This edited volume provides a biosemiotic analysis of the ecological relationship between food and medicine. Drawing on the origins of semiotics in medicine, this collection proposes innovative ways of considering aliments and treatments. Considering the ever-evolving character of our understanding of meaning-making in biology, and considering the keen popular interest in issues relating to food and medicines - fueled by an increasing body of interdisciplinary knowledge - the contributions here provide diverse insights and arguments into the larger ecology of organisms’ (...) engagement with and transformation through taking in matter. Bodies interpret molecules, enzymes, and alkaloids they intentionally and unintentionally come in contact with according to their pre-existing receptors. But their receptors are also changed by the experience. Once the body has identified a particular substance, it responds by initiating semiotic sequences and negotiations that fulfill vital functions for the organism at macro-, meso-, and micro-scales. -/- Human abilities to distill and extract the living world into highly refined foods and medicines, however, have created substances far more potent than their counterparts in our historical evolution. Many of these substances also lack certain accompanying proteins, enzymes, and alkaloids that otherwise aid digestion or protect against side-effects in active extracted chemicals. Human biology has yet to catch up with human inventions such as supernormal foods and medicines that may flood receptors, overwhelming the body’s normal satiation mechanisms. This volume discusses how biosemioticians can come to terms with these networks of meaning, providing a valuable and provocative compendium for semioticians, medical researchers and practitioners, sociologists, cultural theorists, bioethicists and scholars investigating the interdisciplinary questions stemming from food and medicine. (shrink)

To model behavioral and neural correlates of language comprehension in naturalistic environments, researchers have turned to broad‐coverage tools from natural‐language processing and machine learning. Where syntactic structure is explicitly modeled, prior work has relied predominantly on context‐free grammars (CFGs), yet such formalisms are not sufficiently expressive for human languages. Combinatory categorial grammars (CCGs) are sufficiently expressive directly compositional models of grammar with flexible constituency that affords incremental interpretation. In this work, we evaluate whether a more expressive CCG provides a better (...) model than a CFG for human neural signals collected with functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) while participants listen to an audiobook story. We further test between variants of CCG that differ in how they handle optional adjuncts. These evaluations are carried out against a baseline that includes estimates of next‐word predictability from a transformer neural network language model. Such a comparison reveals unique contributions of CCG structure‐building predominantly in the left posterior temporal lobe: CCG‐derived measures offer a superior fit to neural signals compared to those derived from a CFG. These effects are spatially distinct from bilateral superior temporal effects that are unique to predictability. Neural effects for structure‐building are thus separable from predictability during naturalistic listening, and those effects are best characterized by a grammar whose expressive power is motivated on independent linguistic grounds. (shrink)

On elective students may not always be clear about safeguarding themselves and others. It is important that placements are safe, and ethically grounded. A concern for medical schools is equipping their students for exposure to and response to uncomfortable and/or unfamiliar requests in locations away from home, where their comfort and safety, or that of the patient, may be compromised. This can require legal, ethical, and/or moral reasoning on the part of the student. The goal of this article is to (...) establish what students actually encounter on elective, to inform better preparing students for safe and ethical medical placements. We discuss the implications of our findings, which are arguably applicable to other areas of graduate training, e.g. first medical roles post-qualification. An anonymised survey exploring clinical and ethical dilemmas on elective was issued across 3 years of returning final year elective medical students. Questions included the prevalence and type of potentially unsafe scenarios encountered, barriers to saying ‘no’ in unsafe situations, perceived differences between resource poor and developed world settings and the degree to which students refused or consented to participation in events outside of the ‘norms’ of their own training experience. Three hundred seventy-nine students participated. 45% were asked to do something “not permissible” at home. 27% were asked to do something they felt “uncomfortable” with, often an invasive clinical task. Half asked to do something not usually permissible were “comfortable”. 48% felt it more acceptable to bypass guidelines in developing settings. 27% refused an offer outside their experience. Of interest are reasons for “going along with” uncomfortable invitations, e.g. “emergency”, self-belief in ‘capability’ and being ‘more qualified’ than host-personnel. This “best pair of hands available” merits scrutiny. Adverse scenarios were not exclusive to developing settings. We discuss preparing students for decision-making in new contexts, and address whether ‘home’ processes are too inflexible to prepare students for ‘real’ medical life? Ethical decision-making and communicating reluctance should be included in elective preparation. (shrink)

This article is my author's response in a book symposium on my book Relativism and the Foundations of Philosophy. I reply to criticisms raised by Otavio Bueno, Henry Jackman, and Jonathan Weinberg.

Neo-Fregeans such as Bob Hale and Crispin Wright seek a foundation of mathematics based on abstraction principles. These are sentences involving a relation called the abstraction relation. It is usually assumed that abstraction relations must be equivalence relations, so reflexive, symmetric and transitive. In this article I argue that abstraction relations need not be reflexive. I furthermore give an application of non-reflexive abstraction relations to restricted abstraction principles.

(No abstract is available for this citation).

Jonathan Walkan challenges cognitive science's dominant model of mental representation and proposes a novel, well-devised alternative. The traditional view in the cognitive sciences uses a linguistic model of mental representation. That logic-based model of cognition informs and constrains both the classical tradition of artificial intelligence and modeling in the connectionist tradition. It falls short, however, when confronted by the frame problem---the lack of a principled way to determine which features of a representation must be updated when new information becomes (...) available. So far, proposed alternatives, including the imagistic model, have not resolved the problem. Waskan proposes the Intrinsic Cognitive Models hypothesis, according to which representational states can be concpetualized as the cognitive equivalent of scale models.Waskan argues further that the proposal that humans harbor and manipulate cognitive counterparts to scale models offers the only viable explanation for what most clearly differentiates humans from other creatures: the capacity to engage in truth-preserving manipulation of representations. The ICM hypothesis, he claims, can be distinguished from sentence-based accounts of truth preservation in a way that is fully compatible with what is known about the brain. (shrink)

Imagine that the person you see through the looking glass is a real person, with her own experiences, living in an environment that is the mirror-reverse of yours. You look at your right-hand glove as you put it on your right hand; she looks at her left-hand glove as she puts it on her left hand. You feel your heart beating on your left side; she feels her heart beating on her right side. You hear a bird chirping out the (...) window to your left; she hears a bird chirping out the window to her right. Is there any difference between your experience—your what-it-is-like phenomenal character—and hers? She is looking at her left-hand glove, the mirror-reverse of you as you look at your right-hand glove. Does she see what you see, a right-hand glove, or the reverse of what you see, a left-hand glove? Since her environment is the mirror-reverse of yours, and she seems to get by in it just fine, you'd probably assume, if you had to guess, that she sees it correctly. She is looking at her left-hand glove, after all. So it stands to reason that she is having an experience as of a left-hand glove, not a right-hand glove. And it stands to reason—it seems obvious—that an experience as of a left-hand glove differs in what it is like from an experience as of a right-hand glove. In this paper, I will argue that this last presupposition, obvious though it may seem, is false. I'll argue that (unless dualism is true) there is no intrinsic difference between what it is like to experience a left-hand glove and what it is like to experience a right-hand glove: if there are any relevant experiential differences, these are either merely comparative (differences in what it is like to compare gloves) or cognitive (differences in what it is like to bring an experience of a glove under a concept like LEFT or RIGHT). So your mirror-reverse twin, who won't differ from you in what she is comparing or thinking, will have the same (type of) experience as you. I'll call the position I am arguing against orientation–experience categoricalism, and the position I am arguing for orientation–experience relationism. Orientation–experience relationism is a surprising thesis, one whose falsity you might take for granted. I will argue for it by cases. Things go wrong for the orientation–experience categoricalist in one sort of way if we imagine that you and your mirror-twin's experiences differ: basically, this leads to absurdity if we imagine that you and she both live at a world with a non-orientable spatial topology (in the sense in which a Möbius strip or Klein bottle are non-orientable). Things go wrong for the orientation–experience categoricalist in a different sort of way if we assume that you and your twin would experience the same, but that someone else might have the experience that we were just imagining that your twin might have. Under these assumptions, we have to accept the existence of partial zombies, who lack the relevant phenomenology but behave as if they have it, at very close, empirically possible worlds. In an appendix, I argue that property dualism is the best alternative for those who cannot bring themselves to accept orientation-experience relationism. (shrink)

Today, there are different understandings of the first article on the content of the Christian faith, for which an analysis from a theological perspective is necessary. This research sought to reveal the meaning of the first article on the content of the Christian faith in recent theological works that have been produced, through the use of a hermeneutic exercise, conducting a bibliometric and categorical analysis and using NVivo software to analyse the qualitative data. We concluded that the recent theological literature (...) addresses the meaning of the first article of the Christian faith based on the existence, concept and definition of God and his attributes, as well as his power, behaviour, creation, revelation and reign. Although there is little extant material compared to other topics or areas of knowledge that can be explored using these tools, this fact is explained because, normally, theologians are not interested in publishing in high-impact journals. The way of approaching God in contemporary literature can be enriched by taking into account specific contexts, such as poverty, discrimination, suffering, violence, human trafficking, immigration and political realities, in such a way that it is not only a metaphysical reflection of God but also a historical and immanent and even an interreligious research that broadens the concept of the Christian God and answers questions that contemporary society asks in daily life. (shrink)

This title presents a comprehensive guide to interpretative phenomenological analysis (IPA) which is an increasingly popular approach to qualitative inquiry taught to undergraduate and postgraduate students today.

In their recent article, ‘Why lockdown of the elderly is not ageist and why levelling down equality is wrong’, Savulescu and Cameron argue for selective isolation of the elderly as an alternative to general lockdown. An important part of their argument is the claim that the latter amounts to ‘levelling down equality’ and that this is ‘unethical’ or even ‘morally repugnant’. This response argues that they fail to justify either part of this claim: the claim that levelling down is always (...) morally wrong is subject to challenges that Savulescu and Cameron do not consider; and a policy of maintaining general lockdown does not constitute levelling down, as it provides absolute benefits to those who would be worse off under selective isolation. (shrink)

This article explores a concept of artistic transgression I call aesthetic disobedience that runs parallel to the political concept of civil disobedience. Acts of civil disobedience break some law in order to publicly draw attention to and recommend the reform of a conflict between the commitments of a legal system and some shared commitments of a community. Likewise, acts of aesthetic disobedience break some entrenched artworld norm in order to publicly draw attention to and recommend the reform of a conflict (...) between artworld commitments and some shared commitments of a community. Considering artistic transgressions under the concept of aesthetic disobedience highlights often-overlooked features of modern artworld practices. Most significantly, it draws attention to the deliberative participation of a wide variety of citizens of the artworld, including not just artists and performers but also members of audiences, in the transformation of the rules and boundaries of the artworld itself. (shrink)

Are there key respects in which character and character defects are voluntary? Can agents with serious vices be rational agents? Jonathan Jacobs answers in the affirmative. Moral character is shaped through voluntary habits, including the ways we habituate ourselves, Jacobs believes. Just as individuals can voluntarily lead unhappy lives without making unhappiness an end, so can they degrade their ethical characters through voluntary action that does not have establishment of vice as its end. Choosing Character presents an account of (...) ethical disability, expanding the domain of responsibility and explicating the role of character in ethical cognition. Jacobs contends that agents become ethically disabled voluntarily when their habits impair their ability to properly appreciate ethical considerations. Such agents are rational, responsible individuals who are yet incapable of virtuous action. The view develops and modifies Aristotelian claims concerning the fixity of character. Jacobs' interpretation is developed in contrast to the overlooked work of Maimonides, who also used Aristotelian resources but argued for the possibility of character change. The notion of ethical disability has profound ramifications for ethics and for current debates about blame and punishment. (shrink)

Among the instrumental value defenses for biodiversity conservation is the argument that biodiversity is necessary to support ecosystem functioning. Lower levels of biodiversity yield lower levels of ecosystem functioning and hence the inference that we should conserve biodiversity. In our book Defending Biodiversity: Environmental Science and Ethics, we point out three problems with this inference. (1) The empirical support for such an inference derives from experiments conducted on a very small set of ecosystem types (mainly grasslands and fresh water aquatic) (...) and ecosystem functions (mainly nutrient uptake, biomass production, and decomposition rates). These experiments suffer from a number of largely unavoidable logistical constraints making the generality of their results questionable. (2) Even if the experimental results were unequivocal, their lack of external validity would still raise significant questions about how (if at all) these results apply to real world conservation problems. And (3) even if the experimental results were unequivocal and completely applicable to conservation problems, relying on such defenses implies other rational policy commitments that are at odds with other positions that environmentalists commonly take. Odenbaugh and I disagree largely about what inferences follow from these points rather than about the points themselves. I think that what follows is that if environmentalists want to use instrumental value defenses, then we need to accept that not all biodiversity is useful to us, and parts that are useful are not necessarily more useful than alternatives that might threaten biodiversity. I also think that the unpalatable implied commitments need to be taken seriously. This may mean that we environmentalists have to accept that biodiversity should not always be conserved, and that parts of the environmentalist agenda are little more than strong personal preferences that others need not respect. If environmentalists are willing to accept these conclusions, then there are no problems with relying on these instrumental value defenses, but I suspect that environmentalists are likely to be unhappy with such conclusions. (shrink)

In 1927, Walter Lippmann published The Phantom Public, denouncing the ‘mystical fallacy of democracy.’ Decrying romantic democratic models that privilege self-governance, he writes: “I have not happened to meet anybody, from a President of the United States to a professor of political science, who came anywhere near to embodying the accepted ideal of the sovereign and omnicompetent citizen.” Almost 90 years later, Lippmann’s pragmatism is as relevant as ever, and should be applied in new contexts where similar self-governance concerns persist. (...) This paper does just that, repurposing Lippmann’s argument in the context of the ongoing debate over the role of the digital citizen in Big Data management. It is argued that proposals by the Federal Trade Commission, the White House and the US Congress, championing failed notice and choice privacy policy, perpetuate a self-governance fallacy comparable to Lippmann’s, referred to here as the fallacy of data privacy self-management. Even if the digital citizen had the faculties and the system for data privacy self-management, the digital citizen has little time for data governance. We desire the freedom to pursue the ends of digital production, without being inhibited by the means. We want privacy, and safety, but cannot complete all that is required for its protection. If it is true that the fallacy of democracy is similar to the fallacy of data privacy self-management, then perhaps the pragmatic solution is representative data management: a combination of non/for-profit digital dossier management via infomediaries that can ensure the protection of personal data, while freeing individuals from what Lippmann referred to as an ‘unattainable ideal.’. (shrink)

I argue that there can be no such thing as a borderline case of the predicate ‘phenomenally conscious’: for any given creature at any given time, it cannot be vague whether that creature is phenomenally conscious at that time. I first defend the Positive Characterization Thesis, which says that for any borderline case of any predicate there is a positive characterization of that case that can show any sufficiently competent speaker what makes it a borderline case. I then appeal to (...) the familiar claim that zombies are conceivable, and I argue that this claim entails that there can be no positive characterizations of borderline cases of ‘phenomenally conscious’. By the Positive Characterization Thesis, it follows that ‘phenomenally conscious’ can not have any borderline cases. (shrink)

I consider a more generic goal teachers have for students in addition to learning some determinate content: that they learn how to learn anything whatsoever. To explain this process, I draw on two insights from Aristotle’s account of learning: first, that in every case students learn by doing the very things they are learning to do; and second, that it is possible to achieve a general educatedness whereby someone can make intelligent judgments and intellectual progress even in previously unfamiliar subject (...) areas. In both cases, Aristotle’s account of the teacher as thinking-facilitator rather than knowledge-infuser is illuminating. This connects with recent literature on Experiential Learning. Having developed this broadly Aristotelian account of learning how to learn I offer some concrete strategies for putting the theory into practice in the philosophy classroom. These strategies include targeted reading guidance and mystery text assignments, both of which develop incrementally throughout the course. (shrink)

The paradox of pain is that pain is in some ways like a bodily state and in other ways like a mental state. You can have a pain in your shin, but there is no denying that you are in pain if it feels like you are. How can a state be both in your shin and in your mind? Evaluativism is a promising answer. According to evaluativism, an experience of pain in your shin represents that there is a disturbance (...) in your shin, and that it is bad that this disturbance is there. Thus, the experience brings you to tend to your shin by telling you something about the state of your shin. But the paradox of pain still confronts evaluativism in the form of the killing the messenger objection: The evaluativist has a nice story about our body‐directed responses to pain, like tending to wounds, but this story does not explain responses to pain, like taking painkillers, that seem to be experience‐directed. Evaluativists have offered accounts of experience‐directed responses to pain, but I will argue that these accounts conflict with the Transparency thesis—the claim that we can only access our experiences inferentially. Evaluativism and Transparency are natural bedfellows, so this is a problem for evaluativists. Having argued as much, I will go on to develop a new evaluativist account of taking painkillers, which does not conflict with Transparency. I call it naïve evaluativism. According to naïve evaluativism, we experience painkillers as making tissue damage or disruption less bad, and absent further reflection, that is, why we take them. (shrink)

A problem of the many Fs arises in cases where intuitively there is precisely one F (in the region you are talking about), but when you look closely you find many candidates for being that F, each one apparently as well-qualified as the next. Imagine an apparently solitary cloud in an otherwise blue sky. Look closer, and you'll see lots of water vapor molecules, with no one collection of them more eligible than the others to count as the cloud. Many (...) things are like this when you look closely enough. The problem arises for mundane things like rocks, houses and coins. It also arises for entities that present special philosophical challenges, like persons and experiencers. In this essay, I present a new argument that the problem of the many experiencers is an especially hard problem of the many, and property dualism—the view that properties that there is something it is like to instantiate are irreducible—may be the best way to solve it. (shrink)

In the summer of 1983, a group of scholars met in Williamstown, MA for a workshop directed by Allan Gotthelf. Many of the papers presented at this meeting grew into Philosophical Issues in Aristotle’s Biology. The aim of the workshop and volume to follow was to engage with Aristotle’s biological works from a genuinely philosophical perspective. That volume was a watershed moment for the “biological turn” in Aristotle studies.The present volume is compiled in the same spirit, growing out of several (...) conferences and collaborations spearheaded by the late Gotthelf, who was to co-edit the volume until his death in 2013. It presents a range of recent scholarship on the Generation of Animals rather... (shrink)

Various scientists and philosophers have heavily criticized what they see as problematic forms of ‘nutritional reductionism’ or ‘nutritionism’ whereby studying food–health interactions at the level of isolated food components produces largely misguided science and misleading interpretations. However, the exact target of these diverse criticisms remains elusive, and its implications are overstated, which may hinder scientific understanding. To better identify the types of flaws supposedly hindering reductionist research, we disentangle three types of reductionist claims to better determine what the debate is (...) about and to propose ways to move it forward. We then present a qualified defence of the reductionist programme that hinges on the ability to identify nutritional causes that make a difference, which we illustrate through central examples in the history of nutrition. This defence is taken further by using insights from the philosophy of mechanisms to analyse how the field of nutritional ecology offers a synthetic framework to explain, generate, and test predictions about nutrient–organism interactions, which is premised on the biological mechanisms of nutrient-specific appetite regulation. The result, which we call ‘synthetic reductionism’, avoids many, though perhaps not all, of the challenges raised by anti-reductionists, and also highlights the potential of reductionism to identify nutritional difference makers. (shrink)

In our attempts to achieve privacy and reputation deliverables, advocating for service providers and other data managers to open Big Data black boxes and be more transparent about consent processes, algorithmic details, and data practice is easy. Moving from this call to meaningful forms of transparency, where the Big Data details are available, useful, and manageable is more difficult. Most challenging is moving from that difficult task of meaningful transparency to the seemingly impossible scenario of achieving, consistently and ubiquitously, meaningful (...) forms of consent, where individuals are aware of data practices and implications, understand these realities, and agree to them as well. This commentary unpacks these concerns in the online consent context. It emphasizes that self-governance fallacy pervades current approaches to achieving digital forms of privacy, exemplified by the assertion that transparency and information access alone are enough to help individuals achieve privacy and reputation protections. (shrink)

In a recent article in this journal, Savulescu and Schuklenk defend and extend their earlier arguments against a right to medical conscientious objection in response to criticisms raised by Cowley. I argue that while it would be preferable to be less accommodating of medical conscientious than many countries currently are, Savulescu and Schuklenk's argument that conscientious objection is ‘simply unprofessional’ is mistaken. The professional duties of doctors should be defined in relation to the interests of patients and society, and for (...) reasons set out in this article, these may support limited accommodation of conscientious objection on condition that it does not impede access to services. Moreover, the fact that conscientious objection appears to involve unjustifiable compromise from the objector's point of view is not a reason for society not to offer that compromise. Arguing for robust enforcement of the no-impediment condition, rather than opposing conscientious objection in principle, may be a more effective way of addressing the harms resulting from an over-permissive conscientious objection policy. (shrink)

The neurodiversity paradigm is presented by its proponents as providing a philosophical foundation for the activism of the neurodiversity movement. Its central claims are that autism and other neurodivergent conditions are not disorders because they are not intrinsically harmful, and that they are valuable, natural and/or normal parts of human neurocognitive variation. This paper: (a) identifies the non‐disorder claim as the most central of these, based on its prominence in the literature and connections with the practical policy claims that the (...) paradigm is supposed to support; (b) describes the heterogeneity of autism at the behavioural and causal levels, and argues that at the behavioural level this encompasses ways of being autistic that are harmful in ways that cannot be not wholly attributed to discrimination or unjust social arrangements, challenging the claim that autism is not a disorder; (c) considers and rejects responses to this challenge based on separation of high‐ and low‐functioning autism, separation of autism from co‐occurring conditions, and viewing autism as part of an individual’s identity. Two of these responses fail for reasons that are themselves connected with the behavioural and/or causal heterogeneity of autism. (shrink)

Problem-based leaming (PBL) is an increasingly popular curricular technique for developing academic and intellectual talent. Aligning PBL activities and subsequent student assessment often proves to be difficult for teachers, with many PBL activities followed by traditional, pencil-and-paper assessments. This misalignment confuses students by disrupting their understanding of teacher expectations. In this paper, we discuss the importance of instruction-assessment alignment during PBL and provide detailed examples of exemplary units.

Questions about when it is right for police forces to investigate alleged offences committed in the more or less distant past have become increasingly pressing. Recent widely publicized cases of child sexual abuse (CSA) and exploitation, sometimes involving high profile individuals, have illustrated the ethical, psychological, and forensic complexities of investigating non-recent child sexual abuse. Hannah Maslen and Colin Paine have developed the Oxford CSA Framework to assist police to weigh the various ethical considerations that militate for and against initiating (...) a CSA investigation. While such a tool is to be welcomed, and while there is much that is helpful in Maslen and Paine's approach, we suggest that the Oxford CSA framework could be strengthened. Our first suggestion is to abandon a proposed distinction between a set of considerations that is said to generate a “presumption” in favor of investigation and other considerations that may supplement or oppose this presumption. Our second suggestion is to review the weightings applied to the considerations within the model, which lack clear justification and create problematic effects. Finally, we suggest that referring the Oxford CSA Framework to a panel with lived and professional experience of CSA could serve important procedural justice goals and enhance the Framework's recommendations. (shrink)

Theories concerning the structure, or format, of mental representation should (1) be formulated in mechanistic, rather than metaphorical terms; (2) do justice to several philosophical intuitions about mental representation; and (3) explain the human capacity to predict the consequences of worldly alterations (i.e., to think before we act). The hypothesis that thinking involves the application of syntax-sensitive inference rules to syntactically structured mental representations has been said to satisfy all three conditions. An alternative hypothesis is that thinking requires the construction (...) and manipulation of the cognitive equivalent of scale models. A reading of this hypothesis is provided that satisfies condition (1) and which, even though it may not fully satisfy condition (2), turns out (in light of the frame problem) to be the only known way to satisfy condition (3). (shrink)

In this original study, Jonathan Jacobs provides a new account of ethical realism that combines both abstract meta-ethical issues defining the debate on realism and concrete topics in moral psychology. Jacobs argues that practical reasoners can both understand the ethical significance of facts and be motivated to act by that understanding. In that sense, objective considerations are prescriptive. In his discussion of the theory of practical realism, he extends themes and claims originating in Aristotelian ethics while engaging with the (...) most important contemporary literature. Arguing that desire and reason can agree on what is good, Jacobs explains how good action is naturally pleasing to the agent. In acting well, the agent affirms certain values and enjoys doing so. Jacobs grounds his explanation of ethical value in detailed explorations of the moral psychology of self-love, friendship, and respect. Students and scholars of philosophy will be intrigued by this integrated account of meta-ethics, practical reason, and moral psychology. (shrink)

In a recent Dutch euthanasia case, a woman underwent euthanasia on the basis of an advance directive, having first been sedated without her knowledge and then restrained by members of her family while the euthanasia was administered. This article considers some implications of the criminal court’s acquittal of the doctor who performed the euthanasia. Supporters of advance euthanasia directives have welcomed the judgement as providing a clarification of the law, especially with regard to the admissibility of contextual evidence in interpreting (...) advance euthanasia directives, but suggested that the law regarding advance euthanasia directives should be further relaxed to remove the requirement of current suffering and that an unfortunate consequence of the prosecution is that it is likely to deter doctors from performing euthanasia even in more straightforward cases. This article argues that the court’s endorsement of the use of contextual evidence is problematic, that the case for prioritising prior decisions over current interests has not been advanced by the discussion surrounding this case and that worries about the alleged deterrent effect are not well founded. (shrink)

Jonathan Jacobs examines the injustice of incarceration in the U.S. and U.K., both during incarceration and upon release into civil society. Situated at the intersection of criminology and political philosophy, Jacobs's focus is on moral reasoning, and he argues that the current state of incarceration is antithetical to the project of liberal democracy, as it strips incarcerated people of their agency. He advocates for reforms through a renewed commitment to the values and principles of liberal democracy and proposes a (...) retributivist conception of sanction to reform the criminal justice system and emphasizes the importance of proportionality. (shrink)

Jesus’ quotation of Psalm 82:6, ‘I said, You are gods’, a riposte to the accusation that he had blasphemed by making himself equal to God, has attracted considerable attention. The latest suggestion by Jerome H. Neyrey rightly insists that any solution to the problem should take account of the internal logic of the Psalm and argues that it derives from or prefigures a rabbinic Midrash on the Psalm which refers it to the restoration of the immortality lost by Adam to (...) Israel at the giving of the Torah on Sinai. This immortality was then lost again because of the sin of the golden calf. Whilst agreeing that the Psalm is interpreted in the context of the giving of the Torah on Sinai, this article argues that its reference is directed towards Moses on Sinai rather than Israel in general. This accords with the interpretation of Philo and Josephus and other sources much earlier than the Mekkilta de Rabbi Ishmael that Moses is rightly called a god and is assumed to heaven in glory without dying. Rather than deny this attribution of divine features to Moses due to his reception of the Torah on Sinai, John argues that the Torah was received from the hands of Jesus as the Logos. Therefore, Moses’s derivative divine features simply confirm the true divinity of the Logos as the expression of the Father. Moses could be called a god because he knew Jesus as Logos and wrote about him (5:45–5:47), but he sinned and died like any mortal. The corollary is that Moses and his disciples lost their status and died like any mortal, whilst the disciples of Jesus who are ‘taught by God’ and believe in the Incarnate Logos (6:45), have not only seen the glory denied to Moses but are born from above to become divinised as tekna theou (1:12) and do not die. (shrink)

We humans often respond effectively when faced with novel circumstances. This is because we are able to predict how particular alterations to the world will play out. Philosophers, psychologists, and computational modelers have long favored an account of this process that takes its inspiration from the truth-preserving powers of formal deduction techniques. There is, however, an alternative hypothesis that is better able to account for the human capacity to predict the consequences worldly alterations. This alternative takes its inspiration from the (...) powers of truth preservation exhibited by scale models and leads to a determinate computational solution to the frame problem. (shrink)

This book offers an introduction to the philosophical issues of criminal justice ethics in a way suitable for students of criminology and criminal justice. It links philosophical concepts with empirical research in criminology and introduces criminal justice ethics, in the context of political and legal order.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Religious Dualism and the Problem of Dual Religious IdentityJonathan A. SeitzThe word “dualism” is used in many senses. It can refer to the separation of mind and body in classical Western philosophy or to the separation of divine and human in some religious traditions, but religious dualism is also used in the social sciences to describe how two religious systems may relate to each other. Personally, I am interested (...) in this topic because I teach at a Taiwanese seminary, where students draw deeply on Taiwanese culture even as they assert a very clear Christian identity that often challenges or clashes with the broader culture. Like many Protestants, my students generally reject an idea of syncretism while simultaneously affirming Taiwanese culture and many popular beliefs. This dual identity fascinates me.“Dualism” in anthropological research is sometimes used to describe the attachment to two discrete religious or cultural traditions, such as Buddhism and Christianity. An important early theorist was anthropologist June Nash, whose work grew out of ethnographic research in Bolivia and Mexico. Nash looked at Bolivian miners and studied their popular devotion. She wrote that “this technique of syncretizing elements as developed by the Spaniards in the early years of conquest seems alien to the Bolivian way of thinking. It relates to a mode of thinking that accepts only a single, hierarchically defined system of ideas. Indigenous thought is capable of entertaining coexistant and apparently contradictory world views.” Nash says that she “hope[d] to clarify this point of the segmentation in time and space of the two systems, since it defies the model of acculturation as a homogenous blend.”1In this understanding, “dualism” better describes the reality with which many people live than do more general terms like “indigenization” or “acculturation,” and it also resists an understanding that religious traditions simply blend together—rather, they are segmented and retain elements of coherence even when held simultaneously.languages of dual belonging“Dualism” has been helpful because it allows for the recognition that people may belong to two or more distinct traditions. More recently, “dual religious belonging” has been used by theologians such Paul Knitter and Rose Drew. In the past, Buddhist-Christian [End Page 49] Studies has devoted considerable space to the topic.2 The theological step is a step further beyond anthropological dualism, but it is also interested in affirming the “both-ness” of holding to two traditions simultaneously.In this essay I want to grapple with the ways in which dualism can be understood. I believe this systemic language holds some real benefits over other approaches, particularly over more general process terms like “contextualization,” “accommodation,” “indigenization,” “acculturation,” “vernacularization,” and so on. These “-ation” words are helpful in pointing to how conversion or Christianization occurs over time, but they also assume a sort of final synthesis or resolution, and for most people this is probably not how it works. This paper briefly treats two approaches to dual belonging, Nicole Constable’s study of Hakka Protestants in Hong Kong and Jon Kirby’s analysis of northern Ghanaian Catholic communities, and then contrasts these with the more theological language of dual religious belonging found in papers by scholars like Paul Knitter.Essentially, dualism proposes a “both/and” understanding, a type of personal or religious emulsion where two systems are mixed together but resist a full integration. For some scholars, this is fundamentally a positive thing, since it allows for the integrity of the different systems. In others, it is seen as a type of failure to arrive at a reconciled identity, or the bifurcation of an indigenous tradition because of the arrival of Christianity (or another religion).Part of the reason I am interested in this topic is precisely because it gets at a tension—a real ambivalence (i.e., two valences)—that other approaches may not reach. For instance, there is a wide range of uses of contextualization, appropriation, enculturation, vernacularization, indigenization, and so on. My hunch is that scholars use these terms in part because they reduce the cognitive dissonance involved in simultaneously living or working in multiple cultures. Contextualization is a process that may assume a type of full integration, while with dualism the tension is... (shrink)

A recent focus of the debate on conscientious objection in healthcare is the question of whether practitioners should have to justify their refusal to perform certain functions. A recent article by Cowley addresses a practical aspect of this controversy, namely the question of whether doctors claiming conscientious objector status in relation to abortion should be required, like their counterparts claiming exemption from military conscription, to defend their claim before a tribunal. Cowley argues against the use of tribunals in the medical (...) case, on the grounds that there are likely to be fewer unjustified claims to conscientious objection in this context than in the military, and that in any case tribunals will not be an effective way of distinguishing genuine and false cases. I reject these arguments and propose a different conception of the role of a medical conscientious objection tribunal. (shrink)

Jacobs' interpretation is developed in contrast to the overlooked work of Maimonides, who also used Aristotelian resources but argued for the possibility of ...