This paper attempts a defense of John Stuart Mill’s absolute ban against paternalistic restrictions on liberty. Mill’s principle looks more credible once we recognize that some instances of what are thought to be justified instances of paternalism are not instances of paternalism at all—e.g. anti-duelling laws. An interpretation of Mill’s argument is advanced which stresses his commitment to autonomy and his suggestion that exactly the same reasons which favor absolute freedom of speech also favor an absolute prohibition of paternalism. Alternative (...) expositions and appraisals of Mill by Gerald Dworkin and Joel Feiriberg are criticized. Finally, consideration is given to two arguments that render Mill’s principle trivial via the denial that there are any significant self-regarding actions. (shrink)

At a poignant juncture early in Brideshead Revisited, Sebastian, after briefly recounting for Charles his family's rather checkered performance with regard to its Catholicism, remarks, "I wish I liked Catholics more." When Charles replies, "They seem just like other people," Sebastian rebukes him: "My dear Charles, that's exactly what they're not ... It's not just that they're a clique-- as a matter of fact, they're at least four cliques all blackguarding each other half the time--but they've got an entirely different (...) outlook on life; everything they think important is different from other people. They try and hide it as much as they can, but it comes out all the time. It's quite natural, really, that they should. But you see it's difficult for semi-heathens like ... me." Outsiders are often distracted and even mesmerized by the blackguarding. In discussions of the elusive "Catholic character" we have come to expect comments like, "You can't even agree among yourselves what 'Catholic' means; is it any wonder that the rest of us get edgy when we hear of efforts to reinforce the Catholic character of Notre Dame?" Larry's paper helps us to understand a bit better both the significance of these internal disagreements and the fervor with which they are carried on. As he suggests, a true catholicity is marked by a kind of "coincidence of opposites," a plurality within a unity, or perhaps better, a creative anarchy within fixed limits, a volatile mixture of the hierarchical and the charismatic, of the stabilizing and the spontaneous, of St. Peter and St. Paul. Chesterton characterized it as an equilibrium in which the duelling opposites are allowed to become exaggerated just short of the point where the one would wipe out the other: "St. Francis, in praising all good, could be a more shouting optimist than Walt Whitman. St. Jerome, in denouncing all evil, could paint the world blacker than Schopenauer.. (shrink)

Le nominalisme est « le refus d'admettre toute entité autre qu'indivi-duelle ». II doit, pour justifier la simplicité de son ontologie, proposer une théorie de laconnaissance et une théorie sémantique qui ne présupposent ni l'une ni l'autre l'existence réelle des univer-saux. Certaines des voies qui s'ouvrent à cette entreprise délicate ont été systématiquement explorées vers la fin du Moyen Age et il y a tout à parier que, malgré les ruptures épistémologiques, les révolutions scientifiques et autres changements d'epistémè, les nominalistes (...) contemporains pourraient encore profiter de quelque façon de l'immense travail théorique accompli par leurs prédécesseurs médiévaux. C'est dans cet esprit que je voudrais procéder à une reconstruction sommaire de la théorie sémantique avancée au début du quatorzième siècle par le Fran-ciscain Guillaume d'Occam. Je ne m'engagerai pas dans une comparaison détaillée entre Occam et les auteurs contemporains, mais j'essaierai de présenter sans en trahir l'esprit la sémantique occa-miste de manière à en faire apparaître la pertinence pour les débats actuels. II serait possible, me semble-t-il, d'aller encore plus loin dans cette voie en mettant à profit les techniques formelles récentes pour axiomatiser la théorie d'Occam. Pour l'instant cependant, je me limiterai à une présentation plutôt informelle. (shrink)

In developing a new theory of political and moral community, J. Donald Moon takes questions of cultural pluralism and difference more seriously than do many other liberal thinkers of our era: Moon is willing to confront the problem of how ...

Renowned philosopher J. N. Mohanty examines the range of Indian philosophy from the Sutra period through the 17th century Navya Nyaya. Instead of concentrating on the different systems, he focuses on the major concepts and problems dealt with in Indian philosophy. The book includes discussions of Indian ethics and social philosophy, as well as of Indian law and aesthetics.

During medical training students and residents reconstruct their view of the world. Patients become bodies; both the faults and the virtues of the medical profession become exaggerated. This reconstruction has moral relevance: it is in part a moral blindness. The pain of medical training, together with its narrowness, contributes substantially to these faulty reconstructions. Possible improvements include teaching more social science, selecting chief residents and faculty for their attitudes, helping students acquire communication skills, and helping them deal with their own (...) pain. Most importantly, clearer moral vision requires time and scope for reflection. (shrink)

J.O. Urmson's The Greek Philosophical Vocabulary contains some five hundred alphabetically arranged entries, each aiming to provide useful information on a particular word used by Greek philosophers. The book includes a wealth of quotations ranging from the fifth century BC to the sixth century AD.

This paper outlines the qualitative foundations of a “quasiclassical” theory in which particles are pictured as spatially extended periodic excitations of a universal background field, interacting with each other via nonlinearity in the equations of motion for that field, and undergoing collapse to a much smaller volume if and when they are detected. The theory is based as far as possible directly on experiment, rather than on the existing quantum mechanical formalism, and it offers simple physical interpretations of such concepts (...) as mass, 4-momentum, interaction, potentials, and quantization; it may lead directly to the standard equations of quantum theory, such as the multiparticle Schrödinger equation, without going through the conventional process of “quantizing” a classical theory. The theory also provides an alternative framework in which to discuss wave-particle duality and the quantum “measurement problem”; in particular, it is suggested that the unpredictability of quantum phenomena may arise from “deterministic chaos” in the behavior of the background field. (shrink)

The paper examines the problems of the indexical reference and the semantics of the indexical expressions. The basis of its approach is David Kaplan’s theory of indexicals, according to which the meaning of the indexical expression is constituted by two units: one of them is constant – so called character of the indexical expression, the other is changeable – so called content of the indexical expression. The character of the indexical expression is a linguistic rule, by which we can find (...) out the re-ferent of a given indexical expression in dependence on the context of its use. The content of the indexical expression uttered in a given situation context is constituted by its referent. From the perspective of semantics – which aim is to identify the truth condition of the statements, so called propositions – only the changeable unit, i.e. the content of the indexical expression enters the truth condition of the indexical statement. The indexical expressions uttered in different situation contexts may have different contents. Then it is important that if the indexical expression refers to the relevant object in one utterance concerning it – so that the indexical expression gets its content –, this indexical expression does not refer to any other object in any other logically possible world. It means that the indexical expression also gets its constant content by its utterance in a given situation context. That is why the indexical expressions are rigid designators. (shrink)

Álvarez J.F. (2016) Conflicts, Bounded Rationality and Collective Wisdom in a Networked Society. In: Scarafile G., Gruenpeter Gold L. (eds) Paradoxes of Conflicts. Logic, Argumentation & Reasoning (Interdisciplinary Perspectives from the Humanities and Social Sciences), vol 12. Springer, Cham -/- The adoption of an individualistic perspective on reasoning, choice and decision is a spring of paradoxes of conflicts. Usually the agents immerse in conflicts are drawn or modelled as rational individuals with targets well defined and full capabilities to access to (...) information, without both temporal limitations and perfect reasoning abilities to obtain their preferences are taken account. -/- However, other models of agent, in the bounded rationality perspective, could help to understand better the interrelationships. I adopt embedded argumentative reasoning processes as satisfying criteria to analyze the expert function in a new socio technical environment that has changed deeply the mechanism and tools to access and to aggregate information. The open access to information and institutional arrangements addressed towards team knowledge could offer other kind of tools to affront the conflict, even its possible benefits. -/- The “crowd expertise” is emerging as an actual possibility and it must be incorporated to affront with conflicts. The very possibility of obtaining knowledge generated by “many minds”, collective wisdoms, brings up a real challenge to the conservative or elitist conception of the masses, because masses now emerge as a smart collective user, with new mechanisms to select and produce quality knowledge. These new collective actions differ deeply from the traditional modes of social organization. A new mass society is emerging now as a hybrid one that breaks some conceptual traditional models, such as Ortega y Gasset’s ones, and induces a structured way of flourishing both new practices and new knowledge with transforming capabilities. (shrink)

J.L. Chretien is a French public intellectual, philosopher and poet, widely published and revered in his home country and in academic circles worldwide. This translation makes his work available to an English-language audience for the first time and a crucial contribution to our understanding of the phenomenology of religious experience.

In Poetics chapter 9, Aristotle famously claims that poetry is more philosophical than history. What does this mean? I argue that he is talking about the metaphysics of events. Poets seek causal coherence among the events in their stories. Historians must report what happened whether or not the events of history exhibit causal coherence. This makes the poet's job more philosophical than the historian's, for the poet is seeking a unified plot -- an action-type -- that serves as the backbone (...) of the story he is trying to tell. The poet's final script is a token of an Aristotelian universal, the universal being an action-type that could have been fleshed out in many different ways, although with similar characters. Hence, the poet shows us what he thinks it is likely or necessary for agents of different types to do in the circumstances that confront them. Aristotelian mimesis, on this account, is the poetic representation of "one action," that is, of one action-type. (shrink)

This paper deals with Aristotelian and Stoic logic. In the first part the author writes about the history of logic and shows, why Stoic logic had not been studied properly from the Middle Ages up to the beginning of the 20th century, when an increasing interest in the study of Stoic logic is visible. The paper describes the character of Aristotelian and Stoic logic respectively. Stoic logic is first introduced as a system of propositional logic. On this basis a complementarity (...) between the two logical systems of Antiquity is stated. The ways to support the thesis that Stoic logic involved some features of predicative logic are shown at the end of the first part. The ways in which the two rival logical systems were perceived by the authors of the first centuries A. D., namely Galen and Boethius, is described in the second part. Galen is seen as the first to develop an objective synthesis of the two systems. In his Eisagogé dialektiké he tries to show the goals of both rival logical systems. Boethius, in his De hypotheticis syllogismis, is also combining the Aristotelian and the Stoic logic. However, his synthesis is different from Galen's because Boethius probably forms the synthesis unknowingly and indirectly through compiling his confused sources. (shrink)

This volume contains invited and contributed papers delivered at a symposium on the occasion of Professor Glauber's 60th birthday. The papers, many of which are authored by world leaders in their fields, contain recent research work in quantum optics, statistical mechanics and high energy physics related to the pioneering work of Professor Roy Glauber; most contain original research material that is previously unpublished. The concepts of coherence, cooperativity and fluctuations in systems with many degrees of freedom are a common base (...) for all of Professor Glauber's research initiatives and, in fact, for much of contemporary physics. His role in shaping these cconcepts is reflected and honoured in the papers contained in this book. (shrink)

_The Collected Works of John Stuart Mill_ took thirty years to complete and is acknowledged as the definitive edition of J.S. Mill and as one of the finest works editions ever completed. Mill's contributions to philosophy, economics, and history, and in the roles of scholar, politician and journalist can hardly be overstated and this edition remains the only reliable version of the full range of Mill's writings. Each volume contains extensive notes, a new introduction and an index. Many of the (...) volumes have been unavailable for some time, but the _Works_ are now again available, both as a complete set and as individual volumes. (shrink)

Frank Koughan and Walt Bogdanich's response to my article, reminds me of the Shakespearean line, My article was not about the specifics of the 60Minutes April 13, 1997, story on NHBD at the Cleveland Clinic Foundation (CCF), even though the story formed the basis for the reflection. I did not attack the critics, though I do believe that bioethicists are accountable for their scholarly and public pronouncements. Although I do not see why the 60Minutes' story should be treated with deference, (...) my article was designed to raise questions for a primarily bioethics audience about the involvement of bioethicists in media coverage of bioethics topics. I am flattered that they took notice of my piece, but think their efforts to set the record straight only obfuscate matters further. (shrink)

In 2001 hield Johan J. Graafland zijn oratie Maatschappelijk ondernemen: analyse, verantwoording en fundering. Hiermee aanvaardde hij het ambt van bijzonder hoogleraar Economie, Onderneming en Ethiek aan de Universiteit van Tilburg. Graag wil ik Johan Graafland van harte feliciteren met zijn benoeming. Ik ervaar het toch steeds weer als een bijzondere zegen als christenen zo’n positie mogen bezetten. Ik wens hem veel vruchten toe op zijn arbeid. Op de nieuwjaarsconferentie 2002 van de Vereniging voor Reformatorische Wijsbegeerte heeft Graafland een lezing (...) gegeven waarin hij enkele momenten uit zijn oratie toelichtte. Op die conferentie mocht ik als co-referent optreden. De week voorafgaande aan de conferentie was ik voor een zakenreis in Taiwan. Ik kwam vrijdagsavonds weer in Nederland terug. Door een ongelukkige samenloop van omstandigheden kreeg ik ook toen pas de tekst van de oratie van Graafland in handen. De tijd was voor mij te kort — en de onvermijdelijke jet-lag werkt dan ook niet mee — om de oratie goed te bestuderen en op vruchtbare wijze te kunnen reageren. Ik had geen andere mogelijkheid dan een ‘eigen’ verhaal te houden . Graag wil ik nu van de gelegenheid gebruik maken om inhoudelijk op de oratie van Graafland in te gaan. (shrink)

With lost credibility, ratings, and circulation, journalism faces a crisis of conscience. One answer is participatory community journalism; journalists become activists on behalfofthe process of self-government. A veteran journalist and author of Agents of Power, Altschull questions the press's arrogance, its faith in objectivity, and its unvarying insistence on its First Amendment rights, and asks instead that the public interest be put ahead of the maximization of profit, that media help to mediate public issues, and that the public be allowed (...) to play a bigger role in the news decision making process. (shrink)