Providing an overview of the intellectual roots of the worldwide environmental movement - from ancient religions and philosophies to modern science and ethics - this book synthesises them into a new philosophy of nature in which to ground ...

In this account of his mature thinking, Peter Marshall develops a dynamic and organic philosophy for the coming millennium which he calls liberation ecology. Liberation ecology is holistic in viewing the world as a harmonious whole and all beings and things as interwoven threads in nature's web. It is intuitive in recognizing intuition as the main source of knowledge and the imagination as the great organ of morality. It is ecological in seeing human beings as fellow voyagers with (...) other species in the magnificent odyssey of evolution. Above all, it is libertarian in seeking to release humanity, society and nature from their existing burdens so that they can unfurl and realize together their full potential. Exploring our strengths and possibilities, this book presents the ideas and values needed to ride the winds of change at this crucial stage in our development and in the history of the world. It provides a new philosophy for a new era, an uplifting and inspired vision which combines ancient wisdom and modern insights, reason and feeling, science and poetry, myth and the marvellous. It offers a guide for the future on how to rive in the most fulfilling way and how to create a genuinely free and sustainable society in harmony with nature. (shrink)

Keith Thomas: Gerald Edward Aylmer, 1926-2000 Adrian Hollis: William Spencer Barrett, 1914-2001 Bruce Williams: Charles Frederick Carter, 1919-2002 Malcolm Mackintosh: John Erickson, 1929-2002 J. H .R. Davis: Raymond William Firth, 1901-2002 F. M. L. Thompson: Hrothgar John Habakkuk, 1915-2002 A. W. Price: Richard Mervyn Hare, 1919-2002 Hugh Lloyd-Jones: Geoffrey Stephen Kirk, 1921-2003 Michael Lapidge and Peter Matthews: Vivien Anne Law, 1954-2002 Ann Moss: John Lough, 1913-2000 Terence Cave: Ian Dalrymple McFarlane, 1915-2002 Ludwig Paul: David Neil MacKenzie, 1926-2001 Peter (...) Birks: John Kieran Barry Moylan Nicholas, 1919-2002 Jonathan Shepard: Dimitri Dimitrievich Obolensky, 1918-2001 David Cannadine: John Harold Plumb, 1911-2001 Daniel Waley: Nicolai Rubinstein, 1911-2002 Ian Wood: John Michael Wallace-Hadrill, 1916-1985 R. G. M. Nisbet: William Smith Watt, 1913-2002 G. W. Bernard: Richard Bruce Wernham, 1906-1999. (shrink)

This collection of essays provides an introduction to Nietzsche's thought and educational writings, and examines questions concerning the centrality of values for education in postmodernity.

A scholarly edition of Essay Concerning Human Understanding by P. H. Nidditch. The edition presents an authoritative text, together with an introduction, commentary notes, and scholarly apparatus.

This paperback edition reproduces the complete text of the Essay as prepared by professor Nidditch for The Clarendon Edition of the Works of John Locke. The Register of Formal Variants and the Glossary are omitted and Professor Nidditch has written a new foreword.

Can original philosophy be done while simultaneously engaging in the history of philosophy? Such a possibility is questioned by analytic philosophers who contend that history contaminates good philosophy, and by historians of philosophy who insist that theoretical predecessors cannot be ignored. Believing that both camps are misguided, the contributors to this book present a case for historical philosophy as a valuable enterprise. The contributors include: Todd L. Adams, Lilli Alanen, Jos? Bernardete, Jonathan Bennett, John I. Biro, Phillip Cummins, Georges Dicker, (...) Daniel A. Dombrowski, Daniel Garber, Josiah Gould, Jorge J.E. Gracie, Daniel Graham, Charles Griswold, James Lawler, Rudolf Luthe, Edward H. Madden, George Mavrodes, Gerald E. Myers, Jonathan R?e, Frithjof Rodi, Kenneth L. Schmitz, Vladimir Shtinov, David G. Stern, Robert Turnbull, James Van Cleve, Frederick Van De Pitte, Henry Beatch, and Richard Watson. (shrink)

Editor's Comment: One of the functions of the journal is to develop an awareness of its own history. These papers are online-only papers that discuss the first ten years of the journal going back to 1969. Every so often the journal publishes synoptic articles that take a broad approach to the beginning of the Society and the journal to treat major themes and topics. As one can clearly see EPAT published many of the luminaries that helped to shape the discipline.

Philosophical interest in the biological concept of function stems largely from concerns about its teleological associations. Assigning something a function seems akin to assigning it a purpose, and discussion of the purpose of items has long been off-limits to science. Analytic philosophers have attempted to defend ‘function’ by showing that claims about functions do not involve any reference to a problematic notion of purpose. To do this, philosophers offer short lists of necessary and sufficient conditions for the application of the (...) concept—where the conditions involve only acceptable physical or biological notions—and claim that the set of conditions captures the import of function statements. (shrink)

Accounts of the concepts of function and dysfunction have not adequately explained what factors determine the line between low‐normal function and dysfunction. I call the challenge of doing so the line‐drawing problem. Previous approaches emphasize facts involving the action of natural selection (Wakefield 1992a, 1999a, 1999b) or the statistical distribution of levels of functioning in the current population (Boorse 1977, 1997). I point out limitations of these two approaches and present a solution to the line‐drawing problem that builds on the (...) second one. (shrink)

Similarly to other accounts of disease, Christopher Boorse’s Biostatistical Theory (BST) is generally presented and considered as conceptual analysis, that is, as making claims about the meaning of currently used concepts. But conceptual analysis has been convincingly critiqued as relying on problematic assumptions about the existence, meaning, and use of concepts. Because of these problems, accounts of disease and health should be evaluated not as claims about current meaning, I argue, but instead as proposals about how to define and use (...) these terms in the future, a methodology suggested by Quine and Carnap. I begin this article by describing problems with conceptual analysis and advantages of “philosophical explication,” my favored approach. I then describe two attacks on the BST that also question the entire project of defining “disease.” Finally, I defend the BST as a philosophical explication by showing how it could define useful terms for medical science and ethics. (shrink)

Patients should not always receive hard data about the risks and benefits of a medical intervention. That information should always be available to patients who expressly ask for it, but it should be part of standard disclosure only sometimes, and only for some patients. And even then, we need to think about how to offer it.

'Modern History' views claim that in order for a trait X to have the proper function F, X must have been recently favored by natural selection for doing F (Griffiths 1992, 1993; Godfrey-Smith 1994). For many traits with prototypical proper functions, however, such recent selection may not have occurred, since traits may have been maintained owing to lack of variation or selection for other effects. I explore this flaw in Modern History accounts and offer an alternative etiological theory, which I (...) call the 'Continuing Usefulness' account. According to my view, a trait has the proper function F if and only if, first, the trait was favored by selection for doing F at some point (perhaps far in the past), and, secondly, the trait has recently contributed to survival and reproduction by doing F. This separates the requirement involving natural selection from the one involving the recent past, two issues that the Modern History account conflates. The clear separation allows a detailed analysis of the causal judgments and form of adaptationism that ground the etiological approach to function. (shrink)

Some experts have argued that patients should routinely be told the specific magnitude and absolute probability of potential risks and benefits of screening tests. This position is motivated by the idea that framing risk information in ways that are less precise violates the ethical principle of respect for autonomy and its application in informed consent or shared decisionmaking. In this Perspective, we consider a number of problems with this view that have not been adequately addressed. The most important challenges stem (...) from the danger that patients will misunderstand the information or have irrational responses to it. Any initiative in this area should take such factors into account and should consider carefully how to apply the ethical principles of respect for autonomy and beneficence. (shrink)

We describe some of the signs and symptoms of left visuo-spatial neglect. This common, severe and often long-lasting impairment is the most striking consequence of right hemisphere brain damage. Patients seem to (over-)attend to the right with subsequent inability to respond to stimuli in contralesional space. We draw particular attention to how patients themselves experience neglect. Furthermore, we show that the neglect patient's loss of awareness of left space is crucial to an understanding of the condition. Even after left space (...) has been brought into the patient's consciousness (either by local cueing on the left or by an emphasis on global properties of the scene as a whole), this awareness of left space rapidly declines. We suggest that much of the symptomology of left neglect can be interpreted as a disconnection between brain mechanisms that are relatively specialized for local (detail) visual processing and global (panoramic) processing. This failure of communication between functional (subpersonal) mechanisms then has consequences for how perceptual and representational content enters into awareness. Failure of the local contents of left space to be consciously accessed is, in turn, an important aspect of why left neglect is so difficult to remediate. Patients can ''know'' that they have neglect but are cut off from the perceptual awareness that would enable them to overcome their attentional bias to the right. (shrink)

In a series of recent papers, I have made three arguments about how to define “disease” and evaluate and apply possible definitions. First, I have argued that definitions should not be seen as traditional conceptual analyses, but instead as proposals about how to define and use the term “disease” in the future. Second, I have pointed out and attempted to address a challenge for dysfunction-requiring accounts of disease that I call the “line-drawing” problem: distinguishing between low-normal functioning and dysfunctioning. Finally, (...) I have used a dysfunction-requiring approach to argue that some extremely prevalent conditions, such as high blood pressure, high cholesterol, and ductal carcinoma in situ, are not diseases, but instead are risk factors. Four of the papers in this issue directly engage my previous work. In this commentary, I applaud the advances these authors make, address points of disagreement, and make suggestions about where the discussion should go next. (shrink)

"Modern History" versions of the etiological theory claim that in order for a trait X to have the proper function F, individuals with X must have been recently favored by natural selection for doing F (Godfrey-Smith 1994; Griffiths 1992, 1993). For many traits with prototypical proper functions, however, such recent selection may not have occurred: traits may have been maintained due to lack of variation or due to selection for other effects. I examine this flaw in Modern History accounts and (...) offer an alternative etiological theory, the Continuing Usefulness account, which appears to avoid such problems. (shrink)

Some experts have argued that patients facing certain types of choices should not be told whether their risk is above or below average, because this information may trigger a bias (Fagerlin et al. 2007). But careful consideration shows that the comparative risk heuristic can usefully guide decisions and improve their quality or rationality. Building on an earlier paper of mine (Schwartz 2009), I will argue here that doctors and decision aids should provide comparative risk information to patients, even while further (...) research is conducted. (shrink)

I argue that ductal carcinoma in situ (DCIS), the tumor most commonly diagnosed by breast mammography, cannot be confidently classified as cancer, that is, as pathological. This is because there may not be dysfunction present in DCIS—as I argue based on its high prevalence and the small amount of risk it conveys—and thus DCIS may not count as a disease by dysfunction-requiring approaches, such as Boorse’s biostatistical theory and Wakefield’s harmful dysfunction account. Patients should decide about treatment for DCIS based (...) on the risks it poses and the risks and benefits of treatment, not on its disease status. (shrink)

Imagine you fly home from vacation with your one-and-a-half-year-old son who is traveling for free as a “lap child.” In the airport parking lot, you put him into his forward-facing car seat, where he sits much more contentedly than he did in the rear-facing one that was mandatory until his first birthday. After he falls asleep on the way home, you transfer him to his crib without waking him, lowering the side rail so you can lift him in more easily. (...) -/- Many parts of this idyllic parenting picture are deemed unacceptably risky according to recent child safety proposals. While these proposals all aim to improve child safety, their possible impact is unclear because there has been little discussion of the absolute risk and risk reduction involved in each. And while precise figures are lacking, rough estimates indicate that the magnitudes are quite small. I will argue that this risk and benefit data raises important questions about the proposals, including whether parents might reasonably believe that the small absolute risk reduction offered by the proposed changes does not justify the attendant burdens. This possibility—termed the “prevention paradox” in other contexts—highlights ethical and theoretical challenges in this area of public health. (shrink)

The South Korean elite sport system is facing a wide range of problems that account for the high dropout rate among college student-athletes. However, research on dropout rates of student-athletes is so far been limited, which amplifies the actual voices of this group, their dropout experiences, and their challenges, while they were in the career transition process. Therefore, this study used a critical phenomenological approach as a primary methodological lens to gather information on 15 formal Korean male college student-athletes on (...) dropping out of team sports, exploring their life challenges during their career transitions out of the sport. The result showed two main thematic categories with sub-themes, which include factors affecting burning out and terminating athletic careers: injury and failure of rehabilitation and bullying and abandonment; and factors hindering post-retirement career advancement: prejudice and exclusion and absence of mentors and counselors. This study used Social Cognitive Career Theory to explore the participants' progression through specific interventions that engage and empower. Overall, the current study calls upon researchers, counselors, and administrators to continue exploring advocacy efforts with this population to alter policy and practice. (shrink)

An exploration of Bertrand Russell's writings during the interwar years, a period when he advocated "the scientific outlook" to insure the survival of humanity in an age of potential self-destruction.

This is the first of three volumes which will contain all of Locke's extant philosophical writings relating to An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, not included in other Clarendon editions like the Correspondence. It contains the earliest known drafts of the Essay, Drafts A and B, both written in 1671, and provides for the first time an accurate version of Locke's text. Virtually all his changes are recorded in footnotes on each page. Peter Nidditch, whose highly acclaimed edition of An (...) Essay Concerning Human Understanding was published in this series in 1975, used pioneering editorial techniques in his compilation of Volume 1. Most of the work was completed before his tragically early death in 1983. Volumes 2 and 3, almost wholly the work of G. A. J. Rogers will contain the third extant draft of the Essay, the Epitome and the Conduct of the Understanding. They will also include a History of the Writing of the Essay, together with other shorter writings by Locke. (shrink)

This is the first of three volumes which will contain all of John Locke's writings which relate to An Essay concerning Human Understanding. This volume contains an accurate version of the two earliest known drafts of the Essay. Virtually all of Locke's changes are recorded in footnotes. Volume I was largely completed by Peter Nidditch before his death in 1983. His pioneering editorial techniques won him acclaim for his edition of An Essay concerning Human Understanding in this series in (...) 1975. (shrink)

In trying to make sense out of our behavior, we reach a point at which we stop talking about what we did and start talking about what we wish we had done, about what we mean to do next. But we think we are still talking about our motives and intentions in what we did. How do we know when we cross the line between finding out what actually happened and ascribing to a situation what we think ought to have (...) happened?This is a serious question, precisely because we usually do not know the difference between what we do and what we imagine that we do. For since all action is governed by our conception of “how we would have it” and “what we would bring about,” we can always honestly claim to have meant what we did for the best. We frequently find ourselves in the situation in which we don't know why we did what we did, but by casting about, we can always turn up a purpose for which our action must have been meant - a purpose which we now perceive.The reasons we ascribe to our actions, like our excuses, are governed by the demands made on us now, rather than by the factual content of what we did. Thus the behavior of reason-giving or excusing is meant to satisfy the social situation in which we presently find ourselves: the demand for explanation, the need to be “in the right,” the need to reinforce our convictions. The verbal account of what we did is thus literally about (as representing and serving) where we are now rather than what we did then.Our verbal account is about the context of social obligation in which we have to explain ourselves, not about the behavior we claim to interpret. This is why, proverbially, we will give any excuse which will satisfy the accuser and why “understanding” i.e. inventing reasons for our conduct, is no corrective. The addict, alcoholic, neurotic and criminal recidivist are frequently rational and even persuasive in giving reasons for what they do. And we wonder why if they understand their problems so well they can't do something about them. The problem is that the habitué doesn't understand his behavior at all. He is simply trained to give a certain after the fact explanation as a conditioned response to his habitual behavior. What he “understands” is not what makes him go back to the pill, the bottle or to crime, but what to tell people each time after he does. Naturally, when the habit-triggering occasion arises, it is never that reason - the stated one - which leads to repetition, but some new, special crisis, difficulty or impulse.Bluntly stated, our reasons and justifications have little or nothing to do with our actual behavior. We continue to suppose that we intend to do this or that immediately before we do it. But insofar as this intention is expressed it is a separate verbal act having its own conditions and consequences; insofar as it is unexpressed (and in general) intention is disclosed only through conduct. It is only the powerful social convention of justification that supports the illusion that verbal expressions are causal antecedents of acts.Two conclusions follow. First, the “sense” of our activity is either evident in the activity or else it is nonexistent, since not yet discovered meaning is meaning not yet achieved. Second, our verbal justifications are acts having a peculiar sense of their own. They express the relation of our convictions and objectives to the convictions and objectives of those to whom our explanations are addressed. Here is where, in the process of making sense of our activity, the crossover from discovery to invention occurs. This is why we may never discover the extent to which our justifications are inventions superimposed on the conduct they are supposed to represent. Insofar as our justification satisfies those to whom it is addressed, (including ourselves) it is right. But we take this rightness, which is actually the the compatibility of our values and objectives, to be the rightness of the act in question. The reasons we give for our actions make great sense, but despite our invincible “rightness” our actions, taken in themselves, make no more sense.What are our options? They are either to put ourselves in the power of those to whom we explain ourselves, or to take responsibility for our own nonsense. Take our conduct out of the medium of talk - of habitual justification - in which it is suspended and sustained, and what is it? Whatever has become of the “importance” of our appointments, our meetings, our appearances, our obligations, our consistency? Experience, not persuasion and reasoning, is the corrective. Only the direct experience of futility is powerful enough to break our addiction to justification. (shrink)