Logic, Methodology and Philosophy of Science VII.

The authors discuss the political, moral, cultural, and legal aspects of the United States' response to the attacks of September 11.

This article is concerned with developing a philosophical approach to a number of significant changes to academic publishing, and specifically the global journal knowledge system wrought by a range of new digital technologies that herald the third age of the journal as an electronic, interactive and mixed-media form of scientific communication. The paper emerges from an Editors' Collective, a small New Zealand-based organisation comprised of editors and reviewers of academic journals mostly in the fields of education and philosophy. The paper (...) is the result of a collective writing process. (shrink)

Since the discovery that the characteristics of dreaming sleep are far stronger in Stage 1 rapid eye movement sleep than in any other biological state, investigators have attempted to determine the relative responsibility of the tonic versus the phasic properties of REM sleep for the different characteristics of dreaming–features such as the amount of information in the dream report, the brightness and clarity of the visual images, shifts in thematic continuity, and incongruities of image and meaning. The present experiment is (...) designed to identify dream characteristics that are specifically associated with tonic changes in level of cortical activation within sleep. It samples reports of imagery and thought during spontaneous variations within one phase of the 24-h diurnal rhythm and across the REM-NREM sleep cycle in order to identify the independent and joint contributions of the two cycles to imagery and thought. The rising phase of the diurnal cycle in the late night and morning was estimated from clock time during the late night and early morning and was varied by delaying the sleep onset and waking time of the subjects. Considered together with other studies, the results suggest that the major determinant of vivid visual imagery and enhanced cognitive activity during sleep is a pattern of subcortical and cortical activation that is common to both the REM phase of the REM-NREM cycle and the activated phase of the 24-h diurnal wake-sleep cycle. (shrink)

A collection of essays in French or English on the reception of Cartesian philosphy.

Public health ethics is emerging as a new field of inquiry, distinct not only from public health law, but also from traditional medical ethics and research ethics. Public health professional and scholarly attention is focusing on ways that ethical analysis and a new public health code of ethics can be a resource for health professionals working in the field. This article provides a preliminary exploration of the ethical issues faced by public health professionals in day-to-day practice and of the type (...) of ethics education and support they believe may be helpful. (shrink)

The issue of public health ethics has received much attention in recent years and is seen as a new field, distinct from medical ethics. Faculty from the University of Virginia, Johns Hopkins School of Public Health, Georgetown University, the University of Minnesota, and others received a grant from the Greenwall Foundation to examine this new field of public health ethics and identify the unique principles that distinguish it from the study of medical ethics. In the course of that study, which (...) included exploring the field with public health practitioners, a number of distinguishing ethical principles emerged. The moral principles appropriate for public health officials included producing benefits; avoiding, preventing and removing harms; producing a maximum balance of benefits over harms; and distributing benefits and burdens fairly. (shrink)

Public health ethics is emerging as a new field of inquiry, distinct not only from public health law, but also from traditional medical ethics and research ethics. Public health professional and scholarly attention is focusing on ways that ethical analysis and a new public health code of ethics can be a resource for health professionals working in the field. This article provides a preliminary exploration of the ethical issues faced by public health professionals in day-to-day practice and of the type (...) of ethics education and support they believe may be helpful. (shrink)

This essay traces the development of the philosophical debates concerning active powers and human agency in eighteenth-century Scotland. I examine how and why Scottish philosophers such as Francis Hutcheson, George Turnbull, David Hume, and Henry Home, Lord Kames, depart from John Locke’s and other traditional conceptions of the will and how Thomas Reid and Dugald Stewart reinstate Locke’s distinction between volition and desire. Moreover, I examine what role desires, passions, and motives play in the writings of these and other (...) Scottish Enlightenment philosophers on human agency and draw attention to their underlying disputes concerning liberty and necessity. I end by reflecting on how classifications of principles of actions changed in eighteenth and early nineteenth-century Scottish philosophy. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Cloning without Prior Approval:A Response to Recent Disclosures of NoncomplianceRuth Macklin (bio)Editor's note: In September 1994, the Kennedy Institute of Ethics Journal published a special issue on the ethics of embryo splitting or "cloning," which included papers originally prepared for a workshop on embryo splitting sponsored by the National Advisory Board on Ethics in Reproduction (NABER) and NABER's report, Human Cloning through Embryo Splitting. The impetus for the project (...) was embryo-splitting research conducted by Drs. Jerry L. Hall, Robert J. Stillman, and others, at George Washington University and presented in October 1993 at a joint meeting of the American Fertility Society and the Canadian Fertility and Andrology Society. Media coverage at the time reported that the research had been approved by the university's formal review committees. However, it came to light in December 1994 that the researchers had not obtained approval from the university's institutional review board prior to conducting the research. Following a university investigation, the researchers were disciplined and instructed to destroy their data. The university also voluntarily forwarded the records of the incident to the Office for Protection from Research Risks at the National Institutes of Health. Dr. Hall resigned from George Washington University in September 1994.In the following postscript to her article on the ethics of embryo splitting (KIEJ, September 1994), Ruth Macklin discusses these events. The letters and memoranda that she cites were obtained from NIH through the Freedom of Information Act.My article, "Splitting Embryos on the Slippery Slope: Ethics and Public Policy" (KIEJ, September 1994), included a brief assessment of the ethics of the Hall-Stillman embryo-splitting experiment conducted at George Washington University (GWU). The article reviewed the researchers' stated purpose ("to help infertile couples by reproducing nature's ability to reproduce twins"), the features of the research itself (splitting embryos that never could become viable and with no plan to implant either the original or the split embryos), and the review procedures surrounding the experiment. I said that the researchers might be [End Page 57] faulted for not waiting until embryo research guidelines had been established at the national level; on the other hand, they surely could not fail to conform to such national guidelines when none existed.My conclusions were based on information that had been reported in the print media. Dr. Robert J. Stillman's statement that the experiment "had been approved by the university's formal review committees and peer reviewed by colleagues" was reported in the Washington Post on October 25, 1993, (Sawyer 1993). However, in light of the recent disclosure that the researchers had not obtained approval from George Washington University's IRB before proceeding with the research (Schwartz 1994), I now draw a sharply different conclusion about the ethics of the researchers' behavior.The most glaring flaw was the researchers' failure to submit a protocol to their institution's IRB in advance of embarking on the research. Following an investigation of the matter, the Office for Protection from Research Risks (OPRR) made the further determination that "the failure on the part of GWU research investigators and administrators to notify the IRB promptly about noncompliance in this research constitutes additional serious noncompliance" with research regulations (J. Thomas Puglisi, Chief of the Compliance Oversight Branch, Division of Human Subject Protections, OPRR, letter to Stephen J. Trachtenberg, President of George Washington University, 23 August 1994). Is it reasonable to suppose that these researchers were unaware of their obligations (a) to obtain prior review and approval from the IRB and (b) to notify the IRB promptly about their noncompliance? Regarding the latter item, Dr. Puglisi's letter to the President of GWU states that "the notification requirement has been a longstanding element of the GWU MPA [multiple project assurance], which should have been familiar to all members of the GWU research community." I shall concentrate on the researchers' more glaring ethical omission, failure to obtain prior review and approval from the IRB.Did either or both of these researchers contend that they were unaware of any review requirements for their research? Hall blames Stillman, Director of the Division of Reproductive Endocrinology, Fertility, and IVF Programs, for not making the requirement... (shrink)

Happiness is a large idea. It looms enticingly before us when we are young, delivers verdicts on our lives when we are old, and seems to inform a responsible engagement with children. The question is raised: do we want this idea? I explore a distinction between rich and poor conceptions of happiness, suggesting that many sceptical arguments are directed against the latter. If happiness is to receive its teleological due, recognised in rather the way Aristotle saw it, as a final (...) end that crucially lacks specificity, it must be richly conceived without denying the significance of unhappiness or despair. I suggest that Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics is ‘completed’ in a distinctively Aristotelian sense by authors like George Eliot and Virginia Woolf. Substantial excerpts are discussed to show how ideas like ‘making others happy’ may be richly conceived. By treating literary examples (poetically articulated, sensually received) as ineliminable reference points in our thinking, we open up a new way of imagining relationships in education. We attend communally, conversationally and often argumentatively to the dramas of human life. This, I argue, is how we grapple with large ideas and bring about ethical learning. (shrink)

The flip side of radical autonomism is known as radical moralism. Splitting the difference between radical autonomism and radical moralism is the view known as moderate moralism, endorsed by contemporary aesthetician Noël Carrol. Radical moralism traces its roots back to Plato, who was all too aware of art's power to sway the hearts of its audience. The joke slightly depowers the powerful person, by transferring that power to the audience who laughs. John Belushi's Samurai Futaba sketches are more cringy than (...) funny to modern sensibilities, because the butt of the joke is Belushi's fictitious Futaba – a stand‐in for a stereotypical 1970s American understanding of a Japanese person. The butt of an impressionist's joke is usually, pretty straightforwardly, whoever they are doing an impression of. So, the butt of a typical Chase‐as‐Ford pratfall is Gerald Ford, and the butt of Carvey's famous “read my lips” antics is George H.W. Bush. (shrink)

Neither the George Washington University embryo splitting experiment nor the technique of embryo splitting itself has ethical flaws. The experiment harmed or wronged no one, and the investigators followed intramural review procedures for the experiment, although some might fault them for failing to seek extramural consultation or for not waiting until national guidelines for research on preembryos were developed. Ethical objections to such cloning on the basis of possible loss of individuality, possible lessening of individual worth, and concern about (...) potential harm to the resulting children are discussed and challenged, as are objections to the creation of embryos for the purpose of genetic diagnosis. Many of the ethical questions raised by the George Washington experiment are similar to those posed by existing reproductive technologies that allow the simultaneous production of several embryos. A multidisciplinary group should consider whether regulation of cloning is needed, and laws should be enacted to prohibit a commercial market for all frozen embryos. (shrink)

This essay draws on Kenneth George's ethnographic study of the Indonesian painter Abdul Djalil Pirous and his art, as well as Pirous's own characterizations of his paintings as “spiritual notes,” to theorize and examine how paintings serve as ethical media. The essay offers a provisional definition of and methodology for “visual ethics” and considers how pictures and language can function quite differently as sites for ethical reflection. The particular painting analyzed here is a large temple mural of the death (...) of the Buddha located at Wat Unnalom, a prominent Buddhist monastery in Phnom Penh, painted in the 1980s by Cambodian artist Sum Pon. After discussing the lifeworld of Pon's Mahāparinibbāna and varied Khmer Buddhist interpretations of the painting, I suggest that the painting's rendering of “moral vision” helps us understand Buddhist ways of seeing more generally. I conclude by returning to George's question about how our understanding of ethics would change if we took pictures as the “fulcrum of moral relationships,” arguing that pictures can embody certain kinds of tensions or paradoxes that are difficult to explain and grasp discursively, such as paradoxes that arise from the inevitability and yet inexplicability of death as well as the tensions between Buddhist aims of cultivating “boundless” love and the particularities of our own individual experiences of love. (shrink)

Volume I, Substance, contains, under the heading Substance, the writings of Plato, Plotinus, Boethius, Marsilio Ficcino, Tommaso Campanella, Johannes Kepler, Arthur Schopenhauer, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Feruccio Busoni. Under the heading Essence and Distinctness are found the writings of Aristotle, Aristoxenus, Philodemus, Immanuel Kant, Friedrich W.J. Schelling, George W.F. Hegel, Johann Herbart, and Eduard Hanslick.

This volume comprises a selection of papers that were contributed to the 7th International Congress of Logic, Methodology and Philosophy of Science, which was held in Salzburg from the 11th - 16th July, 1983. There were 14 sections in this congress: 1. proof theory and foundations of mathematics 2. model theory and its applica ti on 3. recursion theory and theory of computation 4. axiomatic set theory 5. philosophical logic 6. general methodology of science 7. foundations of probability and induction (...) 8. foundations and philosophy of the physical sciences 9. foundati ons and phi 1 osophy of biology 10. foundations and philosophy of psychology foundations and philosophy 11. of the social sciences 12. foundati ons and philosophy of linguistics 13. history of logic, methodology and philosophy of science 14. fundamental principles of the ethics of science In each section, three or four invited addresses were given, which will be published in the Congress Proceedings (Ruth Barcan Marcus, Georg J. W. Dorn and Paul Weingartner, eds. : Logic, Metho dology and Philosophy of Science VII. Proceedings of the Seventh International Congress of Logic, Methodology and Philosophy of v PREFACE Science, Salzburg, 1983. - Amsterdam, New York, Oxford: North-Holland Publishing 'Company, 1985. ) Every section with the exception of section 14 also contained contributed papers. (shrink)

Pursuing Justice in Africa focuses on the many actors pursuing many visions of justice across the African continent--their aspirations, divergent practices, and articulations of international and vernacular idioms of justice. The essays selected by editors Jessica Johnson and George H. Karekwaivanane engage with topics at the cutting edge of contemporary scholarship across a wide range of disciplines. These include activism, land tenure, international legal institutions, and post-conflict reconciliation. Building on recent work in sociolegal studies that foregrounds justice over and (...) above concepts such as human rights and legal pluralism, the contributors grapple with alternative approaches to the concept of justice and its relationships with law, morality, and rights. While the chapters are grounded in local experiences, they also attend to the ways in which national and international actors and processes influence, for better or worse, local experiences and understandings of justice. The result is a timely and original addition to scholarship on a topic of major scholarly and pragmatic interest. Contributors: Felicitas Becker, Jonathon L. Earle, Patrick Hoenig, Stacey Hynd, Fred Nyongesa Ikanda, Ngeyi Ruth Kanyongolo, Anna Macdonald, Bernadette Malunga, Alan Msosa, Benson A. Mulemi, Holly Porter, Duncan Scott, Olaf Zenker. (shrink)

In 1924, not quite two years after receiving his doctorate from the University of Vienna, Eric Voegelin was named a Laura Spelman Rockefeller Memorial Fellow and thus given the opportunity to pursue postdoctoral studies in the United States. For the next twenty-four months, Voegelin worked with some of the most creative scholars in America and at several of the country's great universities, an experience that undoubtedly influenced his scholarly and personal perspectives throughout his life. A more immediate result was the (...) publication in 1928 of _On the Form of the American Mind,_ the young philosopher's first major work, in which his acute perceptions and analyses combine with a conceptual vocabulary struggling to find its own coherence and form. Voegelin begins his inquiry into the form of the American mind with a complex discussion of the concepts of time and existence in European and American philosophy and continues with an extended interpretation of George Santayana, a study of the Puritan mystic Jonathan Edwards, a presentation on Anglo-American jurisprudence, and a consideration of the historian, economist, and political scientist John R. Commons. Although admitting that this diversity of themes seems only loosely connected," Voegelin demonstrates the actual overall unity of these various subjects: each concerns linguistic expressions of a theoretical nature. Analysis of _On the Form of the American Mind_ indicates that Voegelin integrated the approaches of _Lebensphilosophie_ into what Georg Misch called the "philosophical combination of anthropology and history," which characterized contemporary trends within the discourse of the _Geisteswissenschaften_ and finally resulted in a theoretical paradigm of philosophical anthropology. Jürgen Gebhardt and Barry Cooper provide access to this brilliant study with their two-part introduction. The first part considers _On the Form of the American Mind_ in the context of methodological debates ongoing in Germany at the time Voegelin was writing the book; the second describes Voegelin's American experience and compares his work with similar studies written during the post-World War I period. (shrink)

This book reminds us in yet another context that women's contributions to science can be rendered invisible by “the historical record.” The Manhattan Project, the supersecret midcentury United States research, development, and production enterprise that produced the nuclear bomb, was a massive undertaking, at one time employing 130,000 persons. About 10 percent were women, yet official histories made no mention of female scientists or engineers.Sleuthing by the physicists Ruth Howes and Caroline Herzenberg has documented Manhattan Project contributions by more (...) than three hundred women. Howes and Herzenberg begin with a few well‐known European women pioneers in nuclear science , none Americans and none available for the U.S. bomb effort. They then recount the history of the Manhattan Project via biographical vignettes of women, organized in chapters: “The Physicists,” “The Chemists,” “Mathematicians and Calculators,” “Biologists and Medical Scientists,” “The Technicians,” and “Other Women of the Manhattan Project.”It appears that few of these women knew each other. In her foreword, Ellen Weaver writes: “When I read the personal reminiscences of the men who were nuclear pioneers, I'm struck by the importance they place on their friends and associates, and on the often intense interaction among them, which could lead to major insights in both theory and practice of science. And I'm a bit jealous. By and large, women did not share in that give‐and‐take.”Not only was there little networking among women scientists and technicians in the early 1940s while the bomb was being developed, but there was little opportunity for them to share their experiences later. Only a very small percentage of these women were able to continue their professional careers. The many barriers to women as professional scientists and engineers, temporarily lowered owing to the manpower shortages of wartime, were raised after the war. There did not develop a community of women, engaged in teaching and research, with roots in the Manhattan Project.A web page is being developed to gather and provide further information about the women scientific workers of the Manhattan Project. Howes and Herzenberg are setting up an on‐line archive there, hoping that others who have information about the women scientific workers of the Manhattan Project will contact them via the web page or by email .The magnitude of their endeavor to learn about these women was illustrated vividly to me while writing this review. I attended the memorial service for my aunt, Mary Matilda Morrison Pendleton , and heard in her eulogy that “she worked as a nurse at the Hanford project, near Richland, Washington, where the government was secretly making atomic bombs. She would work shift work, two weeks of day shift, two weeks of swing shift, two weeks of graveyard shift, then she would get seven days off. She wore a badge every day that was checked after each day's work to see how much she had been radiated.” Although I thought that I knew her well, my aunt's role in the Manhattan Project had been unknown to me.The women of the Manhattan Project are finally gaining visibility. For example, Nancy Cook Steeper's book‐length biography of Dorothy Scarritt McKibbon is being published by the Los Alamos Historical Society. Howes and Herzenberg have provided ideas and starting points for many additional biographical projects. Perhaps the greatest long‐term value of their book is the impetus that it will give to further research.The book is well written, easy to read, and attractively printed. An appendix, listing the women and their roles, and a thorough index combine to make this an easily used reference work. There is also an informative sixteen‐page chronology that focuses on the crucial period from 1938 through 1945. (shrink)

In philosophy textbooks for undergraduates the cultural anthropologist Ruth Benedict is often cited as a proponent of moral relativism, and her writings are not infrequently excerpted to illustrate the view that the individual’s moral values are culturally determined. Because Benedict established that significant differences can exist in the underlying cultural patterns of different societies, her work is commonly construed as providing evidence for the arbitrary and non-rational basis of morals. The author of the present essay argues that this popular (...) reading of Benedict is mistaken. He draws a distinction between two different forms of moral relativism—the objective and the subjective—and then contends that Benedict is widely viewed as a subjective relativist when in fact her relativism was of the objective variety. He shows that her position actually has much in common with the pragmatic meliorism of John Dewey and George Herbert Mead. (shrink)

This paper argues for the existence of a fourth positive generic value relation that can hold between two items beyond ‘better than’, ‘worse than’, and ‘equally good’: namely ‘on a par’.

This article reviews some of the definitions in circulation that reveal the varied perspectives and goals of the field of neuroethics. It discusses a brief taxonomy of neuroethical questions. It deals with two specific contentious issues, one clinical and one from social sciences and shows how neuroethicists can serve to inform and to protect. Neuroethicists need education that encompasses many domains. The study describes the academic grounding and qualifications that should be required and also considers the pivotal roles neuroethicists should (...) play. It contributes views that may help define the field of neuroethics and give structure and relevance to its activities. Finally, it concludes that neuroethicists are needed, now more than ever. (shrink)

There are no "special sciences" in Fodor's sense. There is a large group of sciences, "historical sciences," that differ fundamentally from the physical sciences because they quantify over a different kind of natural or real kind, nor are the generalizations supported by these kinds exceptionless. Heterogeneity, however, is not characteristic of these kinds. That there could be an univocal empirical science that ranged over multiple realizations of a functional property is quite problematic. If psychological predicates name multiply realized functionalist properties, (...) then there is no single science dealing with these: human psychology, ape psychology, Martian psychology and robot psychology are necessarily different sciences. (shrink)

In this book, first published in 1975, Dr Kempson argues that previous work on presupposition - whether in philosophy or linguistics - has been mistakenly based on a conflation of two different disciplines: semantics, the study of the meanings assigned to the formal system which constitutes a language, and pragmatics, the study of the use of that system in communication. The first part of the book deals generally with the nature of semantics in linguistic theory and its formal representation within (...) a transformational grammar; Dr Kempson argues against incorporating the relation of presupposition within such a grammar. The second part provides a pragmatic account of the foundations of a theory of communication and its detailed application to the problems raised by presupposition. The book is intended for those studying both philosophy and linguistics and also for those sociolinguists and psychologists with a more general interest in the theory of communication. (shrink)

This paper begins with a response to Josh Gert’s challenge that ‘on a par with’ is not a sui generis fourth value relation beyond ‘better than’, ‘worse than’, and ‘equally good’. It then explores two further questions: can parity be modeled by an interval representation of value? And what should one rationally do when faced with items on a par? I argue that an interval representation of value is incompatible with the possibility that items are on a par (a mathematical (...) proof is given in the appendix). I also suggest that there are three senses of ‘rationally permissible’ which, once distinguished, show that parity does distinctive practical work that cannot be done by the usual trichotomy of relations or by incomparability. In this way, we have an additional argument for parity from the workings of practical reason. (shrink)

John Locke claims both that ‘person’ is a forensic term and that personal identity consists in sameness of consciousness. The aim of my dissertation is to explain and critically assess how Locke links his moral and legal account of personhood to his account of personal identity in terms of sameness of consciousness. My interpretation of Locke’s account of persons and personal identity is embedded in Locke’s sortal-dependent account of identity. Locke’s sortal-dependent account of identity provides an important theoretical framework for (...) my interpretation: It makes clear that Locke’s account of personhood is to be considered separately from his account of personal identity. My approach gives full credit to Locke’s claim that ‘person’ is a forensic term, because I argue that persons, according to Locke, belong to a moral and legal kind of being: they are subjects of accountability. On this basis I argue that two components explain why Locke argues that personal identity consists in sameness of consciousness: firstly, his particular moral and legal conception of a person, and, secondly, his particular understanding of the conditions of just accountability and just reward and punishment. Given one accepts Locke’s conception of a person and his understanding of the conditions of just accountability, it will be easy to see why Locke regards sameness of consciousness to be necessary for personal identity, but the more challenging question is whether sameness of consciousness is also sufficient. I critically assess this question by considering Locke’s account of persons and personal identity within Locke’s epistemological, metaphysical and religious views. I will argue that, at least from the divine perspective, the underlying ontological constitution has to be taken into consideration and that it is a verbal question whether Locke’s term ‘consciousness’ refers not only to phenomenologically given consciousness, but also to the underlying ontological constitution. (shrink)