When Donna Rice, who was brought into the public limelight as a companion to ex-presidentiaI candidate Gary Hart, appeared at a university ethics seminar, her statement, and the subsequent coverage, raised three troubling questions for journalists: the nature of academic inquiry, journalistic practices, and the right of people to define themselves.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:207 THE CARELESS SKEPTIC THE 'PAMPHILIAN' IRONIES IN HUME'S DIALOGUES In "Hume and the Legacy of the Dialogues" E. C. Mossner sets out a widely accepted interpretation of one of Hume's major intentions in that great work. He argues that Hume's main use of irony therein is to dissimulate with respect to his true religious convictions. The purpose is to provide Hume with a defense against the expected negative (...) reaction to the powerful attack on religion mounted 2 in the Dialogues. The attack, as is well known, is set out in the arguments of Philo against natural and revealed religion as espoused by Cleanthes and Demea, and Philo's views are taken to be those of Hume. It is argued or assumed that since such attacks were in Hume's day imprudent, they must be made by indirection, that is, by a device such as irony. Thus the Dialogues have surface meanings in which the religious views under attack are said (by Pamphilus) to win out; they also have other meanings, underlying or implicit, in which the religious views are conclusively refuted. That they are refuted is a conclusion drawn by the interpreters, in the present case Mossner and those who share his views. These destructive refutations are derived from explication and assessment of the ongoing argument as embodied in the explicit statements of the contestants, and are thus not explicitly linked to Hume. In consequence, quite often from one standpoint (a trivial one of external comment by an immature and prejudiced onlooker) the design argument wins; and from another, more sophisticated one, it loses. The upshot is that "Philo, who as Hume's spokesman for mitigated 208 skepticism will perforce be the victor in the philosophic debate, will nevertheless be 'artfully' depicted as being vanquished by the antagonist." The strategy Mossner finds in the Dialogues thus has the youthful Pamphilus, a ward of Cleanthes, and one who takes no actual part in the adversarial discussions, interposing (in brief asides) comments that superficially but subtly belittle Philo's philosophical position. Philo is characterized, for instance, as having a "careless scepticism," in contrast with Cleanthes, who has an "accurate philosophical turn [of mind]" (D 128). Similarly, at the end of the Dialogues, Pamphilus awards the victory to Cleanthes. In support of his thesis that Philo is a devious Hume's mouthpiece, Mossner brings forth two kinds of evidence, roughly characterizable as external and internal. One kind of external evidence is exemplified in Hume's correspondence with Gilbert 4 5 Elliot of Minto, and Adam Smith; the letters involved are interpreted as showing that Philo represents Hume. Another kind involves comparing the amount of space devoted to the arguments of the three adversaries. The internal evidence is derived from the explication and appraisal of the explicit statements of the contestants; and it is essentially identified with the arguments and conclusions of Philo, except where Cleanthes can be said to make claims which square with those made by Hume in other works such as the Treatise. Thus Hume's views and the related arguments are interpreted as those of Philo, in part because they are considered to be more valid and sound than those of Cleanthes, and in part because they are held to square with the views and arguments affirmed in Hume's other writings. Hume's views, as indicated above, are taken to be those of 209 Philo except where Philo appears to agree with Cleanthes and to accept a form of the design argument. Hume is Cleanthes when Cleanthes sets forth doctrines of the Treatise and the Enquiry that are in accordance with the received (more or less) positivistic interpretation of Hume's skepticism. It is this view that requires that in those places in Parts III, X, and XII, where Philo appears to avow a form of the design argument or to let it stand unrefuted, he be (ironically) dissimulating. Thus the surface victories of Cleanthes and natural religion, which the adversarial flow of the statements of Philo and Cleanthes exhibits, are refuted by the propositions derived from the assessed form and content of the philosophical debate. The basic irony, therefore, lies in aspects of the... (shrink)

Other than the historical writings, the edition of which has yet to begin, Series VIII of the Academy Edition of Leibniz’s writings, presenting his “natural-scientific, medical, and technical” contributions, has been, since the project began in 1923, consistently deemed to be of low priority, and it is only very recently that the project has got fully underway. Coming, as it does, nearer to the end of the edition of the complete works, Series VIII has the advantage of accumulating some of (...) the ‘run-off’ of the philosophical writings, that is, texts of philosophical import that for whatever reason were not initially deemed sufficiently philosophical to be included in Series II or VI. Currently in preparation are the writings on chemistry, hydrology, and other natural sciences. The medical and ‘biological’ manuscripts, identified as ‘LH III’, will be edited likely some years from now.2 On our reading of these manuscripts, all or most are of at least some interest to the scholar of Leibniz’s philosophy. (shrink)

D. D. Raphael and A. L. Macfie (1976) II An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, ed. R. H. Campbell and A. S. Skinner; textual editor W. B. Todd, 2 vols. (1976) III Essays on Philosophical Subjects, ed. W. P. D. Wightman  ...

The COVID-19 pandemic prompted immense work on the investigation of the SARS-CoV-2 virus. Rapid, accurate, and consistent interpretation of generated data is thereby of fundamental concern. Ontologies––structured, controlled, vocabularies––are designed to support consistency of interpretation, and thereby to prevent the development of data silos. This paper describes how ontologies are serving this purpose in the COVID-19 research domain, by following principles of the Open Biological and Biomedical Ontology (OBO) Foundry and by reusing existing ontologies such as the Infectious Disease Ontology (...) (IDO) Core, which provides terminological content common to investigations of all infectious diseases. We report here on the development of an IDO extension, the Virus Infectious Disease Ontology (VIDO), a reference ontology covering viral infectious diseases. We motivate term and definition choices, showcase reuse of terms from existing OBO ontologies, illustrate how ontological decisions were motivated by relevant life science research, and connect VIDO to the Coronavirus Infectious Disease Ontology (CIDO). We next use terms from these ontologies to annotate selections from life science research on SARS-CoV-2, highlighting how ontologies employing a common upper-level vocabulary may be seamlessly interwoven. Finally, we outline future work, including bacteria and fungus infectious disease reference ontologies currently under development, then cite uses of VIDO and CIDO in host-pathogen data analytics, electronic health record annotation, and ontology conflict-resolution projects. (shrink)

Rapid advancements in artificial intelligence and machine learning (AI/ML) in healthcare raise pressing questions about how much users should trust AI/ML systems, particularly for high stakes clinical decision-making. Ensuring that user trust is properly calibrated to a tool’s computational capacities and limitations has both practical and ethical implications, given that overtrust or undertrust can influence over-reliance or under-reliance on algorithmic tools, with significant implications for patient safety and health outcomes. It is, thus, important to better understand how variability in trust (...) criteria across stakeholders, settings, tools and use cases may influence approaches to using AI/ML tools in real settings. As part of a 5-year, multi-institutional Agency for Health Care Research and Quality-funded study, we identify trust criteria for a survival prediction algorithm intended to support clinical decision-making for left ventricular assist device therapy, using semistructured interviews (n=40) with patients and physicians, analysed via thematic analysis. Findings suggest that physicians and patients share similar empirical considerations for trust, which were primarilyepistemicin nature, focused on accuracy and validity of AI/ML estimates. Trust evaluations considered the nature, integrity and relevance of training data rather than the computational nature of algorithms themselves, suggesting a need to distinguish ‘source’ from ‘functional’ explainability. To a lesser extent, trust criteria were also relational (endorsement from others) and sometimes based on personal beliefs and experience. We discuss implications for promoting appropriate and responsible trust calibration for clinical decision-making use AI/ML. (shrink)

A well-known open problem in epistemic logic is to give a syntactic characterization of the successful formulas. Semantically, a formula is successful if and only if for any pointed model where it is true, it remains true after deleting all points where the formula was false. The classic example of a formula that is not successful in this sense is the “Moore sentence” p ∧ ¬ BOX p, read as “p is true but you do not know p.” Not only (...) is the Moore sentence unsuccessful, it is self-refuting, for it never remains true as described. We show that in logics of knowledge and belief for a single agent (extended by S5), Moorean phenomena are the source of all self-refutation; moreover, in logics for an introspective agent (extending KD45), Moorean phenomena are the source of all unsuccessfulness as well. This is a distinctive feature of such logics, for with a non-introspective agent or multiple agents, non-Moorean unsuccessful formulas appear. We also consider how successful and self-refuting formulas relate to the Cartesian and learnable formulas, which have been discussed in connection with Fitch’s “paradox of knowability.” We show that the Cartesian formulas are exactly the formulas that are not eventually self-refuting and that not all learnable formulas are successful. In an appendix, we give syntactic characterizations of the successful and the self-refuting formulas. (shrink)

This volume collects contributions from leading scholars of early modern philosophy from a wide variety of philosophical and geographic backgrounds. The distinguished contributors offer very different, competing approaches to the history of philosophy.Many chapters articulate new, detailed methods of doing history of philosophy. These present conflicting visions of the history of philosophy as an autonomous sub-discipline of professional philosophy. Several other chapters offer new approaches to integrating history into one's philosophy by re-telling the history of recent philosophy. A number of (...) chapters explore the relationship between history of philosophy and history of science.Among the topics discussed and debated in the volume are: the status of the principle of charity; the nature of reading texts; the role of historiography within the history of philosophy; the nature of establishing proper context. (shrink)

Rereads classical figures in continental thought, takes up current topics in the legacy of political theory, and analyzes and evaluates Foucault's work as a prime manifestation of the complicated modern interface between truth and power, institution and liberation.

Morality can help guide behavior and facilitate relationships. Although moral judgments by autistic people are similar to neurotypical individuals, many researchers argue that subtle differences signify deficits in autistic individuals. Moral foundation theory describes moral judgments in terms of differences rather than deficits. The current research, aimed at assessing autistic individuals’ moral inclinations using Haidt’s framework, was co-designed with autistic community members. Our aim was to describe autistic moral thinking from a strengths-based perspective while acknowledging differences that may pose interpersonal (...) challenges among autistic youth. We assessed 25 autistic and 23 neurotypical children’s moral judgments using the Moral Foundations Questionnaire for Kids. We used semi-structured interviews and qualitative analysis with a subset of participants to describe children’s moral reasoning. Analyses suggested that autistic and neurotypical children make similar judgments about moral transgressions across all five moral foundations. General linear mixed modeling showed that the greatest predictor of recommending punishment was how bad children deemed moral transgressions to be. We also found a trend that autistic children were more likely to recommend punishment for harmless norms violations than were neurotypical children. Future research could use longitudinal methods to understand the development of moral judgments among autistic and neurotypical children. (shrink)

In their paper, “Conversational Artificial Intelligence in Psychotherapy: A New Therapeutic Tool or Agent?” Sedlakova and Trachsel (2023) claim that therapeutic insights and therapeutic changes are...

The moral worth of attorneys has traditionally been judged in terms of compIiance with legal codes of ethics. These codes, ostensibly designed to promote smooth and equitable functioning of an adversary system, are manifestations of a rule utiIitarian moral system. This paper argues that ethical attorneys have a higher calling than rule compIiance and that "moral commitment," which combines commitment to "right" solutions and moral courage, is a superior yardstick for measuring their moral worth.

There is a well-worn image and phrase for libertarianism: "atomized individualism." This hobgoblin has spread so thoroughly that even some libertarians think their philosophy unreservedly supports private persons, whatever the situation, whatever their behavior. Smith's Self-Interest and Social Order in Classical Liberalism, corrects this misrepresentation with careful intellectual surveys of Hume, Smith, Hobbes, Butler, Mandeville, and Hutcheson and their respective contributions to political philosophy.

What determines whether an action is right or wrong? Morality, Rules, and Consequences: A Critical Reader explores for students and researchers the relationship between consequentialist theory and moral rules. Most of the chapters focus on rule consequentialism or on the distinction between act and rule versions of consequentialism. Contributors, among them the leading philosophers in the discipline, suggest ways of assessing whether rule consequentialism could be a satisfactory moral theory. These essays, all of which are previously unpublished, provide students in (...) moral philosophy with essential material and ask key questions on just what the criteria for an adequate moral theory might be. (shrink)

Like many fields, bioethics has been constrained to thinking to race in terms of colorblindness, the idea that ideal deliberation would ignore race and hence prevent bias. There are practical and e...

The Cell Ontology (CL) is designed to provide a standardized representation of cell types for data annotation. Currently, the CL employs multiple is_a relations, defining cell types in terms of histological, functional, and lineage properties, and the majority of definitions are written with sufficient generality to hold across multiple species. This approach limits the CL’s utility for cross-species data integration. To address this problem, we developed a method for the ontological representation of cells and applied this method to develop a (...) dendritic cell ontology (DC-CL). DC-CL subtypes are delineated on the basis of surface protein expression, systematically including both species-general and species-specific types and optimizing DC-CL for the analysis of flow cytometry data. This approach brings benefits in the form of increased accuracy, support for reasoning, and interoperability with other ontology resources. 104. Barry Smith, “Toward a Realistic Science of Environments”, Ecological Psychology, 2009, 21 (2), April-June, 121-130. Abstract: The perceptual psychologist J. J. Gibson embraces a radically externalistic view of mind and action. We have, for Gibson, not a Cartesian mind or soul, with its interior theater of contents and the consequent problem of explaining how this mind or soul and its psychological environment can succeed in grasping physical objects external to itself. Rather, we have a perceiving, acting organism, whose perceptions and actions are always already tuned to the parts and moments, the things and surfaces, of its external environment. We describe how on this basis Gibson sought to develop a realist science of environments which will be ‘consistent with physics, mechanics, optics, acoustics, and chemistry’. (shrink)

The value of any kind of data is greatly enhanced when it exists in a form that allows it to be integrated with other data. One approach to integration is through the annotation of multiple bodies of data using common controlled vocabularies or ‘ontologies’. Unfortunately, the very success of this approach has led to a proliferation of ontologies which itself creates obstacles to integration. The Open Biomedical Ontologies (OBO) consortium has set in train a strategy to overcome this problem. Existing (...) OBO ontologies, including the Gene Ontology, are undergoing a process of coordinated reform and new ontologies being created on the basis of an evolving set of shared principles governing ontology development. The result is an expanding family of ontologies designed to be interoperable, logically well-formed, and to incorporate accurate representations of biological reality. We describe the OBO Foundry initiative, and provide guidelines for those who might wish to become involved. (shrink)

People have always been xenophobic, but an explicit philosophical and scientific view of human racial difference only began to emerge during the modern period. Why and how did this happen? Surveying a range of philosophical and natural-scientific texts, dating from the Spanish Renaissance to the German Enlightenment, Nature, Human Nature, and Human Difference charts the evolution of the modern concept of race and shows that natural philosophy, particularly efforts to taxonomize and to order nature, played a crucial role. Smith (...) demonstrates how the denial of moral equality between Europeans and non-Europeans resulted from converging philosophical and scientific developments, including a declining belief in human nature's universality and the rise of biological classification. The racial typing of human beings grew from the need to understand humanity within an all-encompassing system of nature, alongside plants, minerals, primates, and other animals. While racial difference as seen through science did not arise in order to justify the enslavement of people, it became a rationalization and buttress for the practices of trans-Atlantic slavery. From the work of François Bernier to G. W. Leibniz, Immanuel Kant, and others, Smith delves into philosophy's part in the legacy and damages of modern racism. With a broad narrative stretching over two centuries, Nature, Human Nature, and Human Difference takes a critical historical look at how the racial categories that we divide ourselves into came into being. (shrink)

We propose a typology of representational artifacts for health care and life sciences domains and associate this typology with different kinds of formal ontology and logic, drawing conclusions as to the strengths and limitations for ontology in a description logics framework. The four types of domain representation we consider are: (i) lexico-semantic representation, (ii) representation of types of entities, (iii) representations of background knowledge, and (iv) representation of individuals. We advocate a clear distinction of the four kinds of representation in (...) order to provide a more rational basis for using ontologies and related artifacts to advance integration of data and enhance interoperability of associated reasoning systems. We highlight the fact that only a minor portion of scientifically relevant facts in a domain such as biomedicine can be adequately represented by formal ontologies as long as the latter are conceived as representations of entity types. In particular, the attempt to encode default or probabilistic knowledge using ontologies so conceived is prone to produce unintended, erroneous models. (shrink)