The link between alcohol consumption and cancer is well established, but public awareness of the risk remains low. Mandated warning labels have been suggested as a way of ensuring “informed choice” about alcohol consumption. In this article we explore various ethical issues that may arise in connection with cancer warning labels on alcoholic beverages; in particular we highlight the potentially questionable autonomy of alcohol consumption decisions and consider the implications if the autonomy of drinking behavior is substantially compromised. Our discussion (...) demonstrates the need for the various ethical issues to be considered and addressed in any decision to mandate cancer warning labels. (shrink)

ABSTRACT In keeping with the pre‐eminent status accorded autonomy within Australia, Europe, and the United States, medical practice requires that patients authorize do‐not‐resuscitate (DNR) orders, intended to countermand the default practice in hospitals of instituting cardiopulmonary‐resuscitation (CPR) on all patients experiencing cardio‐pulmonary arrest. As patients typically do not make these decisions proactively, however, family members are often asked to act as surrogate decision‐makers and decide on the patient's behalf. Although the appropriateness of patients or their families having to decide about (...) the provision of CPR has been challenged, there has been little examination of how patients and their families talk about and negotiate such decisions, particularly in the context of the patient's imminent death. In this article, part of a larger study analysing interviews with 28 patients (13 female) with cancer within weeks of their death, and 20 others (predominantly family) attending, we argue that a common assumption underpinning participants' talk about the DNR decision (i.e. forgoing CPR) is that it requires a choice between life and death. Using illustrative examples, we demonstrate that in making decisions about CPR, patients and their families are implicitly required to make moral judgements about the value of the patient's life, including their relationships with significant others. We identify some implications of these empirical observations for the development of ethically appropriate policies and practices regarding patient autonomy and surrogacy at the end of life. (shrink)

Social, political, and economic environments play an active role in nurturing professional virtue. Yet, these environments can also lead to the erosion of virtue. As such, professional virtue is fragile and vulnerable to environmental shifts. While physicians are often considered to be among the most virtuous of professional groups, concern has also always existed about the impact of commercial arrangements on physicians’ willingness and capacity to enact their professional virtues. This article examines the ways in which commercial arrangements have been (...) negotiated to secure medical virtue from real or perceived threats of erosion. In particular, we focus on the concern surrounding conflicts of interest arising from commercial arrangements that have developed as a result of neoliberal economic and social policies. The deregulation of medical markets and privatization of services have produced new commercial relationships that are often misunderstood by patients, publics, and physicians themselves. ‘Conflicts of interest’ policies have been introduced in an attempt to safeguard ethical conduct and medical practice. However, a number of virtue ethicists have critiqued these policies as inadequate for securing virtue. We examine the ways in which commercial arrangements have been seen to impact upon medical virtue, both historically and in the context of modern medicine. We then describe and critique current efforts to restore clinical virtue through both conflict of interest policies and through virtue ethics. Finally, we suggest some possible ways of addressing the corrosive effects of neoliberalism on medical virtue. (shrink)

Rationale Treatment guidelines recommend a more conservative surgical approach than mastectomy for early stage breast cancer and a stronger emphasis on adjuvant therapy. Registry data at South Australian teaching hospitals have been used to monitor survivals and treatment in relation to these guidelines.Aims and objectives To use registry data to: (1) investigate trends in survival and treatment; and (2) compare treatment with guidelines.Methods Registry data from three teaching hospitals were used to analyse trends in primary courses of treatment of breast (...) cancers during 1977–2003 (n = 4671), using univariate analyses and multiple logistic regression. Disease-specific survivals were analysed using Kaplan–Meier product limit estimates and multivariable Cox proportional hazards regression.Results The 5-year survival was 79.9%, but with a secular increase, reaching 83.6% in 1997–2003. The relative risk of death (95% confidence limits) was 0.74 (0.62, 0.88) for 1997–2003, compared with previous diagnoses, after adjusting for tumour node metastasis stage, grade, age and place of residence. Treatment changes included an increase in conservative surgery (as opposed to mastectomy) from 51.7% in 1977–1990 to 76.8% in 1997–2003 for stage I (P < 0.001) and from 31.1% to 52.2% across these periods for stage II (P < 0.001). Adjuvant radiotherapy also became more common (P < 0.001), with 20.6% of patients receiving this treatment in 1977–1990 compared with 60.7% in 1997–2003. Radiotherapy generally was more prevalent when conservative surgery was provided, although also relatively common in mastectomy patients when tumour diameters exceeded 50 mm or when there were four or more involved nodes. The proportion of patients receiving chemotherapy increased (P < 0.001), from 19.6% in 1977–1990 to 36.9% in 1997–2003, and the proportion having hormone therapy also increased (P < 0.001), from 34.3% to 59.4% between these periods.Conclusions Survivals appear to be increasing and treatment trends are broadly consistent with guideline directions, and the earlier research on which these recommendations were based. (shrink)

One of Ian Hacking's earliest publications, this book showcases his early ideas on the central concepts and questions surrounding statistical reasoning. He explores the basic principles of statistical reasoning and tests them, both at a philosophical level and in terms of their practical consequences for statisticians. Presented in a fresh twenty-first-century series livery, and including a specially commissioned preface written by Jan-Willem Romeijn, illuminating its enduring importance and relevance to philosophical enquiry, Hacking's influential and original work has been revived for (...) a new generation of readers. (shrink)

A great achievement makes one’s life go better independently of its results, but what makes an achievement great? A simple answer is—its difficulty. I defend this view against recent, pressing objections by interpreting difficulty in terms of competitiveness. Difficulty is determined not by how hard the agent worked for the end but by how hard others would need to do in order to compete. Successfully reaching a goal is a valuable achievement because it is difficult, and it is difficult because (...) it is competitive. Hence, both virtuosic performances and lucky successes can be valuable achievements. (shrink)

Philosophers have long struggled to understand our perceptual experience of temporal properties such as succession, persistence and change. Indeed, strikingly, a number have felt compelled to deny that we enjoy such experience. Philosophical puzzlement arises as a consequence of assuming that, if one experiences succession or temporal structure at all, then one experiences it at a moment. The two leading types of theory of temporal awareness—specious present theories and memory theories—are best understood as attempts to explain how temporal awareness is (...) possible within the constraints of this principle. I argue that the principle is false. Neither theory of temporal awareness can be made workable unless it is rejected. Our experience of temporal phenomena cannot be understood if we attempt to break experience down into instantaneous slices. In order to understand the perception of temporal properties we must look beyond the instant. (shrink)

Science is often thought of as a methodical but dull activity. But the finest science, the breakthroughs most admired and respected by scientists themselves, is characterized by elegance." "What does elegance mean in the context of science? Economy is a considerable part of it; creativity too. Sometimes, a suggested solution is so simple and neat that it elicits an exclamation of wonder from the observer. The greatest science, whether primarily theoretical or experimental, reflects a creative imagination." "In this book, the (...) distinguished physiologist and writer Ian Glynn explores some of the finest examples of elegance in science: the delightful simplicity of the laws discovered by Kepler and Newton in the motion of the planets; Galileo's experiments with an inclined plane; the remarkable work of Thomas Young on light; dazzling insights into the counterintuitive workings of our perception demonstrated by Richard Gregory and Vilayanur Ramachandran; and the several breakthroughs that led to Crick and Watson's unravelling of the structure and function of DNA. The result is a fascinating tour through some of the most important episodes in the history of science."--BOOK JACKET. (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)

I offer a new interpretation of Feyerabend’s ‘conquest of abundance’ narrative. I consider and reject both the ontological reading as implausible and the ‘historical’ reading as uncompelling My own proposal is that the ‘conquest of abundance’ be understood in terms of an impoverishment of the richness of human experience. For Feyerabend, such abundance is ‘conquered’ when individuals internalize distorting epistemic prejudices including those integral to the theoretical conceptions associated with the sciences. I describe several ways, identified by Feyerabend, in which (...) individuals can be led to occlude the richness of their experience in ways that are existentially impoverishing. (shrink)

Experimental philosophy of religion is the project of taking the tools and resources of the human sciences—especially psychology and cognitive science—and bringing them to bear on issues within philosophy of religion toward explicit philosophical ends. This paper introduces readers to experimental philosophy of religion. §1 explores the contours of experimental philosophy of religion by contrasting it with a few related fields: the psychology of religion and cognitive science of religion, on the one hand, and natural theology, on the other. §2 (...) offers a brief history of experimental philosophy of religion. The goal in this section is to highlight the ancient pedigree of this emerging area of research; as the contemporary experimental philosophy of religion literature expands and proliferates, it’s important to remember that this field has deep historical roots. Then, §3 focuses on the following questions: Why should we care about experimental philosophy of religion? And why is it needed? (shrink)

A rhetoric of refuge and escape is a consistent feature of the world’s great garden traditions. The connections between a desire for escape, need for refuge and disquieting sense that life is no longer what it ought to be gestures to a complex conception of garden appreciation. I explore these connections using Christian, Islamic, and Chinese garden traditions. In them one finds a conception of certain gardens as places of moral refuge from the corruption and failings of the mainstream world.

A set of replies to critics of my 2021 book 'The Fiery Test of Critique: A Reading of Kant's Dialectic' (OUP). -/- The criticisms are based on talks given at an Author-meets-critics symposium at Princeton University on April 22nd, 2023. The critics are: Beatrice Longuenesse, Patricia Kitcher, Allen Wood, Des Hogan, and Anja Jauernig.

The local food movement has been touted by some as a profoundly effective way to make our food system become more healthy, just, and sustainable. Others have criticized the movement as being less a challenge to the status quo and more an easily co-opted support offering just another set of choices for affluent consumers. In this paper, we analyze three distinct sub-movements within the local food movement, the individual-focused sub-movement, the systems-focused sub-movement, and the community-focused sub-movement. These movements can be (...) combined within any particular campaign or within the goals of any particular organization or individual activist, but they are nevertheless quite different from each other, and come out of different conceptualizations of what food, people, and locality are. We argue that most of the critiques leveled against local food are actually directed against the individual-focused sub-movement, which is most compatible with the current industrial food system, and perhaps not surprisingly receives the most mainstream attention. Further, we argue that while each movement has its own strengths and weaknesses, it is the community-focused sub-movement that has the most potential to radically transform the global food system. (shrink)

Throughout the writings of Paul Feyerabend, there are constant references to the historical contingency of the scientific enterprise, often accompanied by philosophical claims about the significance of that contingency. This paper presents those contingentist claims, situates them in the context of more recent work on the contingency of science, and offers an interpretation of their significance. I suggest that Feyerabend’s sense of contingency was connected to his defences of pluralism, and also to the ‘conquest of abundance’ narrative developed in the (...) very late writings. (shrink)

Love, fear, hope, calculus, and game shows-how do all these spring from a few delicate pounds of meat? Neurophysiologist Ian Glynn lays the foundation for answering this question in his expansive An Anatomy of Thought, but stops short of committing to one particular theory. The book is a pleasant challenge, presenting the reader with the latest research and thinking about neuroscience and how it relates to various models of consciousness. Combining the aim of a textbook with the style of a (...) popularization, it provides all the lay reader needs to know to participate in the philosophical debate that is redefining our attitudes about our minds. Drawing on the rich history of neurological case studies, Glynn picks through the building blocks of our nervous system, examines our visual and linguistic systems, and probes deeply into our higher thought processes. The stories of great scientists, like Ramon y Cajal, and famous patients, like Sperry's split-brained epileptics, illuminate the scientific issues Glynn selects as essential for understanding consciousness. Some might argue that his lengthy explorations of natural selection overemphasize evolutionary explanations of psychological phenomena, but they must also agree that evolutionary psychology has distanced itself mightily from social Darwinism in recent years and merits a reappraisal. The great consciousness debate may form the core of the 21st-century Zeitgeist; get ready for it with An Anatomy of Thought. -Rob Lightner From Publishers Weekly How do we know? What do we think? How could a philosophical problem-'the mind-body problem,' say-induce a headache? What can evolutionary theory, molecular biology, the history of medicine and experimental psychology tell us about the features of human consciousness, and (once again) how do we know? Glynn, a physician and Cambridge University professor, meticulously attempts to answer these questions and more, setting forth the results of all sorts of research relevant to our brains-from 19th-century dissections to Oliver Sacks-like case studies, work with monkeys and supercomputers, and the enduring puzzles of philosophy, which he rightly saves for near the end. After explaining evolution by natural selection and 'clearing away much dross,' Glynn lays out the experiments and theories that have shown 'how nerve cells can carry information about the body, how they can interact' and how sense organs work; demonstrates the 'mixture of parallel and hierarchical organization' in our brains and 'the striking localization of function within it'; considers where neuroscience is likely to go; and admits that, among the many fields of exciting research just ahead, 'we can be least confident of progress toward a complete, scientific explanation of our sensations and thoughts and feelings.' Other recent explaining-the-brain books have sometimes advanced simplistic, or implausibly grand, claims about the nature and features of consciousness in general. Instead, Glynn offers a patient, informative, well-laid-out researcher's-eye view of what we have learned, how we figured it out and what we still don't know about neurons, senses, feelings, brains and minds. (Apr.) Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc. From Library Journal The nature of consciousness, which perennially troubles the minds of scientists and philosophers, is the subject of an ever-growing body of literature. Two of the latest entries approach the topic from different perspectives. Glynn, a professor of physiology and head of the Physiological Laboratory at Cambridge, offers a comprehensive summary of what we know about the brain-both its evolution and its mechanisms. Among the topics he covers are natural selection, molecular evolution, nerves and the nervous system, sensory perception, and the specific structures responsible for our intellect. Using the mechanisms involved in vision and speech as models, Glynn skillfully describes various neurological deficiencies that can lead to 'disordered seeing' and problems with the use of language. He carefully distinguishes what we know through experimental evidence from what we know through the observation of patients with neurological damage. He also describes some of the major theories that attempt to explain why these structures arose. While his book concentrates on the structures that make up the mind, Glynn is well aware that some physical events appear explicable only in terms of conscious mental events-a situation that conflicts with the laws of modern physics. Only briefly, however, does he consider the various approaches that have been taken to deal with the issues of mind/body and free will. In contrast, this is the primary focus of The Physics of Consciousness. After reviewing the fundamentals of classic physics, Walker (who has a Ph.D. in physics) summarizes elements of the new physics in which our knowledge of space, time, matter, and energy are all dependent on the moment of observation. Walker explores the meaning of consciousness as a characteristic of the observer. In this context both the observer and the act of measurement are critical. In essence, Walker leads his reader on a journey through his concept of a 'quantum mind,' which can both affect matter (including other minds) and can be affected by other distant matter/minds. To break up what would otherwise be an extremely dense text, Walker also relates the very touching story of the loss of his high-school sweetheart to leukemia. Indeed, it is his memory of their relationship that drives Walker to seek an understanding of ultimate reality. At times, he has a tendency to be dogmatic-as when he concludes, 'our consciousness, our mind, and the will of God are the same mind.' While An Anatomy of Thought is appropriate for most academic libraries, the Physics of Consciousness will be most accessible to readers with some knowledge of advanced physics. -Laurie Bartolini, Illinois State Lib., Springfield Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc. From Booklist The codiscoverers of natural selection-Charles Darwin and Alfred Wallace-disagreed over the possibility of finding an evolutionary explanation for the human mind. Glynn here argues Darwin's side of the debate, tracing an eons-long path of development starting from simple amino acids floating in primal seas and extending through the erect hominids in which the powers of a massive brain first manifest themselves. Patiently adducing evidence of an evolutionary origin for the underlying molecular machinery, Glynn dissects the nerve centers that make possible speech and hearing, sight, and reading. Pressing deeper, he lays bare the cortical foundations of personality. But those who deal with the mind must attend also to the arguments advanced by philosophers. And it is when he turns from dendrites to syllogisms (especially the vexing mind-body paradox) that Glynn's empirical reasoning fails him. In the end, he concedes his perplexity in trying to conceive of an evolutionary origin for human consciousness. This concession may set the shade of Alfred Wallace to chortling, but it will draw readers into an honest confrontation with a profound enigma. Bryce Christensen. (shrink)

Volume 20, Issue 3, March 2020, Page 81-83.

This Chapter sketches a pluralist account of spiritual exemplarity. Starting from recent work by Linda Zagzebski, three main kinds of spiritual exemplarity are described, distinguished by their underlying aspiration. I name these the aspirations to allegiance, enlightened insight, and emulation, illustrated with examples from the Western and South and East Asian spiritual dispensations. The Chapter concludes by warning against tendencies either to occlude this plurality or to illicitly privilege one of these aspirations by nominating it alone as the 'authentic' form (...) of spiritual life. (shrink)

During this article, I look at three images of thought which feature in Deleuze and Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus and consider their relevance to contemporary pedagogy. Deleuze and Guattari begin by discussing tree-like thought, which involves an insular depiction of the world. I suggest that the performative apparatus, which structures contemporary pedagogy in the comprehensive school, is also tree-like. Deleuze and Guattari’s second image of thought is the fascicular root. Here the principle root is aborted leading to a multiplicity, which (...) flows from it. With fascicular thought, the unity, which is aborted in the object, is returned to in the subject who gains control of multiplicities. In this section I provide a reading of a Classics lesson portrayed in The Secret History by Donna Tartt and go on to focus on Ronald Barnett’s contribution to a debate with Paul Standish, which features in The Blackwell Guide to the Philosophy of Education. In the third section of the article, I consider Deleuze and Guattari’s third image of thought—the rhizome. Rhizomes grow by a process of cloning or lateral spreading; they do not have the central trunk of the tree, with roots and branches extending outwards from this. At the end of this section, I look at two Classics lessons that represent tree-like and rhizomatic pedagogies in turn. I attempt to enrich this discussion by providing a reading of a scene from The History Boys. (shrink)

I note the ambivalence of contemporary attitudes towards pessimism, then offer a way of thinking about philosophical forms of pessimism, intended to encourage us to take pessimism seriously as a stance on the human condition.

Kripke's lectures, published as Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language , posed a sceptical problem about following a rule, which he cautiously attributed to Wittgenstein. He briefly noticed an analogy between his new kind of scepticism and Goodman's riddle of induction. ‘Grue’, he said, could be used to formulate a question not about induction but about meaning: the problem would not be Goodman's about induction—‘Why not predict that grass, which has been grue in the past, will be grue in the (...) future?’—but Wittgenstein's about meaning: ‘Who is to say that in the past I did not mean grue by “green”, so that now I should call the sky, not the grass, “green”?’. (shrink)

Reading W.K. Clifford’s “The Ethics of Belief” in evidentialist terms is standard. However, evidentialist accounts face several longstanding interpretive issues over the Shipowner Story and Clifford’s Motto. This article defends an evidentialist reading. But what distinguishes it from others is that it interprets “The Ethics of Belief” according to Clifford’s “first principle of natural ethics”, a principle he articulates in prior writings, and which comes down to social trust. I reorient Clifford’s evidentialism by returning to his core moral principle and (...) argue that doing so can establish coherence across Clifford’s writings on ethics and can help resolve the relevant interpretive issues. (shrink)

This discussion paper continues the debate over risk‐related standards of mental competence which appears in Bioethics 5. Dan Brock there defends an approach to mental competence in patients which defines it as being relative to differing standards, more or less rigorous depending on the degree of risk involved in proposed treatments. But Mark Wicclair raises a problem for this approach: if significantly different levels of risk attach, respectively, to accepting and refusing the same treatment, then it is possible, on this (...) account, for a patient to be considered competent to accept, but not refuse, the treatment, or vice versa. I argue that this puzzle does not constitute a genuine problem for a risk‐related standard. To this end I focus on the situation where, of two mutually exclusive options, one is riskier, but offering more pronounced benefit, while the other is safer, but offering less benefit. I argue for this proposition: it can take far less insight to know that the safe option is good than to know that the risky option is better. Now say one is actually informed enough to know that the safe option is good, but not enough to know whether the risky option is better; in such a case one is competent to say yes to that first option (the safe one), but not to say yes to the other. (I argue in passing that Pascal's Wager can be interpreted as having precisely this deliberative structure.) I thus conclude that cases do indeed exist where one can be competent to say yes but not no, or vice versa; and that it is thus not an anomaly in the risk‐related standard that it entails the existence of such cases. (shrink)

Arguments strong enough to justify skeptical theism will be strong enough to justify the position that every claim about God is empirically unfalsifiable. This fact is problematic because that position licenses further arguments which are clearly unreasonable, but which the skeptical theist cannot consistently accept as such. Avoiding this result while still achieving the theoretical objectives looked for in skeptical theism appears to demand an impossibly nuanced position.

This paper explores Stanley Cavell’s notion of ‘passionate utterance’, which acts as an extension of/departure from (we might read it as both) J. L. Austin’s theory of the performative. Cavell argues that Austin having made the revolutionary discovery that truth claims in language are bound up with how words perform, then gets bogged by convention when discussing what is done ‘by’ words. In failing to account for the less predictable, unconventional aspects of language, the latter therefore washes his hands of (...) the expressive passionate aspects of speech. To ignore such aspects is to ignore an important moral dimension of language. Finally, I bring Cavell’s approach to bear on the epistemic criterion, which Michael Hand applies in his paper ‘Should We Teach Homosexuality as a Controversial Issue?’. I suggest that Hand’s approach, by failing to account for the linguistic dimension of truth and the expressive quality that accompanies this dimension, presents an overly narrow conception of moral education. (shrink)

An intro. to Didaktic (the heart of thinking about teaching/teacher educ in Germany) for English-speaking readers, drawing on a range of writings assoc. w/ this tradition. Throws light on assumptions, characteristics, & weaknesses of curriculum thought.

he design-based approach is a methodology for investigating mechanisms capable of generating mental phenomena, whether introspectively or externally observed, and whether they occur in humans, other animals or robots. The study of designs satisfying requirements for autonomous agency can provide new deep theoretical insights at the information processing level of description of mental mechanisms. Designs for working systems (whether on paper or implemented on computers) can systematically explicate old explanatory concepts and generate new concepts that allow new and richer interpretations (...) of human phenomena. To illustrate this, some aspects of human grief are analysed in terms of a particular information processing architecture being explored in our research group. We do not claim that this architecture is part of the causal structure of the human mind; rather, it represents an early stage in the iterative search for a deeper and more general architecture, capable of explaining more phenomena. However even the current early design provides an interpretative ground for some familiar phenomena, including characteristic features of certain emotional episodes, particularly the phenomenon of perturbance (a partial or total loss of control of attention). The paper attempts to expound and illustrate the design-based approach to cognitive science and philosophy, to demonstrate the potential effectiveness of the approach in generating interpretative possibilities, and to provide first steps towards an information processing account of `perturbant', emotional episodes. (shrink)

_Fifty Major Political Thinkers _introduces the lives and ideas of some of the most influential figures in Western political thought, from ancient Greece to the present day. The entries provide a fascinating introduction to the major figures and schools of thought that have shaped contemporary politics, including: Aristotle Simone de Beauvoir Michel Foucault Mohandas Gandhi Jurgen Habermas Machiavelli Karl Marx Thomas Paine Jean-Jacques Rousseau Mary Wollstonecraft. Fully cross-referenced and including a glossary of theoretical terms, this wide-ranging and accessible book is (...) essential reading for anyone with an interest in the evolution and history of contemporary political thought. (shrink)