I am really quite honored to have a chance to be here. Also let me say how much I appreciate what all of you public health professionals do. One of the unfortunate dimensions of modern American life is that we have chosen to privatize all aspects of life. People do not live on their front porches anymore and watch their neighbors in the evening. They go out back in their wall-enclosed backyards. And we have done the same with medicine.Medicine has (...) been privatized in America. We have lost a sense of the public obligations of health and hygiene and sanitation. So I thank you for keeping the flame alive on what we clearly now know is the far bigger issue of health care in modern society. (shrink)

I am really quite honored to have a chance to be here. Also let me say how much I appreciate what all of you public health professionals do. One of the unfortunate dimensions of modern American life is that we have chosen to privatize all aspects of life. People do not live on their front porches anymore and watch their neighbors in the evening. They go out back in their wall-enclosed backyards. And we have done the same with medicine.Medicine has (...) been privatized in America. We have lost a sense of the public obligations of health and hygiene and sanitation. So I thank you for keeping the flame alive on what we clearly now know is the far bigger issue of health care in modern society. (shrink)

This collection of articles and associated discussion papers focuses on a problem that has attracted increasing attention from linguists and psychologists throughout the world during the past several years. Reduced to essentials, the problem is that of discovering the character of the mental capacities that make it possible for human beings to attain knowledge of their language on the basis of fragmentary and haphazard early linguistic experience. A fundamental assumption running through all of these contributions is that people possess strong (...) innate predispositions that are critical for success in this task. (shrink)

Although the influence of Homer on Western literature has long commanded critical attention, little has been written on how various generations of readers have found menaing in his texts. These seven essays explore the ways in which the Illiad and the Odyssey have been read from the time of Homer through the Renaissance. By asking what questions early readers expected the texts to answer and looking at how these expectations changed over time, the authors clarify the position of the Illiad (...) and the Odyssey in the intellectual world of antiqueity while offering historical insight into the nature of reading. The collection surveys the entire field of preserved ancient interpretations of Homer, beginning with the fictional audiences portrayed within the poems themselves, proceedings to readings by Aristotle, the Stoics, and Aristarchus and Crates, and culminating in the spritiualized allegorical reading current among Platonists of the fifth and sixth centuries C.E. The influence of these ancient interpretations is then examined in Byzantium and in the Latin West during the Renaissance. Contributors to this volume are Robert Browning, Anthony Grafton, Robert Lamberton, A.A. Long, James Porter, Nicholas Richardson, and Charles Segal. Robert Lamberton is Assistant Professor of Classics and John J. Keaney is Professor of Classics, both at Princeton University. Originally published in 1992. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905. (shrink)

As transnational interactions increase, cross-cultural conflict concerning ethical issues is inevitable. This article presents a model for assisting decision makers in selecting appropriate strategies for addressing cross-cultural ethical conflict. A theoretical framework for the model is developed based on the literature on international business ethics and on conflict resolution. The model is illustrated through several case examples. Implications for future research and practice are discussed.

We develop and test a process model demonstrating how leader charisma and constructive and destructive forms of narcissism interact to influence follower psychological empowerment and moral identity, using survey data from 667 direct reports of leaders from 13 different industries. Study results revealed that leader narcissism moderates the relationship between leader charisma and follower psychological empowerment such that when leaders possess a more constructive and less destructive narcissistic personality, their charisma has a stronger positive relationship with follower psychological empowerment. Study (...) results also revealed that follower psychological empowerment mediates the differential interactive effects of leader charisma and constructive and destructive narcissism on follower moral identity. Implications of these results for future theory development, research, and practice are discussed. (shrink)

Last year in June, British doctors went on strike for the first time since 1975. Amidst a global economic downturn and with many health systems struggling with reduced finances, around the world the issue of public health workers going on strike is a very real one. Almost all doctors will agree that we should always follow the law, but often the law is unclear or does not cover a particular case. Here we must appeal to ethical discussion. The General Medical (...) Council, in its key guidance document for practising doctors, Good Medical Practice, claims that ‘Good doctors make the care of their patients their first concern’. Is this true? And if so, how is this relevant to the issue of striking? One year on since the events, we carefully reflect and argue whether it was right for doctors to pursue strike action, and call for greater discussion of ethical issues such as the recent strikes, particularly among younger members of the profession. (shrink)

We prove a converse to one of the theorems from [F], giving a description in terms of Turing complexity of sets which can be coded into recursive and r.e. quotient Boolean algebras.

This was a class handout that I turned into a publication. As its title indicates, it's about the relation (or non-relation) of (ethical) cultural relativism to tolerance. Core elements of the paper were later absorbed into sections 5K, 6M, and 7K of my paper "Cultural Relativism" (2000), which is listed (and downloadable) on my PhilPapers page.

The Dartmouth Institute for Health Policy and Clinical Practice Atlas Project found “staggering variations” in the quality and quantity of end-of-life care provided to Medicare patients with severe chronic illness across the United States. Particularly concerning is the finding that more care is provided to patients who live in “high-supply” areas, irrespective of the effectiveness of care, and that more care often equaled inappropriate care that increased patients’ suffering at the end of life. Patients in “lower supply” areas typically received (...) better, more appropriate levels of care and reported higher levels of satisfaction with the care they received. (shrink)

Varela's enactive approach to cognitive science has been elaborated into a theoretical framework of agency, sense-making, and sociality, while his key methodological innovation — neurophenomenology (NP) — continues to inspire empirical work. We argue that the enactive approach was originally expressed in NP as three core tenets: (1) phenomenological pragmatics, (2) embodied cognition, and (3) conscious efficacy. However, most efforts in NP have focused on applying tenet 1, while tenet 2 has received notably less attention, and there is even explicit (...) distancing from tenet 3. By way of a critical review of four case studies, we show how NP thereby falls short of its full potential. Crucially, it needs to demonstrate that the first-person perspective matters, not only as a source of correlations with third-person data, but because lived experience, as such, makes a difference in its own right to the living body's dynamics. Given that methods for improving subjective reports have become accepted in human neuroscience (tenet 1), and given the increasing availability for recording multi-scalar organismic activity during embodied action (tenet 2), we propose it is time to integrate these research strands by using this issue of conscious efficacy as a pivot point (tenet 3). The development of genuinely experience-involving accounts of neurophysiological activity during embodied action holds promise for rebooting neurophenomenology in stronger form. (shrink)

Husserl’s Ideen II, subtitled “Phenomenological Investigations on Constitution” and one of Husserl’s most comprehensive works, encompasses wide-ranging analyses of what Husserl calls “material nature,” “animal nahlre,” and “the spiritual world.” In this paper, I shall reflect briefly on his understanding of the interplay among the notions of person, society, and community Both personal and professional factors contribute to this reflection. Each of us belongs to several different, but interrelated and overlapping, communities. family, circle of friends, departmental colleagues, faculty, college or (...) university community, professional society, and political communities of various levels . The functionings and malfunctionings of some of these communities are themselves sufficient to motivate a reflection on the nature of a well-ordered community. In addition, however, the recent publication of the articles Husserl wrote for the Japanese journal Kaizo on the theme of renewal and his early lectures on ethics and value-theory , along with some of the previously published materials on intersubjectivity —as well as the fine commentaries on Husserl’s ethical writings by writers such as Karl Schuhmann, James Hart, and Philip Buckley —provides new reason to reflect on Husserl’s ethical thought, which is too often dismissed as marginal to his work. (shrink)

Although conditional stimulus (CS)/unconditional stimulus (US) contingency awareness appears to be necessary for human Pavlovian autonomie conditioning, only a selective review of the literature and the forgetting of certain basic, brute facts can allow the cognitive conclusion that awareness causes, or even is important for, conditioning. That conclusion is theoretically barren for explaining the phenomenon and is also of little potential practical use.

This paper examines and critiques the ethical issues in postmortem sperm retrieval and the use of postmortem sperm to create new life. The article was occasioned by the recent request of the parents of a West Point cadet who died in a skiing accident at the Academy to retrieve and use his sperm to honor his memory and perpetuate the family name. The request occasioned national media attention. A trial court judge in New York in a two-page order authorized both (...) the retrieval and use of the postmortem sperm. (shrink)

Curbside ethics consultations occur when an ethics consultant provides guidance to a party who seeks assistance over ethical concerns in a case, without the consultant involving other stakeholders, conducting his or her own comprehensive review of the case, or writing a chart note. Some have argued that curbside consultation is problematic because the consultant, in focusing on a single narrative offered by the party seeking advice, necessarily fails to account for the full range of moral perspectives. Their concern is that (...) any guidance offered by the ethics consultant will privilege and empower one party’s viewpoint over—and to the exclusion of—other stakeholders. This could lead to serious harms, such as the ethicist being reduced to a means to an end for a clinician seeking to achieve his or her own preferred outcome, the ethicist denying the broader array of stakeholders input in the process, or the ethicist providing wrongheaded or biased advice, posing dangers to the ethical quality of decision-making. Although these concerns are important and must be addressed, we suggest that they are manageable. This paper proposes using conflict coaching, a practice developed within the discipline of conflict management, to mitigate the risks posed by curbside consultation, and thereby create new spaces for moral discourse in the care of patients. Thinking of curbside consultations as an opportunity for clinical ethics conflict coaching can more fully integrate ethics committee members into the daily ethics of patient care and reduce the frequency of ethically harmful outcomes. (shrink)

This volume includes ninety-two items from 1935, 1936, and 1937, including Dewey's 1935 Page-Barbour Lectures at the University of Virginia, published as Liberalism and Social Action.

The concept of revelation is a pivotal one, both in the study of religion in general, and with regard to Christianity in particular. Yet it is a fluid concept that has undergone notable transformations down the ages as succeeding generations have re-interpreted it in the light of fresh presuppositions which they have come to share. My purpose here is to offer a re-interpretation in the light of some contemporary presuppositions which, though not universal, are, I shall argue, sufficiently widely held, (...) sufficiently basic, and sufficiently secure, to warrant accommodation. I shall be concerned primarily, though not in principle exclusively, with the concept of revelation in a Christian context. (shrink)

In his powerful anti-Christian polemic, The Misery of Christianity , J. Kahl charges Christianity with suffering from a rock-bottom lack of identity. ‘Theologians…have been looking for a continuous thread which will lead them out of the maze of contradictory forms of Christianity…into the open. They would like to be able to say with binding force what Christianity really is.’ 1 But, he urges, they cannot. P. van Buren agrees, but sees in this no cause for concern. ‘Christianity has been changing (...) since its beginning, the religion of the past constantly being adapted to the conditions of each new present. Once we see this character of Christianity, we are released from the misconceived task of trying to identify its unchanging essence.’ 2 Again more recently J. Hick has urged, in effect half agreeing with van Buren, that although there is an unchanging element in Christianity, it is restricted to ‘the originating events from which the moving stream of christian history has flowed’. ‘Christianity is an ongoing movement of life and thought, defined by its origin in the Christ-event and by its consciousness of that origin. It cannot be defined in terms of adherence to any doctrinal standard, for its doctrines are historically and culturally conditioned and have changed as the church has entered new historical and cultural situations.’ 3. (shrink)

It is a current commonplace that if the concept of deity is incoherent then no significant truth-claim is made for a formula like ‘God exists’, for it is neither true nor false but meaningless. This is the problem of factual meaning on which such emphasis is laid by critics like A. Flew, R. W. Hepburn, C. B. Martin, K. Nielsen and P. Edwards. I wish here to counter their challenge.

The rift which has long divided the philosophical world into opposed schools-the "Continental" school owing its origins to the phenomenology of Husserl and the "analytic" school derived from Frege-is finally closing.

In Western political philosophy, democracy is generally the dominant view regarding what the best form of government is, and this holds even in respect to promoting minority rights. However, I argue that there is a better theory for satisfying minority interests and rights. I amass numerous studies from the social sciences demonstrating how democracy does poorly in accounting for minority interests. I then contend that a particular hybrid view that fuses a meritocracy with democracy can do a better job than (...) democracy in accounting for minority interests and in having more equal rights and fair policies coming from the legislative and executive branches. Finally, I defend this thesis from numerous counters. (shrink)

The key to understanding self-identity is identifying the transcendental structures that make a temporally extended, continuous, and unified experiential life possible. Self-identity is rooted in the formal, temporalizing structure of intentional experience that underlies psychological continuity. Personal identity, by contrast, is rooted in the content of the particular flow of experience, in particular and primarily, in the convictions adopted passively or actively in reflection by a self-identical subject in the light of her social and traditional inheritances. Secondarily, a person’s identity (...) is rooted in others’ characterizations of that person in the light of the social conventions and constructs of the cultures and traditions that have shaped the personal identity of the ones who make the attributions. Personal identity, on this view, is fundamentally rooted in beliefs, traits—especially character traits—sentiments, and moods, that is, in the subject’s convictions about the true, the good, and the right—and in the commitments to the pursuit of (apparently) worthwhile goods and to the practical identities rooted in those convictions. (shrink)

This book examines Aristotle's critical reaction to the mathematical cosmology of Plato's Academy, and traces the aporetic method by which he developed his own ...