Outer membrane proteins (OMPs) maintain the viability of Gram‐negative bacteria by functioning as receptors, transporters, ion channels, lipases, and porins. Folding and assembly of OMPs involves synchronized action of chaperones and multi‐protein machineries which escort the highly hydrophobic polypeptides to their target outer membrane in a folding competent state. Previous studies have identified proteins and their involvement along the OMP biogenesis pathway. Yet, the mechanisms of action and the intriguing ability of all these molecular machines to work without the typical (...) cellular energy source of ATP, but solely based on thermodynamic principles, are still not well understood. Here, we highlight how different single‐molecule studies can shed additional light on the mechanisms and kinetics of OMP biogenesis. (shrink)

Michael Dummett, philosopher and social critic, is also one of the sharpest and most prominent commentators and campaigners for the fair treatment of immigrants and refugees in Britain and Europe. This book insightfully draws together his thoughts on this major issue for the first time. Exploring the confused and often highly unjust thinking about immigration, Dummett then carefully questions the principles and justifications governing state policies, pointing out that they often conflict with the rights of refugees as laid down (...) by the Geneva Convention. With compelling and often moving examples, On Immigration and Refugees points a new way forward for humane thinking and practice about a problem we cannot afford to ignore. (shrink)

What is knowledge? What, if anything, can we know? Michael Ayers initiates a fresh approach to these questions by recovering the insight in the distinction between 'knowledge' and 'belief' that was common philosophical currency for two millennia after Plato. He argues that knowledge comes only with direct cognitive contact with reality or truth.

_Pragmatism: An Introduction _provides an account of the arguments of the central figures of the most important philosophical tradition in the American history of ideas, pragmatism. This wide-ranging and accessible study explores the work of the classical pragmatists Charles Sanders Peirce, William James and John Dewey, as well as more recent philosophers including Richard Rorty, Richard J. Bernstein, Cheryl Misak, and Robert B. Brandom. Michael Bacon examines how pragmatists argue for the importance of connecting philosophy to practice. In so (...) doing, they set themselves in opposition to many of the presumptions that have dominated philosophy since Descartes. The book demonstrates how pragmatists reject the Cartesian spectator theory of knowledge, in which the mind is viewed as seeking accurately to represent items in the world, and replace it with an understanding of truth and knowledge in terms of the roles they play within our social practices. The book explores the diverse range of positions that have engendered marked and sometimes acrimonious disputes amongst pragmatists. Bacon identifies the themes underlying these differences, revealing a greater commonality than many commentators have recognized. The result is an illuminating narrative of a rich philosophical movement that will be of interest to students in philosophy, political theory, and the history of ideas. (shrink)

_Pragmatism: An Introduction _provides an account of the arguments of the central figures of the most important philosophical tradition in the American history of ideas, pragmatism. This wide-ranging and accessible study explores the work of the classical pragmatists Charles Sanders Peirce, William James and John Dewey, as well as more recent philosophers including Richard Rorty, Richard J. Bernstein, Cheryl Misak, and Robert B. Brandom. Michael Bacon examines how pragmatists argue for the importance of connecting philosophy to practice. In so (...) doing, they set themselves in opposition to many of the presumptions that have dominated philosophy since Descartes. The book demonstrates how pragmatists reject the Cartesian spectator theory of knowledge, in which the mind is viewed as seeking accurately to represent items in the world, and replace it with an understanding of truth and knowledge in terms of the roles they play within our social practices. The book explores the diverse range of positions that have engendered marked and sometimes acrimonious disputes amongst pragmatists. Bacon identifies the themes underlying these differences, revealing a greater commonality than many commentators have recognized. The result is an illuminating narrative of a rich philosophical movement that will be of interest to students in philosophy, political theory, and the history of ideas. (shrink)

Metaethical constitutivists attempt to explain reasons or normativity in terms of what is constitutive of agency. Michael Smith has recently defended a novel form of constitutivism that he argues provides a rational foundation for morality. This article develops three main objections centered on (1) the normative significance of Smith’s conception of ideal agency, (2) whether that conception begs the question in favor of the rationality of moral requirements, and (3) whether Smith’s constitutivism provides a plausible account of the content (...) of moral requirements. The conclusion is that Smith’s constitutivism, at least in its present form, is not persuasive. (shrink)

Basic Ethics presents for a wide range of students and other interested readers the questions raised in thinking about ethical problems, the answers offered by moral philosophy, and the means to better integrate both into the reader's world and personal life. It takes up what the author calls a "worldview theory," which shows readers how to begin with the values and understanding of the world that they already possess in order to transition from there to new levels of increasing ethical (...) awareness. Updates to the Third Edition include the more thorough integration of feminist ethics into the principal theoretical traditions, a new chapter on the ethical responsibility to be well informed of current events, expanded coverage of human rights, and additional opportunities on how to use ethical reasoning in thinking about one's own life and about public policy. Key Features: - Links personal values to a philosophical treatment of the major ethical theories - Presents ethics in the context of social/political issues that face our nation and the world - Challenges the student to react to the presented material through critical exercises that may be used as weekly assignments and can form the basis of class discussion and evaluation. - Engages the student to think about underlying issues first before presenting the most popular solutions - Invites the reader to make up her own mind on how to formulate an ethical theory that will help her in her own life - Offers a sixteen-chapter format to fit into most college-semester calendars - Presents an overall structure that establishes foundational problems in ethical theory in the first section of the book that are variously addressed by the different ethical theories in the second section of the book - Highlights key terms to help the reader grapple with issues raised - Includes a final chapter designed to help students comprehend the book in its entirety. Updates to the Third Edition: - Highlights new research on human rights and their relevance to ethical thinking and contemporary moral issues - Integrates feminist ethics into the principal theoretical traditions: virtue ethics, ethical intuitionism, and some versions of deontology - Provides new coverage of "fake news" and the moral responsibility to be well and accurately informed of current events - Expands opportunities to use ethical reasoning in thinking about one's own life and about public policy. (shrink)

This paper argues that education itself, properly understood, is intimately concerned with an individual’s being in the world, and therefore is ineluctably environmental. This is guaranteed by the ecstatic nature of consciousness. Furthermore, it is argued that a central dimension of this environment with which ecstatic human consciousness is engaged, is that of nature understood as the ‘self-arising’. Nature, so conceived, is essentially other and is epistemologically mysterious, possessing its own normativity, agency, and intrinsic value. As such, engagement with nature (...) presents opportunities for consciousness quintessentially to go beyond itself, to be inspired and refreshed, and to receive non-anthropogenic standards in the form of intimations of what is fitting and what is not. It will be argued that these are fundamental to the orientation of human being, providing primordial intimations of the nature of reality and truth. Given their centrality to the idea of a person’s becoming educated, the elucidation of these and the issues to which they give rise must be central to the philosophy of education and in this sense it becomes deeply ecological. (shrink)

Michael Martin; V*—The Rational Role of Experience, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Volume 93, Issue 1, 1 June 1993, Pages 71–88, https://doi.org/10.10.

Drawing upon selected literature from the United Kingdom, Denmark, and Canada we examine how Foucault's concepts of ‘episteme’, ‘rupture’ ‘parrhesia’ ‘care of the self’, and ‘problemitization’ have been applied to particular contexts of leadership development, pedagogy, nursing knowledge, and the relationship between caring and politics. Our aims are threefold: to give examples of how selected Foucauldian concepts have been taken up in practice; to clarify how we are positioned today as nurses; and to invite more nurses to engage critically with (...) historical inquiry and to engage in deep philosophical reflection about their relationship with nursing. We begin by examining the conditions and circumstances of Foucault's life, and conclude by posing the question in our subtitle to stimulate debate about the philosophical relevance of Foucauldian scholarship to nursing. (shrink)

In this critique of security studies, with insights into the thinking of Heidegger, Foucault, Derrida, Levinas and Arendt, Michael Dillon contributes to the rethinking of some of the fundamentals of international politics developing what might be called a political philosophy of continental thought. Drawing on the work of Martin Heidegger, Politics of Security establishes the relationship between Heidegger's readical hermeneutical phenomenology and politics and the fundamental link between politics, the tragic and the ethical. It breaks new ground by providing (...) an etymology of security, tracing the word back to the Greek asphaleia, and a unique political reading of Oedipus Rex. Michael Dillon traces the roots of desire for security to the metaphysical desire for certitude, and points out that our way of seeking that security is embedded in 20th century technology, thus resulting in a global crisis. Politics of Security will be invaluable to both political theorists and philosophers, and to anyone concerned with international relations, continental philosophy or the work of Martin Heidegger. (shrink)

A detailed account of human language and evolution, reconciling the apparent dichotomy between humans and all other animals. Focuses on the speculative presence of a Generative Assembly Device, unique to Homo sapiens.

Kant's claim that the rational will has absolute value or dignity appears to render any prudential suicide morally impermissible. Although the previous appeals of Kantians (e. g., David Velleman) to the notion that pain or mental anguish can compromise dignity and justify prudential suicide are unsuccessful, these appeals suggest three constraints that an adequate Kantian defense of prudential suicide must meet. Here I off er an account that meets these constraints. Central to this account is the contention that some suicidal (...) agents, because they are unable to fashion a rational conception of their own happiness, are diminished with respect to their dignity of humanity, and as a result, lack the pricelessness that makes prudential suicide wrong on a Kantian view. (shrink)

We are continually trying to make sense of our world through the stories we tell and are told, but in our search for coherence, we often sacrifice our freedom and the rich randomness of life. In this passionate and lucid book, Michael André Bernstein challenges our practice of "foreshadowing," in which we see our lives as moving toward a predetermined goal or as controlled by fate. Foreshadowing, he argues, demeans the variety and openness that exist in even the most (...) ordinary moments of life. And it is precisely ordinary life, with its random, haphazard, and contradictory choices, that Bernstein celebrates in his call for "sideshadowing"—an alternative practice that reminds us that every present is dense with possible futures. Bernstein sees the Holocaust as the prime example of how our tendency to "foreshadow" and "backshadow" misrepresents history. He argues eloquently against politicians and theologians who posit the Holocaust as foreordained and who depict its victims as somehow complicit with a fate that they should have been able to foresee. Instead, Bernstein proposes a radically new understanding of the relationship between the Holocaust and earlier Jewish experience, transforming how we read and write both individual and communal history. Foregone Conclusions is an extraordinarily wide-ranging book, both in its scope and in its broader intellectual and moral implications. From the latest biographies of Kafka to the peace accords between Israel and the PLO, from the role of cultural diversity in universities to the Crown Heights riots, Bernstein warns us against passively accepting our identities as being shaped primarily by historical or personal victimization. His book liberates us from stereotyped patterns of understanding the relationship between our lives as individuals and as members of racial, sexual, and historic/ethnic communities. Berstein ultimately opens a powerful new way to understand the principles governing how we read and write narratives--whether historical, personal, or literary. In striking original juxtapositions and critical evaluations of Marcel Proust, Robert Musil, and Aharon Appelfeld, Bernstein sugests the need for a new literary model based on the prosaics of daily life. Bernstein speaks directly and persuasively to many of the most pressing issues in Jewish history, Holocaust studies, literary criticism, and cultural history. Foregone Conclusions is a provocative and poignant attempt to find coherence in our world without accepting either ineluctable destiny of pure coincidence. (shrink)

Data protection law has a linear logic, in that it purports to trace the lifecycle of personal data from creation to collection, processing, transfer, and ultimately its demise, and to regulate each step so as to promote the data subject’s control thereof. Big data defies this linear logic, in that it decontextualizes data from its original environment and conducts an algorithmic nonlinear mix, match, and mine analysis. Applying data protection law to the processing of big data does not work well, (...) to say the least. This Article examines the case of big medical data. A survey of emerging research practices indicates that studies either ignore data protection law altogether or assume an ex post position, namely that because they are conducted after the data has already been created in the course of providing medical care, and they use de-identified data, they go under the radar of data protection law. These studies focus on the end-point of the lifecycle of big data: if sufficiently anonymous at publication, the previous steps are overlooked, on the claim that they enjoy immunity. I argue that this answer is too crude. To portray data protection law in its best light, we should view it as a process-based attempt to equip data subjects with some power to control personal data about them, in all phases of data processing. Such control reflects the underlying justification of data protection law as an implementation of human dignity. The process-based approach fits current legal practices and is justified by reflecting dignitarian conceptions of informational privacy. (shrink)

Recently, Kroedel and Schulz have argued that the exclusion problem—which states that certain forms of non-reductive physicalism about the mental are committed to systematic and objectionable causal overdetermination—can be solved by appealing to grounding. Specifically, they defend a principle that links the causal relations of grounded mental events to those of grounding physical events, arguing that this renders mental–physical causal overdetermination unproblematic. Here, we contest Kroedel and Schulz’s result. We argue that their causal-grounding principle is undermotivated, if not outright false. (...) In particular, we contend that the principle has plausible counterexamples, resulting from the fact that some mental states are not fully grounded by goings on ‘in our heads’ but also require external factors to be included in their full grounds. We draw the sceptical conclusion that it remains unclear whether non-reductive physicalists can plausibly respond to the exclusion argument by appealing to considerations of grounding. (shrink)

Nursing scholars continuously refine nursing knowledge and the philosophical foundations of nursing practice. They advance nursing knowledge by creating new knowledge and weighing the relevance of developments in cognate sciences. Nurse philosophers go further by providing epistemological and ontological arguments for explanations of nursing phenomena. In this article, I engage with Bender's arguments about why mechanisms should have more primacy as carriers of nursing knowledge. Despite the careful scholarship involved, Bender's arguments need to be more convincing. Accordingly, this article encourages (...) debate about Bender's arguments for reorientating nursing science to mechanisms. I begin by suggesting that the claim that the theory‐practice divide can be overcome by reorientating to mechanisms is acceptable only if we accept Bender's depiction of the challenge. Then I question the ontology Bender relies on to justify reorientating nursing science. After that, I argue that mechanisms in models that parallel analytical sociology undermine the kind of nursing science Bender advocates. I illustrate my arguments with a social mechanism thought experiment. Then I explain why Bender's arguments cannot escape the received view of science or inform emancipatory nursing action without theory. Finally, I mention some caveats and implications for nursing science. (shrink)

In 1988 the philosopher Gilles Deleuze remarked that throughout his career he had always been 'circling around' a concept of nature. Showing how Deleuze weaves original readings of Plato, the Stoics, Aristotle, and Epicurus into some of his most famous arguments about event, difference, and problem, Michael James Bennett argues that these interpretations of ancient Greek physics provide vital clues for understanding Deleuze's own conception of nature. -/- "Deleuze and Ancient Greek Physics" delves into the original Greek and Latin (...) texts and situates Deleuze's interpretations in relation to contemporary scholarship on ancient philosophy. It reveals that these readings are both more complex and controversial than they may at first appear. Generating both new critical analyses of Deleuze and an appreciation for his classical erudition, this book will be a valuable resource for anyone interested in ancient Greek philosophy, Deleuze's philosophical project, or his unique methodology in the history of philosophy. (shrink)

Chapter 1 presents BS, a basic syllogistic system based on Aristotle's logic, in natural deduction form. Chapters 2 and 3 treat the metatheory of BS: consitency, soundness, independence, and completeness. Chapter 4 and 5 deal with syllogistic and, in turn, propositional and predicate logic, chapter 6 is on existential import, chapter 7 on subject and predicate and chapter 8 on classes. Chapter 9 adds negative variables to BS, and proves its soundness and completeness.

In this chapter, I consider the prospects for deploying the concept of public reason in settling practical bioethical questions, focusing in particular on entitlements to healthcare. I begin by tracing the origins of the concept of public reason to the aspirations of the liberal political theorist to find a justification for the authority of government, which reconciles a basic belief in the autonomy of the individual with the legitimacy of the coercive institutions that create and govern the public sphere. I (...) then consider how the concept of public reason may be used in order to justify a universal entitlement to healthcare, paying particular attention to the work of Norman Daniels. Finally, I briefly consider the objection that an entitlement to healthcare grounded on such terms is insufficiently robust, because it downplays the values that healthcare encodes. I conclude by reflecting on whether the concept of public reason can be stretched to include a more robust conception of the value of health. (shrink)

Radical ecology typically brings to mind media images of ecological activists standing before loggers' saws, staging anti-nuclear marches, and confronting polluters on the high seas. Yet for more than twenty years, the activities of organizations such as the Greens and Earth First! have been influenced by a diverse, less-publicized group of radical ecological philosophers. It is their work—the philosophical underpinnings of the radical ecological movement—that is the subject of _Contesting Earth's Future_. The book offers a much-needed, balanced appraisal of radical (...) ecology's principles, goals, and limitations. Michael Zimmerman critically examines the movement's three major branches—deep ecology, social ecology, and ecofeminism. He also situates radical ecology within the complex cultural and political terrain of the late twentieth century, showing its relation to Martin Heidegger's anti-technological thought, 1960s counterculturalism, and contemporary theories of poststructuralism and postmodernity. An early and influential ecological thinker, Zimmerman is uniquely qualified to provide a broad overview of radical environmentalism and delineate its various schools of thought. He clearly describes their defining arguments and internecine disputes, among them the charge that deep ecology is an anti-modern, proto-fascist ideology. Reflecting both the movement's promise and its dangers, this book is essential reading for all those concerned with the worldwide ecological crisis. (shrink)

Leo Strauss and his alleged political influence regarding the Iraq War have in recent years been the subject of significant media attention, including stories in the _Wall Street Journal _and _New York Times._ _Time_ magazine even called him “one of the most influential men in American politics.” With _The Truth about Leo Strauss_, Michael and Catherine Zuckert challenged the many claims and speculations about this notoriously complex thinker. Now, with _Leo Strauss and the Problem of Political Philosophy_, they turn (...) their attention to a searching and more comprehensive interpretation of Strauss’s thought as a whole, using the many manifestations of the “problem of political philosophy” as their touchstone. For Strauss, political philosophy presented a “problem” to which there have been a variety of solutions proposed over the course of Western history. Strauss’s work, they show, revolved around recovering—and restoring—political philosophy to its original Socratic form. Since positivism and historicism represented two intellectual currents that undermined the possibility of a Socratic political philosophy, the first part of the book is devoted to Strauss’s critique of these two positions. Then, the authors explore Strauss’s interpretation of the history of philosophy and both ancient and modern canonical political philosophers, including Plato, Aristotle, Machiavelli, and Locke. Strauss’s often-unconventional readings of these philosophers, they argue, pointed to solutions to the problem of political philosophy. Finally, the authors examine Strauss’s thought in the context of the twentieth century, when his chief interlocutors were Schmitt, Husserl, Heidegger, and Nietzsche. The most penetrating and capacious treatment of the political philosophy of this complex and often misunderstood thinker, from his early years to his last works, _Leo Strauss and the Problem of Political Philosophy_ reveals Strauss’s writings as an attempt to show that the distinctive characteristics of ancient and modern thought derive from different modes of solving the problem of political philosophy and reveal why he considered the ancient solution both philosophically and politically superior. (shrink)

Dementia is more than a disease. What dementia is, how it is understood, and how it is experienced is influenced by multiple factors including our societal preoccupation with individual identity. This essay introduces empirical and theoretical evidence of alternative ways of understanding dementia that act as a challenge to common assumptions. It proposes that dementia be understood as an experience of systems, particularly networks of people affected by the diagnosis. Taking this step reveals much about the dementia experience, and about (...) what can be learned from persons with dementia and their networks of family, friends, and carers. It also suggests that dementia may be best thought of as an ecology that arises from the interaction between neuropathological change, people, language, and meaning. While challenging, this perspective may provide new ways of responding to dementia and caring for those affected by it. (shrink)

Abstract: Michael Tooley’s Comments on James Sterba’s Book, Is a Good God Logically Possible? -/- My comments on Jim Sterba’s book, Is a Good God Logically Possible?, were divided into the following sections. In the first section, I listed some of the attractive features of Sterba’s discussion. These included, first of all, his use of the ideas of “morally constrained freedom” and “constrained intervention by God” to show the moral evils in our world cannot be justified by an appeal (...) to the idea of free will. Then secondly, there is his response to the claim that if God intervened to prevent horrendous evils, one would have a world without regularities. Thirdly, there are his responses to certain important religiously based attempts to answer arguments from evil, namely, those that appeal to either Christian or Jewish views that we have wronged God, and stand in need of redemption, along with his discussion, and criticism of, certain specific, central Christian doctrines. Fourthly, there are his criticisms, first, of the four solutions that Michael Murray offers for the problem posed by the suffering of non-human animals, and then, secondly, of Trent Dougherty’s use of “a version of John Hick’s theodicy of soul-making in an attempt to provide a God-justifying account of animal suffering” (Dougherty, The Problem of Animal Pain: A Theodicy For All Creatures Great And Small, 2014). -/- I then went on to offer critical comments on various aspects of Sterba’s discussion, where I discussed: (1) his negative view of the relevance of probabilistic epistemology to the problem of evil; (2) his failure, in attempting to rule out logical connections between goods and evil, to consider evils that are not moral evils, such as Peter van Inwagen’s claim that “Being massively irregular is a defect in a world, a defect at least as great as the defect of containing patterns of suffering mentally equivalent to those found in the actual world”; (3) his failure, in discussing Michael Bergmann’s skeptical theism, to point out the central weakness in the principles that Bergmann advances, namely, that they entail not only moral skepticism, but inductive skepticism as well; (4) his treatment of natural evils, where he mistakenly claims that, in contrast to the case of horrendous moral evils, all of which God could prevent, God could not eliminate all horrendous natural evils, and where he says noting about either the horrendous evils due to bacteria and viruses or those due to natural disasters, all of which could be prevented by an omnipotent and omniscient deity without our ever being aware that this was happening. -/- Finally, I concluded by raising the question of what the strongest way is of formulating a logical incompatibility argument from evil, and I argued that it should take the form of the argument I set out in The Problem of Evil (2019) so that first, it should be based on natural evils rather than on moral evils; secondly, that it should focus on the case of suffering endured by sentient non-persons; and thirdly, that a crucial part must be an argument restricting the logical connections between goods and evils, an argument based on the proposition that the only goods and evils that can exist involve properties of, and relations between, conscious beings. -/- . (shrink)

One view of language is that it emerged in a single step in Homo sapiens, and depended on a radical transformation of human thought, involving symbolic representations and computational rules for combining them. I argue instead that language should be viewed as a communication system for the sharing of thoughts, and that thought processes themselves evolved well before the capacity to share them. One property often considered unique to language is generativity—the capacity to generate a potentially infinite variety of sentences. (...) I suggest that generativity is derived from the understanding of space and the capacity to recall or construct spatiotemporal scenarios, and probably goes far back in the evolution of animals that move in spatial habitats. Another property essential to language is theory of mind, the ability to understand what others are thinking, which probably emerged from animal empathy and became more complex in hominin evolution. Language evolved for the sharing of experiences, whether remembered or constructed, perhaps initially through pantomime but gradually conventionalized into standardized forms, including speech. These developments probably took place gradually during the Pleistocene, rather than as a sudden event in the evolution of H. sapiens. (shrink)

In Leviathan, Thomas Hobbes famously characterizes the state of nature as a predicament in which life is “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.” The only means of escape from that dire condition is to found the commonwealth, with its notorious sovereign. Hobbes invests the sovereign with virtually absolute power over the poor subjects of the commonwealth, and that vast and unlimited sovereign has drawn the reader’s eye for 350 years. -/- Yet Hobbes has a great deal to say about subjects (...) in a commonwealth as well, and he articulates a normative conception of a good subject. This book develops a novel interpretation of the role of submission in Leviathan, and it introduces the concept of subjection to explain the expectations Hobbes has for good subjects. (shrink)

Examines the dialogues from Plato's early and middle periods and illustrates the similarities and differences between Plators"s concept of craft knowledge and ...

Evolutionary medicine (EM) is an emerging field of medical studies that uses evolutionary theory to explain the ultimate causes of health and disease. The field’s main objective is to reconceptualize bodily vulnerabilities and pathophysiologies as evolutionary tradeoffs—many the result of an evolutionary mismatch between our ancient genome and modern lifestyle. This conceptual shift allows EM to describe health and disease in terms of adaptive functions and to prescribe treatments that best complement our evolved bodies. The goal is to “transform the (...) way patients and doctors see disease” (Nesse and Williams 1994, p. 245) in order to harness a renewed “feeling for the organism as a product of natural selection” .. (shrink)

While many theories exist to explain the complexity of environmental behaviour, the role of individuals' relationship with nature has not yet been fully clarified. This paper attempts to operationalise human-nature relationships. It expands upon a scale assessed by an iterative process of mixed methods in the US and Europe. This scale is then used to assess individuals' relationship with nature, and whether such relationships correlate with environmental behaviour. The value scale of Schwartz's Theory of Basic Values is used to validate (...) the results. The results verify that people hold multiple human-nature relationships, confirm strong correlations between human-nature relationships and values, and reveal that individuals' behaviour is connected to the relationship they have with nature. (shrink)

Annotation. In this sequel to his Morality, Politics, and Law, Michael Perry addresses the proper relation of moral convictions to the politics of a morally pluralistic society. While his analysis focuses on religious morality, Perry's argument applies to morality generally. Contending that nojustification of a contested political choice can be neutral among competing conceptions of human good, the author develops an ideal of "ecumenical politics" in which moral convictions about human good can be brought to bear in a productive (...) way in political argument. (shrink)

Mirrored-self misidentification is the delusional belief that one's own reflection in the mirror is a stranger. In two experiments, we tested the ability of hypnotic suggestion to model this condition. In Experiment 1, we compared two suggestions based on either the delusion's surface features (seeing a stranger in the mirror) or underlying processes (impaired face processing). Fifty-two high hypnotisable participants received one of these suggestions either with hypnosis or without in a wake control. In Experiment 2, we examined the extent (...) to which social cues and role-playing could account for participants' behaviour by comparing the responses of 14 hypnotised participants to the suggestion for impaired face processing (reals) with those of 14 nonhypnotised participants instructed to fake their responses (simulators). Overall, results from both experiments confirm that we can use hypnotic suggestion to produce a compelling analogue of mirrored-self misidentification that cannot simply be attributed to social cues or role-playing. (shrink)

abstract Ryan Tonkens proposes that my Kantian approach to suicide intervention with respect to the mentally ill (2002) wrongly assumes that the suicidally mentally ill are rational and are therefore rational agents to whom Kantian moral constraints ought to apply. Here I indicate how the empirical evidence concerning the suicidally mentally ill does not support Tonkens' criticism that the suicidally mentally ill are irrational. In particular, that evidence does not support the conclusion that such individuals are systemically practically irrational so (...) as to undermine the attribution of at least minimal rational autonomy to them. A Kantian moral framework, albeit one developed in a non-ideal direction, remains applicable to such individuals. (shrink)

This third edition is revised throughout, and adds nine new paradoxes that have important bearings in areas such as law, logic, ethics and probability.