The English Synopsis is after the text of the book. The book presents an original and generalizing substantive vision of the philosophy of science through the prism of a detailed analysis of the polysystem structure of scientific theories. Theories are considered, firstly, as complex specialized forms of developed scientific thinking about the realities studied by natural science, secondly, as constantly improving tools for producing new knowledge in interaction with experimental research, and thirdly, as carriers of ordered and verified knowledge. Emphasis (...) is placed on their nominal and ontic subsystems. The book develops personal and joint research of the authors (theoretical physicist and philosopher), the experience of teaching philosophy of physics at NaUKMA, philosophy of science at the Higher School of Philosophy at the H. Skovoroda Institute of Philosophy of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine and theoretical physics at the National Technical University "Ihor Sikorsky Kyiv Polytechnic Institute". The research is based on a significant source base covering works of modern Western researchers in natural science and philosophy of science. For students, teachers, and scientists who are interested in the problems of modern philosophy of science and have a certain amount of scientific knowledge. It will also be useful for high school students who are eager to become scientists. (shrink)

This third edition of The Infinite includes a new part 'Infinity Superseded' which contains two new chapters refining Moore's ideas through a re-examination of the ideas of Spinoza, Hegel, and Nietzsche. Much of this is heavily influenced by the work of Deleuze. There is also a new technical appendix on still unresolved issues about different infinite sizes.

For Philippa Foot, the essence of morality consists in acting on the reasons on which, qua human being, one ought to act; and this ought is one of “natural normativity”—the same ought that also occurs in statements about what a plant or an animal, qua exhibiting a certain form of life, “ought” to be like in various respects, or how its organs “ought” to function. Of this conception Foot avails herself in order to refute the moral sceptic—an undertaking that raises (...) various critical questions, in particular: 1) Is it the naturally normative ought that also occurs in a practical judgement of the form “I ought to F”? If so, how are we to account for what Foot calls the “practicality” of such a judgement? If not, what kind of intelligible step could an agent take, in order to get from a theoretical statement of natural normativity to a practical judgement that ceteris paribus issues in action? 2) Can we understand the validity of every moral requirement in terms of natural normativity, i.e. of a teleological necessity of individuals’ acting well? 3) If we can, will this understanding rely on premises sufficiently certain to justify morality in a sense suggested by Foot’s anti-sceptical considerations?—I argue that “Natural Goodness” does not satisfactorily answer these questions, and conclude by sketching an account of practical moral knowledge that does not seem to provoke them. (shrink)

The World Medical Association (WMA), the global representation of the medical profession, first adopted the International Code of Medical Ethics (ICoME) in 1949 to outline the professional duties of physicians to patients, other physicians and health professionals, themselves and society as a whole. The ICoME recently underwent a major 4-year revision process, culminating in its unanimous adoption by the WMA General Assembly in October 2022 in Berlin. This article describes and discusses the ICoME, its revision process, the controversial and uncontroversial (...) issues, and the broad consensus achieved among WMA constituent members, representing over 10 million physicians worldwide. The authors analyse the ICoME, including its response to contemporary changes and challenges like ethical plurality and globalisation, in light of ethical theories and approaches, reaching the conclusion that the document is a good example of international ethical professional self-regulation. (shrink)

Journal of Social Philosophy, EarlyView.

One of the major contributions which Christopher Hookway has made to pragmatist epistemology is a critical exploration of the role that affective dispositions play in inquiry. According to Hookway, a well-functioning rational inquirer must rely upon a set of pre-reflective and affective dispositions which are not themselves fully available to rational evaluation. Despite their pre-reflective nature, on the pragmatist account these affective dispositions provide us with judgments and evaluations which are in many cases more reliable than those provided by explicit (...) rational reflection. -/- This chapter presents and defends Hookway’s account of the epistemic importance of our affective dispositions. The first section presents three roles which affective dispositions play within inquiry. The second section considers the concern that affective dispositions should be considered impositions upon our epistemic agency. In response, Hookway suggests that we must identify with our affective dispositions, and two interpretations of this claim are offered. The third section considers the possibility that the confidence we have in our affective dispositions might be appropriately shaken if we recognize that they are not shared by other inquirers. The chapter concludes by suggesting that Hookway’s position can overcome this worry by developing his notion of critical self-trust in three distinct ways. (shrink)

Research in communication studies has suggested that Al-Jazeera produces different versions of news stories for different audiences. Yet, examining the linguistic means used to create these versions has remained under-researched. Drawing on Fairclough’s three-dimensional model (1992) and Halliday’s Transitivity Model (1985), this study aims at exploring how Al-Jazeera Arabic (AJA) and Al-Jazeera English (AJE) discursively represented the participants involved in the 2022 Russo-Ukrainian conflict in headlines. The analysis of transitivity patterns in AJA and AJE headlines reveals both similar and different (...) representations of the conflict. Although they avoided negative labeling of the Russian government, both channels ascribed conflict escalation to it, highlighting civilians suffering and protesting. Nevertheless, while AJE emphasized the Ukrainian government vulnerability, AJA presented the conflict as a confrontation between two symmetrical forces. Similarities are attributed to organizational and social institutional forces, while differences result from different editorial policies and audience preferences. As discursive and social practices, the headlines contribute to shaping audience perceptions of the conflict, with AJA challenging the prevailing western narrative of the conflict while AJE reinforcing it. (shrink)

"The golden rule" (Matthew 7:12) is a formulation of natural moral law, a logical way to divide good from evil. It has been attacked by J.W. Hennessey, Jr. and Bernard Gert as a "particularist preachment." On the contrary, it remains a useful, universal guide to moral conduct and cannot be considered a self-centered, subjective guide to the moral life. We must agree with Jeffrey Wattles that there are multiple possible meanings to the "rule", some legitimate and some spurious. The legitimate (...) meanings, such as the "standard of God-like behavior," all yield the same judgment on morally doubtful actions such as forgery. The so-called "platinum" rule, "Do unto others as they would have you do unto them" has face appeal, but is fatally flawed in its logic, and does not supercede "the golden rule" because part of the treatment I wish from others is a full understanding of my true needs and wishes, even when I do not judge my own needs correctly. (shrink)

AI-developers face a challenge when seeking to use models that aim to be culturally sensitive. While we agree that culture is an emergent reality, there is always the risk of creating algorithms that treat culture as objective to account for various facets of the social realm. As a result, culture becomes prepackaged and autonomous. Nonetheless, culture is not only emergent but dialogically and socially invented. In this article, the point is to advance the discussion about culture by addressing a crucial (...) philosophical issue and proposing some practical themes on how to avoid culturalism in AI development. (shrink)

As an application of his Material Theory of Induction, Norton (2018; manuscript) argues that the correct inductive logic for a fair infinite lottery, and also for evaluating eternal inflation multiverse models, is radically different from standard probability theory. This is due to a requirement of label independence. It follows, Norton argues, that finite additivity fails, and any two sets of outcomes with the same cardinality and co-cardinality have the same chance. This makes the logic useless for evaluating multiverse models based (...) on self-locating chances, so Norton claims that we should despair of such attempts. However, his negative results depend on a certain reification of chance, consisting in the treatment of inductive support as the value of a function, a value not itself affected by relabeling. Here we define a purely comparative infinite lottery logic, where there are no primitive chances but only a relation of ‘at most as likely’ and its derivatives. This logic satisfies both label independence and a comparative version of additivity as well as several other desirable properties, and it draws finer distinctions between events than Norton's. Consequently, it yields better advice about choosing between sets of lottery tickets than Norton's, but it does not appear to be any more helpful for evaluating multiverse models. Hence, the limitations of Norton's logic are not entirely due to the failure of additivity, nor to the fact that all infinite, co-infinite sets of outcomes have the same chance, but to a more fundamental problem: We have no well-motivated way of comparing disjoint countably infinite sets. (shrink)

People live in distinct groups, notably territory-holding societies, whose boundaries aren't neatly defined by the traits that Pietraszewski describes for his socially aligned groups, as I propose calling them, which occur both within and between our societies. Although studying SAGs could prove enlightening, societies are essential human groups that likely existed long before the complex SAGs of today.

I submit the need to establish a comparative study of societies, namely groups beyond a simple, immediate family that have the potential to endure for generations, whose constituent individuals recognize one another as members, and that maintain control over access to a physical space. This definition, with refinements and ramifications I explore, serves for cross-disciplinary research since it applies not just to nations but to diverse hunter-gatherer and tribal groups with a pedigree that likely traces back to the societies of (...) our common ancestor with the chimpanzees. It also applies to groups among other species for which comparison to humans can be instructive. Notably, it describes societies in terms of shared group identification rather than social interactions. An expansive treatment of the topic is overdue given that the concept of a society (even the use of such synonyms as primate “troop”) has fallen out of favor among biologists, resulting in a semantic mess; while sociologists rarely consider societies beyond nations, and social psychologists predominantly focus on ethnicities and other component groups of societies. I examine the relevance of societies across realms of inquiry, discussing the ways member recognition is achieved; how societies compare to other organizational tiers; and their permeability, territoriality, relation to social networks and kinship, and impermanence. We have diverged from our ancestors in generating numerous affiliations within and between societies while straining the expectation of society memberships by assimilating diverse populations. Nevertheless, if, as I propose, societies were the first, and thereafter the primary, groups of prehistory, how we came to register society boundaries may be foundational to all human “groupiness.” A discipline-spanning approach to societies should further our understanding of what keeps societies together and what tear them apart. (shrink)

Old habits die hard; so, it seems, do old arguments. Proponents of thoracoabdominal normothermic regional perfusion (TA-NRP, but more commonly referred to as NRP) continue to proffer arguments and...

In Chapter 12 of his book Material Beings (Van Inwagen, Peter. 1990. Material Beings. Ithaca: Cornell University Press) van Inwagen argues that there are no artefacts, or very few, certainly fewer than most people believe. Artisans very rarely create, at least in the sense of causing things to come into existence. The argument in Chapter 12 is a very powerful one. I do not think that it establishes van Inwagen’s conclusion, but it does, I think, given its (plausible) premise, establish (...) that if there are not far fewer material things in the world than we ordinarily believe, then there are far more. In this sense it establishes, as Russell once said, ‘the truth about physical objects must be strange’. Furthermore, I argue at the end, we cannot avoid this conclusion even if we reject van Inwagen’s premise. Thus the defender of our common sense ontology is caught on the horns of a dilemma. So our commonsense ontology is indefensible. (shrink)

Ursula K. Le Guin’s classic work of anarchist literature, _The Dispossessed_ (1974), is preoccupied with the issue of imprisonment. This is hardly surprising given anarchism’s longstanding critical engagement with the prison as state apparatus. For classical anarchists, the prison represents one of the most vile and visible examples of state repression. However, while the abolition of prisons constitutes one of the fundamental goals of anarchism, the alternatives put forth by classical anarchist thinkers risk perpetuating the underlying power relations of carceral (...) justice by encouraging social shaming and the policing of norms. The anarchist society of _The Dispossessed_ uses these techniques to discourage the accumulation of power in order to create an egalitarian society. Unfortunately, these same techniques encourage a conformity that hinders other anarchist values, such as creativity and individual self-determination. In essence, the anarchist society depicted in the novel replaces the literal prison with a different form of imprisonment—the social prison, which continues the repressive function of the state through different means. By creating an “ambiguous” anarchist utopia, Le Guin anticipates the critiques of classical anarchism formulated by poststructural and postmodern anarchist theorists. These critiques are most evident in the theme of imprisonment that threads throughout the novel. (shrink)

Several facts about organ donation and transplantation are not in dispute: (1) there is a shortage of available organs; (2) many potential organ donors die after authorized withdrawal of life-susta...

You are, I am sure, just as aware as I am that the operational nodes of a complex problem, the points at which it can be split open to yield nuggets of new insight or achieve lasting advances, often lie in tediously technical details perhaps incomprehensible to all but specialists in the matter and anyways totally lacking in the romance and easy excitement which attract the topic's dilettantes. I would like you to hold fast to this appreciation, for the concerns (...) I shall raise here are technical indeed. They are, however,seminaltechnicalities which, as we seek to fathom them, should fundamentally reshape our comprehension of the logic of confirmation, causal connectedness, and the foundations of statistical inference. In brief, it will be seen that certain powerful everyday intuitions concerning which propositions are confirmationally irrelevant to which others are exceedingly difficult to justify. (shrink)

With the emergence of Olympic internationalism, scholarly networking in East Central Europe came to be dominated by the idea of scholars representing their nations, which replaced the previously leading pattern of private elite scholars with extensive international contacts. This also formalised trans-border contacts, which became increasingly seen as international. In this article, we trace the relationship between these formal and informal networks from the late 19th century to the end of the socialist period, showing that even as formalisation grew, it (...) depended heavily on a variety of informal connections. Even during the period of socialism, when the state sought to control international exchange, scholars used informality to circumvent politically determined constraints. Nevertheless, these informal contacts were not outside the system, but were an integral part of it and depended on formal preconditions. Concentrating on Czechoslovak-Polish relations we argue that in addressing the issue of the relationship between the formal and the informal, a combination of sources must be used, which should then be scrutinised for the stories their authors wish to tell. While archival sources are used for the formal part, oral histories or memoirs reveal the informal part. In East Central Europe, formal sources are likely to ignore informality, especially when it was associated with illegality, whereas ego-documents, especially those produced after 1989, are likely to ignore or downplay connections to the state and overemphasise informality as a means of acting outside politics. Thus, writing the history of informality in socialist scholarship, not only in terms of international contacts but also in terms of everyday practices, is a way of developing counter-narratives to the state-centeredness of current research, which must be linked to a critical study of the contemporary memory of socialist scholarship that shapes the narratives told in oral history. (shrink)

This volume, which is part of the Clarendon Aristotle Series, offers a clear and faithful new translation of Books II to IV of Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics, accompanied by an analytical commentary focusing on philosophical issues. In Books II to IV, Aristotle gives his account of virtue of character in general and of the principal virtues individually, topics of central interest both to his ethical theory and to modern ethical theorists. Consequently major themes of the commentary are connections on the one (...) hand with other relevant Aristotelian texts and on the other with modern writings, both text-related and thematic. Since the main aim of the volume is to make Aristotle's thought as accessible as possible to readers who do not know Greek, considerable care is taken to elucidate both his technical vocabulary and significant features of his Greek idiom. C. C. W. Taylor also provides systematic comparisons with other translations into English and other languages, and frequent references to other commentaries, ancient, medieval, and modern. These features make the work useful to other scholars in the field as well as to students of philosophy, both undergraduate and graduate.In view of the widespread contemporary interest in the topic of virtue, the volume should appeal to students of ethics and to any reader who is concerned to see how fundamental questions of life and conduct were approached in a culture significantly different from our own. (shrink)

This scarce antiquarian book is a facsimile reprint of the original. Due to its age, it may contain imperfections such as marks, notations, marginalia and flawed pages. Because we believe this work is culturally important, we have made it available as part of our commitment for protecting, preserving, and promoting the world's literature in affordable, high quality, modern editions that are true to the original work.

The fourth volume of Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science consists mainly of papers which were contributed to our Colloquium during the past few years. The volume represents a wide range of interests in contem porary philosophy of science: issues in the philosophy of mind and of language, the neurophysiology of perceptual and linguistic behavior, philosophy of history and of the social sciences, and studies in the fun damental categories and methods of philosophy and the inter-relation ships of the (...) sciences with ethics and metaphysics. Papers on the logic and methods of the natural sciences, including biological, physical and mathematical topics appear in the fifth volume of our series. We have included in the present volume the first English translation of the classic and fundamental work on aphasia by Carl Wernicke, together with a lucid and appreciative guide to his work by Dr. Norman Geschwind. The papers were not written to form a coherent volume, nor have they been edited with such a purpose. They represent current work-in progress, both in the United States and in Europe. Although most of the authors are philosophers, it is worth noting that we have essays of philosophical significance here written by a sociologist, an anthropologist, a political scientist, and by three neurophysiologists. We hope that collaboration among working scientists and working philosophers may develop further. (shrink)

A probability distribution is regular if it does not assign probability zero to any possible event. Williamson argued that we should not require probabilities to be regular, for if we do, certain “isomorphic” physical events must have different probabilities, which is implausible. His remarks suggest an assumption that chances are determined by intrinsic, qualitative circumstances. Weintraub responds that Williamson’s coin flip events differ in their inclusion relations to each other, or the inclusion relations between their times, and this can account (...) for their differences in probability. Haverkamp and Schulz rebut Weintraub, but their rebuttal fails because the events in their example are even less symmetric than Williamson’s. However, Weintraub’s argument also fails, for it ignores the distinction between intrinsic, qualitative differences and relations of time and bare identity. Weintraub could rescue her argument by claiming that the events differ in duration, under a non-standard and problematic conception of duration. However, we can modify Williamson’s example with Special Relativity so that there is no absolute inclusion relation between the times, and neither event has longer duration except relative to certain reference frames. Hence, Weintraub’s responses do not apply unless chance is observer-relative, which is also problematic. Finally, another symmetry argument defeats even the appeal to frame-dependent durations, for there the events have the same finite duration and are entirely disjoint, as are their respective times and places. (shrink)

In this paper we examine the study of minerals from the Renaissance to the early nineteenth century in the light of the work of Michel Foucault on the history of systems of thought. In spite of a certain number of theoretical problems, Foucault's enterprise opens up to the historian of science a vast terrain for exploration. But this is the place neither for a general exegesis nor for a general criticism of his position; our aim here is the more modest (...) one of taking certain points from Foucault's study,The order of things, and seeing how far they can be extended into an area not explicitly considered in that work. (shrink)

"Technological balance" occurs automatically when the designer, builder, and user of a tool is the same person. "Technological imbalance" occurs when these activities become separated and in opposition to one another. Tools become menacing exoge nous objects. We see a shift in connotation of the word technology from the skill of the person to the object produced. Designers and builders create tools with the passive consent and willful ignorance of users. Curricula often contribute to this imbalance. Apprentice designers and builders (...) receive specialized instruction in creating objects, whereas users uncritically learn the procedural requirements of the resulting objects. This system of education turns "machine tending" into a pedagogical goal. The university has the potential to become a model of technological balance for the soci ety as a whole using such means as selecting tools that encourage balance, "technology audits, " and break ing down the specializations among designers, builders, and users. (shrink)

Modernism in the arts commenced during the second half of the 19th century and extended into most of the 20th. A significant feature of this period is that each type of art gave principal attention to dimensions of itself. This was a type of self-analysis. I consider those art forms consisting of an image on a flat two-dimensional surface. I give particular attention to painting, a familiar example of this type of image. Explanations of Modernism are philosophically relevant not only (...) for aesthetics but also for epistemology. The reason is that an analysis of our perceptions as a result of seeing a painted image can contribute to philosophy's analysis of the process by which we obtain knowledge through perception. I argue that we should interpret Modernism as contributing to this investigation. (shrink)

The implications of variation in skin pigmentation for the blush have attracted discussion for centuries. Two long-standing positions are identified. First, the blush has been identified with shame, giving rise to claims that because people with dark skin do not blush they do not have the capacity to experience shame. Second, the meaning of a visible blush can be ambiguous. A review of more recent theorizing and empirical research suggests that people blush whatever their level of pigmentation; the blush tends (...) to be associated with embarrassment rather than shame; it serves both intraindividual and communicative functions. Nevertheless, there has been little systematic investigation into the impact of the relative discernibility of the blush on emotional experience or its functions. (shrink)

Literary analysis of the blush in Austen's novels identifies three themes, namely the potential ambiguity of a blush, its association with modesty, and its erotic and gendered nature, issues that scarcely figure in current psychological explanations of the phenomenon. I examine these themes and compare them with current psychological accounts which assign a central place to embarrassment and, more specifically, emphasise either unwanted social attention, exposure of the self, or the blush's signalling function. Analysis of Austen's work suggests that greater (...) attention should be paid to self-consciousness as it relates to threats to reputation, to the erotic dimension of the blush, and to potential gender differences. It should encourage researchers to be aware of limitations of psychological accounts and to expand their range of sources of information in order to enhance understanding of this elusive phenomenon. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Full Collection of Personal NarrativesZohar Lederman, Ola Ziara, Rachel Coghlan, Oksana Sulaieva, Anna Shcherbakova, Oleksandr Dudin, Vladyslava Kachkovska, Iryna Dudchenko, Anna Kovchun, Lyudmyla Prystupa, Yuliya Nogovitsyna, Ghaiath Hussein, Kathryn Fausch, P. P. Kyaw, Ayesha Ahmad, Richard W Sams II, Handreen Mohammed Saeed, Artem Riga, Ryan C. Maves, Elizabeth Dotsenko, Irina Deyneka, Eva V. Regel, and Vita Voloshchuk• An Unsettling Affair• How We Keep Caring While Walking Through Our Pain• (...) Adjusting Laboratory Practices to the Challenges of Wartime• Why We Stay• A Semi-Personal Story from a Ukrainian NGO Professional (or a Semi-Professional Story from a Ukrainian Person) Living through the War• When Ethics Survives Where People Do Not: A Story From Darfur• Burma’s Healthcare Under Fire: My Experience as an Exiled Medical Professional• When a Conflict Collapses on a Child: An (Aborted) Medical Evacuation of a Hazara Toddler During the Kabul Airport Blast and the Taliban Takeover• The Vagaries and Vicissitudes of War• Providing Care to a Potential Aggressor: An Ethical Dilemma• One Surgeon’s Experience During Armed Conflict in Ukraine• The Limits of Our Obligations• A Liberating Breath• Soldiers of the Invisible Front: How Ukrainian Therapists Are Fighting for the Mental Health of the Nation Under Fire• Stories of Families with Chronically Ill Pediatric Patients during the War in UkraineCopyright © 2023 Johns Hopkins University Press... (shrink)

In this first lecture Quine argues for a physicalistic monism and examines how mentalistic discourse can be located in that framework. He defends the following standard: a mental event qualifies as physically genuine if it is specifiable strictly by physiological description, presumably neurological, without any appeal to mentalistic terms. He further characterizes the basic mentalistic level that his view can accept: the learning process involving perception, expectation, action and pleasure, which all have important neural analogues. It is from this starting (...) point that he further speculates how it is possible to move from such perceptual events to our knowledge of nature. Lastly, he reflects more generally on what epistemology looks like when it is placed within this physicalist framework with its focus on language. (shrink)