Eighteen obituaries of recently deceased Fellows of the British Academy: John Ackrill; Maurice Beresford; Malcolm Bowie; Peter Brunt; Norman Cohn; John Crook; Robert Davies; David Foxon; Terence Hutchison; Philip Jones; Michael Levey; John Macquarrie; Charles Moule; Anthony Nuttall; Alan Raitt; Joseph Trapp; William Watson; Bryan Wilson.

Seventeen obituaries of recently deceased Fellows of the British Academy: Shackleton Bailey; James Barr; William Beasley; Lord Blake; Julian Budden; Lord Bullock; Robert Carson, Laurence Cohen; Charles Feinstein; Henry Gifford; Peter Holt; Emrys Jones; Robert Megarry; Edward Oates; Maurice Wiles; Brian Woledge; Austin Woolrych.

The general process view of learning, which guided research into learning for the first half of this century, has come under attack in recent years from several quarters. One form of criticism has come from proponents of the so-called biological boundaries approach to learning. These theorists have presented a variety of data showing that supposedly general laws of learning may in fact be limited in their applicability to different species and learning tasks, and they argue that the limitations are drawn (...) by the nature of each species' adaptation to the particular requirements of its natural environment. The biological boundaries approach has served an important critical function in the move away from general process learning theory, but it is limited in its ability to provide an alternative to the general process approach. In particular, the biological boundaries approach lacks generality, it is in some respects subservient to the general process tradition, and its ecological content is in too many cases limited toex post factoadaptive explanations of learning skills. A contrasting, ecological approach to learning, which can provide a true alternative to general process theory, is presented. The ecological approach begins by providing an ecological task description for naturally occurring instances of learning; this step answers the question:Whatdoes this animal learn to do? The next step is an analysis of the means by which learning occurs in the course of development, answering the question:Howdoes the animal learn to do this? On the basis of such analyses, local principles of adaptation are formulated to account for the learning abilities of individual species. More global principles are sought by generalization among these local principles and may form the basis for a general ecological theory of learning. (shrink)

Despite several decades of criticism, dichotomous thinking about behavioral development remains widespread and influential. This is particularly true in study of birdsong development, where it has become increasingly common to diagnose songs, elements of songs, or precursors of songs as either innate or learned on the basis of isolation-rearing experiments. The theory of sensory templates has encouraged both the dichotomous approach and an emphasis on structural rather than functional aspects of song development. As a result, potentially important lines of investigation (...) have been overlooked and the interpretation of existing data is often flawed. Evidence for a genetic origin of behavioraldifferencesis frequently interpreted as evidence for the genetic determination of behavioralcharacters. The technique of isolation rearing remains the methodology of choice for many investigators, despite the fact that it offers only a rather crude analysis of the contribution of experience to song development and provides no information at all about genetic contributions to development. The latter could in principle be elucidated by the application of developmental-genetic techniques, but it is unlikely that these can easily be applied to the study of birdsong. Because developmental questions are so often posed in terms of the learned–innate dichotomy, “experience” is taken to be synonymous with “learning” and the possible role of nonobvious contributions to song development has largely been ignored. An alternative approach, based on Daniel Lehrman's interactionist theory of development, permits a more thorough appreciation of the problems that have yet to be addressed, and provides a more secure conceptual foundation for theories of song development. (shrink)

The Australian Royal Commission into Aged Care Quality and Safety acknowledged understaffing and substandard care in residential aged care and home care services, and recommendations were made that that the Australian Government should promote assistive technology within aged care. Robotic care assistants can provide care and companionship for the elderly—both in their own homes and within health and aged care institutions. Although more research is required into their use, studies indicate benefits, including enabling the elderly to live independently at home, (...) assistance with medication and monitoring of safety. Nevertheless, there are inherent ethical challenges in the use of robots as carers, including loss of privacy, unwarranted restrictions on autonomy, lack of dignity, deception, and the exacerbation of loneliness. Ethics by design can counter these issues in development of robotics and clinical ethics committees have been put forward as a way of dealing with the ethical use of robotic care in healthcare institutions. In this paper I outline the ethical challenges of robotic care assistants and how these may be mediated in their design and use. (shrink)

The idea of the Inner is central to our concept of a person and yet is far from being philosophically understood. This book offers a comprehensive account of Wittgenstein's work on the subject and presents a forceful challenge to contemporary views. Written in a non-technical and accessible style, it throws new light both on Wittgenstein's work and on the problem of the Inner self.

As new parents quickly learn, parenting always involves choosing your battles. Ideally, parents have the freedom to make those moral choices without the prejudice of an unreasonable or premature inflicted ought. Resolving the predictive uncertainties of genomic information is the professional responsibility of the biomedical community, just as clarifying the impact of global warming or assessing the risks of rising multidrug resistance is the responsibility of similar specialists. Until sequencing can give parents clear and meaningful information that they can use (...) to protect their children without also burdening parents with uncertain findings about which little if anything can be done, it makes no sense to impute an obligation for them to seek it out. To do so not only increases the mental and emotional burden on parents but also distorts the scope of parental responsibility in ways that undermine parents’ capacity to play their immediate role as the nurturers of a new life. (shrink)

This article explores traditional views of advance care planning in the broader context of advance personal planning, which also accounts for legal and financial matters. Criticisms of existing processes are noted, while the significance of interprofessional collaboration is highlighted. Reframing the purpose of advance personal planning as planning for the rest of life, rather than the end-of-life, and adopting a more holistic perspective informed by theory may help individuals to view advance personal planning as a routine, preventative exercise that safeguards (...) their autonomy and well-being. Both lawyers and healthcare providers have an important role to play in reframing the purpose of advance personal planning. This revised approach is underpinned by the unification of two separate theoretical lenses: Preventive Law Theory and Therapeutic Jurisprudence. This combination enhances our understanding of what it means for people to truly achieve “the good result” (Holtz 2017) when planning ahead for their future legal, financial, health, and personal interests. Preventive Law Theory encourages an ongoing, collaborative relationship between lawyers and their clients, or healthcare providers and their patients, while Therapeutic Jurisprudence ensures an ethical approach to advance personal planning that accounts for all aspects of the individual’s well-being, including consideration of vulnerability, autonomy, and empowerment. (shrink)

There has been widespread academic and popular debate about the transformative potential of consumption choices, particularly food shopping. While popular food media is optimistic about “shopping for change,” food scholars are more critical, drawing attention to fetishist approaches to “local” or “organic,” and suggesting the need for reflexive engagement with food politics. We argue that reflexivity is central to understanding the potential and limitations of consumer-focused food politics, but argue that this concept is often relatively unspecified. The first objective of (...) this paper is to operationalize reflexivity and advance understanding of reflexivity as an important tool for understanding the lived experience of food shopping. Our second objective is to explore the range of reflexivity observed in a mainstream “shopping for change” market sector. To do this, we draw from in-depth interviews with shoppers at Whole Foods Market (WFM)—a retail venue with the stated goal of making consumers “feel good about where [they] shop.” This group is chosen because of our interest in investigating the reflexivity of consumer engagement with the corporatized arm of ethical consumption—a realm of concern to food scholars as alternative agricultural initiatives are absorbed (both materially and symbolically) into corporate institutions. Our analysis suggests that shopping at venues like WFM is primarily motivated by traditional consumer pleasures, even for politicized consumers, a finding that poses serious limitations for a consumer-regulated food system. (shrink)

Since 1980, the number of twin births in the United States has increased 76 percent, and the number of triplets or higher‐order multiples has increased over 400 percent. These increases are due in part to increased maternal age, which is associated with spontaneous twinning. But the primary reason for these increases is that more and more people are undergoing fertility treatment. Despite an emerging (but not absolute) consensus in the medical literature that multiples, including twins, should be a far less (...) frequent outcome of fertility treatment, American clinicians currently practice fertility medicine in ways likely to result in twins and, occasionally, triplets—often, they tell us, at the request of their patients. At first blush, one might conclude that these practice patterns show that patients and their doctors have weighed the risks associated with twins against the benefits of swiftly completing their families and decided that the risks are worth taking. That is, their requests for twins must represent their free and informed choices. But there are reasons to be skeptical of this interpretation, including that the preferences of many patients seem to be very strongly shaped, if not sometimes completely constrained, by concerns about costs—costs that mainly result from the routine exclusion of in vitro fertilization from health insurance coverage. It is quite possible, we believe, that these cost concerns actually undermine the autonomy of fertility patients, pushing many of them to take risks with their health and the health of their hoped‐for future children. (shrink)

_A Brief History of_ _Justice_ traces the development of the idea of justice from the ancient world until the present day, with special attention to the emergence of the modern idea of social justice. An accessible introduction to the history of ideas about justice Shows how complex ideas are anchored in ordinary intuitions about justice Traces the emergence of the idea of social justice Identifies connections as well as differences between distributive and corrective justice Offers accessible, concise introductions to the (...) thought of several leading figures and schools of thought in the history of philosophy. (shrink)

The idea of the Inner is central to our concept of a person and yet is far from being philosophically understood. This book offers a comprehensive account of Wittgenstein's work on the subject and presents a forceful challenge to contemporary views. Written in a non-technical and accessible style, it throws new light both on Wittgenstein's work and on the problem of the Inner self.

Ralph Wedgwood balks at my argument at three significant points. I have some brief, and I hope helpful, reactions to the resistance that he offers.

Abstract Hayek assailed the idea of social justice by arguing that any effort to realize it would transform society into an oppressive organization, stißing liberty. Hayek's view is marred by two omissions. First, he fails to consider that the goal of social justice, like the goal of wealth generation, might be promoted by strategies of indirection that do not entail oppressive organization. Second, he underestimates the tendency of the market order itself to generate oppressive organization, and consequently sees advantages in (...) the market order that it may not possess. (shrink)

Hayek claimed that the idea of social justice is meaningless in a market economy because in that context, no identifiable agent intentionally brings about the distribution of wealth. But the assumption that the existence of injustice entails an identifiable agent of injustice is erroneous. Moreover, Hayek ignores the fact that in a market economy, the broad pattern of economic outcomes is foreseeable even if detailed, person‐by‐person outcomes are not. Hayek's rejection of the idea of social justice reveals a striking naïveté (...) about his own ethical presuppositions. (shrink)

My task in this paper is to demonstrate, contra Nel Noddings, that Kantian ethics does not have an expectation of treating those closest to one the same as one would a stranger. In fact, Kantian ethics has what I would consider a robust statement of how it is that those around us come to figure prominently in the development of one's ethics. To push the point even further, I argue that Kantian ethics has an even stronger claim to treating those (...) closest to oneself as imperative than Noddings and sentiment‐based ethical theory in general, proposes. (shrink)

This book presents a comprehensive critical survey of all the logical doctrines of the well-known but little understood Catalan philosopher and theologian, Ramon Llull (1232-1316). The highly idiosyncratic character of Llull's writings has long frustrated the efforts of general medieval historians to define his contribution to later scholastic culture, and has resisted attempts by specialists to explain exactly how his methods and procedures worked. This new study--the first book-length treatment in English of Llull's philosophy to appear in over fifty years--seeks (...) to resolve both of these difficulties. The author argues that Llull's peculiar logical doctrines result from his reinterpretation of the use of commonplace scholastic teachings according to his own preferred ethical and spiritual ideals. (shrink)

Especially during the brief post-revolutionary period before the rise of Stalinism, certain thinkers in the Soviet milieu offered some attention-worthy reflections regarding Freud’s body of work. In particular, Luria and Vygotsky put forward thoughtful Marxism-informed assessments of the metapsychology and methodology of psychoanalysis. And strong cross-resonances are audible between these Soviet thinkers’ reflections and the early stages of Western Marxism’s rapprochement with Freud, starting in texts by Reich and Fenichel and continuing with the Frankfurt School, of whose members Marcuse arguably (...) furnishes the most sophisticated and sustained engagement with analysis. In this essay, I argue that Luria, Vygotsky, Reich, Fenichel, and Marcuse share in common a fundamentally correct insight according to which the theory of drive (Trieb) is a load-bearing pillar for any psychoanalytic Marxism. Moreover, not only is the Freudian metapsychological concept of drive applicable to and productive of Marxism and its form(s) of materialism—echoing Lacan’s claim that Marx invented the symptom, I contend, here and elsewhere, that Marx’s mature critique of political economy already anticipates the later analytic idea of Trieb. In fact, I would go so far as to credit Marx with (also) being the inventor of the analytic drive (albeit avant la lettre). (shrink)

In this paper we will argue that the ontology implicit in John Buridan’s modal octagon commits him to a form of contingentism. In particular, we will argue that Buridan is committed to denying the validity of the Barcan and converse Barcan formulae.

This paper was first published in Pli: The Warwick Journal of Philosophy, no. 15, Spring 2004, pp. 199-228.

This article investigates how Chaucer‘s Knight‘s and Squire‘s tales critically engage with the Orientalist strategies buttressing contemporary Italian humanist discussions of visual art. Framed by references to crusading, the two tales enter into a dialogue focusing, in particular, on the relations between the classical, the scientific and the Oriental in trecento Italian discourses on painting and optics, discourses that are alluded to in the description of Theseus Theatre and the events that happen there. The Squire‘s Tale exhibits what one might (...) call a strategic Orientalism designed to draw attention to the Orientalism implicit in his fathers narrative, a narrative that, for all its painstaking classicism, displays both remarkably Italianate and Orientalist features. Read in tandem, the two tales present a shrewd commentary on the exclusionary strategies inherent in the construction of new cultural identities, arguably making Chaucer the first postcolonial critic of the Renaissance. (shrink)

In 2013, the U.S. National Institutes of Health funded four large interdisciplinary research projects exploring the “implications, challenges and opportunities associated with the possible use of g...

This chapter contains sections titled: I II III IV V.

Prior research on facial beauty has suggested that the average female face in a population is perceived to be the most attractive face. This finding, however, is based on an image processing methodology that appears to be flawed. An alternative method for generating attractive faces is described and the findings using this procedure are compared with the reports of other experimenters. The results suggest that (1) beautiful female faces are not average, but vary from the average in a systematic manner, (...) and (2) female beauty can best be explained by a sexual selection viewpoint, whereby selection favors cues that are reliable indicators of fertility. (shrink)

Schelling argues that the Kantian transcendental apparatus lacks the ability to systematically ground itself. He insists that one must account for the prior emergence of experiential reality in addition to delineating this reality’s structure once constituted, and he presents his genetic model of epistemological subjectivity as a supplement completing the Kantian edifice. Although he never finally arrives at a satisfactory system of his own, Schelling repeatedly attempts, in various ways, to strike a productive compromise between transcendental and historico-genetic approaches to (...) subjectivity. Given that contemporary thinkers are still wrangling with the problem of how to adjudicate between those who make claims regarding the existence of invariant features of subjectivity and those who reject the notion that there are non-empirical, ahistorical constants defining human cognition, Schelling’s struggle with these same issues promises to furnish today’s readers with instructive lessons about the potentials and pitfalls of the endeavor to resolve this impasse. (shrink)