Health disparities are primarily driven by structural inequality including systemic racism. Medical educators, led by the AAMC, have tended to minimize these core drivers of health disparities. Ins...

Volume 20, Issue 7, July 2020, Page 112-114.

This book examines Platos account in the Timaeus of a third kind and its cosmic members, a material principle and place.

The health system is, in particular ways, a microcosm of society and both reflects and contributes to its ills of racism, inequities, and disparities. As such, the house of medicine is obligated to...

This paper gives a brief discussion of the problem of ascribing authorship to ancient philosophical texts when there is evidence both for and against traditional ascription. The case in point is tradition’s claim that Simplicius is the author of the De Anima commentary. It is argued here that, while Gabor provides new and important methodological evidence for Simplicius’s authorship, we should not expect certainty. It is suggested that, in cases where historical fact may never be ascertained, we will be better (...) served by the notion of credences. (shrink)

Plato’s chief argument against rhetoric is epistemological. Plato claims that rhetoric accomplishes what it does on the basis of experience,not knowledge. In this article I examine Plato’s criticisms of rhetoric in the Gorgias and the Phaedrus. I argue that Plato is right to identify rhetoric’s empirical basis, but that having this epistemic basis does not constitute an argument against rhetoric. On the contrary, Plato’s criticism of rhetoric serves to give us an epistemological explanation of rhetoric’s success.

The early modern era produced the Scientific Revolution, which originated our present understanding of the natural world. Concurrently, philosophers established the conceptual foundations of modernity. This rich and comprehensive volume surveys and illuminates the numerous and complicated interconnections between philosophical and scientific thought as both were radically transformed from the late sixteenth to the mid-eighteenth century. The chapters explore reciprocal influences between philosophy and physics, astronomy, mathematics, medicine, and other disciplines, and show how thinkers responded to an immense range of (...) intellectual, material, and institutional influences. The volume offers a unique perspicuity, viewing the entire landscape of early modern philosophy and science, and also marks an epoch in contemporary scholarship, surveying recent contributions and suggesting future investigations for the next generation of scholars and students. (shrink)

Cognitive Science, Volume 46, Issue 6, June 2022.

It is difficult to write clearly about any aspect of Plotinus’ thought. There are many reasons for this. One reason is that he is a very systematic thinker. So, for example, to treat his aesthetics one must also discuss his metaphysics, psychology, and his ethics. Anther reason is his well-known subtlety and obscurity of expression. Kuisma’s book on Plotinus’ aesthetics, however, shows that it is possible to write clearly, accurately, and succinctly about Plotinus. This book is a pleasure to read. (...) Kuisma argues against a modern, widely held interpretation of Plotinus’s aesthetics which claims that “Plotinus, in contrast to Plato, accepted the possibility of the artistic imitation of intelligible Forms,” thus giving “a new direction to Platonic art theory”. His thesis is, instead, that “the objects of artistic imitation are limited to the sphere of perceptions,” although this limitation can be overcome to some extent by “the use of symbols and symbolic conventions”, inasmuch as symbolic representations do not convey on the basis of sameness of form. He calls the common view “strong mimesis,” and his own view, “weak mimesis”. Clearly, Kuisma’s view shows Plotinus to be a traditional Platonist. Indeed, it would be odd if Plotinus, of all people, should discount Plato’s doubts about the ability of sensibles to represent eternal form. (shrink)

This is a collection of essays, many of which were given originally as papers at a conference on Ancient Method held at Amherst College in 1994. Few directly address the subject of method in ancient philosophy. Readers whose primary interest is this subject and have high hopes for this new volume from Oxford University Press will be somewhat disappointed. Yet those of us whose interests in ancient philosophy are broader will find not a few excellent essays on important questions by (...) some of the leaders in the field. (shrink)

History and Philosophy of Logic, Volume 33, Issue 1, Page 104-106, February 2012.

This is a wonderful book. It is, in my opinion, the best book on Aristotle’s treatment of the physical world to appear in recent years. Still, this book is not one that can be read through on a Sunday afternoon. It resembles a text of Aristotle in the compactness of argument, though not, I am happy to report, in clarity. Like a guide raised in the wild, Lang leads us through a large sector of the forest of arguments in the (...) Physics and De Caelo. This analogy brings me to the following point: Lang’s perspective on Aristotle is extraordinary. Lang is the author of another excellent book, Aristotle’s Physics and Its Medieval Varieties. Discussions of Aristotle’s philosophy of nature through the lens of medieval philosophy and science are not uncommon. These discussions, however, face the peril of attributing, in one way or another, viewpoints to Aristotle that are actually those of his medieval successors. For this reason most work on Aristotle is now done without reference to medieval thought. Perhaps this is as it should be. But one of the great difficulties in understanding Aristotle’s conception of the world is how we are to interpret what he says. Our perspective on the world is largely formed on the basis of early modern rejections of medieval Aristotelian views. That is to say that built into our perspective is a negative response not to Aristotle directly but to medieval interpretation of Aristotle. This fact makes it extremely difficult for us to see Aristotle clearly. Here lies the advantage of knowing the “medieval varieties” of Aristotle’s natural philosophy when we try to make sense of Aristotle. Knowing this helps us distinguish more clearly between our own perspective and its roots and Aristotle’s. Aristotle’s perspective is in fact fundamentally different from ours. For example, Lang points out that to insert the notion of “speed” into Aristotle’s discussion of motion is “seriously misleading” because speed is conceptually distinguishable from moving bodies and is so treated, whereas motion, for Aristotle, is always the actualization of a capacity intrinsic to a moved body; therefore motion can neither be quantified nor abstracted from what is moved. (shrink)

Plato's dialogues are masterpieces of philosophy and literature. This insures their place in the firmament of human achievement, but it also makes their interpretation difficult. For example, does the literary artifice contribute to the philosophic argument? If it does, how does it do so and how are we to judge its contribution? Much of modern interpretation of Plato's dialogues focuses on the logical strength and direction of the philosophical arguments. One reason for this is that here we have something we (...) have means to evaluate; we can determine, for the most part, what the arguments are, whether they are consistent, and how much they demonstrate. Here we seem to stand, more or less, on a philosophical terra firma. Yet the contribution of Plato's literary artifice remains, for such interpretive efforts, a philosophical terra incognita precisely because there seem to be no evident, objective standards by which to judge this contribution. (shrink)

This latest volume of BACAP Proceedings contains some innovative research by international scholars on Plato, Aristotle, and Sophocles. It covers such themes as Plato on the philosopher ruler, and Aristotle on essence and necessity in science. This publication has also been published in paperback, please click here for details.

According to David Miller, immigration is not a human right. Conversely, Kieran Oberman makes a case for immigration as a human right. We agree with the latter view, but we show that its starting point is mistaken. Indeed, both Miller and Oberman discuss the right to immigration within the liberal paradigm: it is a right or not depending on the correct balance between the interests of the citizens of a given national state and the interests of the immigrants. (...) Instead, we claim that public justification can underpin immigration as a human right. That said, the public justification of the right to immigration has several counterarguments to rebut. Before we deal with that issue, relying on Jürgen Habermas’s social theory, we examine the legal structures that could support the right to immigration in practice. To be sure, this does not provide the normative justification needed, instead it shows the framework that allows the institutional realization of this right. Then, through a combination of civic and cosmopolitan forms of solidarity, the article discusses the formation of a public sphere, which could provide the justification of the right to immigration. (shrink)

The lambda calculus is a universal programming language. It can represent the computable functions, and such offers a formal counterpart to the point of view of functions as rules. Terms represent functions and this allows for the application of a term/function to any other term/function, including itself. The calculus can be seen as a formal theory with certain pre-established axioms and inference rules, which can be interpreted by models. Dana Scott proposed the first non-trivial model of the extensional lambda (...) calculus, known as $ D_{\infty }$, to represent the $\lambda $-terms as the typical functions of set theory, where it is not allowed to apply a function to itself. Here we propose a construction of an $\infty $-groupoid from any lambda model endowed with a topology. We apply this construction for the particular case $D_{\infty }$, and we see that the Scott topology does not provide enough information about the relationship between higher homotopies. This motivates a new line of research focused on the exploration of $\lambda $-models with the structure of a non-trivial $\infty $-groupoid to generalize the proofs of term conversion to higher-proofs in $\lambda $-calculus. (shrink)

The aim of this article is to apply the concept of synergy to the workings of memory in Alex Miller’s Landscape of Farewell by focusing on the relationship between its two main characters, M...

La Educación Sensible es ayuda para que el “yo” habite en su “hogar interior” y crezca hacia su “apoteosis original” en el “nosotros”, donde se hace cocreador de belleza con libertad, sabiduría y amor. La educación sensible es pedagogía no invasiva pero radicalmente exigente para que la persona acepte desplegar su versión original y vivir con gozo en un “nosotros-maduro”. No es una pedagogía que protege a los sensibles; es una educación que atiende a todas las personas, independientemente de su (...) grado de sensibilidad: alta, media o baja (como intervalos comunes que se manejan en las ciencias de la sensibilidad). La sensibilidad personal es capaz de captar la propia originalidad y disponerse para interpretarla en los dos sentidos: comprenderla y actuarla. La sensibilidad humana necesita la educación sensible para que sea punto de partida de un desarrollo personal auténtico y pleno de la propia originalidad que es alterada y altera la de los “yoes” con quien habita la existencia formando “nosotros”, que a su vez, se impactan con interdependencia. Además de al “yo”, la educación sensible se orienta al “nosotros”, que será tanto más “sensible” en la medida que altera la intimidad de la persona con “amor-maduro” que es fuente de gozo, a pesar de los pesares. Sin educación sensible la vida daña y cuanta mayor es la sensibilidad de la persona, mayor es el daño, pero también es mayor la capacidad para detectarlo cicatrizarlo y ayudar a otros con educación sensible. Así, la educación sensible se manifiesta de tres maneras: como acción sanadora de la persona, destrucción creadora para evolucionar en el tiempo, como la crisálida se transforma en mariposa, y acción desarrollante del propio potencial con originalidad. (shrink)

Miller (2005) and Miller (2008) argue that the branching picture of time is incompatible with the possibility of backwards time travel. In this paper I show that Miller’s conclusion is based on a hidden assumption which, while generally plausible, is unwarranted if time travel is possible. Branching time is, after all, compatible with time travel as Miller characterises it.

This paper has three main sections. The first section provides a general characterisation of presentism, eternalism and growing blockism. It presents a pair of core, defining claims that jointly capture each of these three views. This makes clear the respects in which the different views agree, and the respects in which they disagree, about the nature of time. The second section takes these characterisations and considers whether we really do have three distinct views, or whether defenders of these views are (...) somehow talking past one another when they claim to disagree. The third section looks at the key objections to each view and considers some of the replies that can be made to those objections. The paper concludes by offering some thoughts about how future research might help us resolve the debate between defenders of these three views. (shrink)

It is often assumed that it seems to each of us as though time flows, or passes. On that assumption it follows either that time does in fact pass, and then, pretty plausibly, we have mechanisms that detect its passage, or that time does not pass, and we are subject to a pervasive phenomenal illusion. If the former is the case, we are faced with the explanatory task of spelling out which perceptual or cognitive mechanism (or combination thereof) allows us (...) to detect and track time’s passage (§2.1) If the latter, then we are faced with the task of explaining how, and why, we are subject to a pervasive phenomenal illusion (§2.2). There is, however, a third, somewhat less discussed, explanatory project. Rather than assuming that it seems to each of us as though time passes, and then attempting to explain why it seems that way, we jettison that assumption. According to these views it does not seem to us as though time passes; instead, we come to falsely believe that it seems to us as though time passes (§3). This view requires that we explain how we come to have systematically false beliefs about the way our experiences seem to us. This paper aims to motivate this third explanatory strategy and say something about what kind of cognitive mechanisms might be responsible for our having a false belief that it seems as though time passes, (§3.1) and why we might have evolved (some of) those mechanisms (§3.2). In particular, the paper does not aim to argue for this view: rather, it aims to present it as a viable contender alongside other more common views. (shrink)

An important objection to signaling approaches to representation is that, if signaling behavior is driven by the maximization of usefulness, then signals will typically carry much more information about agent-dependent usefulness than about objective features of the world. This sort of considerations are sometimes taken to provide support for an anti-realist stance on representation itself. The author examines the game-theoretic version of this skeptical line of argument developed by Donald Hoffman and his colleagues. It is shown that their argument only (...) works under an extremely impoverished picture of the informational connections that hold between agent and world. In particular, it only works for cue-driven agents, in Kim Sterelny’s sense. In cases in which the agents’ understanding of what is useful results from combining pieces of information that reach them in different ways, and that complement one another, maximizing usefulness involves construing first a picture of agent-independent, objective matters of fact. (shrink)

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

Perhaps the most widely touted of GPT-4’s at-launch, zero-shot capabilities has been its reported 90th-percentile performance on the Uniform Bar Exam. This paper begins by investigating the methodological challenges in documenting and verifying the 90th-percentile claim, presenting four sets of findings that indicate that OpenAI’s estimates of GPT-4’s UBE percentile are overinflated. First, although GPT-4’s UBE score nears the 90th percentile when examining approximate conversions from February administrations of the Illinois Bar Exam, these estimates are heavily skewed towards repeat test-takers (...) who failed the July administration and score significantly lower than the general test-taking population. Second, data from a recent July administration of the same exam suggests GPT-4’s overall UBE percentile was below the 69th percentile, and $$\sim$$ ∼ 48th percentile on essays. Third, examining official NCBE data and using several conservative statistical assumptions, GPT-4’s performance against first-time test takers is estimated to be $$\sim$$ ∼ 62nd percentile, including $$\sim$$ ∼ 42nd percentile on essays. Fourth, when examining only those who passed the exam (i.e. licensed or license-pending attorneys), GPT-4’s performance is estimated to drop to $$\sim$$ ∼ 48th percentile overall, and $$\sim$$ ∼ 15th percentile on essays. In addition to investigating the validity of the percentile claim, the paper also investigates the validity of GPT-4’s reported scaled UBE score of 298. The paper successfully replicates the MBE score, but highlights several methodological issues in the grading of the MPT + MEE components of the exam, which call into question the validity of the reported essay score. Finally, the paper investigates the effect of different hyperparameter combinations on GPT-4’s MBE performance, finding no significant effect of adjusting temperature settings, and a significant effect of few-shot chain-of-thought prompting over basic zero-shot prompting. Taken together, these findings carry timely insights for the desirability and feasibility of outsourcing legally relevant tasks to AI models, as well as for the importance for AI developers to implement rigorous and transparent capabilities evaluations to help secure safe and trustworthy AI. (shrink)

Experimental balance is usually understood as the control for the value of the conditions, other than the one under study, which are liable to affect the result of a test. We discuss three different approaches to balance. ‘Millean balance’ requires identifying and equalizing ex ante the value of these conditions in order to conduct solid causal inferences. ‘Fisherian balance’ measures ex post the influence of uncontrolled conditions through the analysis of variance. In ‘efficiency balance’ the value of the antecedent conditions (...) is decided ex ante according to the efficiency they yield in the estimation of the treatment outcome. Against some old arguments by Worrall, we show that in both Fisherian and efficiency balance there are good reasons to randomize the allocation of treatments, in particular when there is no agreement among experimenters as to the antecedent conditions to be controlled for. (shrink)

Dana S. Belu combines Heidegger's phenomenology of technology with feminist phenomenology in order to make sense of the increased technicization of women's reproductive bodies during conception, pregnancy, and birth.

This chapter examines how the problem of the nature of body had become the central debate in the field of natural philosophy in England by the middle of the seventeenth century. It explains that the nature of the physical body is one of the major problems of seventeenth-century natural philosophy and that it began, at least in part, as a byproduct of a change in the philosophical vocabulary. The chapter also evaluates solutions proposed to address the problem concerning the nature (...) of body, including those derived from theory of matter and mixed mathematics. (shrink)

There has been much discussion of so-called teleosemantic approaches to the naturalization of content. Such discussion, though, has been largely confined to simple, innate mental states with contents such as ?There is a fly here.? Even assuming we can solve the issues that crop up at this stage, an account of the content of human mental states will not get too far without an account of productivity: the ability to entertain indefinitely many thoughts. The best-known teleosemantic theory, Millikan's biosemantics, offers (...) an account of productivity in thought. This paper raises a basic worry about this account: that the use of mapping functions in the theory is unacceptable from a naturalistic point of view. (shrink)

This article discusses the meaning of the notion of virtuality in modern physics. To this end, it develops considerations on the introduction and establishment in nuclear physics of two independent concepts at the turn of the 1920s and 1930s: that of the virtual state, used in the context of neutron scattering studies, and that of the virtual transition, useful for the theoretical understanding of strong nuclear forces, which forms the basis of what are now called virtual particles. Their comparative analysis (...) highlights the theoretical nature of virtual entities and processes in modern physics. It also shows how the virtual has been associated with various purely physical attributes, leading to a form of polysemy of the term, from the beginning of the application of these concepts. (shrink)