David Boucher, Political Theories of International Relations. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998. Pp.431. £40.00, ISBN 0?19?878053?2 (hb) and £15.99, ISBN 0?19?878054?0 (pb).

-- James Der Derian, University of Massachusetts.

The debate about whether misoprostol should be distributed to low resource communities to prevent post-partum haemorrhage, recognised as a major cause of maternal mortality, is deeply polarised. This is in spite of stakeholders having access to the same evidence about the risks and benefits of misoprostol. To understand the disagreement, we conducted a qualitative analysis of the values underpinning debates surrounding community distribution of misoprostol. We found that different moral priorities, epistemic values, and attitudes towards uncertainty were the main factors (...) sustaining the debate. With this understanding, we present a model for ethical discourse that might overcome the current impasse. (shrink)

Clearly, Marx thought he was promoting democratic values. In the Manifesto, the immediate goal of socialism is summed up as “to win the battle of democracy.” Marx sees the reduction of individuality as one of the greatest injuries done by a system in which most people buy and sell their labor power on terms over which they have little control. As they supervised translations and re-issues of the Manifesto, Marx and Engels singled out just one point as a major (...) topic on which their view in 1848 had been superseded. The forms of government needed to be changed to give people more control over the state, a change in structure pioneered by the Paris Commune. (shrink)

While ethics and evidence‐based medicine are often viewed as separate domains of inquiry and practice, what we know influences what we can ethically justify doing, and what we see as our moral obligations shapes the way we interpret evidence. The boundaries between the moral and epistemic spheres become particularly blurred when the health of people is at stake and even more so when no “officially” recommended medical intervention is available to help a patient in need. The treatment of major hemorrhages (...) using recombinant factor VIIa (rFVIIa), which was originally approved under orphan drug legislation to treat hemophilia, is a case in point.Following reports in the late 1990s that rFVIIa was success­fully used to stop bleeding in gunshot trauma, there was much excitement about its potential to help patients with uncontrolled bleeding in other clinical settings, leading to wide‐spread off‐label use of the drug. In recent years, new evidence has raised questions about the off‐label use of rFVIIa for severe bleeding. Nonetheless, while some clini­cians are now adamantly opposed to prescribing rFVIIa for massive bleed­ing, many remain determined to continue the practice. This raises the question: why do clinicians have such variable responses to the same body of evidence?We analyzed the debate around off‐label use of rFVIIa and character­ized its main conceptual features and tensions. We did not seek to provide a normative analysis as to whether the evidence supports the case for off‐label prescribing, nor did we try to provide a historical analysis of how attitudes and clinical practice have changed. Rather, we sought to make visible the moral and epistemic values underpinning stakeholders’ opinions and practices. On the basis of our analysis, which is described in this ar­ticle, we suggest that debates such as those surrounding rFVIIa will not be resolved simply by conducting more studies and that, therefore, there is also a need for conceptual and pro­cedural frameworks that more sys­tematically incorporate values into clinical policy‐making. (shrink)

This article addresses Simon Lohse’s and Daniel Little’s responses to my article “Is Social Ontology Prior to Social Scientific Methodology?.” In that article, I present a pragmatic and deflationary view of the priority of social ontology to social science methodology where social ontology is valued for its ability to promote empirical success and not because it yields knowledge of what furnishes the social world. First, in response to Lohse, I argue that my view is compatible with a role for (...) ontological theorizing in the social sciences. However, the view that results instrumentalizes social ontology. Second, in my response to Little, I argue that the same considerations I made in my article apply to naturalistic attempts to motivate a non-deflationary view, repeating some of the central issues of that article. (shrink)

_For curious readers young and old, a rich and colorful history of religion from humanity’s earliest days to our own contentious times_ In an era of hardening religious attitudes and explosive religious violence, this book offers a welcome antidote. Richard Holloway retells the entire history of religion—from the dawn of religious belief to the twenty-first century—with deepest respect and a keen commitment to accuracy. Writing for those with faith and those without, and especially for young readers, he encourages curiosity (...) and tolerance, accentuates nuance and mystery, and calmly restores a sense of the value of faith. Ranging far beyond the major world religions of Judaism, Islam, Christianity, Buddhism, and Hinduism, Holloway also examines where religious belief comes from, the search for meaning throughout history, today’s fascinations with Scientology and creationism, religiously motivated violence, hostilities between religious people and secularists, and more. Holloway proves an empathic yet discerning guide to the enduring significance of faith and its power from ancient times to our own. (shrink)

Richard Arthur’s _Natural Deduction_ provides a wide-ranging introduction to logic. In lively and readable prose, Arthur presents a new approach to the study of logic, one that seeks to integrate methods of argument analysis developed in modern “informal logic” with natural deduction techniques. The dry bones of logic are given flesh by unusual attention to the history of the subject, from Pythagoras, the Stoics, and Indian Buddhist logic, through Lewis Carroll, Venn, and Boole, to Russell, Frege, and Monty Python.

The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which. —George Orwell, Animal Farm.

Richard Wolin, in his article 'Nazism and the Complicities of Hans-Georg Gadamer: Untruth and Method' ( New Republic , 15 May 2000, pp. 36-45), wrongly accuses Gadamer of being 'in complicity' with the Nazis. The present article in reply was rejected by the New Republic , but is printed here to show that Wolin in his article is misinformed and unfair. First, Wolin makes elementary factual errors, such as stating that Gadamer was born in Breslau instead of Marburg. He (...) relies on a highly questionable source, Teresa Orozco, as 'definitive'. He argues often by misconstruing the evidence and guilt by association. For instance, he associates Gadamer with Werner Jaeger, with whom he disagreed and had little contact. Finally,he misinterprets basic terms in Gadamer's hermeneutics, Vorurteil and authority, attributing to them the popular sense of these terms instead of their place in Gadamer's hermeneutics. Vorurteil , popularly translated as 'prejudice', but better rendered as 'prejudgment', refers to the prior knowledge that one needs in order to understand a situation or a text. In some cases, this is part of the inherited tradition. Authority refers to the respect one pays to those one recognizes as having more knowledge than oneself: one's doctor, or parent, or teacher, a judge, or certain texts. It is not an abject surrender to all authority but the necessary respect for authority in human relationships and in society in general. By misconstruing these terms, Wolin attempts to discredit Gadamer's general philosophy,not just to demonstrate a connection to the Nazis. At the end, his argument turns into a misinformed general political attack on Gadamer as an enemy of Enlightenment values. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Richard H. Popkin 1923-2005Harry M. Bracken and Richard A. WatsonRichard H. Popkin, founding editor of the journal of the History of Philosophy, died on April 14, 2005. He was 81 years old and had continued his research and writing to the last moment before he entered the hospital on march 21st with extreme respiratory difficulties.Popkin's The History of Scepticism from Erasmus to Descartes (1960) revolutionized the study (...) and understanding of early modern philosophy. Popkin entered the minds and world of thinkers from Erasmus to Descartes in a way few other scholars had done, and he showed how the development of philosophy and science was far from an easy series of steps from success to success. Instead, philosophers and scientists pursued a dozen lines from the scepticism of Sextus Empiricus through religious belief, atheism, numerology, astrology, alchemy, eschatology, magic, and millenarianism—a maelstrom of ideas out of which emerged the major figures and ideas of Modern philosophy and science. Dick once explained that actually he lived in the 17th century, and certainly he knew as many of those thinkers and their thoughts as did many people who actually lived at that time. Of course Popkin did not originate the notion of exploring the history of philosophy in the context of its times, but he made that approach central today. It led him not only through the Early Modern period, but also from medieval jewish philosophy to a critical analysis of the Kennedy assassination.Popkin received his PhD at Columbia University, and in his career he taught at the universities of Connecticut, Iowa, California (San Diego and Los Angeles), Washington University in St. Louis, and Harvey Mudd College. He served as the first editor of the Journal of the History of Philosophy, and as president of JHP, Inc. For many years, and was active in its operation for over four decades, having attended the annual meeting of the Board of Directors a little over a month before he died. After retirement, he lived in close association with the Clark Library in Los Angeles. He was well known to scholars and librarians throughout the world. Whatever library he visited, he was likely to find some obscure or hidden document that would either clear up some mystery, or give rise to a new problem. His memory was extraordinary. During his final years when he was virtually blind, he would sift through his mind, send assistants off to look for something that had to be in this or that library and write papers in his head for later dictation. Besides his memory, indispensable throughout his lifetime he had Julie, his co-worker and wife of 60 years, without whom, the Popkin we knew could not have existed.These few paragraphs are meant to be neither an obituary nor an adequate memorial. We were Dick's first two PhDs, and we were barely five years his junior. He treated us from the beginning as colleagues and he became a lifelong friend. He changed our lives, as he did the lives of many other aspiring scholars. We miss him.Copyright © 2005 Journal of the History of Philosophy, Inc.... (shrink)

This paper analyses the fraught relationship between physics and the ‘occult sciences’ in the decades around 1900. For some, there was no relationship at all; for others there was a relationship but they did not agree on what it looked like. Many physicists converged with spiritualists, theosophists, and others in interpreting X-rays, the electrical theory of matter, and other aspects of the ‘new’ physics as powerful ways of rendering psychic and occult effects scientifically more understandable. However, they were opposed by (...) commentators on physics who agreed that there was a relationship between the ‘new’ physics and psychical research but that these were two manifestations of a worrying drift of physics into metaphysics and religion. More redoubtable critics were the psychologists who denied that physicists had the experience or experimental skill to cope reliably with the psycho-physical phenomena encountered in psychical research. This paper shows that physicist–psychical researchers were content to ally the ‘new’ physics with religion because it helped vanquish awkward associations with materialism. They also tried to justify the value of their experimental skills by appealing to their expertise in investigating subtle physical effects and ability to create tests that respected the delicate conditions of séances.Keywords: Physics; Psychical research; Ether; Occult; Psychology; Fin-de-siècle. (shrink)

In lively and readable prose, Arthur presents a new approach to the study of logic, one that seeks to integrate methods of argument analysis developed in modern “informal logic” with natural deduction techniques. The dry bones of logic are given flesh by unusual attention to the history of the subject, from Pythagoras, the Stoics, and Indian Buddhist logic, through Lewis Carroll, Venn, and Boole, to Russell, Frege, and Monty Python. A previous edition of this book appeared under the title _Natural (...) Deduction_. This new edition adds clarifications of the notions of explanation, validity and formal validity, a more detailed discussion of derivation strategies, and another rule of inference, Reiteration. (shrink)

In The Selfish Gene, Richard Dawkins crystallized the gene's eye view of evolution developed by W.D. Hamilton and others. The book provoked widespread and heated debate. Written in part as a response, The Extended Phenotype gave a deeper clarification of the central concept of the gene as the unit of selection; but it did much more besides. In it, Dawkins extended the gene's eye view to argue that the genes that sit within an organism have an influence that reaches (...) out beyond the visible traits in that body - the phenotype - to the wider environment, which can include other individuals. So, for instance, the genes of the beaver drive it to gather twigs to produce the substantial physical structure of a dam; and the genes of the cuckoo chick produce effects that manipulate the behaviour of the host bird, making it nurture the intruder as one of its own. This notion of the extended phenotype has proved to be highly influential in the way we understand evolution and the natural world. It represents a key scientific contribution to evolutionary biology, and it continues to play an important role in research in the life sciences. The Extended Phenotype is a conceptually deep book that forms important reading for biologists and students. But Dawkins' clear exposition is accessible to all who are prepared to put in a little effort. Oxford Landmark Science books are 'must-read' classics of modern science writing which have crystallized big ideas, and shaped the way we think. (shrink)

Strangers, Gods and Monster is a fascinating look at how human identity is shaped by three powerful but enigmatic forces. Often overlooked in accounts of how we think about ourselves and others, Richard Kearney skillfully shows, with the help of vivid examples and illustrations, how the human outlook on the world is formed by the mysterious triumvirate of strangers, gods and monsters. Throughout, Richard Kearney shows how strangers, gods and monsters do not merely reside in myths or fantasies (...) but constitute a central part of our cultural unconscious. Above all, he argues that until we understand better that the Other resides deep within ourselves, we can have little hope of understanding how our most basic fears and desires manifest themselves in the external world and how we can learn to live with them. (shrink)

The authors find East Asians to be holistic, attending to the entire field and assigning causality to it, making relatively little use of categories and formal logic, and relying on "dialectical" reasoning, whereas Westerners, are more analytic, paying attention primarily to the object and the categories to which it belongs and using rules, including formal logic, to understand its behavior. The 2 types of cognitive processes are embedded in different naive metaphysical systems and tacit epistemologies. The authors speculate that (...) the origin of these differences is traceable to markedly different social systems. The theory and the evidence presented call into question long-held assumptions about basic cognitive processes and even about the appropriateness of the process–content distinction. (shrink)

Reviews evidence which suggests that there may be little or no direct introspective access to higher order cognitive processes. Ss are sometimes unaware of the existence of a stimulus that importantly influenced a response, unaware of the existence of the response, and unaware that the stimulus has affected the response. It is proposed that when people attempt to report on their cognitive processes, that is, on the processes mediating the effects of a stimulus on a response, they do not (...) do so on the basis of any true introspection. Instead, their reports are based on a priori, implicit causal theories, or judgments about the extent to which a particular stimulus is a plausible cause of a given response. This suggests that though people may not be able to observe directly their cognitive processes, they will sometimes be able to report accurately about them. Accurate reports will occur when influential stimuli are salient and are plausible causes of the responses they produce, and will not occur when stimuli are not salient or are not plausible causes. (shrink)

The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which. —George Orwell, Animal Farm.

Consider Phoebe and Daphne. Phoebe has credences in 1 million propositions. Daphne, on the other hand, has credences in all of these propositions, but she's also got credences in 999 million other propositions. Phoebe's credences are all very accurate. Each of Daphne's credences, in contrast, are not very accurate at all; each is a little more accurate than it is inaccurate, but not by much. Whose doxastic state is better, Phoebe's or Daphne's? It is clear that this question is (...) analogous to a question that has exercised ethicists over the past thirty years. How do we weigh a population consisting of some number of exceptionally happy and satisfied individuals against another population consisting of a much greater number of people whose lives are only just worth living? This is the question that occasions population ethics. In this paper, I go in search of the correct population ethics for credal states. (shrink)

In “Theories of Justification,” Richard Fumerton begins an overview of several prominent positions on the nature of justification by isolating epistemic justification from nonepistemic justification. He also distinguishes between “having justification for a belief” and “having a justified belief,” arguing that the former is conceptually more fundamental. Fumerton then addresses the possibility that justification is a normative matter, suggesting that this possibility has little to offer as a concept of epistemic justification. He also critically examines more specific attempts (...) to capture the structure and content of epistemic justification. These include traditional foundationalism and variants thereof, externalist versions of foundationalism, contextualism, coherentism, and “mixed” theories which combine aspects of coherentism and foundationalism. (shrink)

The article responds to Richard Lauer’s (2019) “Is Social Ontology Prior to Social Scientific Methodology?” The article concurs that “social ontology matters” for the conduct of research and theory in social science. It argues, however, that neither of the interpretations of the status of social ontology offered by Lauer is satisfactory (either apriori philosophical realism or pragmatist anti-realism). The article argues for a naturalized, fallibilist, and realist interpretation of the claims of social ontology and presents the field of social (...) ontology as the most abstract edge of social-science theorizing, subject to broad empirical constraints. The approach taken is anti-foundationalist in both epistemology and metaphysics. Ontological theorizing is part of the extended scientific enterprise of understanding the social world. Claims about the nature of the social world are not different in kind from more specific sociological claims about social class or individual rationality, to be justified ultimately by the coherence and explanatory success of the theories they help to create. At the same time, it is justified to treat the claims of social ontology as provisionally true, which supports a realist interpretation of the findings of social ontology. (shrink)

Although experimental philosophers have been busy kindling fires under well-worn armchairs in areas of philosophy as varied as epistemology, normative ethics, theories of reference, and the free will controversy, the philosophy of art has remained largely untouched. As Denis Dutton observes: “There is precious little reference to empirical psychology in contemporary philosophical aesthetics, almost as if philosophers of art have wanted to protect their patch from incursions by psychologists.” I intend to show how techniques borrowed from experimental psychology can (...) bring light as well as warmth to the old debate over “What is art?”. (shrink)

In lively and readable prose, Arthur presents a new approach to the study of logic, one that seeks to integrate methods of argument analysis developed in modern “informal logic” with natural deduction techniques. The dry bones of logic are given flesh by unusual attention to the history of the subject, from Pythagoras, the Stoics, and Indian Buddhist logic, through Lewis Carroll, Venn, and Boole, to Russell, Frege, and Monty Python. A previous edition of this book appeared under the title _Natural (...) Deduction_. This new edition adds clarifications of the notions of explanation, validity and formal validity, a more detailed discussion of derivation strategies, and another rule of inference, Reiteration. (shrink)

There are many reasons we might want to take the opinions of various individuals and pool them to give the opinions of the group they constitute. If all the individuals in the group have probabilistic opinions about the same propositions, there is a host of pooling functions we might deploy, such as linear or geometric pooling. However, there are also cases where different members of the group assign probabilities to different sets of propositions, which might overlap a lot, a (...) class='Hi'>little, or not at all. There are far fewer proposals for how to proceed in these cases, and those there are have undesirable features. I begin by considering four proposals and arguing that they don't work. Then I'll describe my own proposal, which is intended to cover the situation in which we want to pool the individual opinions in order to ascribe an opinion to the group considered as an agent in its own right. (shrink)

In search of good -- A Socratic question -- Flourishing and well-being -- Mind and value -- Utilitarianism -- Rawls and the priority of the right -- Right, wrong, should -- The elimination of moral rightness -- Rules and good -- Categorical imperatives -- Conflicting interests -- Whose good? The egoist's answer -- Whose good? The utilitarian's answer - Self-denial, self-love, universal concern -- Pain, self-love, and altruism -- Agent-neutrality and agent-relativity -- Good, conation, and pleasure -- "Good" and "good (...) for" -- "Good for" and advantage -- "Good that" and "Bad that" -- Pleasure and advantage -- Good for S that P -- The "for" of "good for" -- Plants, animals, humans -- Ross on human nature -- The perspectival reading of "good for" -- The conative approach to well-being -- Abstracting from the content of desires and plans -- The faulty mechanisms of desire formation -- Infants and adults -- The conation of an ideal self -- The appeal of the conative theory -- Conation hybridized -- Strict hedonism -- Hedonism diluted -- Prolegomenon to flourishing -- Development and flourishing: the general theory -- Development and flourishing: the human case -- More examples of what is good -- Appealing to nature -- Sensory un-flourishing -- Affective flourishing and un-flourishing -- Hobbes on tranquility and restlessness -- Flourishing and un-flourishing as a social being -- Cognitive flourishing and un-flourishing -- Sexual flourishing and un-flourishing -- Too much and too little -- Comparing lives and stages of life -- Adding goods: Rawls's principle of inclusiveness -- Art, science, and culture -- Self-sacrifice -- The vanity of fame -- The vanity of wealth -- Making others worse-off -- Virtues and flourishing -- The good of autonomy -- What is good and why -- The sovereignty of good -- The importance of what is good for us -- Good's insufficiency -- Promises -- Retribution -- Cosmic justice -- Social justice -- Pure antipaternalism -- Moral space and giving aid -- Slavery -- Torture -- Moral rightness revisited -- Lying -- Honoring the dead -- Meaningless goals and symbolic value -- Good-independent realms of value -- Good thieves and good human beings -- Final thoughts. (shrink)

_Deprivation and Freedom _investigates the key issue of social deprivation. It looks at how serious that issue is, what we should do about it and how we might motivate people to respond to it. It covers core areas in moral and political philosophy in new and interesting ways, presents the topical example of disability as a form of social deprivation, shows that we are not doing nearly enough for certain sections of our communities and encourages that we think differently about (...) how we should best organize our societies in the future. The book develops a comprehensive yet accessible account of human freedom, which shows how the ability to realise our freedom is partly definitive of freedom itself. That account conclusively illustrates how many deprivations represent remediable inequalities of important and very basic human freedoms, posing the question as to why societies continue to do so little about them. In answering that question, Richard J. Hull shows how the idea of social exclusion is misleading and, instead, tackles the far more pertinent and challenging issue of societies' failure to include. The moral seriousness of non-inclusion, the failure to provide for freedom, is evaluated via critical discussion of a variety of central themes and distinctions in ethical and political theory. The author shows how such themes and distinctions comprise a framework for evaluating a raft of social issues, in turn providing a unique resource for students of moral, political and applied philosophy. The book concludes with an innovative, challenging and effective combination of analytic and continental styles, so to address the critical question of how we might actually motivate constructive social change. In doing so, it shows how a variety of approaches can work successfully together to provide an emphatic case for greater social inclusion. _Deprivation and Freedom _shows how even fairly modest claims about social provision illustrate that we should be doing a lot more about social deprivation than we are now. It should be of interest to anyone who is concerned with questions about the type of society in which they live, what it says about us to continue as we are – and how we might motivate realistically achievable social change. (shrink)

Because little is known about the human trait of affiliation, we provide a novel neurobehavioral model of affiliative bonding. Discussion is organized around processes of reward and memory formation that occur during approach and consummatory phases of affiliation. Appetitive and consummatory reward processes are mediated independently by the activity of the ventral tegmental area (VTA) dopamine (DA)–nucleus accumbens shell (NAS) pathway and the central corticolimbic projections of the u-opiate system of the medial basal arcuate nucleus, respectively, although these two (...) projection systems functionally interact across time. We next explicate the manner in which DA and glutamate interact in both the VTA and NAS to form incentive-encoded contextual memory ensembles that are predictive of reward derived from affiliative objects. Affiliative stimuli, in particular, are incorporated within contextual ensembles predictive of affiliative reward via: (a) the binding of affiliative stimuli in the rostral circuit of the medial extended amygdala and subsequent transmission to the NAS shell; (b) affiliative stimulus-induced opiate potentiation of DA processes in the VTA and NAS; and (c) permissive or facilitatory effects of gonadal steroids, oxytocin (in interaction with DA), and vasopressin on (i) sensory, perceptual, and attentional processing of affiliative stimuli and (ii) formation of social memories. Among these various processes, we propose that the capacity to experience affiliative reward via opiate functioning has a disproportionate weight in determining individual differences in affiliation. We delineate sources of these individual differences, and provide the first human data that support an association between opiate functioning and variation in trait affiliation. Key Words: affiliation corticolimbic-striatal networks; appetitive and consummatory reward; dopamine; oxytocin; personality; social bonds; social memory; u-opiates. (shrink)

There have been few tests of whether exposure to naturalistic or experimental disease-threat inductions alter disgust sensitivity, although it has been hypothesized that this should occur as part of disgust’s disease avoidance function. In the current study, we asked Macquarie university students to complete measures of disgust sensitivity, perceived vulnerability to disease, hand hygiene behavior and impulsivity, during Australia’s Covid-19 pandemic self-quarantine period, in March/April 2020. These data were then compared to earlier Macquarie university, and other local, and overseas student (...) cohorts, to determine if disgust sensitivity and the other measures, were different in the lockdown sample. The most consistent finding in the lockdown sample was of higher core disgust sensitivity, with some evidence of greater germ aversion on the PVD, and an increase in hand and food-related hygiene, but with little change in impulsivity. The consistency with which greater core disgust sensitivity was observed, suggests exposure to a highly naturalistic disease threat is a plausible cause. Greater disgust sensitivity may have several functional benefits and may arise implicitly from the threat posed by the Covid-19 pandemic. (shrink)

Most recent discussion of the provocation defence has focused on the objective test, and little attention has been paid to the subjective test. However, the subjective test provides a substantial constraint: the killing must result from a provocation that undermines the defendant's self-control. The idea of loss of self-control has been developed in both the philosophical and psychological literatures. Understanding the subjective test in the light of the conception developed there makes for a far more coherent interpretation of the (...) provocation defence. It also makes clear just how radical various proposals for reform of the defence would be. (shrink)

humanism /'hju:menizm/ n. an outlook or system of thought concerned with human rather than divine or supernatural matters. Albert Einstein, Isaac Asimov, E.M. Forster, Bertrand Russell, and Gloria Steinem all declared themselves humanists. What is humanism and why does it matter? Is there any doctrine every humanist must hold? If it rejects religion, what does it offer in its place? Have the twentieth century's crimes against humanity spelled the end for humanism? On Humanism is a timely and powerfully argued philosophical (...) defence of humanism. It is also an impassioned plea that we turn to ourselves, not religion, if we want to answer Socrates' age-old question: what is the best kind of life to lead? Although humanism has much in common with science, Richard Norman shows that it is far from a denial of the more mysterious, fragile side of being human. He deals with big questions such as the environment, Darwinism and 'creation science', euthanasia and abortion, and then argues that it is ultimately through the human capacity for art, literature and the imagination that humanism is a powerful alternative to religious belief. Drawing on a varied range of examples from Aristotle to Primo Levi and the novels of Virginia Woolf and Graham Swift, On Humanism is a lucid and much needed reflection on this much talked about but little understood phenomenon. (shrink)

The reappearance of the question of moral judgments by historians makes a reappraisal of the issues timely. Almost all that has been written on the subject addresses only the propriety of moral judgments in the written texts historians produce. However, historians have to make moral choices when selecting a subject upon which to write; and they make a tacit moral commitment to write and teach honestly. Historians usually dislike making explicit moral evaluations, and have little or no training in (...) how to do so. They can argue it’s not their job; they are only finders of fact. Historians holding a determinist view of actions do not think it appropriate to blame people for doing what they couldn’t help doing; for those believing there is an overall pattern to history, individual morality is beside the point. Finally, since earlier cultures had values different from ours, it seems unjust to hold them to contemporary standards. This essay modifies or rejects these arguments. Some historians have manifested ambivalence, acknowledging it is difficult or impossible to avoid making moral evaluations . Ordinary-language philosophers, noting that historiography has no specialized vocabulary, see it as saturated by the values inherent in everyday speech and thought. I argue that the historicist argument about the inevitably time-bound limitation of all values is exaggerated. Historians who believe in the religious grounding of values obviously disagree with it; but even on a secular level, morals are often confused with mores. If historians inevitably make moral evaluations, they should examine what philosophical ethicists—virtue ethicists, deontologists, and consequentialists—have said about how to make them; and even if they find no satisfactory grounding for their own moral attitudes, it is a brute fact that they have them. I end with an argument for “strong evaluations”—neither treating them as a troublesome residue in historiography nor, having despaired of finding a solid philosophical ground for moral evaluations, concluding that they are merely matters of taste. I believe historians should embrace the role of moral commentators, but that they should be aware that their evaluations are, like all historical judgments, subject to the criticisms of their colleagues and readers. Historians run little risk of being censorious and self-righteous; the far greater danger is acquiescing in or contributing to moral confusion and timidity. (shrink)

Bayesian models typically assume that agents are rational, logically omniscient and opinionated. The last of these has little descriptive or normative appeal, however, and limits our ability to describe how agents make up their minds (as opposed to changing them) or how they can suspend or withdraw their opinions. To address these limitations this paper represents the attitudinal states of non-opinionated agents by sets of (permissible) probability and desirability functions. Several basic ways in which such states of mind can (...) be changed are then characterised and compared with those found in AGM style models of attitude revision. Finally these models are employed to describe how agents make up their mind when deliberating. (shrink)

Ordeals are burdens placed on individuals that yield no benefits to others; hence they represent a dead-weight loss. Ordeals – the most common is waiting time – play a prominent role in rationing health care. The recipients most willing to bear them are those receiving the greatest benefit from scarce health-care resources. Health care is heavily subsidized; hence, moral hazard leads to excess use. Ordeals are intended to discourage expenditures yielding little benefit while simultaneously avoiding the undesired consequences of (...) rationing methods such as quotas or pricing. This analysis diagnoses the economic underpinnings of ordeals. Subsidies for nursing-home care versus home care illustrate. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Richard J. Arneson BENTHAMITE UTILITARIANISM AND HARD TIMES IT is commonly understood that Dickens's vaguely specified criticisms of the "Hard Facts" philosophy in Hard Times are intended as criticisms of Benthamite Utilitarianism. It is also commonly held that, on the level of theory at any rate, Dickens's criticisms are in the form of caricature so crudely painted as almost entirely to misrepresent its object. ' It would be (...) foolish to deny the presence of bathos, flat caricature, and stereotyped sentiment in this novel, or for that matter in any of Dickens's novels. But alongside the flamboyantly bad there is much stronger and subtler material. In this paper I examine the criticisms of Utilitarianism in Hard Times, and argue that Dickens's arguments possess more cogency than he is usually given credit for. It will turn out that much of the intellectual interest of the novel derives from the tension between what Dickens says to us in authorial sermons and what he shows us in the structure of his plot. One complaint Dickens offers is that Utilitarians like Thomas Gradgrind oppose fact to fancy and, in their gross worship of fact and downcrying of fancy, stifle much in human beings that is essential to their flourishing. The fact-versus-fancy theme is traceable in the novel's handling of education in the Gradgrind school, of the upbringing of the Gradgrind children, and of working-class life in industrial towns such as Coketown. Here as elsewhere Dickens means to present in tandem a criticism of the "Hard Facts" philosophy and of the society which he believed increasingly to be operating on the principles of that philosophy; hence a response to Hard Times must deal with social criticism as well as philosophical critique. What exactly is it that Gradgrind thinking aims to excise from Victorian culture by its campaign against "fancy"? Critics have objected that 60 Richard J. Arneson61 Dickens's notion of fancy comprehends only playful imagination and light-minded amusement and as such cannot bear the heavy burden of argument he rests upon it.2 In many passages of the novel fancy is indeed tantamount to play. But Dickens insists on the significance of fancy for moral education and on the continuity between light fancy and the poetical imagination that heightens moral sensibility. Fancy, nurtured in a child even in the humble pursuits of nursery rhymes and fairy tales, turns into moral imagination in an adult, who is thereby enabled to place himself in thought in the position of another, intuit his way of thinking, sense his feelings, and so acquire the knowledge and the inclination to treat the other with intelligent sympathy. That Gradgrind education frustrates this natural process is Dickens's complaint against it. It is worth calling attention to the similarity between Dickens's complaint against a vaguely discerned spirit of the times and the much more focused criticism urged by J. S. Mill against Bentham in his 1838 essay in London and Westminster Review. Bentham, says Mill, lacked himself, and failed to appreciate, a certain sort of imagination— that which enables us, by a voluntary effort, to conceive the absent as if it were present, the imaginary as if it were real, and to clothe it in the feelings which, if it were indeed real, it would bring along with it. This is the power by which one human being enters into the mind and circumstances of another. This power constitutes the poet, insofar as he does anything but melodiously utter his own actual feelings.... Mill concludes that Bentham, lacking imagination and an historical sense, "saw accordingly in man little but what the vulgarest eye can see."3 And in his Autobiography, Mill acknowledges that in the Benthamite Radical circles he frequented in the 1820's, "From this neglect both in theory and in practise of the cultivation of feeling, naturally resulted, among other things, an undervaluing of poetry, and of Imagination generally, as an element of human nature."4 A sympathetic internal critic of Utilitarianism, Mill tries to retain the essentials of Bentham's secular and empiricist moral doctrine while softening its cruder aspects. Like Bentham, Mill identifies morality with furthering the greatest happiness... (shrink)

A common complaint against contemporary epistemology is that its issues are too rarified and, hence, of little relevance for the everyday assessments we make of each other=s beliefs. The notion of epistemic rationality focuses on a specific goal, that of now having accurate and comprehensive beliefs, whereas our everyday assessments of beliefs are sensitive to the fact that we have an enormous variety of goals and needs, intellectual as well as nonintellectual. Indeed, our everyday assessments often have a quasi-ethical (...) dimension; we want to know, for example, whether someone has been responsible, or at least non-negligent, in forming opinions. Nevertheless, epistemology, properly conceived, is relevant to our commonplace intellectual concerns. Epistemic rationality is an idealized notion, but its idealized character makes it suitable to serve as a theoretical anchor for other notions of rationality, including notions that are less idealized and, hence, potentially more directly relevant to our everyday assessments. (shrink)

Most approaches to iterated belief revision are accompanied by some motivation for the use of the proposed revision operator (or family of operators), and typically encode enough information in the epistemic state of an agent for uniquely determining one-step revision. But in those approaches describing a family of operators there is usually little indication of how to proceed uniquely after the first revision step. In this paper we contribute towards addressing that deficiency by providing a formal framework which goes (...) beyond the first revision step in two ways. First, the framework is obtained by enriching the epistemic state of an agent starting from the following intuitive idea: we associate to each world x two abstract objects x⁺ and x⁻, and we assume that, in addition to preferences over the set of worlds, we are given preferences over this set of objects as well. The latter can be considered as meta-information encoded in the epistemic state which enables us to go beyond the first revision step of the revision operator being applied, and to obtain a unique set of preferences over worlds. We then extend this framework to consider, not only the revision of preferences over worlds, but also the revision of this extended structure itself. We look at some desirable properties for revising the structure and prove the consistency of these properties by giving a concrete operator satisfying all of them. Perhaps more importantly, we show that this framework has strong connections with two other types of constructions in related areas. Firstly, it can be seen as a special case of preference aggregation which opens up the possibility of extending the frame-work presented here into a full-fledged framework for preference aggregation and social choice theory. Secondly, it is related to existing work on the use of interval orderings in a number of different contexts. (shrink)

The proposed volumes are aimed at a multidisciplinary audience and seek to fill the gap between law, semiotics and visuality providing a comprehensive theoretical and analytical overview of legal visual semiotics. They seek to promote an interdisciplinary debate from law, semiotics and visuality bringing together the cumulative research traditions of these related areas as a prelude to identifying fertile avenues for research going forward. Advance Praise for Law, Culture and Visual Studies This diverse and exhilarating collection of essays explores the (...) many facets both historical and contemporary of visual culture in the law. It opens a window onto the substantive, jurisdictional, disciplinary and methodological diversity of current research. It is a cornucopia of materials that will enliven legal studies for those new to the field as well as for established scholars. It is a 'must read' that will leave you wondering about the validity of the long held obsession that reduces the law and legal studies to little more than a preoccupation with the word. Leslie J Moran Professor of Law, Birkbeck College, University of London Law, Culture and Visual Studies is a treasure trove of insights on the entwined roles of legality and visuality. From multiple interdisciplinary perspectives by scholars from around the world, these pieces reflect the fullness and complexities of our visual encounters with law and culture. From pictures to places to postage stamps, from forensics to film to folklore, this anthology is an exciting journey through the fertile field of law and visual culture as well as a testament that the field has come of age. Naomi Mezey, Professor of Law, Georgetown University Law Center, Washington, D.C., USA This highly interdisciplinary reference work brings together diverse fields including cultural studies, communication theory, rhetoric, law and film studies, legal and social history, visual and legal theory, in order to document the various historical, cultural, representational and theoretical links that bind together law and the visual. This book offers a breath-taking range of resources from both well-established and newer scholars who together cover the field of law's representation in, interrogation of, and dialogue with forms of visual rhetoric, practice, and discourse. Taken together this scholarship presents state of the art research into an important and developing dimension of contemporary legal and cultural inquiry. Above all, Law Culture and Visual Studies lays the groundwork for rethinking the nature of law in our densely visual culture: How are legal meanings produced, encoded, distributed, and decoded? What critical and hermeneutic skills, new or old, familiar or unfamiliar, will be needed? Topical, diverse, and enlivening, Law Culture and Visual Studies is a vital research tool and an urgent invitation to further critical thinking in the areas so well laid out in this collection. Desmond Manderson, Future Fellow, ANU College of Law / Research School of Humanities and the Arts, Australian National University, Australia. (shrink)

In lively and readable prose, Arthur presents a new approach to the study of logic, one that seeks to integrate methods of argument analysis developed in modern “informal logic” with natural deduction techniques. The dry bones of logic are given flesh by unusual attention to the history of the subject, from Pythagoras, the Stoics, and Indian Buddhist logic, through Lewis Carroll, Venn, and Boole, to Russell, Frege, and Monty Python. A previous edition of this book appeared under the title _Natural (...) Deduction_. This new edition adds clarifications of the notions of explanation, validity and formal validity, a more detailed discussion of derivation strategies, and another rule of inference, Reiteration. (shrink)

The last two and a half decades has seen the emergence of philosophical counseling. While it is practiced in many countries comparatively little has been said on its general character. In this paper I will seek to understand philosophical counseling by exploring its points of convergence to and deviation from its complimentary parts – philosophy and counseling. The practical and applied orientation of philosophical counseling seems worlds apart from what many consider to exemplify philosophy – theoretical, intellectual and abstract (...) concern with foundational questions. Given this it is worth exploring how philosophical counseling coincides with what is understood in academic circles as philosophy. On the other hand, the field of counseling has largely been the domain of psychology. Given the influence and orientation of the practice it would seem likely that philosophical counseling would be significantly different from the common conception of psychological counseling, but in what ways? Understanding how the practice lies in relation to the discipline of philosophy and psychological counseling will go some way to grasping its nature. (shrink)

Does media coverage of politics undermine democratic deliberation? By covering the “horse race” instead of the issues, the media encourage people to believe that politicians place self‐interest above the public interest. The media also affect which issues people consider important, and negative advertisements discourage political participation. People learn from the media only because they know so little about politics. Were democracy deliberative, these media effects would undermine it. But democracy is not a deliberation but a contest that relies on (...) the ability of the media to shape public opinion. The evidence for media effects is strong, but the media cannot be undermining a form of democracy that does not and cannot exist, and they do sustain the form that does. (shrink)

There has been an exponential growth in research examining the neurological basis of human cognition and learning. Little is known, however, about the extent to which sports coaches are aware of these advances. Consequently, the aim of the present study was to examine the prevalence of pseudoscientific ideas among British and Irish sports coaches. In total, 545 coaches from the United Kingdom and Ireland completed a measure that included questions about how evidence-based theories of the brain might enhance coaching (...) and learning, how they were exposed to these different theories, and their awareness of neuromyths. Results revealed that the coaches believed that an enhanced understanding of the brain helped with their planning and delivery of sports sessions. Goal-setting was the most frequently used strategy. Interestingly, 41.6% of the coaches agreed with statements that promoted neuromyths. The most prevalent neuromyth was “individuals learn better when they receive information in their preferred learning style (e.g., auditory, visual, or kinesthetic)”, which 62% of coaches believed. It is apparent that a relatively large percentage of coaches base aspects of their coaching practice on neuromyths and other pseudoscientific ideas. Strategies for addressing this situation are briefly discussed and include changing the content of coach education programs. (shrink)