This paper is a revalidation of Oliver Sacks's role in the development of medicine's narrative turn and, as such, a reinterpretation of the history of narrative in medicine. It suggests that, from the late 1960s, Sacks pioneered in his ‘Romantic Science’ a new medical mode that reunited the seemingly incommensurable art and science of medicine while also offering a way for medical humanities to shape clinical reasoning more effectively.

This collection of original essays--by philosophers of biology, biologists, and cognitive scientists--provides a wide range of perspectives on species. Including contributions from David Hull, John Dupre, David Nanney, Kevin de Queiroz, and Kim Sterelny, amongst others, this book has become especially well-known for the three essays it contains on the homeostatic property cluster view of natural kinds, papers by Richard Boyd, Paul Griffiths, and Robert A. Wilson.

ust-jackets are frequently adorned by quotations from famous people praising the book. At first glance, Andrew Brown's The Darwin Wars is no exception. Pithy quotations from Steve Jones, Richard Dawkins, John Maynard Smith, Stephen Jay Gould and Daniel Dennett. Who could ask for more? However, on closer inspection these quotations turn out not to be about Brown's book at all, but quotations that Brown uses in his book. Only Dennett's blurb refers to one of Brown's own publications: "What (...) a sleazy bit of trash journalism.". (shrink)

In this paper, we examine the lawfulness of a proposal to provide elective ventilation to incompetent patients who are potential organ donors. Under the current legal framework, this depends on whether the best interests test could be satisfied. It might be argued that, because the Mental Capacity Act 2005 (UK) (and the common law) makes it clear that the best interests test is not confined to the patient's clinical interests, but extends to include the individual's own values, wishes and beliefs, (...) the proposal will be in the patient's best interests. We reject this claim. We argue that, as things currently stand, the proposal could not lawfully be justified as a blanket proposition by reference to the best interests test. Accordingly, a modification of the law would be necessary to render the proposal lawful. We conclude with a suggestion about how that could be achieved. (shrink)

The modern slavery literature engages with history in an extremely limited fashion. Our paper demonstrates to the utility of historical research to modern slavery researchers by explaining the rise and fall of the ethics-driven market category of “free-grown sugar” in nineteenth-century Britain. In the first decades of the century, the market category of “free-grown sugar” enabled consumers who were opposed to slavery to pay a premium for a more ethical product. After circa 1840, this market category disappeared, even though considerable (...) quantities of slave-grown sugar continued to arrive into the UK. We explain the disappearance of the market category. Our paper contributes to the on-going debates about slavery in management by historicizing and thus problematizing the concept of “slavery”. The paper challenges those modern slavery scholars who argue that lack of consumer knowledge about product provenance is the main barrier to the elimination of slavery from today’s international supply chains. The historical research presented in this paper suggests that consumer indifference, rather than simply ignorance, may be the more fundamental problem. The paper challenges the optimistic historical metanarrative that pervades much of the research on ethical consumption. It highlights the fragility of ethics-driven market categories, offering lessons for researchers and practitioners seeking to tackle modern slavery. (shrink)

In this work, I attempt a four-part task: to explicate Heidegger's notion of the Fourfold, to show its necessary relation to technology, to think the limit that separates these, and to show how this constellation of the Fourfold and technology escapes from the "metaphysics of presence" with which Heidegger has been charged. ;1. The Fourfold is the belonging together of Earth, Sky, Mortals, and Divinities. Heidegger inherits the components from Holderlin, but transforms then in his thought. The gathering of these (...) four goes to make up the presencing of a singular and delimited entity . Such a thing exists as unique and irreplaceable. ;2. This singular mode of presence is only understandable against the background of limitless technological circulation. Influenced by Ernst Junger, Heidegger sees technology as setting into place a world of instantaneous replacement and sameness. The name for this manner of replaceable presence is "Bestand ." ;3. The unworld of technology is no simple "opposite" to the Fourfold, however. Rather the two modes of presence belong together. Heidegger repeatedly emphasizes how there can never be a complete loss of world in the enframing of technology. Conversely, the Fourfold is never free of the Bestand. A play of revelation and concealment is operative here and intimately related to Heidegger's new notion of essence. I examine this intricate and intimate co-belonging of technology and the Fourfold. ;4. This interpretation is used to counter the charge that Heidegger would think in terms of metaphysical presence, i.e., in terms of complete, self-present, and pure presence. Such a charge is leveled in the early work of Jacques Derrida. I show that Heidegger's thinking is already a thought of the trace. Since there is consequently no total presence or absence for Heidegger , there can be no simple overcoming of metaphysics either. Metaphysics cannot be so easily left behind, but must undergo a transformation . This is nothing more than a recognition of the trace and its place at the limit of singular, finite existence. ;The first chapter treats the circulation of technology, the remaining four address in series the elements of the Fourfold. (shrink)

The article reviews several books about philosophical isuuses including "Against Coherence: Truth, Probability, and Justification," by Olsson Erik J., "Fixing Frege," by Burgess John, "Events and Semantic Architecture," by Pietroski Paul M.

Hirst always highlighted knowledge when reflecting on the school curriculum. He replaced his early focus on liberal education, the development of mind and theoretical knowledge by emphasizing the practical and practices as a curriculum starting point and for the framing of educational aims. In this paper I explore links between Hirst’s philosophical treatment of knowledge and some currently contested aspects of UK government education policies. I also note some ways in which his work relates to selected present-day debates in philosophy (...) of education. Examples of UK government policy will include Ofsted’s definition of learning as a ‘change in long-term memory’ and the ways in which they place ‘logical sequencing’ at the heart of teaching, learning, and curriculum. Their learning definition treats knowledge as an individual asset rather than something about individuals as embedded in the social world of practices, a perspective more in keeping with Hirst’s later views. The critique of individualistic notions of knowledge and learning includes some explorations of how learners move into the ‘space of reasons’. Where I draw attention to relationships between Hirst’s thought and contemporary philosophy of education debates, I do not always draw any definite conclusions. (shrink)

John N Andrews; General Thinking Skills: are there such things?, Journal of Philosophy of Education, Volume 24, Issue 1, 30 May 2006, Pages 71–79, https://doi.o.

In this paper I expound and criticise the arguments of two leading exponents of critical ecological feminism. According to critical ecological feminism responsibility for the oppressions of the natural world and the oppressions of racism and sexism can be traced to a logic of domination that is based on suspect value dualities and presupposes an unacceptable ‘moral extensionism’. I argue firstly that critical ecological feminism's critique of value dualism presupposes the truth of the thesis that humans and non‐humans are morally (...) equal, a thesis for which it offers no persuasive arguments . Secondly I maintain that moral extensionism, contrary to the claims of critical ecological feminism, can support a genuine respect for the natural world. Finally I suggest that the arguments for one version of critical ecological feminism, in order to be made convincing, themselves require the truth of moral extensionism. (shrink)

What job should authorities give to review boards? We are grateful to Soren Holm, Rosamond Rhodes, Julian Savulescu and G Owen Schaefer for their thoughtful commentaries on our answer.1–4 Here we add to the discussion. Let us summarise the claims for which we argued.5 Relevant authorities can task boards with review for consistency with duly established code, thereby making code-consistent activities apt for approval and code-inconsistent activities apt for rejection. They can instead task boards with review for ethical acceptability, making (...) ethically acceptable activities apt for approval and ethically unacceptable activities apt for rejection. For every proposal a board might consider, these two different jobs establish different review bases, and their approvals and rejections also sometimes conflict. Some international and national statements require ECR, others instead require CCR, and others again seem either to require both or just to run the two together. Those responsible for these statements should make them clearer and better aligned here. For reasons of practicality, publicity and separation of powers, authorities do better to task boards with CCR and not ECR. These arguments also count against establishing any code with content that in effect collapses CCR into ECR. If our arguments withstand robust scrutiny, authorities should also remove ‘ethics’ and cognate terms from the names of these boards and their review activities and emphasise code expertise not ethics expertise in the required skill sets of boards. Our article noted that ‘ethical considerations informed the genesis of these boards and express their aspirations’. Rhodes similarly notes: ‘the authors and endorsers of research ethics codes, declarations and regulations … articulating the ethical standards for conducting human subject research’ and ‘This framework embeds the ethical parameters of human subject research into the moral missions of institutions’. Schaefer too …. (shrink)

Published in 1918, _The View of Life_ is Georg Simmel’s final work. Famously deemed “the brightest man in Europe” by George Santayana, Simmel addressed a variety of topics across his essayistic writings, which have influenced scholars in aesthetics, ethics, epistemology, and sociology. Nevertheless, a set of core issues emerged over the course of his career, most centrally the genesis, structure, and transcendence of social and cultural forms and the nature and genesis of authentic individuality. Composed in the years before his (...) death, _The View of Life_ was, according to Simmel, his “testament,” a capstone work of profound metaphysical inquiry intended to formulate his conception of life in its entirety. Now Anglophone readers can at last read in full the work that shaped the argument of Heidegger’s _Being and Time_ and whose extraordinary impact on European intellectual life between the wars was extolled by Jürgen Habermas. Presented alongside these seminal essays are aphoristic fragments from Simmel’s last journal, providing a beguiling look into the mind of one of the twentieth century’s greatest thinkers. (shrink)

Weak panpsychism, the view that mindlike qualities are wide-spread in nature, has recently been argued for by the prominent ecofeminist Val Plumwood and has been used by her to ground an ethic of respect for nature. This ethic advocates a principle of respect for difference, the rejection of moral hierarchy and the inclusion of plants, mountains, rivers and ecosystems within the moral community. I argue that weak panpsychism cannot, convincingly, justify the rejection of moral hierarchy, as it is compatible with (...) it. Also the intentional criterion of mind, employed by weak panpsychism, which includes teleology, has the counter-intuitive implication of giving machines moral status. I cast doubt on the claims that (i) intentionality is a necessary condition for moral status and that (ii) it is sufficient for the ascription of agency. It is suggested that any account of intentionality that allows it to be predicated of mountains, rivers etc. would be widely, and correctly regarded as a reduction of that account. Finally an aesthetic reinterpretation of weak panpsychism is offered. (shrink)

This innovative collection offers one of the first analyses of criminologies of the military from an interdisciplinary perspective. While some criminologists have examined the military in relation to the area of war crimes, this collection considers a range of other important but less explored aspects such as private military actors, insurgents, paramilitary groups and the role of military forces in tackling transnational crime. Drawing upon insights from criminology, this book's editors also consider the ways the military institution harbours criminal activity (...) within its ranks and deals with prisoners of war. The contributions, by leading experts in the field, have a broad reach and take a truly global approach to the subject. (shrink)

In December 2013, the Nonhuman Rights Project (NhRP) filed a petition for a common law writ of habeas corpus in the New York State Supreme Court on behalf of Tommy, a chimpanzee living alone in a cage in a shed in rural New York (Barlow, 2017). Under animal welfare laws, Tommy’s owners, the Laverys, were doing nothing illegal by keeping him in those conditions. Nonetheless, the NhRP argued that given the cognitive, social, and emotional capacities of chimpanzees, Tommy’s confinement constituted (...) a profound wrong that demanded remedy by the courts. Soon thereafter, the NhRP filed habeas corpus petitions on behalf of Kiko, another chimpanzee housed alone in Niagara Falls, and Hercules and Leo, two chimpanzees held in research facilities at Stony Brook University. Thus began the legal struggle to move these chimpanzees from captivity to a sanctuary, an effort that has led the NhRP to argue in multiple courts before multiple judges. The central point of contention has been whether Tommy, Kiko, Hercules, and Leo have legal rights. To date, no judge has been willing to issue a writ of habeas corpus on their behalf. Such a ruling would mean that these chimpanzees have rights that confinement might violate. Instead, the judges have argued that chimpanzees cannot be bearers of legal rights because they are not, and cannot be persons. In this book we argue that chimpanzees are persons because they are autonomous. (shrink)

We submit this brief in support of the Nonhuman Rights Project’s efforts to secure habeas corpus relief for the elephant named Happy. We reject arbitrary distinctions that deny adequate protections to other animals who share with protected humans relevantly similar vulnerabilities to harms and relevantly similar interests in avoiding such harms. We strongly urge this Court, in keeping with the best philosophical standards of rational judgment and ethical standards of justice, to recognize that, as a nonhuman person, Happy should be (...) released from her current confinement and transferred to an appropriate elephant sanctuary, pursuant to habeas corpus. (shrink)

In this brief, we argue that there is a diversity of ways in which humans (Homo sapiens) are ‘persons’ and there are no non-arbitrary conceptions of ‘personhood’ that can include all humans and exclude all nonhuman animals. To do so we describe and assess the four most prominent conceptions of ‘personhood’ that can be found in the rulings concerning Kiko and Tommy, with particular focus on the most recent decision, Nonhuman Rights Project, Inc v Lavery.

We submit this brief in support of the Nonhuman Rights Project’s efforts to secure habeas corpus relief for the elephant named Happy. The Supreme Court, Bronx County, declined to grant habeas corpus relief and order Happy’s transfer to an elephant sanctuary, relying, in part, on previous decisions that denied habeas relief for the NhRP’s chimpanzee clients, Kiko and Tommy. Those decisions use incompatible conceptions of ‘person’ which, when properly understood, are either philosophically inadequate or, in fact, compatible with Happy’s personhood.

‘There is no place in the phenomenology of fully absorbed coping’, writes Hubert Dreyfus, ‘for mindfulness. In flow, as Sartre sees, there are only attractive and repulsive forces drawing appropriate activity out of an active body’1. Among the many ways in which history animates dynamical systems at a range of distinctive timescales, the phenomena of embodied human habit, skilful movement, and absorbed coping are among the most pervasive and mundane, and the most philosophically puzzling. In this essay we examine both (...) habitual and skilled movement, sketching the outlines of a multidimensional framework within which the many differences across distinctive cases and domains might be fruitfully understood. Both the range of movement phenomena which can plausibly be seen as instances of habit or skill, and the space of possible theories of such phenomena are richer and more disparate than philosophy easily encompasses. We seek to bring phenomenology into contact with relevant movements in psychological theories of skilful action, in the belief that phenomenological philosophy and cognitive science can be allies rather than antagonists. (shrink)

Hastings Center Report, Volume 52, Issue 2, Page 14-20, March‐April 2022.

Recent investigations on how people derive meaning from language have focused on task‐dependent shifts between two cognitive systems. The symbolic (amodal) system represents meaning as the statistical relationships between words. The embodied (modal) system represents meaning through neurocognitive simulation of perceptual or sensorimotor systems associated with a word's referent. A primary finding of literature in this field is that the embodied system is only dominant when a task necessitates it, but in certain paradigms, this has only been demonstrated using nouns (...) and adjectives. The purpose of this paper is to study whether similar effects hold with verbs. Experiment 1 evaluated a novel task in which participants rated a selection of verbs on their implied vertical movement. Ratings correlated well with distributional semantic models, establishing convergent validity, though some variance was unexplained by language statistics alone. Experiment 2 replicated previous noun‐based location‐cue congruency experimental paradigms with verbs and showed that the ratings obtained in Experiment 1 predicted reaction times more strongly than language statistics. Experiment 3 modified the location‐cue paradigm by adding movement to create an animated, temporally decoupled, movement‐verb judgment task designed to examine the relative influence of symbolic and embodied processing for verbs. Results were generally consistent with linguistic shortcut hypotheses of symbolic‐embodied integrated language processing; location‐cue congruence elicited processing facilitation in some conditions, and perceptual information accounted for reaction times and accuracy better than language statistics alone. These studies demonstrate novel ways in which embodied and linguistic information can be examined while using verbs as stimuli. (shrink)

James Lorimer Halliday (1897–1983) pioneered the development of the concept of psychosocial medicine in Britain in the 1930s and 1940s. He worked in Glasgow, first as a public health doctor, and then as part of the corporatist National Health Insurance scheme. Here he learned about links between poverty, the social environment, emotional stress and psychological and physical ill-health, and about statistical tools for making such problems scientifically visible. The intellectual development of his methodologically and epistemologically integrated medicine – a hybrid (...) of biomedical and psychological approaches – was embedded in the context of this practice with its particular medical culture and socio-economic circumstances. Halliday’s ideas are part of the wider, heterogeneous turn towards medical modernism and holism within mainstream medicine in Britain, western Europe and the United States in the inter-war period, and their evolution underlines the varied nature of contemporary anti-reductionist thinking in medicine. It also points to the diversity of the sources of holism and the many routes by which psychological and especially psychosocial discourses about health and illness entered professional and public arenas in Britain in this period. (shrink)

v. 1. A-C -- v. 2. D-J -- v. 3. K-Q -- v. 4. R-Z.

James Lorimer Halliday pioneered the development of the concept of psychosocial medicine in Britain in the 1930s and 1940s. He worked in Glasgow, first as a public health doctor, and then as part of the corporatist National Health Insurance scheme. Here he learned about links between poverty, the social environment, emotional stress and psychological and physical ill-health, and about statistical tools for making such problems scientifically visible. The intellectual development of his methodologically and epistemologically integrated medicine – a hybrid of (...) biomedical and psychological approaches – was embedded in the context of this practice with its particular medical culture and socio-economic circumstances. Halliday’s ideas are part of the wider, heterogeneous turn towards medical modernism and holism within mainstream medicine in Britain, western Europe and the United States in the inter-war period, and their evolution underlines the varied nature of contemporary anti-reductionist thinking in medicine. It also points to the diversity of the sources of holism and the many routes by which psychological and especially psychosocial discourses about health and illness entered professional and public arenas in Britain in this period. (shrink)

Education, Religion and Society celebrates the career of Professor John Hull of the University of Birmingham, UK, the internationally renowned religious educationist who has also achieved worldwide fame for his brilliant writings on his experience, mid-career, of total blindness. In his outstanding career he has been a leading figure in the transformation of religious education in English and Welsh state schools from Christian instruction to multi-faith religious education and was the co-founder of the International Seminar on Religious Education (...) and values. John Hull has also made major contributions to the theology of disability and the theological critique of the "money culture." This volume brings together leading international scholars to honour John Hull's contribution, with a focus on furthering scholarship in the areas where he has been active as a thinker. The book offers a critical appreciation of his contribution to religious education and practical theology, and goes on to explore the continuing debate about the role of religious education in promoting international understanding, intercultural education and human rights education. A possible basis for integrating Islamic education into Western education is suggested and the contribution of the philosophy of religion to pluralistic religious education is outlined. The contributors also deal with issues relating to indoctrination, racism and relationship in Christian religious aspects, and examines aspects of the the theology of social exclusion and disability. (shrink)

This paper traces the relationship between the food committees of the Royal Society and government during the First World War, concentrating on the period up to the resignation of Lord Devonport as first Food Controller. It argues that, in the context of a radical public science discourse emanating from some sections of the scientific community and greatly increased contacts between scientists and government, the food scientists of the committees were moved to press for a formalization of the committees' role in (...) food policy. The members constantly manoeuvred to achieve this aim, but also used a network of alternative channels into the heart of the policy process to get their findings translated into hard policy. In doing so, they explicitly rehearsed characteristic 'public science' arguments. In the institutional blur of wartime state-science relations, scientists often got close to the policy-making process. Post-War, the state swiftly moved to clarify the position: science was to be given more money, but was to be specifically blocked by new administrative arrangements embodied in the Haldane Report on the Machinery of Government from having any say in the core areas of general policy, the expert domain of the generalist policy-maker. (shrink)

Expert skill in music performance involves an apparent paradox. On stage, expert musicians are required accurately to retrieve information that has been encoded over hours of practice. Yet they must also remain open to the demands of the ever-changing situational contingencies with which they are faced during performance. To further explore this apparent paradox and the way in which it is negotiated by expert musicians, this article profiles theories presented by Roger Chaffin, Hubert Dreyfus and Tony and Helga Noice. For (...) Chaffin, expert skill in music performance relies solely upon overarching mental representations, while, for Dreyfus, such representations are needed only by novices, while experts rely on a more embodied form of coping. Between Chaffin and Dreyfus sit the Noices, who argue that both overarching cognitive structures and embodied processes underlie expert skill. We then present the Applying Intelligence to the Reflexes approach—a differently nuanced model of expert skill aligned with the integrative spirit of the Noices’ research. The AIR approach suggests that musicians negotiate the apparent paradox of expert skill via a mindedness that allows flexibility of attention during music performance. We offer data from recent doctoral research conducted by the first author of this article to demonstrate at a practical level the usefulness of the AIR approach when attempting to understand the complexities of expert skill in music performance. (shrink)

The principle of universal instantiation plays a pivotal role both in the derivation of intensional paradoxes such as Prior’s paradox and Kaplan’s paradox and the debate between necessitism and contingentism. We outline a distinctively free logical approach to the intensional paradoxes and note how the free logical outlook allows one to distinguish two different, though allied themes in higher-order necessitism. We examine the costs of this solution and compare it with the more familiar ramificationist approaches to higher-order logic. Our assessment (...) of both approaches is largely pessimistic, and we remain reluctantly inclined to take Prior’s and Kaplan’s derivations at face value. (shrink)

Aristotle is often considered to have a very pessimistic view about what histories can tell us, considering them too particular and lacking the generality required for scientific knowledge. Most importantly, they are considered to lack causal explanations. I argue against this view and instead that Aristotle considers histories to provide a highly practical level of knowledge. Histories can provide instances of both accidental and hypothetically necessary causation. I draw on the Athenian Constitution and the Constitution of the Spartans to show (...) that the historiai which were written under Aristotle’s direction display these causal explanations. While these explanations are still not at the level of generality characteristic of the most rigorous forms of epistemē, the causal pictures presented are still rich enough to provide valuable insights for both the politician and the political scientist. (shrink)

Few automated legal reasoning systems have been developed in domains of law in which a judicial decision maker has extensive discretion in the exercise of his or her powers. Discretionary domains challenge existing artificial intelligence paradigms because models of judicial reasoning are difficult, if not impossible to specify. We argue that judicial discretion adds to the characterisation of law as open textured in a way which has not been addressed by artificial intelligence and law researchers in depth. We demonstrate that (...) systems for reasoning with this form of open texture can be built by integrating rule sets with neural networks trained with data collected from standard past cases. The obstacles to this approach include difficulties in generating explanations once conclusions have been inferred, difficulties associated with the collection of sufficient data from past cases and difficulties associated with integrating two vastly different paradigms. A knowledge representation scheme based on the structure of arguments proposed by Toulmin has been used to overcome these obstacles. The system, known as Split Up, predicts judicial decisions in property proceedings within family law in Australia. Predictions from the system have been compared to those from a group of lawyers with favourable results. (shrink)

Expert skill in music performance involves an apparent paradox. On stage, expert musicians are required accurately to retrieve information that has been encoded over hours of practice. Yet they must also remain open to the demands of the ever-changing situational contingencies with which they are faced during performance. To further explore this apparent paradox and the way in which it is negotiated by expert musicians, this article profiles theories presented by Roger Chaffin, Hubert Dreyfus and Tony and Helga Noice. For (...) Chaffin, expert skill in music performance relies solely upon overarching mental representations, while, for Dreyfus, such representations are needed only by novices, while experts rely on a more embodied form of coping. Between Chaffin and Dreyfus sit the Noices, who argue that both overarching cognitive structures and embodied processes underlie expert skill. We then present the Applying Intelligence to the Reflexes (AIR) approach?a differently nuanced model of expert skill aligned with the integrative spirit of the Noices? research. The AIR approach suggests that musicians negotiate the apparent paradox of expert skill via a mindedness that allows flexibility of attention during music performance. We offer data from recent doctoral research conducted by the first author of this article to demonstrate at a practical level the usefulness of the AIR approach when attempting to understand the complexities of expert skill in music performance. (shrink)