This collection of essays, offered in honor of the distinguished career of prominent political philosophy professor Clifford Orwin, brings together internationally renowned scholars to provide a wide context and discuss various aspects of the virtue of “humanity” through the history of political philosophy.

The book highlights important research strategies in the quest to find thecause of SLI and to develop methods of prevention and treatment.

In many learning or inference tasks human behavior approximates that of a Bayesian ideal observer, suggesting that, at some level, cognition can be described as Bayesian inference. However, a number of findings have highlighted an intriguing mismatch between human behavior and standard assumptions about optimality: People often appear to make decisions based on just one or a few samples from the appropriate posterior probability distribution, rather than using the full distribution. Although sampling-based approximations are a common way to implement Bayesian (...) inference, the very limited numbers of samples often used by humans seem insufficient to approximate the required probability distributions very accurately. Here, we consider this discrepancy in the broader framework of statistical decision theory, and ask: If people are making decisions based on samples—but as samples are costly—how many samples should people use to optimize their total expected or worst-case reward over a large number of decisions? We find that under reasonable assumptions about the time costs of sampling, making many quick but locally suboptimal decisions based on very few samples may be the globally optimal strategy over long periods. These results help to reconcile a large body of work showing sampling-based or probability matching behavior with the hypothesis that human cognition can be understood in Bayesian terms, and they suggest promising future directions for studies of resource-constrained cognition. (shrink)

We respond to a Letter to the Editor regarding "Principlism and contemporary ethical considerations for providers of transgender health care." We address criticisms by Castle & Klein (2024) of blatant fatphobia related to the ethical elements concerning BMI restrictions for gender-affirming surgery. Our response corrects several mischaracterizations of the article and clarifies our position. My co-authors and I remain focused on advocating for patient-centered, ethically sound, evidence-based, and equitable healthcare policies.

Background: Transgender health care is a subject of much debate among clinicians, political commentators, and policy-makers. While the World Professional Association of Transgender Health (WPATH) Standards of Care (SOC) establish clinical standards, these standards contain implied ethics but lack explicit focused discussion of ethical considerations in providing care. An ethics chapter in the SOC would enhance clinical guidelines. Aims: We aim to provide a valuable guide for healthcare professionals, and anyone interested in the ethical aspects of clinical support for gender (...) diverse and transgender people of all ages. Recognizing that the WPATH is a global association, we address broad challenges. We offer a reflection on general ethical principles, providing conceptual tools for healthcare providers, patients, and families to navigate the specific challenges they might encounter in transgender health care, in line with WPATH’s worldwide mission and scope. Method: This article employs a descriptive analysis, and our framework of reference is the four principles of biomedical ethics: respect for autonomy, beneficence, nonmaleficence, and justice. Results: The article presents a discussion on the four ethical principles as applied to transgender health care. We address issues such as respect for patient autonomy in decision-making, the role of beneficence and nonmaleficence in clinical interventions, and the importance of justice in equitable treatment and access to care. Some of the ethical concerns we address in this article pertain to the current sociopolitical climate, where there has been increasing legal interference, internationally, for transgender and nonbinary people, particularly youth, seeking medical care. Discussion: We highlight the interplay between ethical principles and clinical practice, underscoring the need for ethical guidance in addressing the diverse challenges faced by healthcare providers and patients in transgender health care. We advocate for continuous refinement of ethical thinking to ensure that transgender health care is not only medically effective but also ethically sound. (shrink)

The best things in my Ufe have come to me by accident and this book results from one such accident: my having the opportunity, out of the blue, to go to work as H. Tristram Engelhardt, Jr. 's, research assistant at the Institute for the Medical Humanities in the University of Texas Medi cal Branch at Galveston, Texas, in 1974, on the recommendation of our teacher at the University of Texas at Austin, Irwin C. Lieb. During that summer Tris "lent" (...) me to Chester Bums, who has done important schol arly work over the years on the history of medical ethics. I was just finding out what bioethics was and Chester sent me to the rare book room of the Medical Branch Library to do some work on something called "medical deontology. " I discovered that this new field of bioethics had a history. This string of accidents continued, in 1975, when Warren Reich (who in 1979 made the excellent decisions to hire me to the faculty in bioethics at the Georgetown University School of Medicine and to persuade Andre Hellegers to appoint me to the Kennedy Institute of Ethics) took Tris Engelhardt's word for it that I could write on the history of modem medical ethics for Warren's major new project, the Encyclopedia of Bioethics. Warren then asked me to write on eighteenth-century British medical ethics. (shrink)

CHAPTER ONE Moral Character and Moral Theories Social interaction is the thread from which the fabric of moral character is woven.1 For it is social ...

We combine two recent probabilistic approaches to natural language understanding, exploring the formal pragmatics of communication on a noisy channel. We first extend a model of rational communication between a speaker and listener, to allow for the possibility that messages are corrupted by noise. In this model, common knowledge of a noisy channel leads to the use and correct understanding of sentence fragments. A further extension of the model, which allows the speaker to intentionally reduce the noise rate on a (...) word, is used to model prosodic emphasis. We show that the model derives several well-known changes in meaning associated with prosodic emphasis. Our results show that nominal amounts of actual noise can be leveraged for communicative purposes. (shrink)

This book explores the impact of neuroscience research over the past 20 or more years on brain function as it affects moral decisions. Findings show that the mind and brain are very close, if not the same, and that the brain 'makes' the mind. This is bringing about a change of focus from examining mental activity to the physical activity of the brain to understand thinking and behavior. We are discovering that the physical features of the brain play the major (...) role in shaping our thoughts and emotions, including the way we deal with 'moral' issues. This book sets out the historical framework of the transition from 'mentalism' to 'physicalism', shows how the physical brain works in moral decisions and then examines three broad areas of moral decision-making - the brain in 'bad' acts, the brain in decisions involving sexual relations, and the brain in money decision-making. (shrink)

In this paper I present a novel account of achievement and I argue that, all other things being equal, the presence of this particular type of achievement in a person’s life makes that life more meaningful. In arguing for this conclusion, I explore the connections between m-achievements and a person’s self-conception and especially the idea that m-achievements provide a reason for the revision of one’s self-conception.

The work of Hardt and Negri offers the field of education important theoretical resources for reconceptualizing subjectivity as a site of politics. Yet recent shifts on the Left toward more articulated mobilizations, along with the emergence of new decolonizing movements that interrogate the undifferentiated character of the common, partly affirm long-standing critiques of Hardt and Negri’s theses. Rather than rejecting their arguments, we should rethink their central assertions—from the starting point of decolonial theory—in a way that responds to these concerns. (...) We argue that the notion of constituent power grounding their theorization of politics be rethought in dialogue with the ethico-political concept of obediential power ; that the “monstrous” subjectivity they propose as the mode of exodus from given forms of biopolitical production take direction from Wynter’s new Human Project; and that the insurrectionary figure of the multitude be reconsidered alongside the variegated figure of insurgent cosmopolitanism. This rethinking restores to Hardt and Negri’s project a more contextualized and less universalistic theory of politics, and establishes a foundation for a critical pedagogy that, beginning from an accountability to student agency, engages a form of insurgent leadership that responds to the centrality in capitalist education of the historical processes of colonial partition. (shrink)

An oft-rehearsed objection to the claim that an intention can give one reasons is that if an intention could give us reasons that would allow an agent to bootstrap herself into having a reason where she previously lacked one. Such bootstrapping is utterly implausible. So, intentions to φ cannot be reasons to φ. Call this the bootstrapping objection against intentions being reasons. This essay considers four separate interpretations of this argument and finds they all fail to establish that non-akratic, nonevil, (...) and deliberatively sound intentions cannot be reasons. The first argument is the argument from evil intentions, the second is the argument from akratic intentions, the third is the argument from errors in deliberation, and the last is what I call the ‘wizardry’ argument. This ‘argument’, put forward most clearly by John Broome, claims that intentions are so insubstantial that were they on their own reasons for action, that would amount to creating something out of nothing and that is impossible. The essay argues that the claim that intentions are insubstantial is too strong a premise to put forward without argument. For there are other attitudes that are on their own sufficient to generate reasons, such as loving attitudes. The essay then argues that the bootstrapping objection’s status as dogma in the philosophy of action has led to insufficient attention being paid to the entirely reasonable question of whether intentions are sufficiently like other reason-giving attitudes, such as loving and valuing. It may turn out that, just as loving someone can give the loving person a reason to act in a certain, so too can intending to do something give someone a reason to act in a certain way, but we cannot effectively engage this question without first giving up our commitment to the bootstrapping objection as a central “insight” in philosophy of action. The essay concludes by proposing two research questions that are opened up by the abandonment of the bootstrapping objection as dogma, and proposes that we turn our philosophical attentions to those questions. (shrink)

A syntactically correct number-specification may fail to specify any number due to underspecification. For similar reasons, although each sentence in the Yablo sequence is syntactically perfect, none yields a statement with any truth-value. As is true of all members of the Liar family, the sentences in the Yablo sequence are so constructed that the specification of their truth-conditions is vacuous; the Yablo sentences fail to yield statements. The ‘revenge’ problem is easily defused. The solution to the semantical paradoxes offered here (...) revives the mediaeval cassatio approach, one that largely disappeared due to its incomprehending rejection by influential contemporary writers such as William Shyreswood and Thomas Bradwardine. The diagnosis readily extends to the set-theoretic paradoxes. (shrink)

Children with specific language impairment (SLI) show a protracted period of inconsistent use of tense/agreement morphemes. The purpose of this investigation was to determine whether this inconsistent use could be attributed to the children's misinterpretations of particular syntactic structures in the input. In Study 1, preschool-aged children with SLI and typically developing peers heard sentences containing novel verbs preceded by auxiliarywasor sentences in which the novel verb formed part of a nonfinite subject-verb sequence within a larger syntactic structure (e.g.We saw (...) the dog relling). The children were then tested on their use of the novel verbs in contexts that obligated use of auxiliaryis. The children with SLI were less accurate than their peers and more likely to produce the novel verb withoutisif the verb had been heard in a nonfinite subject-verb sequence. In Study 2, children with SLI and typically developing peers were tested on their comprehension of sentences such asThe cow sees the horse eating. The children with SLI were less accurate than their peers and were disproportionately influenced by the nonfinite subject-verb clause at the end of the sentence. We interpret these findings within the framework of construction learning. (shrink)

Examines the philosophical and clinical history of scientific medicine, and critiques the movements in psychoneuroimmunology and holistic and environmental medicine.

I argue for the use of the adjunction operator (adding a single new element to an existing set) as a basis for building a finitary set theory. It allows a simplified axiomatization for the first-order theory of hereditarily finite sets based on an induction schema and a rigorous characterization of the primitive recursive set functions. The latter leads to a primitive recursive presentation of arithmetical operations on finite sets.

Anthony David Nuttall, a Fellow of the British Academy, was born on April 25, 1937, and grew up in Hereford. He attended Hereford Grammar School and then Watford Grammar School, where he received a thorough, old-fashioned classical education. Nuttall then went to Merton College in the University of Oxford, where he met his lifelong friend Stephen Medcalf. In 1962, he was appointed lecturer in English at the new University of Sussex, rising to professor ten years later, and in 1978 he (...) became Pro-Vice-Chancellor. After twenty-two years teaching at Sussex, Nuttall applied for a fellowship at New College, Oxford. Common Sky was the book in which he emerged as a critic with a distinctive and compelling way of looking at literature. Another book, Overheard by God is about George Herbert's poetry, but its first, riveting sentence displays the brilliance of its immodesty. In New Mimesis, Nuttall discusses the present state of literary theory. He also wrote Essay on Man, The Alternative Trinity, and The Stoic in Love. (shrink)

This essay discusss (1) the differences and commonalities between romantic love and friendship and (2) the differences and commonalities between parental love of friendship.

outrageous remarks about contradictions. Perhaps the most striking remark he makes is that they are not false. This claim first appears in his early notebooks (Wittgenstein 1960, p.108). In the Tractatus, Wittgenstein argued that contradictions (like tautologies) are not statements (Sätze) and hence are not false (or true). This is a consequence of his theory that genuine statements are pictures.

Volume 20, Issue 3, March 2020, Page 65-68.

I report the findings of a comparative analysis of online Christian and Buddhist responses to artificial intelligence. I review the Buddhist response and compare it with the Christian response outlined in an earlier essay (Tamatea 2008). The discussion seeks to answer two questions: Which approach to imago Dei informs the online Buddhist response to artificial intelligence? And to what extent does the preference for a particular approach emerge from a desire to construct the Self? The conclusion is that, like the (...) Christian response, the Buddhist response is grounded not so much in the reality of AI as it is in the discursive constructions of AI made available through Buddhist cosmology, which (paradoxically), like the Christian response, are deployed in defense of the Self, despite claimed adherence to the notion of anatta, or non-Self. (shrink)

For familiar reasons, stereotyping is believed to be irresponsible and offensive. Yet the use of stereotypes in humor is widespread. Particularly offensive are thought to be sexual and racial stereotypes, yet it is just these that figure particularly prominently in jokes. In certain circumstances it is unquestionably wrong to make jokes that employ such stereotypes. Some writers have made the much stronger claim that in all circumstances it is wrong to find such jokes funny; in other words that people who (...) laugh at such jokes betray sexist/racist attitudes. This conclusion seems false. There is, as I shall argue, a thin dividing line between being properly sensitive to the rights and feelings of women and of racial groups different from our own, and being excessively sensitive to oversensitivity. Oversensitivity is, in this context, a kind of intolerance, and there is no reason why we should pander to that. One can be opposed to the unchecked dissemination of certain kinds of racist or sexist humor without oneself being a racist or sexist for finding such humor funny. The use of various stereotypes in humor serves the linguistic purpose of facilitating brevity and punch, the cultural purpose of preserving, in a sanitized form traditional rivalries and antipathies, and the psychological purpose of discharging fears. Blanket moral condemnation is inappropriate, though there will, of course, be circumstances under which the promulgation of certain types of humor, or even its enjoyment, ought to be condemned. (shrink)

Over the past thirty-five years, there has been an explosive increase in scientists' ability to explain the structure and functioning of the human brain. While psychology has advanced our understanding of human behavior, various other sciences, such as anatomy, physiology, and biology, have determined the critical importance of synapses and, through the use of advanced technology, made it possible actually to see brain cells at work within the skull's walls. Here Jean-Pierre Changeux elucidates our current knowledge of the human brain, (...) taking an interdisciplinary approach and explaining in layman's terms the complex theories and scientific breakthroughs that have significantly improved our understanding in the twentieth century. (shrink)

This essay looks at the impact that technology is having upon friendship. For as we all know, it is nothing at all to see friends at a restaurant table all engaged in texting rather than talking to one another.

Ethical egoism and Kantian ethics constitute radically different and incompatible moral traditions. Speaking rather broadly, one might go so far as to say that each tradition is a source of inspiration for criticisms of the other, each tradition reminding us of the limitations of the other. For Kantian ethics, with its extreme other-regarding and abstract approach to morality, would sometimes seem to lose sight of the self, leaving a self that seems somewhat eviscerated. Ethical egosim, by contrast, with its extreme (...) self-centered conception, would seem to lose sight of the importance of others, positing a self that can only give instrumental value to others. Though both traditions have been criticized, these criticisms have travelled independently of one another—no line of argument being at once a criticism of both. Perhaps no such argument is to be had. However, when two traditions trade off of one another this suggests an underlying text or theme. That theme, I suggest, is about the metaphysics of the moral self—that is, the way in which the self is morally constituted. I want to offer an account of the way in which the self is morally constituted which is at once a criticism of both ethical egoism and Kantian ethics. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Grounding Psychiatry in the Body and the Social WorldLaurence J. Kirmayer, MD, FRCPC, FCAHS, FRSC (bio)The sensing body is like an open circuit that completes itself only in things, in others, in the surrounding earth.—David Abram (2012)Giulio Ongaro has written an interesting set of papers that aim to advance our thinking about ‘externalist’ (i.e., social) approaches to psychiatry by rehearsing an enactivist account of mental disorder and elaborating an (...) ethnographic example of social explanation rooted in a different cultural ontology and system of healing. I am completely onboard with his calls for more attention to the social world in psychiatric theory, research, and practice. What is especially novel in his work is the use of ethnographic research to inform philosophical thinking about psychiatry.Despite my enthusiasm for this effort, I have three concerns with his argument that I can only briefly outline in this commentary: i) the lack of attention to a large body of work in social epidemiology, psychosomatics, and cultural psychiatry that speaks directly to the goals of the biopsychosocial (BPS) approach and that vitiates much of the recent critique of that model; ii) the use of an ethnographic example to idealize an ‘externalist’ system of medicine that patently cannot address the many social structural and sociophysiological processes that psychiatry needs to understand; and iii) most importantly from a philosophical perspective, the fact that the enactivist framework he endorses actually breaks down the distinctions between internalist/externalist psychiatry and naturalist/constructivist ontologies around which he organizes his critique and proposed remedy (Kirmayer & Ramstead, 2017).Integration and the BPS ApproachOngaro’s first paper begins by acknowledging the recent critiques of the BPS approach that claim the BPS leaves vague or underspecified the ways in which the biological, psychological and social domains interact to give rise to mental disorders and how they can be included in systematic case formulation to guide assessment and treatment [End Page 315] intervention. Ongaro notes that current efforts to elaborate an embodied, enactivist approach to psychiatry hold the promise of outlining a more systematic approach to the relationship between levels or domains in the BPS. However, he argues this still leaves psychiatry with excessive emphasis on ‘internalizing’ explanations that appeal to biological or psychological processes within the person to characterize mental disorders. He suggests that this needs to be complemented by an externalizing approach that gives due weight to social processes. The dominant approaches leave the social world underspecified and he notes psychiatry lacks an “ontology of the social.”To some extent, this recent critique—not by Ongaro but by some of the authors he cites—reveals a lack of familiarity or engagement with a rich literature in social epidemiology, psychosomatics and sociosomatics that has long demonstrated the close links between social and physiological processes (Krieger, 2021). This research has produced multiple examples of these relationships detailing their mechanisms and dynamics in ways that do not privilege internal processes. There is no problem identifying many specific instances of these links; for example, research has examined how exposure to racism and discrimination results in increased risk for psychiatric disorders (Kirkbride et al., 2024). We have listed many other such mechanisms related to depression in a recent paper (Gómez-Carrillo & Kirmayer, 2023). This work does not yield a single overarching model or explanation but reveals diverse kinds of mechanisms that interact in a multilevel system that includes both dynamic and linguistic modes (Gómez-Carrillo et al., 2023). Integration occurs in the functioning of this system and cannot be captured in any monolithic theory. This is not a limitation of the BPS, simply a reflection of the complexity of human beings.Can we have a general theory of the links between dimensions or domains in the BPS or will it always remain a piecemeal account that depends on the details of specific systems? Given the many different kinds of processes involved, it seems unrealistic to expect a totalizing theory. If so, both research and clinical work need practical ways to assess the myriad pathways and processes involved in psychiatric disorders in order to formulate cases efficiently, identify a manageable subset of factors to consider in a... (shrink)

The development of X-ray diffraction photography was central to the discovery of the helical structure of DNA in 1953. Unfortunately the story of how this technique was developed receded into the background as subsequent attention focused on the moment of discovery by Watson and Crick. As a result the importance of photography as ‘data’ and the role it plays in scientific discovery is underplayed. We seek to rectify this situation by presenting this story and by drawing conclusions about the importance (...) of this form of photography in scientific investigation as well as for the insights it gives us regarding the process of discovery. (shrink)

This book critically examines Leo Strauss s claim that the philosophers of antiquity, especially Plato, wrote esoterically, hiding the highest truths exclusively between the lines.

outrageous remarks about contradictions. Perhaps the most striking remark he makes is that they are not false. This claim first appears in his early notebooks (Wittgenstein 1960, p.108). In the Tractatus, Wittgenstein argued that contradictions (like tautologies) are not statements (Sätze) and hence are not false (or true). This is a consequence of his theory that genuine statements are pictures.