Discussion of the posthuman has emerged in a wide set of fields through a diverse set of thinkers including Donna Haraway, Ray Kurzweil, Nick Bostrom, N. Katherine Hayles, and Francis Fukuyama, just to name a few. Despite his extensive critique of technology, commentators have not explored the fruitfulness of Heidegger's work for deciphering the various strands of posthumanism recently formulated in response to contemporary technological developments. Here, I employ Heidegger's critique of technology to trace opposing visions of the posthuman, visions (...) that are both tied intimately to new information technologies. For those seeking to extend humanist ideals, information technologies are employed to extend the vision of an ultra-humanist view of a ‘scientific posthuman’ that dangerously understands the body to be a forfeitable nuisance, rather than an inherent aspect of being human. Along Heideggerian lines, thinkers such as N. Katherine Hayles and Thomas Carlson have developed an alternative trajectory related to Dasein's Being-in-the-world. This trajectory posits the self as constituted by a lack or abyss, enabling the formulation of a ‘mystical posthuman,’ celebrating, rather than forfeiting, humanity's embodied existence. (shrink)

Contributing Authors: Lilli Alanen & Frans Svensson, David Alm, Gustaf Arrhenius, Gunnar Björnsson, Luc Bovens, Richard Bradley, Geoffrey Brennan & Nicholas Southwood, John Broome, Linus Broström & Mats Johansson, Johan Brännmark, Krister Bykvist, John Cantwell, Erik Carlson, David Copp, Roger Crisp, Sven Danielsson, Dan Egonsson, Fred Feldman, Roger Fjellström, Marc Fleurbaey, Margaret Gilbert, Olav Gjelsvik, Kathrin Glüer & Peter Pagin, Ebba Gullberg & Sten Lindström, Peter Gärdenfors, Sven Ove Hansson, Jana Holsanova, Nils Holtug, Victoria Höög, Magnus Jiborn, Karsten (...) Klint Jensen, Sigurður Kristinsson, Isaac Levi, Kasper Lippert-Rasmussen, David Makinson, Anna-Sofia Maurin, Philippe Mongin, Kevin Mulligan, Lennart Nordenfelt, Jonas Olson, Erik J. Olsson, Ingmar Persson, Johannes Persson, Björn Petersson, Philip Pettit, Hans Rott, Toni Rønnow-Rasmussen, Krister Segerberg, John Skorupski, Howard Sobel, Fredrik Stjernberg, Fred Stoutland, Caj Strandberg, Pär Sundström, Folke Tersman, Torbjörn Tännsjö, Peter Vallentyne, Bruno Verbeek, Stella Villarmea, and Michael J. Zimmerman. (shrink)

It is argued that the English bare plural (an NP with plural head that lacks a determiner), in spite of its apparently diverse possibilities of interpretation, is optimally represented in the grammar as a unified phenomenon. The chief distinction to be dealt with is that between the generic use of the bare plural (as in Dogs bark) and its existential or indefinite plural use (as in He threw oranges at Alice). The difference between these uses is not to be accounted (...) for by an ambiguity in the NP itself, but rather by explicating how the context of the sentence acts on the bare plural to give rise to this distinction. A brief analysis is sketched in which bare plurals are treated in all instances as proper names of kinds of things. A subsidiary argument is that the null determiner is not to be regarded as the plural of the indefinite article a. (shrink)

Anti-exceptionalism about logic is the thesis that logic is not special. In this paper, I consider, and reject, a challenge to this thesis. According to this challenge, there are basic logical principles, and part of what makes such principles basic is that they are epistemically exceptional. Thus, according to this challenge, the existence of basic logical principles provides reason to reject anti-exceptionalism about logic. I argue that this challenge fails, and that the exceptionalist positions motivated by it are thus unfounded. (...) I make this case by disambiguating two senses of ‘basic’ and showing that, once this disambiguation is taken into account, the best reason we have for thinking that there are basic principles actually implies that those principles do not require a special epistemology. Consequently, the existence of basic logical principles provides reason to accept, rather than reject, anti-exceptionalism concerning the epistemology of logic. I conclude by explaining how an abductivist, anti-exceptionalist approach to the epistemology of logic can accommodate the notion of basic logical principles. (shrink)

ObjectiveOur objective was to evaluate whether those individuals with previous involvement with formal clinical ethics processes differ in their attitudes towards the resolution of prototypical clinical ethics cases than general health care professionals. We hypothesized that those individuals with previous participation in ethics consultation would have significantly different attitudes on the appropriate role of ethics committees in the assessment and resolution of clinical ethical dilemmas than those who have not.MethodsWe conducted a case-based survey of health care professionals at six US (...) hospitals. We administered the survey to health care professionals in a variety of clinical roles at each center and further sub-categorized these by respondents reporting or not reporting their membership on an ethics committee or participation as an ethics consultant/requestor of ethics consult services. Using the analysis of variance test, we present the variation in attitudes using a 5-point Likert scale with 95% confidence intervals and significance set at p ≤ 0.05.ResultsA total of 240 respondents completed the survey (response rate: 63.6%) from all six surveyed centers (128 respondents with involvement with ethics consultation, 112 respondents without). Health care professionals not previously involved with formal clinical ethics processes were less likely to view the ethics committee as having a role in resolving the presented clinical ethical dilemmas ( p = 0.01 for analysis of variance comparison).ConclusionIn this multi-center survey study, health care providers without previous involvement with formal clinical ethics processes were less likely than those with previous involvement to support a role for ethics committees aiding in ethical case resolution. (shrink)

It is plausible to claim that it is morally worse to kill an innocent person than to give any number of people a mild one‐hour headache. Alaistar Norcross has argued that consequentialists, at least, should reject this claim. According to him, any harm that can befall a person can be morally outweighed by a sufficient number of very small harms. He gives a general argument for this view, and tries to show, by means of an argument from analogy, that it (...) is less counter‐intuitive than it appears. I show that his main argument relies on a false assumption, and argue that the purported analogy is dubious. (shrink)

Achieving a high quality of life is dependent upon how individuals face adversity. Positive psychological interventions are well-suited to support coping efforts; however, experimental research is limited. The purpose of the current research was to examine whether different savoring interventions could increase important coping resources in response to a social-evaluative hassle. We completed an experimental mixed subject design study with a university student sample. All participants completed a hassle induction task and were then randomly assigned into different intervention groups. Positive (...) emotion ratings were collected at three points in time. Results revealed a significant time x intervention interaction effect, such that individuals in the savoring the moment intervention reported higher levels of positive emotions compared to individuals assigned to the true control group, guided imagery control group, and savoring through reminiscence intervention. Such findings represent a significant extension to savoring theory and offer support for savoring the moment exercises as a primary prevention strategy to bolster effective responses to social-evaluative hassles. (shrink)

(2008). 2007 AESA Presidential Address Conflict of the Faculties: Democratic Progressivism in the Age of “No Child Left Behind”. Educational Studies: Vol. 43, No. 2, pp. 94-113.

This short paper states a new objection against “spectrum arguments” for nontransitive betterness. It is shown that defenders of such arguments must reject one of two very plausible principles.

This article is a response to yuriko saito's "is there a correct aesthetic appreciation of nature?" (jae 18:4) which challenges the position on the aesthetic appreciation of nature that i develop in a series of recent articles. i here consider saito's arguments, concluding that they neither establish the correctness of a wide range of kinds of aesthetic appreciations of nature nor undercut the grounds for the prominence i grant to scientific considerations in such appreciation.

This article examines the time duration of individual occasions in the light of the discovery that temporal succession produces frequency ratios. The frequency ratios are used to define energy ratios and the quantum. The manifold and the common particles are constructed graphically using the arrows of time, with the mass-ratios of the particles derivable from the graphs. The formal reduction of physics to time compels us to adopt Whitehead's conception of the physical universe as occasions of experience engaged in temporal/causal (...) succession. The relative duration of the constituent occasions of the particles are determined by their graphs. In the final section, a refined account of the mind-brain interaction sequence confirms the duration of a human occasion as one tenth of a second. (shrink)

Struggles over journalism are often struggles over boundaries. These symbolic contests for control over definition also mark a material struggle over resources. In short: boundaries have consequences. Yet there is a lack of conceptual cohesiveness in what scholars mean by the term "boundaries" or in how we should think about specific boundaries of journalism. This book addresses boundaries head-on by bringing together a global array of authors asking similar questions about boundaries and journalism from a diverse range of perspectives, methodologies, (...) and theoretical backgrounds. (shrink)

We consider a well-known partial order of Prikry for producing a collapsing function of minimal degree. Assuming MA + ≠ CH, every new real constructs the collapsing map.

En explorant plus avant le projet des ouvrages théologiques précédents, Au lieu de soi ne distingue pas simplement la pensée de la création de l’onto-théologie mais la sépare aussi de son dépassement heideggérien, qui demeure pour Marion aussi idolâtrique que la métaphysique elle-même. L’ouvrage se concentre ici autour de l’interprétation de l’adonné comme créature par excellence, ou créature iconique – dont le privilège tient à sa temporalité et à sa mutabilité. Indispensable à l’interprétation de saint Augustin comme penseur non métaphysique, (...) l’analyse de la temporalité de l’homme iconique, en démontrant la manière dont la pensée de la création reste hors de l’ontothéologie et de la causa et de l’ego, suggère en même temps que saint Augustin n’affirme le devenir de l’homme qu’en lui enlevant toute innocence et, corrélativement, ne trouve pas de bonheur véritable dans l’amour du mortel comme tel. (shrink)

We consider a well-known partial order of Prikry for producing a collapsing function of minimal degree. Assuming $MA + \neq CH$, every new real constructs the collapsing map.