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 These essays, all of which are previously unpublished, provide students in (...)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

Christopher Caudwell’s The Crisis in Physics is a stylish and readable analysis of the lines of connection between scientific theories and economic realities. Caudwell provides a trenchant critique of mechanism and positivism. In the words of J.B.S. Haldane, The Crisis in Physics offers a “quarry of ideas” for future philosophers: a wealth of insights and arguments that demands continuing critical reflection.

ICAP is a theory of active learning that differentiates students’ engagement based on their behaviors. ICAP postulates that Interactive engagement, demonstrated by co‐generative collaborative behaviors, is superior for learning to Constructive engagement, indicated by generative behaviors. Both kinds of engagement exceed the benefits of Active or Passive engagement, marked by manipulative and attentive behaviors, respectively. This paper discusses a 5‐year project that attempted to translate ICAP into a theory of instruction using five successive measures: (a) teachers’ understanding of ICAP after (...) completing an online module, (b) their success at designing lesson plans using different ICAP modes, (c) fidelity of teachers’ classroom implementation, (d) modes of students’ enacted behaviors, and (e) students’ learning outcomes. Although teachers had minimal success in designing Constructive and Interactive activities, students nevertheless learned significantly more in the context of Constructive than Active activities. We discuss reasons for teachers’ overall difficulty in designing and eliciting Interactive engagement. (shrink)

Work-themed play may allow children to learn complex skills, and ethno-typical and gender-typical behaviors. Thus, play may have made important contributions to the evolution of childhood through the development of embodied capital. Using data from Aka foragers and Ngandu farmer children from the Central African Republic, we ask whether children perform ethno- and gender-typical play and work activities, and whether play prepares children for complex work. Focal follows of 50 Aka and 48 Ngandu children were conducted with the aim of (...) recording children’s participation in 12 categories of work and work-themed play. Using these data, we test a set of hypotheses regarding how age, gender, ethnicity, and task complexity influence children’s activities. As hypothesized, we find performance of work-themed play is negatively correlated with age. Contrary to our hypothesis, children do not play more than they work at complex tasks, but they work more than they play at simple ones. Gender and ethnicity are associated with play and work at culturally salient activities, despite availability of other-gender and other-ethnicity social partners. Our findings show that ethnic and gender biases are apparent in the play and work behavior of Aka and Ngandu children. Moreover, our results show that play helps both forager and farmer children learn complex skills, consistent with play having an adaptive learning function. (shrink)

In the face of mounting criticism against advance directives, we describe how a novel, computer-based decision aid addresses some of these important concerns. This decision aid, Making Your Wishes Known: Planning Your Medical Future , translates an individual's values and goals into a meaningful advance directive that explicitly reflects their healthcare wishes and outlines a plan for how they wish to be treated. It does this by (1) educating users about advance care planning; (2) helping individuals identify, clarify, and prioritize (...) factors that influence their decision-making about future medical conditions; (3) explaining common end-of-life medical conditions and life-sustaining treatment; (4) helping users articulate a coherent set of wishes with regard to advance care planning—in the form of an advance directive readily interpretable by physicians; and (5) helping individuals both choose a spokesperson, and prepare to engage family, friends, and health care providers in discussions about advance care planning. (shrink)

Mr. Galanas, an eighty‐six‐year‐old man, intentionally shot himself in the chest and abdomen. Surprisingly, the bullet damaged only his distal pancreas and part of his colon, requiring a diverting colostomy to prevent leakage of bowel fluids into his abdomen. After being admitted, he lies intubated in the intensive care unit awaiting surgery to repair his colon. He is responsive but does not demonstrate clear decision‐making capacity. He grudgingly accepts pain medications but refuses antibiotics and antidepressants. He has a living will (...) that gives his wife durable power of attorney and also explicitly states a desire to refuse all medical interventions if he is permanently unconscious or in an end‐stage condition. Mrs. Galanas reports frequent conversations in which her husband said he would not want to be sustained on life support. She also says that he often mentioned he would not want an ostomy bag—a likely, albeit temporary, outcome of the proposed surgery. His physicians are nervous about withholding medical interventions when Mr. Galanas's injury is the result of a suicide attempt and his prognosis is good. Should the care team surgically repair his injured colon, regardless of the patient's capacity, his advance directive, and his wife's statement that he would not want surgery or other life‐sustaining treatment? (shrink)

Whereas many evolutionary models emphasize within-group cooperation or between-group competition in explaining human large-scale cooperation, recent work highlights a critical role for intergroup cooperation in human adaptation. Here we investigate intergroup cooperation in the domain of shotgun hunting in northern Republic of the Congo. In the Congo Basin broadly, forest foragers maintain relationships with neighboring farmers based on systems of exchange regulated by norms and institutions such as fictive kinship. In this study, we examine how relationships between Yambe farmers and (...) BaYaka foragers support stable intergroup cooperation in the domain of shotgun hunting. In the study village, shotgun hunting is based on a specialization-based exchange wherein Yambe farmers contribute shotguns and access to markets to buy cartridges and sell meat while BaYaka foragers contribute their specialized forest knowledge and skill. To understand how costs and benefits are distributed, we conducted structured interviews with 77 BaYaka hunters and 15 Yambe gun owners and accompanied hunters on nine hunting trips. We found that hunts are organized in a conventional manner within a fictive kinship structure, consistent with the presence of intercultural mechanisms to stabilize cooperation. However, because bushmeat demand is high, gun owners can gain significant cash profit, while compensating hunters only with cigarettes, alcohol, and a traditional hunter’s portion of meat. To level payoffs, hunters strategically hide kills or cartridges from gun owners to feed their own families. Our results illustrate how each group prioritizes different currencies (e.g., cash, meat, family, intergroup relations) and provide insights into how intergroup cooperation is stabilized in this setting. The example of this long-standing intergroup cooperative system is discussed in terms of its contemporary entwinement with logging, the bushmeat trade, and growing market intersection. (shrink)

Within the field of medical ethics there is a startling amount of diversity regarding which issues and relationships are deemed relevant for ethical inquiry and analysis, what strategies are appropriate for examining and resolving ethical conflict, what should be the goals for medical ethics, even who should participate in that project. What I will try to make clear in this paper is that how we go about this process of doing medical ethics, of examining, reflecting, decisionmaking, and behaving, makes a (...) practical difference, and not just a philosophical one, in terms of the understandings we will reach about ethical matters. Without attempting to resolve any of the conflicts within or between different conceptions of doing ethics, I will try to articulate the differences in orientation, and particularly the tone and educational emphasis, that attend four major contemporary approaches to ethical inquiry and analysis: deductivism, principlism, modern casuistry, and feminist/relationist ethics. Keywords: casuistry, deductivism, ethics, feminism, principlism, relationism CiteULike Connotea Del.icio.us What's this? (shrink)

In the United States, the implementation of a successful system of mandated reporting of suspected child abuse continues to be plagued by the absence of a clear standard for when one must report. All 50 states of the U.S. have laws requiring certain individuals to report suspected child abuse. However, at present, there are variable thresholds for mandated reporting and no clear consensus on how existing thresholds should be interpreted. Because “child abuse” is often present as a possible etiology for (...) injuries and non-infectious conditions that beset children, it is problematic to suggest that “the mere possibility of child abuse” qualifies as cause to report. In an effort to move toward a more effective system of mandated reporting of child maltreatment, this paper discusses how the absence of a clear threshold affects mandated reporters, examines the relevant legal and conceptual issues, and suggests future directions for policy, practice, and research. (shrink)

A father brings his six-year-old daughter and her older sister to their pediatrician to be evaluated for a history of cough, runny nose, and low-grade fever. In addition to signs of a cold, the girl's nasal bridge is quite swollen and bruised. When asked how her nose was injured, she shrugs, and her father's only conjecture is that she sleepwalks and might have bumped into something. The father sits impatiently and as questioning progresses becomes increasingly defensive, at one point angrily (...) declaring, “We don't beat our kids, if that's what you’re asking.” Further complicating the situation is information from nurses that this family is “on the brink” socially and financially, and that additional stress is likely “to blow this family apart.” A careful physical exam identifies no other injuries, and a thorough review reveals no evidence of prior suspicious injuries, frequent visits to the emergency room, or bleeding abnormalities. The evidence does not point to abuse as the most likely explanation for the injury, but it clearly is not ruled out. Should one report this family for suspected abuse? Is one required to report? (shrink)

The last 20 years have seen the development of a new form of therapy, compassion focused therapy. Although CFT has a growing evidence base, there have been few studies of CFT outside of an Anglo-European cultural context. In this paper, we ask: Might a CFT-based approach be of value for Indigenous Australians? If so, what kind of cultural adaptations might be needed? We report the findings from a pilot study of an arts-based compassion skills training group, in which usual CFT (...) group processes were significantly adapted to meet the needs of Indigenous Australians. At face value, CFT appeared to be a promising approach to enhancing the social and emotional wellbeing of Australia’s Indigenous peoples. However, despite initial consultations with Indigenous health professionals, the first attempts to offer a more conventional group-based CFT to Indigenous clients were largely unsuccessful. Following a review and advice from two Indigenous clients, we combined elements of CFT with visual arts to develop a new approach, “arts-based compassion skills training”. This paper reports an evaluation of this pilot ABCST group. The group had 6 × 4 h sessions of ABCST, facilitated by two psychologists and two artists. There were 10 participants, who attended between 2 and 6 sessions: five were clients, five were health professionals. Between 1 and 3 months later, six of the participants were interviewed. Qualitative analysis of interview data identified that two key processes—creating a positive group atmosphere and channeling compassion skills training through the medium of visual arts—led to four positive outcomes for participants: planting the seeds of new understandings, embodying the skills of compassion, strengthening relationships with others, and evolving a more self-compassionate relationship. We suggest that the preliminary results are sufficiently encouraging to warrant further development of ABCST in Indigenous communities. (shrink)

Wicker's concern is to build a philosophical and justificational foundation for a "Christian radicalism" which can serve to synthesize the two modern secular themes of self-determination and communalism. He explores particular secular theories of perception, language, and society and rejects them as irrelevant to modern realities. He then constructs in their place three sacred theories, where "sacred" is to be understood not as a sheltered corner of our experience but rather as the basis of the more general intersubjectivity which defines (...) man-in-society. He draws on Merleau-Ponty for a theory of perception, Wittgenstein for a theory of language, and Marx for a theory of society. All three theories find man in a closer participating relation with his world environment than do their rejected alternatives. These three theories suggest three modes of being-in-the-world: the bodily, the linguistic, and the economic, all of which are expressive—the latter in the sense that it involves the transformation of environment into expressiveness. The conjunction of the three modes, then, defines our community life. Wicker uses George Eliot, Dickens, Orwell, and William Golding to show how various human attitudes toward environment are manifest in literature. These attitudes are classifiable into the secular—environment as passive context for human life—and the sacred—environment as fraught with primordial significance which man shares and of which he is part. Wicker further justifies his vision of Christianity with the aid of Levy-Bruhl, van der Leeuw, and Eliade whose studies in primitive religions fructify Wicker's notion of the sacred. The book ends with a theological formulation of its main themes involving new translations of old doctrines. The book is a brave effort to revitalize with secular insights a moribund Christianity and to point it to its own roots in the foundations of man.—S. O. H. (shrink)

"Every word, like a sacred object, has its place. No _précis_ is possible. This extraordinary book must be read."—Edmund Carpenter, _New York Times Book Review _ "No outline is possible; I can only say that reading this book is a most exciting intellectual exercise in which dialectic, wit, and imagination combine to stimulate and provoke at every page."—Edmund Leach, _Man _ "Lévi-Strauss's books are tough: very scholarly, very dense, very rapid in argument. But once you have mastered him, human history (...) can never be the same, nor indeed can one's view of contemporary society. And his latest book, _The Savage Mind_, is his most comprehensive and certainly his most profound. Everyone interested in the history of ideas _must_ read it; everyone interested in human institutions _should _read it."—J. H. Plumb, _Saturday Review_ "A constantly stimulating, informative and suggestive intellectual challenge."—Geoffrey Gorer, _The Observer_, London. (shrink)

The relations between philosophy, science and religion preoccupied S.H. Bergman for many years. He wanted to corroborate, by belief, a personal God to whom, and not only about whom, one can speak. This should follow from authentic religious experience, making it independent from philosophy. Furthermore, according to Bergman, religion can do what philosophical reasoning is incapable of doing since he considers belief to be stronger than knowledge. A criticalscrutiny of these assumptions involves some interesting implications concerning toleration, freedom-of-thought and dogmatism. (...) The final conclusion consists in that belief cannot refute philosophical knowledge but can reject it while philosophy can refute belief but cannot reject it. (shrink)

The relations between philosophy, science and religion preoccupied S.H. Bergman for many years. He wanted to corroborate, by belief, a personal God to whom, and not only about whom, one can speak. This should follow from authentic religious experience, making it independent from philosophy. Furthermore, according to Bergman, religion can do what philosophical reasoning is incapable of doing since he considers belief to be stronger than knowledge. A criticalscrutiny of these assumptions involves some interesting implications concerning toleration, freedom-of-thought and dogmatism. (...) The final conclusion consists in that belief cannot refute philosophical knowledge but can reject it while philosophy can refute belief but cannot reject it. (shrink)

The relations between philosophy, science and religion preoccupied S.H. Bergman for many years. He wanted to corroborate, by belief, a personal God to whom, and not only about whom, one can speak. This should follow from authentic religious experience, making it independent from philosophy. Furthermore, according to Bergman, religion can do what philosophical reasoning is incapable of doing since he considers belief to be stronger than knowledge. A criticalscrutiny of these assumptions involves some interesting implications concerning toleration, freedom-of-thought and dogmatism. (...) The final conclusion consists in that belief cannot refute philosophical knowledge but can reject it while philosophy can refute belief but cannot reject it. (shrink)

Edward H. Levi served the University of Chicago for most of his professional life, as a professor, dean of the law school, provost, and eventually president. Gathered here are fourteen talks he delivered between 1963 and 1969 that include such topics as the role of the university; the purposes of undergraduate and liberal education, professional training, and graduate research; the relations between the university and its surroundings; and the causes of student unrest. Throughout these talks, the reader will find (...) expressions of Levi’s essential belief that “the university must stand for reason and for persuasion by reasoning.”. (shrink)

Edward H. Levi served the University of Chicago for most of his professional life, as a professor, dean of the law school, provost, and eventually president. Gathered here are fourteen talks he delivered between 1963 and 1969 that include such topics as the role of the university; the purposes of undergraduate and liberal education, professional training, and graduate research; the relations between the university and its surroundings; and the causes of student unrest. Throughout these talks, the reader will find (...) expressions of Levi’s essential belief that “the university must stand for reason and for persuasion by reasoning.”. (shrink)

R.A.Fisher introduced the fiducial argument as a means for obtaining something from nothing. He thought that on some occasions it was legitimate to obtain a posterior probability distribution over a range of simple statistical hypotheses without commitment to a prior distribution [4].H.Jeffreys thought he could tame Fisher by casting his argument in a Bayesian mold through a derivation of the fiducial posterior from a suitably constructed ignorance prior via Bayes’ theorem and conditionalization on the data of experimentation. According to Jeffreys, (...) Fisher was using something to obtain something after all ([7],pp.381-383).D.V.Lindley furthered the process of taming by specifying allegedly necessary and sufficient conditions for the consistency of fiducial reasoning in contexts of one parameter estimation with Bayesian requirements [14]. I. Hacking exploited Lindley’s result to supply his own ingenious method for taming Fisher([5],ch. 9).T.Seidenfeld has recently demonstrated that Lindley’s conditions are insufficient for consistency and that reconstructions like Jeffreys’ or Hacking’s lead to contradiction ([15], PP. 721-727). (shrink)

In this paper I take Hempel’s raven paradox as the claim that statements of the form ‘∼Ru v Bu’, ‘u is not a raven or u is black,’ confirm the hypothesis h ‘(x)(Rx → Bx)’, ‘All ravens are black.’ Although Hempel discusses this using a criterion of confirmation expressed wholly in terms of deductive logic (see 1965, pp. 35-9), it has become more common to articulate criteria of confirmation using concepts of probability and, in particular, to employ the positive relevance (...) criterion of confirmation which says that, given background knowledge k, (i) e confirms h if and only if P(h/e.k)>P(h/k); (ii) e disconfirms h if and only if P(h/e.k)shrink)

The things themselves, which only the limited brains of men and animals believe fixed and stationary, have no real existence at all. They are the flashing and sparks of drawn swords, the glow of victory in the conflict of opposing qualities. SummaryThe conflicts between the eristentialism of Jean‐Paul Sartre and the structuralism of Claude Lévi‐Strauss present a privileged site for illuminating larger conflicts in the human studies as a whole. The present paper argues that a method for addressing and perhaps (...) resolving thes conflicts can be drawn from the respective logics of existentialism and structuralism. The essay begins by discussing the dialectical social theory of lean‐Paul Sartre and then, after treating Lévi‐Strauss's theory of structure, goes on to argue that dialectical thought generates structures, and that structuralism invites a dialectical method of construction. While an integration of methods along these lines does not constitute an integrated social theory, it can remove an important obstacle to the development of such theory. (shrink)

Sensory substitution devices (SSDs) are most familiar from their use with subjects who are deficient in a target modality (e.g. congenitally blind subjects), but there is no doubt that the use and potential value of SSDs extend to persons without such deficits. Recent work by Amedi and his team (in particular Levy-Tzedek et al. 2012) has begun to explore this. Their idea is that SSDs may facilitate behavioural transference (BT) across sense modalities. In this case, a motor skill learned through (...) visual perception might be subsequently employed in response to auditory perception, using an SSD as a mediator. They infer from the existence of such BT that the learned skill is amodally represented. After a brief overview I identify ways to more fully test for BT within this experimental paradigm and argue that their conclusion about amodal representation is premature. Additionally, I argue that their preferred SSD (Eyemusic) is of limited value for the project. While my remarks are critical, my intention is to be constructive, particularly in light of the fact that Levy-Tzedek et al. (2012), is, I believe, the first output from Amedi's lab concerning this line of research. (shrink)

Papers collected in this volume were originally presented at a symposium held at the University of Pennsylvania in December, 1968 and revised in the light of discussion at the symposium for publication. The contributors hold different views about the role played by induction in theories of knowledge and rational belief but many of the papers are conciliatory, reflecting no doubt a good deal of helpful communication at the symposium. For example, Frederic Schick's clearly written and informative lead article considers subjectivist, (...) empiricist, and pragmatist theories of rational belief, arguing that they are compatible theories relevant to different types of issues. Marshall Swain follows with an article which presents a general framework within which rules of rational acceptance can be constructed. An exchange between Isaac Levi and Richard Jeffrey shows that advocates of theories of acceptance and theories of partial belief may be defending complementary and not mutually exclusive theories. In the remaining three essays Henry Kyburg Jr., Gilbert Harman, and Keith Lehrer defend their own distinctive views about the nature of inductive inference and rational belief. Kyburg traces difficulties in some theories to the acceptance of the principle of conjunction which he rejects. Harman and Lehrer both see the relation of inductive inference to explanation as crucial to understanding the former and they develop theories along different lines which make use of this relation. A long and useful bibliography was prepared for the symposium by Ralph L. Slaght and revised for publication in the volume.--R. H. K. (shrink)

In various writings Maimonides claims that God’s knowledge encompasses sublunar things, including human affairs, that we are incapable of understanding the nature of this knowledge, and that the term “knowing” is equivocal when said of God and of humans. In the fourteenth century these claims were given widely divergent interpretations. According to Levi ben Gershom (Gersonides, 1288–1344), Maimonides was compelled by religious considerations to maintain that God knows sublunar particulars in all their particularity, and to adopt a position that (...) was diametrically opposed to the Aristotelian one. By contrast, Moses of Narbonne (Narboni, d.1362) found Maimonides’ views on divine knowledge to be identical with those of the “ancient philosophers,” that is to say, the Peripatetics, as presented by Averroes. Whether ultimately convincing or not, Narboni’s Averroist interpretation forces the reader to admit that Maimonides shares a great deal more in common with Averroes on this topic than is often thought. By examining briefly the view of Maimonides and Averroes on these matters I hope to make Narboni’s interpretation appear less far-fetched. (shrink)

Durkheim's functional and structural sociology is examined with an eye to the two structuralist modes of inquiry that it inspired, French structuralism and British structuralism. French structuralism comes from Levi-Strauss's inverting the basic ideas of Durkheim and others in the French circle, including Marcell Mauss, Robert Hertz, and Ferdinand de Saussure. British structuralism comes from A.R. Radcliffe-Brown's adoption of Durkheimian ideas to ethnographic interpretation and theoretical speculation. French structuralism produced a broad intellectual movement, whereas British structuralism culminated in network (...) analysis, which is beginning only now to become a broad intellectual movement. In both cases, the intellectual children and grandchildren of functionalism may prove to be more influential in sociology and elsewhere than Durkheimian functionalism, the parent. (shrink)

‘Where have you been?’ I expect philosophers to ask me this when I tell them that this paper is on the Gettier Problem. I found it difficult to participate in the discussion of the problem until now because instead of wanting to consider what could be done to revive the project of identifying necessary and conditions for knowledge after the apparent damage done to it by Gettier counter-examples, I wanted to question the legitimacy of the project itself.