressly allowing for the exchange of small gifts such as pens, note pads, and coffee. Considerable evidence from the social sciences suggests that gifts of negligible value can influence the behavior of the recipient in ways the recipient does not always realize. (...) Policies and guidelines that rely on arbitrary value limits for gift-giving or receipt should be reevaluated. (shrink)

Historically, male sexual fitness was framed by a patriarchal politics of life centred on regeneration, population and nation. In the later 20th century, as successful ageing became promoted by the lifestyle practices of an idealized healthy and active senior citizenry, traditional gerontocratic power over the sexual risks of youth gave way to a medical sexology concerned with sexual functionality across the lifecourse; in particular, erectility. Recently, erectile dysfunction has expanded to become a population-wide health problem with increasingly refined diagnoses based (...) on `phases', `early warning signs' and preventative regimes, especially as Viagra has become so widely available. This article explores a new bodily configuration in the making; arising, on the one hand, from the pharmacological and scientific technologization of male sexuality, and, on the other, from a contemporary politics of life that both contests the late-life ageism of the past and fosters a mid-life ageism in the present. (shrink)

There is little agreement about Aristotle’s philosophy of geometry, partly due to the textual evidence and partly part to disagreement over what constitutes a plausible view. I keep separate the questions ‘What is Aristotle’s philosophy of geometry?’ and ‘Is Aristotle right?’, and consider the textual evidence in the context of Greek geometrical practice, and show that, for Aristotle, plane geometry is about properties of certain sensible objects—specifically, dimensional continuity—and certain properties possessed by actual and potential compass-and-straightedge drawings qua quantitative and (...) continuous. For their part, the objects of stereometry are potential sensible three-dimensional figures qua quantitative and continuous. (shrink)

Ecological restoration has been a topic for philosophical criticism for three decades. In this essay, I present a discussion of the arguments against ecological restoration and the objections raised against my position. I have two purposes in mind: to defend my views against my critics, and to demonstrate that the debate over restoration reveals fundamental ideas about the meaning of nature, ideas that are necessary for the existence of any substantive environmentalism. I discuss the possibility of positive restorations, the idea (...) that nature can restore itself, the meaning of artifacts, and the significance of the distinction between humanity and nature. (shrink)

At the center of the debate between contextualist versus relativist semantics for epistemic modal claims is an empirical question about when competent subjects judge epistemic modal disagreement to be present. John MacFarlane’s relativist claims that we judge there to be epistemic modal disagreement across the widest range of cases. We wish to dispute the robustness of his data with the results of two studies. Our primary conclusion is that the actual disagreement data is not consistent with relativist predictions, and so, (...) that the primary motivation for relativism disappears. Our study differs from a related study by Knobe and Yalcin :1–21, 2014) in that we focus directly on the question of genuine disagreement, as opposed to a question about truth or the appropriateness of retraction. Some of our findings agree with theirs about relativism. We uncover new lessons along the way, including that there are widespread situation effects of epistemic modal discourse; idiosyncratic features of the vignettes significantly influencing judgments about epistemic modal disagreement. We reflect with mixed feelings on the prospects for contextualism to accommodate our findings. (shrink)

An old book by children’s author Dr. Seuss can be an inspiration to examine the ethical and ontological meaning of geoengineering. My argument is based on my critique of the process of ecological restoration as the creation of an artifactual reality. When humanity intentionally interferes with the processes and entities of nature, we change the ontological reality of the natural world. The world becomes a garden, or a zoo, an environment that must be continually managed to meet the goals of (...) human purposes. Geoengineering is a more radical and comprehensive example of this process of planetary management. Thus, as with ecological restoration, geoengineering reinforces the paradigm of human mastery and domination of nature. To counteract this dream of domination, we must, as Dr. Seuss instructed us when we were children, learn to live in the natural world with humility. (shrink)

Historically, male sexual fitness was framed by a patriarchal politics of life centred on regeneration, population and nation. In the later 20th century, as successful ageing became promoted by the lifestyle practices of an idealized healthy and active senior citizenry, traditional gerontocratic power over the sexual risks of youth gave way to a medical sexology concerned with sexual functionality across the lifecourse; in particular, erectility. Recently, erectile dysfunction has expanded to become a population-wide health problem with increasingly refined diagnoses based (...) on `phases', `early warning signs' and preventative regimes, especially as Viagra has become so widely available. This article explores a new bodily configuration in the making; arising, on the one hand, from the pharmacological and scientific technologization of male sexuality, and, on the other, from a contemporary politics of life that both contests the late-life ageism of the past and fosters a mid-life ageism in the present. (shrink)

The doctrine of informed consent, borrowed from the law of torts, cannot be readily transplanted into therapeutic settings. The broader, as yet unrealized, idea of informed consent, which suggests that parties must make decisions jointly, should guide interactions between physicians and patients or investigators and subjects.

Although the modern American kinship system is nominally a bilateral system, the very definition of kin ties is based on the principles of patriarchy. Women do not gain their rights to their children in this society as mothers, but as father-equivalents, sources of genetic material. In child rearing as in childbearing, women may take on the role of fathers to their children, substituting poorer women to do the traditional mothering work. The resultant recasting of the classic Oedipal drama in terms (...) of class and race rather than gender is described. This article argues that we must move beyond patriarchal definitions of the relations between parents and children, and beyond modifications that simply extend to some women, most often at cost to other women, some of the privileges of patriarchy. (shrink)

As Minkoff, Vullikanti, and Marshall (2024) note, pregnancy has long been the basis for dismissal of individual rights. It is important to note that Roe did not grant full bodily autonomy to the ge...

The omen of the door and the eagle at Iliad 24.314–21 appears to have sparked scant scholarly interest, but deserves careful attention. The omen itself forms part of an analogy, for the eagle is likened in the size of its wingspan to a large, barred door. This simile might seem unremarkable, merely a convenient means of depicting great size, a casual juxtaposition of two ordinary nouns. The omen, on the whole, might be dismissed as nothing more than a conventional expression (...) of divine favor. But closer scrutiny will reveal that there is, in fact, nothing arbitrary or haphazard in the selection of the terms of the analogy. Appreciation of the elegance and subtlety of the simile in turn reveals the full import of the omen. (shrink)

Domestic violence is a growing societal concern that often spills over into the workplace. However, employers are not recognizing the spillover of domestic violence as a workplace issue. This is problematic considering the serious financial, legal, and ethical consequences for organizations. We analyzed six cases involving domestic violence that were litigated under specific legal bases: Violence Against Women Act, discrimination laws including Title VII, Family and Medical Leave Act, Americans with Disabilities Act, Social Security Disability, Occupational Safety and Health Act, (...) and associated state and municipal ordinances. We chose cases that illustrate the problems of companies meeting the legal standards but not necessarily reaching ethical expectations. Our approach is congruent with the perspective that both legal and ethical analyses should be used in organizational decision making. We suggest for future research the analysis of additional litigated cases, other ethical perspectives, and additional sources of data. In addition, we suggest that companies who are striving for corporate social responsibility should integrate the ethical treatment of domestic violence victims. (shrink)

Cet article se propose de montrer comment un crime de masse tel que le génocide entraîne des répercussions psychiques sur plusieurs générations, ce que l’on peut considérer comme une catastrophe de la filiation. Comment s’inscrire dans un lien de filiation pour écrire son propre roman des origines lorsque l’horreur vécue musèle à jamais la vie de la mémoire, de la parole et de la transmission? C’est à travers la médiation projective de la libre réalisation de l’arbre généalogique que l’article tentera (...) d’explorer ces questions par une étude de cas. Dans l’espace intermédiaire de la rencontre, tout en respectant les aménagements défensifs du sujet, le travail de perlaboration se rend possible. L’article montre comment la dimension médiatrice et projective du dispositif se met au service du travail d’historicisation et de remémoration de l’histoire familiale et collective chez un descendant d’un survivant de la Shoah. (shrink)

The first half of the 17th century was a time of intellectual ferment when wars of natural philosophy were echoes of religious wars, as we illustrate by a case study of an apparently innocuous mathematical technique called adequality pioneered by the honorable judge Pierre de Fermat, its relation to indivisibles, as well as to other hocus-pocus. André Weil noted that simple applications of adequality involving polynomials can be treated purely algebraically but more general problems like the cycloid curve cannot be (...) so treated and involve additional tools–leading the mathematician Fermat potentially into troubled waters. Breger attacks Tannery for tampering with Fermat’s manuscript but it is Breger who tampers with Fermat’s procedure by moving all terms to the left-hand side so as to accord better with Breger’s own interpretation emphasizing the double root idea. We provide modern proxies for Fermat’s procedures in terms of relations of infinite proximity as well as the standard part function. (shrink)

Among the many parodic elements in the Homeric Hymn to Hermes is the day-old baby's fart-omen. As is well-known, sneezing was considered prophetic in the ancient world, and the humour of the scene comes from the immediately preceding fart and the fact that Hermes’ bodily emissions are deliberate . Apollo has, in fact, gone in search of his baby brother on the basis of a standard bird-omen and confronted with Hermes’ signs, he recognizes that the crepitation is just as much (...) an omen as the sneeze, witness the plural τoúτoιζ oìωυoîσι a few lines later . We may compare a passage in Aristophanes’ Knights where the Sausage-seller reports that he took courage before speaking to the Council from a good omen: a man farted to the right, ༐κ δπξιâζ ᾤπέπαρδε . Aristophanes’ formulation suggests to me that the composer of the hymn may be intentionally setting up a play on words : the only difference between the verbal form ༐πέπταδε ‘sneezed’ is the reversal of the liquid and the dental stop. (shrink)

Feminist Time Against Nation Time offers a series of essays that explore the complex and oftentimes contradictory relationship between feminism and nationalism through a problematization of contemporality. The collection pursues the following questions: how do the specific temporalities of nationalism and war limit and delimit public spaces in which dissent might happen; and how might we account for the often contradictory and ambiguous relationship of "feminism" and "nationalism" through an exploration of the problem of time?

Einleitung -- Opernmusik -- Theaterwissenschaft -- Schauspielmusik -- Filmmusik -- Funktionssystem für Musik in der Oper -- Analysen im Lichte der Funktionen.

To account for category-specific semantic deficits, Humphreys and Forde propose to fractionate semantic memory into multiple sensory and functional knowledge stores. There are reasons to doubt the empirical productivity of this proposal, unless theoretically motivated principles of distinguishing and weighting the different kinds of object knowledge can be spelled out in detail.

The entrapment defense is a puzzle of long standing. One the one hand, we are offended by the government’s subjecting someone vulnerable to extreme temptation. It seems like something anyone might fall prey to. On the other hand, it is hard to explain why someone who actually commits, or attempts a crime, and who would be liable if anyone other than the government had tempted him, should escape punishment. His blameworthiness seems the same. This essay seeks to illuminate this puzzle (...) by showing how it parallels the long-standing debate surrounding the criminal law problem of the actio libera in causa—situations in which someone seeks to escape liability by contriving to put a certain defense in place, such as provoking his victim into attacking him, so that he can then kill him in self-defense. The parallels between the two problems do not serve to resolve either, but make them appear in a rather different light. (shrink)

The American Journal of Bioethics, Volume 12, Issue 7, Page 56-58, July 2012.

Weston and I will be forever linked in the field of environmental philosophy because of an exchange of essays that were published in the journal Environmental Ethics in 1985 and 1987 on the subject...

I discuss donald davidson's argument for the psycho-Physical identity theory and contend that it fails: it relies on an implausible account of mental and physical events. Davidson proposes a linguistic test for determining whether a given event is mental or physical. I argue that the assumptions that are necessary for employing such a criterion of the mental are either false or presuppose the truth of the identity theory.

While substantial progress has been made in the field known as artificial consciousness, at the present time there is no generally accepted phenomenally conscious machine, nor even a clear route to how one might be produced should we decide to try. Here, we take the position that, from our computer science perspective, a major reason for this is a computational explanatory gap: our inability to understand/explain the implementation of high-level cognitive algorithms in terms of neurocomputational processing. We explain how addressing (...) the computational explanatory gap can identify computational correlates of consciousness. We suggest that bridging this gap is not only critical to further progress in the area of machine consciousness, but would also inform the search for neurobiological correlates of consciousness and would, with high probability, contribute to demystifying the “hard problem” of understanding the mind–brain relationship. We compile a listing of previously proposed computational correlates of consciousness and, based on the results of recent computational modeling, suggest that the gating mechanisms associated with top-down cognitive control of working memory should be added to this list. We conclude that developing neurocognitive architectures that contribute to bridging the computational explanatory gap provides a credible and achievable roadmap to understanding the ultimate prospects for a conscious machine, and to a better understanding of the mind–brain problem in general. (shrink)

This essay investigates the constitution of the principal research question on women in ancient Greece, namely, the status of women in ancient Athens, and attempts to formulate a historiography for it under three headings. "Patriarchy and Misogyny" reviews the history of the question, from the time of its canonical formulation by A. W. Gomme in 1925, back to its initial constitution as a scholarly question by K. A. Böttiger in 1775, and up to its conceptualization in contemporary and feminist scholarship. (...) This section concludes with a statement on the historiographical inadequacy of this research question, and suggests that a historiographically appropriate formulation must be based on a reconsideration of the ideology which informed the initial constitution of the research issue."Women in Civil Society" investigates the ideological underpinnings of the late eighteenth- and nineteenth-century scholarly orthodoxy, concluding that it was founded on a historiographical tautology--with the example of women in ancient Athens providing the basis for eighteenth-century views on women's exclusion from civil society, and with the latter serving as the foundation for the investigation of women in ancient Greece. This section concludes with a discussion of some recent work in which the areas of investigation have been reformulated, but notes the overall exclusion from this work of issues having to do with race and sexuality."Race, Culture, and Sexuality" takes up the treatment of women in ancient Greece by Christoph Meiners who, in 1778, was one of the earliest to bring together considerations of cultural particularity with that of women's status. This section goes on to show how the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century reformulations of ancient medical theory generated the notions of race and sex as biological essences, and invented also, and also with reference to ancient Greece, a theory of sexual degeneracy. This section concludes with a discussion of the current debate in the scholarly literature of the nature of sexuality, and in particular, of homosexuality, in Greek antiquity, and notes that this discussion has inadequately integrated questions having to do with female sexuality in antiquity and modernity. (shrink)

Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–1778) opens his book The Social Contract (1762) with his famous statement, “Man is born free; and everywhere he is in chains.” An Enlightenment thinker, Rousseau understands himself to be responding to the two dominant traditions of political thought at this time: the voluntarist tradition of Hobbes, Pufendorf, and Grotius; and the liberal tradition of Locke and Montesquieu. The latter group argues that civil society exists to protect certain natural rights, one of which is liberty. The former group (...) supports an absolute monarchy (benevolent or not), with the famous statement by Hobbes, as its signature: in the State of Nature, life is nasty, poor, brutish, and short. The only solution is to surrender one’s freedom to the sovereign and thus escape the brutality and depravity of life in the state of nature. (shrink)

Buddhist teachings and modern science are analogous both in their approach to the search for truth and in some of the discoveries of contemporary physics, biology, and psychology. However, despite these congruencies and the recognized benefits of science, Buddhism reminds us of the dangers of a tendency toward scientific reductionism and imperialism and of the sciences’ inability to deal with human moral and spiritual values and needs. Buddhism and science have human concerns and final goals that are different, but as (...) long as the boundaries between them are not trespassed, they can be mutually corrective and allied to benefit humankind. Buddhism must be open to the discoveries of science about the physical world as must all religions today, but no matter how much it may have to modify some of its ancient beliefs, its basic truths—the truths about human suffering and its release—will remain untouched. (shrink)

The early modern era produced the Scientific Revolution, which originated our present understanding of the natural world. Concurrently, philosophers established the conceptual foundations of modernity. This rich and comprehensive volume surveys and illuminates the numerous and complicated interconnections between philosophical and scientific thought as both were radically transformed from the late sixteenth to the mid-eighteenth century. The chapters explore reciprocal influences between philosophy and physics, astronomy, mathematics, medicine, and other disciplines, and show how thinkers responded to an immense range of (...) intellectual, material, and institutional influences. The volume offers a unique perspicuity, viewing the entire landscape of early modern philosophy and science, and also marks an epoch in contemporary scholarship, surveying recent contributions and suggesting future investigations for the next generation of scholars and students. (shrink)