This volume concerns the status and ambitions of metaphysics as a discipline.

What is the relation between a clay statue andthe lump of clay from which it is made? According to the defender of the standardaccount, the statue and the lump are distinct,enduring objects that share the same spatiallocation whenever they both exist. Suchobjects also seem to share the samemicrophysical structure whenever they bothexist. This leads to the standard objection tothe standard account: if the statue and thelump of clay have the same microphysicalstructure whenever they both exist, how canthey differ in their (...) de re temporalproperties, de re modal properties and soon? In this paper I develop amereological answer to this question – thestatue and the lump differ with respect totheir parts and this explains theirdifference with respect to de re temporalproperties, de re modal properties andthe like. (shrink)

What is the best question to ask an omniscient being? The question is intriguing; is it also paradoxical? We discuss several versions of what Ned Markosian calls the paradox of the question and suggest solutions to each of those puzzles. We then offer some practical advice about what do if you ever have the opportunity to query an omniscient being.

The Eleatic philosophers argued that it was impossible for anything to change, since that would require something to differ from itself. Although this line of reasoning is unpersuasive, it challenges us to provide an account of temporal predication, which is the focus of much recent work on change. This paper surveys various approaches to change and temporal predication and addresses related questions about identity, persistence, properties, time, tense, and temporal logic.

Rabbi Simcha Wasserman was a rosh yeshivah; kiruv pioneer; advisor; foster father; storyteller; transmitter of tradition; founder of yeshivos; hatzalah activist. This book captures him speaking with patience, simplicity, and intellect, about burning topics such as Holocaust, Kabbalah, Providence, and child-rearing. Includes a biographical sketch.

When a chimpanzee stockpiles rocks as weapons or when a frog sends out mating calls, we might easily assume these animals know their own motivations--that they use the same psychological mechanisms that we do. But as Beyond the Brain indicates, this is a dangerous assumption because animals have different evolutionary trajectories, ecological niches, and physical attributes. How do these differences influence animal thinking and behavior? Removing our human-centered spectacles, Louise Barrett investigates the mind and brain and offers an alternative (...) approach for understanding animal and human cognition. Drawing on examples from animal behavior, comparative psychology, robotics, artificial life, developmental psychology, and cognitive science, Barrett provides remarkable new insights into how animals and humans depend on their bodies and environment--not just their brains--to behave intelligently. Barrett begins with an overview of human cognitive adaptations and how these color our views of other species, brains, and minds. Considering when it is worth having a big brain--or indeed having a brain at all--she investigates exactly what brains are good at. Showing that the brain's evolutionary function guides action in the world, she looks at how physical structure contributes to cognitive processes, and she demonstrates how these processes employ materials and resources in specific environments. Arguing that thinking and behavior constitute a property of the whole organism, not just the brain, Beyond the Brain illustrates how the body, brain, and cognition are tied to the wider world. (shrink)

Childhood obesity has become a public health epidemic, and currently a battle exists over how to frame and address this problem. This paper explores how public policy approaches can be employed to address obesity. We present the argument that obesity should be viewed as the consequence of a “toxic environment” rather than the result of the population failing to take enough “personal responsibility.” In order to make progress in decreasing the prevalence of obesity, we must shift our view of obesity (...) away from the medical model to a public health model . At the same time, we must be sensitive to the problem of weight bias.Potential obstacles to taking a public policy approach are identified, as well as suggestions on how to overcome them. (shrink)

Beginnings : a Russian émigré's first interviews (1932-1949) -- Russian girl jeers at U.S. for depression complaint, Oakland Tribune, 1932 -- True picture of Russian girls' love life tragic, Boston Post, 1936 -- The woman of tomorrow, WJZ radio, 1949 -- On campus : Ayn Rand talks with future intellectuals (1962-1966) -- Objectivism versus conservatism -- The campaign against extremism -- The robber-barons -- Myths of capitalism -- The political structure of a free society -- The American Constitution -- Objective (...) law -- The role of a Free Press -- Education -- Romantic literature -- Romanticism versus naturalism -- The visual arts -- Cyrano de Bergerac -- Favorites in art -- The nature of humor -- The foundations of morality -- Altruism -- Individual rights -- The ethics of objectivism -- On television and radio : Ayn Rand in America's living rooms (1959-1981) -- The Mike Wallace interview, ABC-TV, 1959 -- For the intellectual, University of Michigan television, with Professor James McConnell, 1961 -- The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson, NBC-TV, August 1967 -- The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson, NBC-TV, October 1967 -- Speaking freely with Edwin Newman, NBC-TV, 1972 -- Day and Night, a television program hosted by James Day, 1974 -- Focus on youth, a radio show hosted by Garth R. Ancier, 1976 -- The Raymond Newman Journal, a radio show, 1980 -- Louis Rukeyser's Business Journal, 1981. (shrink)

After years of near total neglect, the problem of childhood obesity is now in the limelight. Terms like “epidemic,” “crisis,” and “emergency” are used frequently when describing the trend. Progress is defined with strong language and fueled by statistics such as the observation that this generation of children will be the first to live shorter lives than their parents. Multi-disciplinary journals such as the Journal of Law, Medicine & Ethics have dedicated symposiums to the issue, and conferences have been convened (...) not only by health professionals but by government agencies, the food industry, and even professionals who market to children. The seriousness of childhood obesity is no longer in doubt, and finally attention has turned to the more complex question – what must be done? (shrink)

Our purpose in this article is to identify and suggest resolution for two core problematics of grounded theory. First, while grounded theory provides transparency to one part of the conceptualization process, where codes emerge directly from the data, it provides no such systematic or transparent way for gaining insight into the conceptual relationships between discovered codes. Producing a grounded theory depends not only on the definition of conceptual pieces, but the delineation of a relationship between at least two of those (...) pieces. Second, the conceptualization process of grounded theory is done in hierarchical fashion, where individual codes emerge from the data but then are used to generate insight into more general concepts and thematic statements. But various works on grounded theory have failed to provide any systematic way of using data specific levels of scale (the codes) to gain insight into more macro levels of scale (concepts and themes). We offer fractal concept analysis as a means of resolving both of these issues. By using a logic structure generator, fractal concept analysis delineates self-similar conceptual frameworks at various levels of abstraction, yielding a method for linking concepts together within and between levels of scale encountered in the grounded theory coding and categorization process. We conclude that this fractal analytic technique can bolster the aims of grounded theory as a formalized and systematic process for generating theory from empirical data. (shrink)

How veridical is perception? Rather than representing objects as they actually exist in the world, might perception instead represent objects only in terms of the utility they offer to an observer? Previous work employed evolutionary modeling to show that under certain assumptions, natural selection favors such “strict‐interface” perceptual systems. This view has fueled considerable debate, but we think that discussions so far have failed to consider the implications of two critical aspects of perception. First, while existing models have explored single (...) utility functions, perception will often serve multiple largely independent goals. (Sometimes when looking at a stick you want to know how appropriate it would be as kindling for a campfire, and other times you want to know how appropriate it would be as a weapon for self‐defense.) Second, perception often operates in an inflexible, automatic manner—proving “impenetrable” to shifting higher‐level goals. (When your goal shifts from “burning” to “fighting,” your visual experience does not dramatically transform.) These two points have important implications for the veridicality of perception. In particular, as the need for flexible goals increases, inflexible perceptual systems must become more veridical. We support this position by providing evidence from evolutionary simulations that as the number of independent utility functions increases, the distinction between “interface” and “veridical” perceptual systems dissolves. Although natural selection evaluates perceptual systems only on their fitness, the most fit perceptual systems may nevertheless represent the world as it is. (shrink)

EDITORS' INTRODUCTION B he Vedas tell of a conversation between a young man, Shvetaketu, and his father concerning what the son had learned in his education ...

In recent years, calls for philosophy to interact more with the public have grown louder in the German-speaking world as well as elsewhere. Public philosophy, as it were, has a long-standing tradition, reaching back to Enlightenment-era German “Popularphilosophie” and of course to Socrates and the Sophists. This section presents four short articles on some current aspects of the public-philosophy debate: on the overall conditions for transferring content from academic philosophy to the public in Germany; on the relations between philosophers’ mediatic (...) presence and their disciplinary expertise; on 18th-century guidelines for accessible philosophical writing; and on public philosophy as a social practice that is more than mere unidirectional knowledge transfer. (shrink)

This paper explores the relationship between people's mental imagery for their experiences of paths and roads and the metaphorical use of path and road in discourse. We report the results of two studies, one a survey examining people's mental imagery about their embodied experiences with paths and roads, with the second providing a corpus analysis of the ways path and road are metaphorically used in discourse. Our hypothesis is that both people's mental imagery for path and road, and speakers' use (...) of these words in metaphorical contexts are strongly guided by their embodied understandings of real-world events related to travel on paths and roads. The results of these studies demonstrate how bodily experiences with artifacts partly constrains not only how specific conceptual metaphors emerge, but how different metaphorical understandings are applied in talk about abstract entities and events. (shrink)

African American distrust of medicine has consequences for treatment seeking and healthcare behaviour. Much work has been done to examine acute events that have contributed to this phenomenon and a sophisticated bioethics discipline keeps watch on current practices by medicine. But physicians and clinicians are not the only actors in the medical arena, particularly when it comes to health beliefs and distrust of medicine. The purpose of this paper is to call attention not just to ethical shortcomings of the past, (...) but to the structural contexts of those events and the contributions and responsibilities of popular media and academic disciplines in the production of knowledge. We argue that ignoring context and producing inaccurate work has real impacts on health and healthcare, particularly for African Americans, and thus engenders ethical obligations incumbent on disciplines traditionally recognised as purely academic. (shrink)

In De veritate I.2, Thomas Aquinas claims that “to every true act of understanding there must correspond some being and likewise to every being there corresponds a true act of understanding.” For Aquinas, the ratio of truth consists in a conformity between intellect and being. This account of truth, however, doesnot appear to allow for a certain class of truths, namely those that are about nonbeings. Many think that it is true that ‘no chimeras exist,’ that ‘blindness can becaused by (...) exposure to bright lights,’ and that ‘evil should be avoided.’ Yet, in each of these cases of truth, there does not appear to be a being to which the intellectconforms. In this paper, I will explore the ways in which Aquinas’s notion of truth as “conformity to being” is able to accommodate truths about nonbeings. (shrink)

La presente investigación surge como parte del análisis para la creación de políticas de ecoeficiencia en las empresas y tiene como finalidad el conocer las buenas prácticas ambientales aplicadas por las empresas del sector servicios en la ciudad de Girardot. Se presenta como un estudio descriptivo-analítico con enfoque cualitativo, utilizando como instrumento la ficha de observación aplicada a una muestra de 30 empresas del sector de servicios. Dentro de los resultados obtenidos se encuentra la calificación de acuerdo con un puntaje (...) entre 0.0 y 1.0 y el análisis del resultado total con ponderación de 0% a 100% a 11 criterios evaluados. (shrink)

This paper critically engages ethical issues in the allocation of novel, and potentially costly, health care resources to patients with disorders of consciousness. First, we review potential benefits of novel health care resources for patients and their families and outline preliminary considerations to address concerns about cost. We then address two problems regarding the allocation of health care resources to patients with disorders of consciousness: (1) the problem of uncertain moral status; and (2) the problem of accurately measuring the welfare (...) burdens these resources would relieve. We conclude by suggesting that opportunity-based frameworks might complement standard approaches for justifying resources allocation to patients with disorders of consciousness. (shrink)

Previous theories of the relationship between dispositions and conditionals are unable to account for the fact that dispositions come in degrees. We propose a fix for this problem that has the added benefit of avoiding the classic problems of finks and masks.