One WHY LOVERS CAN'T BE FRIENDS James Conlon That one's spouse is also one's closest friend is a common claim and seems innocent enough. ...

Considerable controversy has recently arisen regarding the patenting of medical and surgical processes in the United States. One such patent, viz. for a "chevron" incision used in ophthalmologic surgery, has especially occasioned heated response including a major, condemnatory ethics policy statement from the American Medical Association as well as federal legislation denying patent protection for most uses of a patented medical or surgical procedure. This article identifies and discusses the major legal, ethical and public policy considerations offered by proponents and (...) opponents of such patents. The existing literature divides up into those who favor such patents essentially without qualification, and those who condemn and wish to outlaw them. We advance a compromise position where administrative and legislative action is called for to provide more specific guidelines regarding the patentability of such processes by the Patent and Trademark Office. Our position, in sum, will be that too much is at stake in this complicated area for either the blanket prohibition, or wholesale, uncritical acceptance, of the patenting of medical and surgical processes or techniques. (shrink)

Flaubert is a major writer, as popular in England as he is in France, and of an enduring fascination. This book examines his responses to pictorial art, from classical to popular, Eastern to Western, traditional to modern. Rival and foil, pictorial art emerges as one of the most powerful driving forces behind his own work.

The lottery problem is often regarded as a successful counterexample to reliabilism. The process of forming your true belief that your ticket has lost solely on the basis of considering the odds is, from a purely probabilistic viewpoint, much more reliable than the process of forming a true belief that you have lost by reading the results in a normally reliable newspaper. Reliabilism thus seems forced, counterintuitively, to count the former process as knowledge if it so counts the latter process. (...) -/- I offer a theory of empirical knowledge which, while being recognizably reliabilist, restricts empirical knowledge to cases in which the fact that p and the belief that p are causally connected. I show that this form of reliabilism solves the lottery problem, avoids the problems that beset the causal theory of knowledge, and show how it handles a number of problematic cases in the recent literature. (shrink)

Judeans in Babylonia: A Study of Deportees in the Sixth and Fifth Centuries BCE. By Tero Alstola. Culture and History of the Ancient Near East, vol. 109. Leiden: Brill, 2020. Pp. xii + 353. $150.

Brings together an impressive collection of primary sources from ancient and modern philosophy. Arranged chronologically and featuring introductory overviews explaining technical terms, this accessible reader is easy-to-follow and unrivaled in its historical scope. With selections from key thinkers such as Plato, Aristotle, Descartes, Hume and Kant, it connects the major ideas of the ancients with contemporary thinkers. A selection of recent texts from philosophers including Quine, Putnam, Field and Maddy offering insights into the current state of the discipline clearly illustrates (...) the development of the subject. (shrink)

There is a rapidly growing interest in the topic of sustainability as it relates to long‐term business performance that optimizes the “triple bottom line”: economic, environmental, and social outcomes. This article articulates a multilevel conceptual model for executing a business strategy for sustainability primarily through the design and implementation of human resource management practices. The model builds on open systems theory, the resource based view of the firm, and the concept of line of sight to identify certain key organizational capabilities, (...) group competencies, and individual abilities and other characteristics that combine to drive organizational performance when pursuing a sustainability strategy. The article concludes with a discussion of implications of the model for theory, research, and practice. (shrink)

These are the abstracts of papers for the conference, History Unveiled Science Unfettered: A Conference in Celebration of James E. McGuire University of Pittsburgh, January 19, 2002.

Historiography in a metaphysical mode Content Type Journal Article Pages 1-17 DOI 10.1007/s11016-011-9524-6 Authors Bernadette Bensaude-Vincent, CETCOPRA/Université Paris 1-Panthéon-Sorbonne, 17 Rue de la Sorbonne, 75231 Paris Cedex05, France Jan Golinski, Department of History, University of New Hampshire, 20 Academic Way, Durham, NH 03824, USA Lissa L. Roberts, Department of Science, Technology and Policy Studies (STePS), University of Twente, Postbox 217, 7500 AE Enschede, The Netherlands John McEvoy, Department of Philosophy, University of Cincinnati, Cincinnati, OH 45221, USA Journal Metascience Online (...) ISSN 1467-9981 Print ISSN 0815-0796. (shrink)

Although eye tracking has been used extensively to assess cognitions for static stimuli, recent research suggests that the link between gaze and cognition may be more tenuous for dynamic stimuli such as videos. Part of the difficulty in convincingly linking gaze with cognition is that in dynamic stimuli, gaze position is strongly influenced by exogenous cues such as object motion. However, tests of the gaze‐cognition link in dynamic stimuli have been done on only a limited range of stimuli often characterized (...) by highly organized motion. Also, analyses of cognitive contrasts between participants have been mostly been limited to categorical contrasts among small numbers of participants that may have limited the power to observe more subtle influences. We, therefore, tested for cognitive influences on gaze for screen‐captured instructional videos, the contents of which participants were tested on. Between‐participant scanpath similarity predicted between‐participant similarity in responses on test questions, but with imperfect consistency across videos. We also observed that basic gaze parameters and measures of attention to centers of interest only inconsistently predicted learning, and that correlations between gaze and centers of interest defined by other‐participant gaze and cursor movement did not predict learning. It, therefore, appears that the search for eye movement indices of cognition during dynamic naturalistic stimuli may be fruitful, but we also agree that the tyranny of dynamic stimuli is real, and that links between eye movements and cognition are highly dependent on task and stimulus properties. (shrink)

ObjectiveCo-morbid insomnia and sleep apnea is a common and debilitating condition that is more difficult to treat compared to insomnia or sleep apnea-alone. Emerging evidence suggests that cognitive behavioral therapy for insomnia is effective in patients with COMISA, however, those with more severe sleep apnea and evidence of greater objective sleep disturbance may be less responsive to CBTi. Polysomnographic sleep study data has been used to predict treatment response to CBTi in patients with insomnia-alone, but not in patients with COMISA. (...) We used randomized controlled trial data to investigate polysomnographic predictors of insomnia improvement following CBTi, versus control in participants with COMISA.MethodsOne hundred and forty five participants with insomnia and sleep apnea [apnea-hypopnea index ≥ 15] were randomized to CBTi or no-treatment control. Mixed models were used to investigate the effect of pre-treatment AHI, sleep duration, and other traditional, and novel [quantitative electroencephalography ] polysomnographic predictors of between-group changes in Insomnia Severity Index scores from pre-treatment to post-treatment.ResultsCompared to control, CBTi was associated with greater ISI improvement among participants with; higher AHI, less wake after sleep onset, and less N3 sleep. No quantitative electroencephalographic, or other traditional polysomnographic variables predicted between-group ISI change.DiscussionAmong participants with COMISA, higher OSA severity predicted a greater treatment-response to CBTi, versus control. People with COMISA should be treated with CBTi, which is effective even in the presence of severe OSA and objective sleep disturbance. (shrink)

Several high-profile mathematical problems have been solved in recent decades by computer-assisted proofs. Some philosophers have argued that such proofs are a posteriori on the grounds that some such proofs are unsurveyable; that our warrant for accepting these proofs involves empirical claims about the reliability of computers; that there might be errors in the computer or program executing the proof; and that appeal to computer introduces into a proof an experimental element. I argue that none of these arguments withstands scrutiny, (...) and so there is no reason to believe that computer-assisted proofs are not a priori. Thanks are due to Michael Levin, David Corfield, and an anonymous referee for Philosophia Mathematica for their helpful comments. Earlier versions of this paper were presented at the Hofstra University Department of Mathematics colloquium series, and at the 2005 New Jersey Regional Philosophical Association; I am grateful to both audiences for their comments. CiteULike Connotea Del.icio.us What's this? (shrink)

Setting the thought of Robert Grosseteste within the broader context of the intellectual, religious, and social movements of his time, this study elucidates the evolution of his ideas on topics ranging from the mathematical laws that govern the movement of bodies, God as the mathematical Creator, and human knowledge, to religious experience and the place of humanity within the social, natural, and providential orders.

In recent decades, experimental mathematics has emerged as a new branch of mathematics. This new branch is defined less by its subject matter, and more by its use of computer assisted reasoning. Experimental mathematics uses a variety of computer assisted approaches to verify or prove mathematical hypotheses. For example, there is “number crunching” such as searching for very large Mersenne primes, and showing that the Goldbach conjecture holds for all even numbers less than 2 × 1018. There are “verifications” of (...) hypotheses which, while not definitive proofs, provide strong support for those hypotheses, and there are proofs involving an enormous amount of computer hours, which cannot be surveyed by any one mathematician in a lifetime. There have been several attempts to argue that one or another aspect of experimental mathematics shows that mathematics now accepts empirical or inductive methods, and hence shows mathematical apriorism to be false. Assessing this argument is complicated by the fact that there is no agreed definition of what precisely experimental mathematics is. However, I argue that on any plausible account of ’experiment’ these arguments do not succeed. (shrink)

Duncan Pritchard's version of the safety analysis of knowledge has it that for all contingent propositions, p, S knows that p iff S believes that p, p is true, and (the “safety principle”) in most nearby worlds in which S forms his belief in the same way as in the actual world, S believes that p only if p is true. Among the other virtues claimed by Pritchard for this view is its supposed ability to solve a version of the (...) lottery puzzle. In this paper, I argue that the safety analysis of knowledge in fact fails to solve the lottery puzzle. I also argue that a revised version of the safety principle recently put forward by Pritchard fares no better. (shrink)

Robert Grosseteste was the initiator of the English scientific tradition, one of the first chancellors of Oxford University, and a famous teacher and commentator on the newly discovered works of Aristotle. In this book, James McEvoy provides the first general, inclusive overview of the entire range of Grosseteste's massive intellectual achievement.

The works of Paul K. Feyerabend, Norwood Russell Hanson and Thomas S. Kuhn have come to occupy a central place in the annals of contemporary philosophy of science. Some of their contemporaries,, tend to regard them as the vanguard of a new “revolutionary” intellectual movement. Reacting against the views of their positivist predecessors, they embrace and propagate the idea that “pervasive presuppositions” are fundamental to scientific investigations. Thus, Feyerabend thinks that, “... scientific theories are ways of looking at the world; (...) and their adoption affects our general beliefs and expectations, and thereby also our experiences and our conception of reality”. This is in stark contrast to the positivist view that the aim of science is the systematization of experience that exists independently of any scientific theories. This new view of scientific theories also involves a “radical” conception of the nature of theoretical change. Rejecting the positivist notion of any constant element through such change, Kuhn regards a basic theoretical change as a conceptual revolution and “wants to say that after a revolution scientists are responding to a different world”. Hanson uses the phrase ‘theory-loaded’ to give expression to a view of the semantic content of observation statements that follows from this general position. (shrink)

Drawing on philosophical thought from the eighteenth century as well as conceptual frameworks developed in the twenty-first century, the essays in Beyond Sense and Sensibility examine moral formation as represented in or implicitly produced by literary works of late eighteenth-century British authors.

This paper aims to share reflections produced in the core of a research developed in everyday life of a school located in the city of Rio de Janeiro, in order to think the teacher training process and the child's potentiality in it. Through an investigation from the perspective of research with daily life, making use of narratives produced in the field notebook and of impressions and senses created throughout the investigation, brings two scenes experienced in the daily life of the (...) mentioned public school and, with them, discusses concepts of training and child, defending the latter as a legitimate other in teacher education and training as a singular process and at the same time, collective and polyphonic. Finally, from the proposed problematization, the text invites us to think training with childhood in the quality of training as experience: that one which makes us think and think about ourselves, that is a training that moves us and causes us to inquire about our certainties and crystallized truths, invites us to be already others of ourselves, to rethink our ways of being, to be and to live the teaching experience with the children. Therefore, it is an invitation to think about our place and the place of children, in other words, our relationship in education and teacher's training. (shrink)

Jody Azzouni has offered the following argument against the existence of mathematical entities: if, as it seems, mathematical entities play no role in mathematical practice, we therefore have no reason to believe in them. I consider this argument as it applies to mathematical platonism, and argue that it does not present a legitimate novel challenge to platonism. I also assess Azzouni's use of the ‘epistemic role puzzle’ (ERP) to undermine the platonist's alleged parallel between skepticism about mathematical entities and external-world (...) skepticism. I conclude that ERP fails to undermine this parallel. (shrink)

Setting the thought of Robert Grosseteste within the broader context of the intellectual, religious, and social movements of his time, this study elucidates the evolution of his ideas on topics ranging from the mathematical laws that govern the movement of bodies, God as the mathematical Creator, and human knowledge, to religious experience and the place of humanity within the social, natural, and providential orders.

Mathematical apriorism holds that mathematical truths must be established using a priori processes. Against this, it has been argued that apparently a priori mathematical processes can, under certain circumstances, fail to warrant the beliefs they produce; this shows that these warrants depend on contingent features of the contexts in which they are used. They thus cannot be a priori. -/- In this paper I develop a position that combines a reliabilist version of mathematical apriorism with a platonistic view of mathematical (...) ontology. I argue that this view both withstands the above objection and explains the reliability of a priori mathematical warrant. (shrink)

The appearance of Priestley's electrical work as a brief and irrelevant prelude to his more substantial chemical enquiries may explain why it has been strangely overlooked by historians of science. It was only fairly recently that Sir Philip Hartog sought to rectify this situation with the affirmation that ‘Priestley's electrical work offers the key to Priestley's scientific mind’. Attacking traditional chemical historiography for tracing Priestley's opposition to Lavoisier's theory to a deficiency in his scientific sensibilities, Hartog insisted that Priestley's natural (...) philosophy can properly be understood only in relation to his ‘profound convictions on scientific method’ as fully expressed in the History of electricity. Only thus would Priestley's scientific thought be related correctly to his ‘work as a whole’. (shrink)

The safety analysis of knowledge, due to Duncan Pritchard, has it that for all contingent propositions, p, S knows that p iff S believes that p, p is true, and (the “safety principle”) in most nearby worlds in which S forms his belief in the same way as in the actual world, S believes that p only if p is true. Among the other virtues claimed by Pritchard for this view is its supposed ability to solve a version of the (...) lottery puzzle. In this paper, I argue that the safety analysis of knowledge in fact fails to solve the lottery puzzle. I also argue that a revised version of the safety principle recently put forward by Pritchard fares no better. (shrink)

The Generality Problem for process reliabilism is to outline a procedure for determining when two beliefs are produced by the same process, in such a way as to avoid, on the one hand, individuating process types so narrowly that each type is instantiated only once, or, on the other hand, individuating them so broadly that beliefs that have different epistemic statuses are subsumed under the same process type. In this paper, I offer a solution to the problem which takes belief‐independent (...) processes to be functions that take as inputs information about distal states of affairs, and produce beliefs as outputs. Processes are individuated narrowly, so as to avoid the latter aspect of the Generality problem, but, by holding process tokens to be of the same type when they take perceptually equivalent scenes as inputs, and produce beliefs of the same kind as outputs, the former aspect of the problem is avoided too. Having argued that this method of typing process tokens solves the Generality Problem, I then argue that my solution does not fall prey to objections that have been, or might be, raised for similar proposals. (shrink)

... END Reflections on Johannes Scottus's Place in Carolingian Eschatology BERNARD MCGINN I. Eschatology in the Ninth Century In 847, during the decade that ...

This paper argues that reliabilism can handle Gettier cases once it restricts knowledge producing reliable processes to those that involve a suitable causal link between the subject’s belief and the fact it references. Causal tracking reliabilism (as this version of reliabilism is called) also avoids the problems that refuted the causal theory of knowledge, along with problems besetting more contemporary theories (such as virtue reliabilism and the “safety” account of knowledge). Finally, causal tracking reliabilism allows for a response to Linda (...) Zagzebski’s challenge that no theory of knowledge can both eliminate the possibility of Gettier cases while also allowing fully warranted but false beliefs. (shrink)

Mathematical apriorists sometimes hold that our non-derived mathematical beliefs are warranted by mathematical intuition. Against this, Philip Kitcher has argued that if we had the experience of encountering mathematical experts who insisted that an intuition-produced belief was mistaken, this would undermine that belief. Since this would be a case of experience undermining the warrant provided by intuition, such warrant cannot be a priori.I argue that this leaves untouched a conception of intuition as merely an aspect of our ordinary ability to (...) reason. Thus the apriorist may still hold that some mathematical beliefs are warranted by intuition. (shrink)

In this article, I present a novel account of a priori warrant, which I then use to examine the relationship between a priori and a posteriori warrant in mathematics. According to this account of a priori warrant, the reason that a posteriori warrant is subordinate to a priori warrant in mathematics is because processes that produce a priori warrant are reliable independent of the contexts in which they are used, whereas this is not true for processes that produce a posteriori (...) warrant. Following this, I show how this difference explains why a priori warranting processes, such as proof (and mathematical intuition) can, and a posteriori warranting processes cannot, definitively establish mathematical results. I then show why, in the event of a conflict between a priori and a posteriori warranting processes, the former undermine, and cannot be undermined by, the latter. Finally, I explain the connection between apriority and mathematical necessity, but do so in a way that allows for the existence of contingent a priori knowledge. (shrink)