In this article, Harvey notes the initial confusion about the statement made by the pope concerning artificial nutrition and hydration on patients suffering persistent vegetative states (PVS) due to misunderstanding through the translation of the pope's words. He clarifies and assesses what was meant by the statement. He also discusses the problems of terminology concerned with the subject of PVS. Harvey concludes that the papal allocution was in line with traditional Catholic bioethics, and that while maintaining the life (...) of a patient is favorable, in particular cases this presumption wanes when it is clear that this treatment modality would be futile or very burdensome. (shrink)

Sensations represent our subjective 'take' on sensory stimulation — how we feel about red light falling on the retina, salt dissolving on the tongue, a thorn piercing the skin. They tell — in the language of phenomenal properties -- what the experience is like for us. In so far as they represent the reality of this subjective relationship, they cannot be said to be illusory. The relationship, magical as it may seem, is not being misrepresented as something it is not. (...) If anything, it is being represented as something 'super-real'. (shrink)

The mind-body problem is widely seen as the great remaining challenge to science and philosophy. Why and how did matter evolve to take on the quality of mind? The author takes the reader to the edges of current knowledge and back to the beginning of time, before mind existed, and in doing so constructs a history of consciousness.

Prior literature on socially responsible investment has contended that excluding “sin stocks” from a portfolio will reduce performance and increase risk. Further, incorporating stocks of firms with positive social responsibility scores will improve performance and reduce risk. We simulate portfolios designed to mimic typical equity mutual funds’ holdings and investigate these propositions. We remove the potentially confounding influences of differences in manager skill, transaction costs and fees, and conduct a clean experiment on the effect of positive and negative portfolio screening. (...) We find no difference in the return or risk of screened and unscreened portfolios. We conclude that a typical socially responsible fund will neither gain nor lose from screening its portfolio. (shrink)

It is the ambition of evolutionary psychology to explain how the basic features of human mental life came to be selected because of their contribution to biological survival. Counted among the most basic must be the subjective qualities of conscious sensory experience: the felt redness we experience on looking at a ripe tomato, the felt saltiness on tasting an anchovy, the felt pain on being pricked by a thorn. But, as many theorists acknowledge, with these qualia, the ambition of evolutionary (...) psychology may have met its match. Everyone agrees that a trait can only contribute to an organism's biological survival in so far as it operates in the public domain. Yet almost everyone also agrees that the subjective quality of sensory experience is (at least for all practical purposes) private and without external influence. Then, maybe we must either concede that the subjective quality of sensations cannot after all have been determined by selection (even if this is theoretically depressing) or else demonstrate that the quality of sensations is not as private as it seems to be (even if this is intuitively unconvincing). No. I believe neither of these solutions to the puzzle is in fact the right one. I argue instead that the truth is that the quality of sensations has indeed been shaped by selection in the past, despite the fact that it is today effectively private. And this situation has come about as a result of a remarkable evolutionary progression, whereby the primitive activity of sensing slowly became "privatized" - that is to say, removed from the domain of overt public behavior and transformed into a mental activity that is now, in humans, largely if not exclusively internal to the subject's mind. (shrink)

America’s unfinished revolution The_revolutionary spirit that runs through American history and whose_founding_father and greatest advocate was Thomas Paine is fiercely traced in Thomas Paine and the Promise of America ._Showing how Paine turned Americans into radicals—and how we have remained radicals at heart ever since—Harvey J. Kaye presents the nation’s democratic story with wit, subtlety, and, above all, passion. Paine was one of the most remarkable political writers of the modern world and the greatest radical of a radical age._Through (...) writings like Common Sense —and words such as “The sun never shined on a cause of greater worth,” “We have it in our power to begin the world over again,” and “These are the times that try men’s souls”—he not only turned America’s colonial rebellion into a revolutionary war but, as Kaye demonstrates, articulated an American identity charged with exceptional purpose and promise. Beginning with Paine’s life and ideas and following their vigorous influence through to our own day, Thomas Paine and the Promise of America reveals how, while the powers that be repeatedly sought to suppress, defame, and most recently co-opt Paine’s memory, generations of radical and liberal Americans turned to Paine for inspiration as they endeavored to expand American freedom, equality, and democracy. (shrink)

The purpose of this book is to build towards an explanation of just what the matter is.

There is growing regulatory pressure on firms worldwide to address the under-representation of women in senior positions. Regulators have taken a variety of approaches to the issue. We investigate a jurisdiction that has issued recommendations and disclosure requirements, rather than implementing quotas. Much of the rhetoric surrounding gender diversity centres on whether diversity has a financial impact. In this paper we take an aggregate (market-level) approach and compare the performance of portfolios of firms with gender diverse boards to those without. (...) We also investigate whether having multiple women on the board is linked to performance, and if there is a within-industry effect. Overall, we do not find evidence of an association between diversity and performance. We find some weak evidence of a negative correlation between having multiple women on the board and performance, but that in some industries diversity is positively correlated with performance. (shrink)

I said that the cure itself is a certain leaf, but in addition to the drug there is a certain charm, which if someone chants when he makes use of it, the medicine altogether restores him to health, but without the charm there is no profit from the leaf.

The McCollough effect, an orientation-contingent color aftereffect, has been known for over 30 years and, like other aftereffects, has been taken as a means of probing the brain's operations psychophysically. In this paper, we review psychophysical, neuropsychological, and neuroimaging studies of the McCollough effect. Much of the evidence suggests that the McCollough effect depends on neural mechanisms that are located early in the cortical visual pathways, probably in V1. We also review evidence showing that the aftereffect can be induced without (...) conscious perception of the induction patterns. Based on these two lines of evidence, it is argued that our conscious visual experience of the world arises in the cortical visual system beyond V1. (shrink)

Nicholas Humphrey's writings about the evolution of the mind have done much to set the agenda for contemporary psychology.

We define a class of functions, the descent recursive functions, relative to an arbitrary elementary recursive system of ordinal notations. By means of these functions, we provide a general technique for measuring the proof-theoretic strength of a variety of systems of first-order arithmetic. We characterize the provable well-orderings and provably recursive functions of these systems, and derive various conservation and equiconsistency results.

In this paper we defend a particular version of the epistemic approach to argumentation. We advance some general considerations in favor of the approach and then examine the ways in which different versions of it play out with respect to the theory of fallacies, which we see as central to an understanding of argumentation. Epistemic theories divide into objective and subjective versions. We argue in favor of the objective version, showing that it provides a better account than its subjectivist rival (...) of the central fallacy of begging the question. We suggest that the strengths of the objective epistemic theory of fallacies provide support for the epistemic approach to argumentation more generally. (shrink)

In English we use the word “invention” in two ways. First, to mean a new device or process developed by experimentation, and designed to fulfill a practical goal. Second, to mean a mental fabrication, especially a falsehood, designed to please or persuade. In this paper I argue that human consciousness is an invention in both respects. First, it is a cognitive faculty, evolved by natural selection, designed to help us make sense of ourselves and our surroundings. But then, second, it (...) is a fantasy, conjured up by the brain, designed to change the value we place on our existence. (shrink)

In English we use the word “invention” in two ways. First, to mean a new device or process developed by experimentation, and designed to fulfill a practical goal. Second, to mean a mental fabrication, especially a falsehood, designed to please or persuade. In this paper I argue that human consciousness is an invention in both respects. First, it is a cognitive faculty, evolved by natural selection, designed to help us make sense of ourselves and our surroundings. But then, second, it (...) is a fantasy, conjured up by the brain, designed to change the value we place on our existence. (shrink)

Contemplating the catastrophic course of the Nazi Revolution we may well find it all too easy to see nothing in the spectacle but the nether darkness made visible; and if we are advised that it is not merely permissible but highly advisable to learn from the enemy, we may be tempted to think that whatever the Nazi war-machine has to teach the strategist and the technician, the political history of Germany in the last decade, and in particular the political ideology (...) that has imposed itself upon the German mind with such apparent thoroughness, can yield only the negative lesson of a warning, by displaying upon the world-wide stage the doomful consequences of wrong principles ruthlessly pushed to their extreme. But it is certainly an error to deny that nothing of more positive value has emerged out of the revolutionary cauldron: and indeed it would be more than strange, where such whole-hearted energies of mind are being enlisted in the evil cause of Nazism, if none of its votaries had ever stumbled for a time into wisdom. (shrink)

_Papers in medical journals are often difficult to understand and tedious to read. An editor's first loyalty should be to readers, by prioritising readability over merely producing a repository of data for the scientific community generally. The web now provides infinite repository space so there is even less excuse for journals to be unreadable. I give examples of how I attempted to improve one journal, despite external pressures and regardless of how it might affect the Impact Factor. As a postscript (...) I outline increasing involvement in promoting honesty and integrity in publishing through the auspices of the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE). _. (shrink)

During his long and continuing scholarly career, Patrick Suppes contributed significantly both to the sciences and to their philosophies. The volume consists of papers by an international group of Suppes colleagues, collaborators, and students in many of the areas of his expertise, building on or adding to his insights. Michael Friedman offers an overview of Suppes accomplishments and of his unique perspective on the relation between science and philosophy. Paul Humphreys, Stephen Hartmann, and Tom Ryckman present essays in the philosophy (...) of physics. Jens-Erik Fenstad, Harvey Friedman, and Jaako Hintikka consider problems in the foundations of mathematics, while the late Duncan Luce, Jean-Claude Falmagne, Brian Skyrms, and Hannes Leitgeb have contributed essays in theory of measurement, decision theory and probability. Foundations of economics and political theory are addressed by Adolfo Garcia de la Sienra, Russell Hardin, and Kenneth Arrow. Psychology, language, and philosophy of language are addressed by Elizabeth Loftus, Anne Fagot-Largeault, Willem Levelt, Dagfinn Follesdal, and Marcos Perreau-Guimares and some of Suppes most recent research in neurobiology is addressed in essays by Colleen Crangle, Acadio de Barros and Claudio Carvalhes. Finally Nancy Cartwright and Alexandre Marcelles consider the alignment (or misalignment) of method and policy. Each of the essays is accompanied by a response from Suppes.". (shrink)

Radical form criticism has raised a roadblock on the way from the Jesus of history to the church's Christology. Are there alternative approaches to the problem? Or does historical criticism in itself bring an end to the direct relation between Jesus and the church's faith?

Connie Missimer (1990) challenges what she calls the Character View, according to which critical thinking involves both skill and character, and argues for a rival conception-the Skill View-according to which critical thinking is a matter of skill alone. In this paper I criticize the Skill View and defend the Character View from Missimer's critical arguments.

We provide a comprehensive analysis of differences between socially responsible investment and conventional funds in terms of manager characteristics, performance and fund styles. We use holdings-based analysis to evaluate fund performance and style, which allows us to perform a more in-depth analysis than the extant literature. We find that SRI managers have longer tenure and are more likely to be a female. However, these differences do not result in any significant difference in the performance of SRI and conventional funds. Further, (...) it is possible to find an SRI fund of any style, although these funds are under-represented in value styles. (shrink)

William Paley in his famous statement in 1800 of the Argument from Design, imagined that he found a watch lying on a heath and set to wondering how it came to be there. “The inference is inevitable, that the watch must have had a maker: that there must have existed, at some time, and at some place or other, an artificer or artificers who formed it for the purpose which.

Violations of expected utility theory are sometimes attributed to imprecise preferences interacting with a lack of learning opportunity in the experimental laboratory. This paper reports an experimental test of whether a learning opportunity which engenders accurate probability assessments, by enhancing understanding of the meaning of stated probability information, causes anomalous behaviour to diminish. The data show that whilst in some cases expected utility maximising behaviour increases with the learning opportunity, so too do systematic violations. Therefore, there should be no presumption (...) that anomalous behaviour under risk is transient and that discovered preferences will be appropriately described by expected utility theory. (shrink)

Presents a number of scenarios involving ethical dilemmas and asks the reader to decide what to do.

What unites the many selves that constitute the human mind? How is the self-binding problem solved? I argue that separate selves come to belong together as one Self as a result of their dynamic participation in creating a single life, rather as the members of an orchestra come to belong together as a result of their jointly creating a single work of music.

Scientists are generally more moral, and moralists more scientific, than Knobe suggests. His own experiments show that people, rather than making unscientific judgements about the moral intentions of others, are behaving as good Bayesians who take account of prior knowledge.

Philosophical/epistemic theories of rationality differ over the role of judgment in rational argumentation. According to the “classical model” of rationality, rational justification is a matter of conformity with explicit rules or principles. Critics of the classical model, such as Harold Brown and Trudy Govier, argue that the model is subject to insuperable difficulties. They propose, instead, that rationality be understood, ultimately, in terms of judgment rather than rules. In this article I respond to Brown's and Govier's criticisms of the classical (...) model, and to the “judgment model” they propose in its place. I argue that that model is unable both to distinguish between rational and irrational judgment and to avoid recourse to rules, and is therefore inadequate as an account of rationality, critical thinking, or argument appraisal. More positively, I argue that an adequate account of rationality must include a place for both rules and judgment. (shrink)