Political thrillers often encourage the feeling that a mere individual has the power to make a difference on a large scale. Caught up in a chain of events they wished they had never uncovered, a protagonist can occupy a position in which their actions have far-reaching consequences, with the rookie CIA analyst accidentally bringing down a whole corrupt political system being only one example. Much of the critical attention these films have garnered falls under the rubric of detective work in (...) that the protagonist is seen as exposing a web of corruption which would otherwise have gone on unnoticed. However, this paper is focused on how the scale of the individual comes into contact with other, larger scales of events. Points of contact between scales are important because they are where change can take place, thus allowing an individual to influence the supra-individual. (shrink)

Aging is associated with declines in sensorimotor function. Several studies have demonstrated that transcranial direct current stimulation, a form of non-invasive brain stimulation, can be combined with training to mitigate age-related cognitive and motor declines. However, in some cases, the application of tDCS disrupts performance and learning. Here, we applied anodal tDCS either over the left prefrontal cortex, right PFC, supplementary motor complex, the left M1, or in a sham condition while older adults practiced a Discrete Sequence Production, an explicit (...) motor sequence, task across 3 days. We hypothesized that stimulation to either the right or left PFC would enhance motor learning for older adults, based on the extensive literature showing increased prefrontal cortical activity during motor task performance in older adults. Contrary to our predictions, stimulation to the right and left PFC resulted in slowed motor learning, as evidenced by a slower reduction rate of reduction of reaction time and the number of sequence chunks across trials relative to sham in session one and session two, respectively. These findings suggest an integral role of the right PFC early in sequence learning and a role of the left PFC in chunking in older adults, and contribute to mounting evidence of the difficultly of using tDCS in an aging population. (shrink)

In the middle of the 18th century, a new fad found its way into the gardens of England's well-to-do: building fake Gothic ruins. Newly constructed castle towers and walls looked like they were already falling apart, even on the first day of their creation. Made of stone, plaster, or even canvas, these "sham ruins" are often considered an embarrassing blip in English architectural history. However, Sham Ruins: A User's Guide expands the specific example of the sham ruin into a general (...) principle to examine the way purposely broken objects can be used both to uncover old truths and invent new ones. Along with architecture, work by Ivan Vladislavić, Tom Stoppard, Alain Mabanckou, Aleksei Fedorchenko, Michael Haneke, and Sturtevant is used to develop this thesis, as well as artifacts such as pre-torn jeans, fake histories, and broken screen apps. Using these examples, one of the key questions the book raises is: What is it that sham ruins ruin? In other words, if real ruins are ruins of what they actually are, then sham ruins should be considered ruins of what they are not. Thus sham ruins are about imposing new meaning where such meaning does not and should not exist. They also can show how things we think are functioning well are actually already broken. Sham ruins do this, and much more, by being lies, ruses, and embarrassments. This is what gives them the power with which we can think about objects in new, unintended ways. (shrink)

In the _Nichomachean Ethics_, Aristotle defines three kinds of friendship: utility, pleasure, and virtue. The characters in the films of Sean Baker fit into none of these categories. Friendship is central to all of Baker’s films, but it takes the non-Aristotelian form of “friends, no matter what,” which I interpret as a description of the aporia of friendship, of an impossible friend, or a friend in the realm of fantasy. In other words, friends are only friends when they resist everything (...) friends are supposed to do. Betrayal, lies, and complications sit at the heart of this new definition. One mechanism for this kind of friendship is _mourning_. Friends are only friends when friendship is mourned, or when it is part of a crypt, or a vault for losses that are too traumatic to confront fully, as set out in the work of Sigmund Freud, Jacques Derrida, Nicolas Abraham and Mária Török, and developed by Laurence Rickels. This reading of mourning puts a particular spin on fantasy, for if fantasy is generally assumed to be about wish-fulfillment, then when fantasy reaches into the crypt for inspiration, it is retooled into a vehicle for confronting what is too hard to face. This is the function of friendship in Baker’s films: his friends are Judas figures going against their friends in order to keep their friendship alive. In _Tangerine_ (2015), two transgender sex workers in West Hollywood develop their friendship around a fight over a man. In _Starlet_ (2012), a young woman hides a secret from her elderly female friend, and this friendship is only saved when another actress betrays this secret. In these films, friendship is paradoxically formed by attempting to ruin friendship. Thought on fantasy and mourning will help in defining this type of non-Aristotelian friendship, as well as Freud’s work on the “ambivalence of feeling” from his writing on the First World War. (shrink)

This chapter contains section titled: “One Must Die to Know the Truth” “Prayer to the Cloud of Unknowing” Bored, as in Really Bored The Boxing of D'Anna Biers Notes.

This handbook presents a comprehensive introduction to the core areas of philosophy of education combined with an up-to-date selection of the central themes. It includes 95 newly commissioned articles that focus on and advance key arguments; each essay incorporates essential background material serving to clarify the history and logic of the relevant topic, examining the status quo of the discipline with respect to the topic, and discussing the possible futures of the field. The book provides a state-of-the-art overview of philosophy (...) of education, covering a range of topics: Voices from the present and the past deals with 36 major figures that philosophers of education rely on; Schools of thought addresses 14 stances including Eastern, Indigenous, and African philosophies of education as well as religiously inspired philosophies of education such as Jewish and Islamic; Revisiting enduring educational debates scrutinizes 25 issues heavily debated in the past and the present, for example care and justice, democracy, and the curriculum; New areas and developments addresses 17 emerging issues that have garnered considerable attention like neuroscience, videogames, and radicalization. The collection is relevant for lecturers teaching undergraduate and graduate courses in philosophy of education as well as for colleagues in teacher training. Moreover, it helps junior researchers in philosophy of education to situate the problems they are addressing within the wider field of philosophy of education and offers a valuable update for experienced scholars dealing with issues in the sub-discipline. Combined with different conceptions of the purpose of philosophy, it discusses various aspects, using diverse perspectives to do so. Contributing Editors: Section 1: Voices from the Present and the Past: Nuraan Davids Section 2: Schools of Thought: Christiane Thompson and Joris Vlieghe Section 3: Revisiting Enduring Debates: Ann Chinnery, Naomi Hodgson, and Viktor Johansson Section 4: New Areas and Developments: Kai Horsthemke, Dirk Willem Postma, and Claudia Ruitenberg. (shrink)

En el contexto político global contemporáneo, las diversas luchas sociales se están alienando entre sí hasta elpunto de que la ilusión del capitalismo como único sistema socioeconómico posible está difuminando todos los horizontesdel cambio social. En este artículo, trataremos de redefinir las causas comunes de las luchas sociales, demostrando su interseccionalidad e interdependencia. Para ello, nos ocuparemos de una serie de conceptos de la filosofía de Marx. En la introducción, examinaremos la noción de valor, afirmando que la teoría del valor (...) de Marx no es simplemente una teoría laboral del valor, sino que más bien refleja la estructura paralela de la producción y la circulación, cristalizada en la forma de valor última del dinero. Una vez obtenidas estas ideas preliminares, volveremos al fenómeno del trabajo en el capitalismo, para reinterpretar, en la primera sección del artículo, la distinción marxiana entre trabajo productivo e improductivo. A partir de ahí, se darán los primeros ejemplos concretos de la interseccionalidad de las luchas sociales contra la abstracción del capital: a saber, mostrar que las luchas de género y las raciales tienen ciertas causas comunes, enraizadas en la hegemonía gramsciana. En la segunda sección, examinaremos la distinción que Marx establece entre la subsunción formal y la real. Esta última, afirmaremos, es decisiva para entender cómo el capital estructura la cuasi-totalidad de nuestras relaciones sociales. Tras una interpretación de la película Toni Erdmann de Maren Ade, propondremos algunos medios posibles de lucha interseccional contra la subsunción real, que encontrarán su respaldo teórico en el concepto de universales subversivos. Las observaciones finales abordarán la lógica nuclear de la distribución y la acumulación del capital, un síntoma que pervive a lo largo de la historia preservado e impulsado por la omnipresencia de la ideología, y subrayarán de nuevo implícitamente la importancia de la lucha común en el descongelamiento de la emergencia de un nuevo sujeto revolucionario. (shrink)

A la luz de algunas críticas recientes, en el marco de este texto se busca impulsar un debate que tiene lugar en dos frentes: por una parte, la lógica del origen de la lógica y, por otra parte, la relación entre psicoanálisis y marxismo. Para ello se recuperan algunos textos publicados por Alain Badiou hacia finales de la década de 1960, en los que polemiza con Jacques-Alain Miller alrededor de los concepto de "sutura" y "sujeto" (Zizek), para situar tanto las (...) diversas posiciones como las coherentes reconsideraciones a lo largo de su trayectoria intelectual. En efecto, desde "El concepto de modelo" hasta su más reciente trilogía (Teoría del sujeto, El ser y el acontecimiento y Lógica de los Mundos), se propone una perspectiva que lejos de establecer jerarquías y subordinaciones busca promover conexiones a partir de las especificidades y las diferencias a través de esa vía particular que es la filosofía. De este modo resulta posible apreciar que, pese a su crítica respecto de la primacía de la lógica del significante, los conceptos propuestos por Jacques Lacan funcionaron como una notoria fuente de inspiración para Badiou, especialmente en relación con el sujeto del inconsciente. (shrink)

This article explores the philosophy of Alain Badiou from the vantage point of the concepts of the localization, delocalization, and relocalization of the void as thematized through literary arts, religion, emancipatory politics, and the subject of psychoanalysis. In short, these moments around the void characterize the processes through which truth is processed and seen through their full realization by a philosophical engagement across the various conditions in which these truths occur. The localization of a void is the naming of an (...) indiscernible element that is incommensurable to the rubric of constructible knowledge, sense and meaning which could saturate the space of truth. Thus, the naming that localizes the void acts as a subtraction of the invariant in the variance of situation such that across various points in space and time, we are still able to subtract the universal as the invariant not just as the fidelity to the localized truth but also as the resurrection of truth upon its relocalization at a different place and a different time. At its core, this article is concerned with truth, why truth is persistent, and why we have to struggle to articulate the truth that we are trying to be faithful to again and again with each instance that truth risks being covered-over and obscured. (shrink)

Literacy in the Persianate World: Writing and the Social Order. Edited by Brian Spooner and William L. Hanaway. Penn Museum International Research Conferences, vol. 4. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, 2012; distributed by University of Pennsylvania Press. Pp. xviii + 437. $59.95, £39.

A comment the paper by Brian McLaughlin in the same volume, this paper raises questions about whether the classicism/connectionism debate is really well-formed.

Physicians are increasingly confronted with the consequences of allocation policies. In several countries, physicians have been assigned a gatekeeper role for secondary health care. Many ethicists oppose this assignment for several reasons, concentrating on the harm the intrusion of societal arguments would inflict on doctor-patient relations. It is argued that these arguments rest on a distinction of spheres of values and of rationality, without taking into account the mixing of values and rationalities that takes place in everyday medical practice. If (...) medical practice, then, does not follow a single, pure rationality, can it also incorporate the societal rationality of the gatekeeper role?Using a case from general practice, I try to show how physicians may integrate societal arguments into their practice in a morally acceptable way. A version of the model of reflective equilibrium and especially Beauchamp and Childress's safeguards, may be helpful both to analyse and teach such balancing of values and rationalities. (shrink)

The objective of this study was to explore the participants’ processing strategies on the mere exposure effect, object decision priming and explicit recognition. In Experiments 1, we observed that recognition and the mere exposure effect for unfamiliar three-dimensional objects were not dissociated by plane rotations in the same way as recognition and object decision priming. However, we showed that, under identical conditions, prompting analytic processing at testing produced a large plane rotation effect on recognition and the mere exposure effect similar (...) to that observed for object decision priming . Furthermore, inducing a non-analytic processing strategy at testing produced a reduced plane rotation effect on recognition and object decision , similar to that observed for the mere exposure effect. These findings suggest that participants’ processing strategies influence performance on the three tasks. (shrink)

Brian Skyrms offers a fascinating demonstration of how fundamental signals are to our world. He uses various scientific tools to investigate how meaning and communication develop. Signals operate in networks of senders and receivers at all levels of life, transmitting and processing information. That is how humans and animals think and interact.

Objectives Access to healthcare in most western societies is based on equality. Rapidly rising costs have fuelled debates about differentiation in access to healthcare. We assessed the public's perceptions and attitudes about differentiation in healthcare according to lifestyle behaviour. Methods A vignette study was undertaken in participants in a colorectal cancer screening pilot programme in the Netherlands. Screenees with a negative test result received a questionnaire in which nine hypothetical situations were described: three different healthcare settings (screening, lung cancer, chronic (...) obstructive pulmonary disease) combined with three forms of differentiation each: a difference in premium, waiting list ordering or copayment according to lifestyle. We evaluated the responses using a general hierarchical linear model. Results The percentage of participants in agreement with differentiation varied from 20% to 58% (overall mean of 40%). Significantly more participants were in favour of giving a premium discount to those who do not engage in unhealthy behaviour compared with supporters for higher payments for those who do. More differentiation was supported for non-smoking versus smoking cessation than for participation versus non-participation in screening. We observed in-group favouritism in smokers, but no significant effects of age or disease. There was no support for waiting list ordering based on lifestyle. Conclusions Results of this study show that Dutch citizens eligible for colorectal cancer screening are in favour of some form of financial differentiation in the distribution of healthcare, but that significant differences exist between type of setting and the type of behaviour. Our study can be used in the ongoing discussion about solidarity and behaviour in healthcare. (shrink)

BackgroundConsent for data research in acute and critical care is complex as patients become at least temporarily incapacitated or die. Existing guidelines and regulations in the European Union are of limited help and there is a lack of literature about the use of data from this vulnerable group. To aid the creation of a patient-centred framework for responsible data research in the acute setting, we explored views of patients and next-of-kin about the collection, storage, sharing and use of genetic and (...) health-related data for observational research.MethodsWe conducted qualitative interviews (n = 19) with Dutch sudden cardiac arrest survivors who donated clinical and socio-economic data and genetic samples to research. We also interviewed their next-of-kin. Topics were informed by ethics literature and we used scenario-sketches to aid discussion of complex issues.ResultsSudden cardiac arrest survivors displayed limited awareness of their involvement in health data research and of the content of their given consent. We found that preferences regarding disclosure of clinically actionable genetic findings could change over time. When data collection and use were limited to the medical realm, patients trusted researchers to handle data responsibly without concern for privacy or other risks. There was no consensus as to whether deferred consent should be explicitly asked from survivors. If consent is asked, this would ideally be done a few months after the event when cognitive capacities have been regained. Views were divided about the need to obtain proxy consent for research with deceased patients’ data. However, there was general support for the disclosure of potentially relevant post-mortem genetic findings to relatives.ConclusionsSudden cardiac arrest patients’ donation of data for research was grounded in trust in medicine overall, blurring the boundary between research and care. Our findings also highlight questions about the acceptability of a one-time consent and about responsibilities of patients, researchers and ethics committees. Finally, further normative investigation is needed regarding the (continued) use of participants’ data after death, which is of particular importance in this setting. Our findings are thought to be of relevance for other acute and life-threatening illnesses as well. (shrink)

This book focuses on the idea of a modus vivendi as a way of governing political life and addressing problems characterized by pluralism or deep-rooted diversity. The individual essays illustrate both the merits and the limitations of a political theory of modus vivendi; how it might be interpreted and developed; specific challenges entailed by articulating it in a convincing form; what its institutional implications might be; and how it relates to other seminal issues and concepts in political theory; such as (...) legitimacy, toleration, the social contract, etc. The book makes a significant contribution to the discussion on the scope and limits of liberal political theory, and on how to deal politically with deep-rooted diversity. (shrink)

Brian Skyrms, author of the successful Evolution of the Social Contract has written a sequel. The book is a study of ideas of cooperation and collective action. The point of departure is a prototypical story found in Rousseau's A Discourse on Inequality. Rousseau contrasts the pay-off of hunting hare where the risk of non-cooperation is small but the reward is equally small, against the pay-off of hunting the stag where maximum cooperation is required but where the reward is so (...) much greater. Thus, rational agents are pulled in one direction by considerations of risk and in another by considerations of mutual benefit. Written with Skyrms's characteristic clarity and verve, this intriguing book will be eagerly sought out by students and professionals in philosophy, political science, economics, sociology and evolutionary biology. (shrink)

Previous studies show that medical students in clinical training face ethical problems that are not often discussed in the literature. In order to make teaching timely and relevant for them, it is important to understand what medical students perceive as ethical problems, as various factors may influence their perception, including cultural differences and working environment. The purpose of this qualitative study was to explore students’ perceptions of what an ethical problem is, during their clinical training in the hospital, and compare (...) the results from two different countries. We observed a total of eighteen ethics group discussions and interviewed fifteen medical students at two medical schools, in Indonesia and the Netherlands. Data were interpreted and analyzed using content analysis. We found that students in both settings encounter problems which are closer to their daily work and responsibilities as medical students and perceive these problems as ethical problems. Indonesian students perceived substandard care and inequity in healthcare as ethical problems, while Dutch students perceived that cases which are not matters of life and death are less worthy to discuss. Our study suggests that there might be a gap between ethical problems that are discussed in class with teachers, and problems that students actually encounter in practice. Teachers should be aware of the everyday situations in clinical training which may be perceived by students as ethically problematic and should acknowledge and discuss these ethical problems with students as part of the learning processes in ethics education. (shrink)

Almost every country today contains adherents of different religions and different secular conceptions of the good life. Is there any alternative to a power struggle among them, leading most probably to either civil war or repression? The argument of this book is that justice as impartiality offers a solution. According to the theory of justice as impartiality, principles of justice are those principles that provide a reasonable basis for the unforced assent of those subject to them. The object of this (...) book is to set the theory out, explain its rationale, and respond to a variety of criticism that have been made of it. As the second volume of his work-in-progress, A Treatise on Social Justice, this work lies at the heart of a thriving academic debate which the author has played a key role in shaping. (shrink)

Although the body has been the focus of much contemporary cultural theory, the models that are typically applied neglect the most salient characteristics of embodied existence—movement, affect, and sensation—in favor of concepts derived from linguistic theory. In _Parables for the Virtual_ Brian Massumi views the body and media such as television, film, and the Internet, as cultural formations that operate on multiple registers of sensation beyond the reach of the reading techniques founded on the standard rhetorical and semiotic models. (...) Renewing and assessing William James’s radical empiricism and Henri Bergson’s philosophy of perception through the filter of the post-war French philosophy of Deleuze, Guattari, and Foucault, Massumi links a cultural logic of variation to questions of movement, affect, and sensation. If such concepts are as fundamental as signs and significations, he argues, then a new set of theoretical issues appear, and with them potential new paths for the wedding of scientific and cultural theory. Replacing the traditional opposition of literal and figural with new distinctions between stasis and motion and between actual and virtual, _Parables for the Virtual _tackles related theoretical issues by applying them to cultural mediums as diverse as architecture, body art, the digital art of Stelarc, and Ronald Reagan’s acting career. The result is an intriguing combination of cultural theory, science, and philosophy that asserts itself in a crystalline and multi-faceted argument. _Parables for the Virtual_ will interest students and scholars of continental and Anglo-American philosophy, cultural studies, cognitive science, electronic art, digital culture, and chaos theory, as well as those concerned with the “science wars” and the relation between the humanities and the sciences in general. (shrink)

Intuitively, Gettier cases are instances of justified true beliefs that are not cases of knowledge. Should we therefore conclude that knowledge is not justified true belief? Only if we have reason to trust intuition here. But intuitions are unreliable in a wide range of cases. And it can be argued that the Gettier intuitions have a greater resemblance to unreliable intuitions than to reliable intuitions. Whats distinctive about the faulty intuitions, I argue, is that respecting them would mean abandoning a (...) simple, systematic and largely successful theory in favour of a complicated, disjunctive and idiosyncratic theory. So maybe respecting the Gettier intuitions was the wrong reaction, we should instead have been explaining why we are all so easily misled by these kinds of cases. (shrink)

Brian Skyrms constructs a theory of "dynamic deliberation" and uses it to investigate rational decision-making in cases of strategic interaction. This illuminating book will be of great interest to all those in many disciplines who use decision theory and game theory to study human behavior and thought. Skyrms begins by discussing the Bayesian theory of individual rational decision and the classical theory of games, which at first glance seem antithetical in the criteria used for determining action. In his effort (...) to show how methods for dealing with information feedback can be productively combined, the author skillfully leads us through the mazes of equilibrium selection, the Nash equilibria for normal and extensive forms, structural stability, causal decision theory, dynamic probability, the revision of beliefs, and, finally, good habits for decision. The author provides many clarifying illustrations and a handy appendix called "Deliberational Dynamics on Your Personal Computer." His powerful model has important implications for understanding the rational origins of convention and the social contract, the logic of nuclear deterrence, the theory of good habits, and the varied strategies of political and economic behavior. (shrink)

Brian Hedden defends a radical view about the relationship between rationality, personal identity, and time. On the standard view, personal identity over time plays a central role in thinking about rationality, because there are rational norms for how a person's attitudes and actions at one time should fit with her attitudes and actions at other times. But these norms are problematic. They make what you rationally ought to believe or do depend on facts about your past that aren't part (...) of your current perspective on the world, and they make rationality depend on controversial, murky metaphysical facts about what binds different instantaneous snapshots into a single person extended in time. Hedden takes a different approach, treating the relationship between different time-slices of the same person as no different from the relationship between different people. On his account, the locus of rationality is the time-slice rather than the temporally extended agent. This impersonal, time-slice-centric approach to rationality yields a unified approach to the rationality of beliefs, preferences, and actions where what rationality demands of you is solely determined by your evidence, with no special weight given to your past beliefs or actions. (shrink)

Dogmatism is sometimes thought to be incompatible with Bayesian models of rational learning. I show that the best model for updating imprecise credences is compatible with dogmatism.

Kaplan (1989a) insists that natural languages do not contain displacing devices that operate on character—such displacing devices are called monsters. This thesis has recently faced various empirical challenges (e.g., Schlenker 2003; Anand and Nevins 2004). In this note, the thesis is challenged on grounds of a more theoretical nature. It is argued that the standard compositional semantics of variable binding employs monstrous operations. As a dramatic first example, Kaplan’s formal language, the Logic of Demonstratives, is shown to contain monsters. For (...) similar reasons, the orthodox lambda-calculus-based semantics for variable binding is argued to be monstrous. This technical point promises to provide some far-reaching implications for our understanding of semantic theory and content. The theoretical upshot of the discussion is at least threefold: (i) the Kaplanian thesis that “directly referential” terms are not shiftable/bindable is unmotivated, (ii) since monsters operate on something distinct from the assertoric content of their operands, we must distinguish ingredient sense from assertoric content (cf. Dummett 1973; Evans 1979; Stanley 1997), and (iii) since the case of variable binding provides a paradigm of semantic shift that differs from the other types, it is plausible to think that indexicals—which are standardly treated by means of the assignment function—might undergo the same kind of shift. (shrink)

Conciliatory theories of disagreement face a revenge problem; they cannot be coherently believed by one who thinks they have peers who are not conciliationists. I argue that this is a deep problem for conciliationism.

When Georg von der Gabelentz’s book Die Sprachwissenschaft was published, the historical-comparative paradigm was the dominant perspective in empirical linguistic enquiry, and the then current theory of language was fijirmly rooted in language psychology. While itself based in this tradition, Gabelentz’s Sprachwissenschaft nevertheless strikes another chord, which sets it apart from contemporary sources. This chapter argues that the book is particularly noteworthy for its wide-ranging bottom-up approach to linguistic phenomena and its propensity to conceive of language both as object and (...) instrument of enquiry in a sense akin to the ‘reflexive’ stance that later would become a hallmark of Edmund Husserl’s phenomenology. The ‘phenomenological mindset’ can in particular be retraced in the way a diffferent philosophy of the language sciences and theory of meaning take shape in Die Sprachwissenschaft. (shrink)

philosophy of language, the study of the essence of language and its importance to mankind and culture, is concerned with the relationship between linguistic signs and thought, knowledge , consciousness, logic, communication, truth, reference, and reality.

Grounded in human experience, this accessible introduction to principles in Catholic morality focuses on moral development, not simply the acquisition of learning. The book begins with a historical overview of moral theology and goes on to examine such issues as conscience, freedom, fundamental option, authority, law, sin, and conversion.

Many writers have held that in his later work, David Lewis adopted a theory of predicate meaning such that the meaning of a predicate is the most natural property that is (mostly) consistent with the way the predicate is used. That orthodox interpretation is shared by both supporters and critics of Lewis's theory of meaning, but it has recently been strongly criticised by Wolfgang Schwarz. In this paper, I accept many of Schwarze's criticisms of the orthodox interpretation, and add some (...) more. But I also argue that the orthodox interpretation has a grain of truth in it, and seeing that helps us appreciate the strength of Lewis's late theory of meaning. (shrink)

To Aristotle, spoken words are symbols, not of objects in the world, but of our mental experiences related to these objects. Presently there are two major strands of interpretation of Aristotle’s concept of the linguistic sign. First, there is the structuralist account offered by Coseriu (Geschichte der Sprachphilosophie. Von den Anfängen bis Rousseau, 2003 [1969], pp. 65–108) whose interpretation is reminiscent of the Saussurean sign concept. A second interpretation, offered by Lieb (in: Geckeler (Ed.) Logos Semantikos: Studia Linguistica in Honorem (...) Eugenio Coseriu 1921–1981, 1981) and Weidemann (in: Schmitter (Ed.) Geschichte der Sprachtheorie 2. Sprachtheorien der abendländischen Antike, 1991), says that Aristotle’s concept of the linguistic sign is similar to the one presented in Ogden and Richard’s (The meaning of meaning: A study of the influence of language upon thought and of the science of symbolism, 1970 [1923]) semiotic triangle. This paper starts off with an introductory outline of the so-called phýsei-thései discussion which started during presocratic times and culminated in Plato’s Cratylus. Aristotle’s concept of the linguistic sign is to be regarded as a solution to the stalemate position reached in the Cratylus. Next, a discussion is offered of both Coseriu’s and Lieb’s analysis. We submit that Aristotle’s concept of the linguistic sign shows features of both Saussure’s and Ogden and Richards’s sign concept but that it does not exclusively predict one of the two. We argue that Aristotle’s concept of the linguistic sign is based on three different relations which together evince his teleological as well empiricist point of view: one internal (symbolic) relation and two external relations, i.e. a likeness relation and a relation katà synthéken. (shrink)

Background: Biomedical science is producing an avalanche of data about risk factors, often with a small predictive value, associated with a broad diversity of diseases. Prevention and screening are increasingly moving from public health into the clinic. Therefore, the question of which risk factors to investigate and disclose in the individual patient, becomes ethically increasingly urgent. In line with Wilson and Jungner's public health-related 10 principles for screening, it seems crucial to distinguish important from unimportant health risks.Aim: to explore the (...) ways in which clinicians distinguish important from unimportant health risks.Methods: We interviewed 36 respondents (gastroenterologists and gynaecologists/obstetrics) in 5 focus group interviews and 15 open in-depth interviews on their interpretation of what makes a health risk important.Results: Physicians primarily interpreted importance as the severity of the possible harm, less often its probability. Possibilities of prevention or reassurance strongly influenced their judgment on importance.Discussion: It is not likely that interpreting ‘important’ as ‘severe’ will help in differentiating meaningful from meaningless risk knowledge. A more fundamental change in our ways of dealing with risk may be called for. We discuss existing literature on resilience as an alternative way to deal with risk. Balancing prevention and risk reduction with resilience could be a fruitful direction. (shrink)

Some instances of right and wrongdoing appear to be of a distinctly collective kind. When, for example, one group commits genocide against another, the genocide is collective in the sense that the wrongness of genocide seems morally distinct from the aggregation of individual murders that make up the genocide. The problem, which I refer to as the problem of collective wrongs, is that it is unclear how to assign blame for distinctly collective wrongdoing to individual contributors when none of those (...) individual contributors is guilty of the wrongdoing in question. I offer Christopher Kutz’s Complicity Principle as an attractive starting point for solving the problem, and then argue that the principle ought to be expanded to include a broader and more appropriate range of cases. The view I ultimately defend is that individuals are blameworthy for collective harms insofar as they knowingly participate in those harms, and that said individuals remain blameworthy regardless of whether they succeed in making a causal contribution to those harms. (shrink)