Patients' wishes regarding health care and dying must be taken into consideration by their physicians. Competent patients need to record directives about their care in advance of a crisis situation. The primary care physician, seeing the patient at the time of a routine office visit, is in a favorable position to explore and record attitudes. A patient's value system should be part of a medical history before hospital admission. Details in a Value History Questionnaire facilitate guiding an incompetent (...) patient through a terminal illness in accordance with wishes previously expressed.An instrument in the form of a questionnaire was designed to record the attitudes of 200 patients regarding health care and dying. Respondents ranged in age from 17 to 84 years, and all were members of one family practice. They reacted positively to the opportunity to record their values, opinions, and wishes about their health care and process of dying. They clearly indicated that, in the absence of prior directives, they would want their families consulted about crucial decisions. (shrink)

It is often assumed that there is a necessary relationship between historical value and irreplaceability, and that this is an essential feature of historical value’s distinctive character. Contrary to this assumption, I argue that it is a merely contingent fact that some historically valuable things are irreplaceable, and that irreplaceability is not a distinctive feature of historical value at all. Rather, historically significant objects, from heirlooms to artifacts, offer us an otherwise impossible connection with the past, a value that persists (...) even in the face of suitable replacements. (shrink)

Philosophy and History of Education examines the complex relationship between the study of philosophy and history, and the value of these related studies for improving educational knowledge, policy, and practice.

This article follows shorebirds—migratory animals that have gone from game to nongame animals over the course of the past century in North America—as a way to track modern field biology, bureaucratic institutions, and the valuation of wildlife. Doing so allows me to make interrelated arguments about the history of wildlife management and science. The first is to note the endurance of observation-based natural history methods in field biology over the long twentieth century and the importance of these methods (...) for the persistent contribution of amateurs. The second major line of argument advances the historical significance of scientific, government bureaucracies as sites of natural knowledge production. Historians of biology and ecology have tended to stress scientists with institutional homes in universities, museums, and at land-grant field stations—particularly as various forms of field biology became professionalized over the twentieth century. In contrast, migratory animals like shorebirds, whether under the auspices of the US Biological Survey or the contemporary Fish and Wildlife Service, were primarily studied and conserved by biologists in bureaucratic agencies. Mid- to low-level bureaucrats, along with avocational birders, have mainly been responsible for developing what we know about shorebird migration, behavior, and life history. And third, shorebirds foreground the importance of bureaucratic context for the valuation of nature, from their economic value to agriculture in the early twentieth century to their value as rare, endangered species in the twentyfirst. (shrink)

A relation is obtained between weak values of quantum observables and the consistency criterion for histories of quantum events. It is shown that “strange” weak values for projection operators always correspond to inconsistent families of histories. It is argued that using the ABL rule to obtain probabilities for counterfactual measurements corresponding to those strange weak values gives inconsistent results. This problem is shown to be remedied by using the conditional weight, or pseudo-probability, obtained from the multiple-time application (...) of Lüders’ Rule. It is argued that an assumption of reverse causality implies that weak values obtain, in a restricted sense, at the time of the weak measurement as well as at the time of post-selection. Finally, it is argued that weak values are more appropriately characterized as multiple-time amplitudes than expectation values, and as such can have little to say about counterfactual questions. (shrink)

A relation is obtained between weak values of quantum observables and the consistency criterion for histories of quantum events. It is shown that “strange” weak values for projection operators always correspond to inconsistent families of histories. It is argued that using the ABL rule to obtain probabilities for counterfactual measurements corresponding to those strange weak values gives inconsistent results. This problem is shown to be remedied by using the conditional weight, or pseudo-probability, obtained from the multiple-time application (...) of Lüders’ Rule. It is argued that an assumption of reverse causality implies that weak values obtain, in a restricted sense, at the time of the weak measurement as well as at the time of post-selection. Finally, it is argued that weak values are more appropriately characterized as multiple-time amplitudes than expectation values, and as such can have little to say about counterfactual questions. (shrink)

In my reply to George Crowder’s criticism of my essay on the Soviet Revolution in the last issue of Analyse & Kritik, I discuss two problems: the nature of a reasonable value pluralism and the relation between ethics and philosophy of history. Concerning the first, I insist on the necessity of an objective rank ordering of values; with regard to the second, I side with Kant, who builds philosophy of history on ethics, and reject the Marxist idea (...) that ethics is itself grounded in philosophy of history. (shrink)

ABSTRACT: A relation is obtained between weak values of quantum observables and the consistency criterion for histories of quantum events. It is shown that ``strange'' weak values for projection operators always correspond to inconsistent families of histories. It is argued that using the ABL rule to obtain probabilities for counterfactual measurements corresponding to those strange weak values gives inconsistent results. This problem is shown to be remedied by using the conditional weight, or pseudo-probability, obtained from the multiple-time (...) application of Luders' Rule. It is argued that an assumption of reverse causality implies that weak values obtain, in a restricted sense, at the time of the weak measurement as well as at the time of post-selection. Finally, it is argued that weak values are more appropriately characterised as multiple-time amplitudes than expectation values, and as such can have little to say about counterfactual questions. (shrink)

Writing History in the Medieval Islamic World: The Value of Chronicles as Archives. By Fozia Bora. The Early and Medieval Islamic World. London: I.B. Tauris, 2019. Pp. xviii + 250. $115.

Objectives—To study the value of taking an ethics history as a means of assessing patients' preferences for decision making and for their relatives' involvement.Design—Questionnaire administered by six junior doctors to 56 mentally competent patients, admitted into general and geriatric medical beds.Setting—A large district general hospital in the United Kingdom.Main measures—To establish whether patients were adequately informed about their illness and whether they minded the information being communicated to their relatives. To establish their preference regarding truthful disclosure and participation in (...) decision making with risk attached. To establish whether they wished to be involved in CPR decision making, and if not, who should make the decision. To establish whether they knew of living wills and whether they had any advance directives.Results—Twenty-four were inadequately informed of their illness.Forty-six said they would want to know were something serious to be found. Twenty-eight wanted to make their own decision if requiring risky treatment and 11 wanted family members involved. Thirty-one wanted to make a cardiopulmonary resuscitation decision and five of these decisions differed from those made by the doctors. Twenty-five preferred the doctors to decide. Eleven of the patients had heard of living wills but only one had executed such a will. Seven of the patients wished to provide advance directives. Three did not find the history taking helpful but none were discomforted.Conclusion—Taking an ethics history is a simple means of obtaining useful information about patients' preferences. (shrink)

There has lately been substantial interest in scrutinizing our evaluative attitudes in light of our evolutionary history. However, these discussions have been hampered by an insufficiently expansive vantage. Our history did not begin ex nihilo a few million years ago with the appearance of hominins, or apes, or primates—those are very recent chapters of a much larger story that spans billions of years. This paper situates the mechanisms underlying normative thought within this broader context. I argue that this (...) historical perspective creates difficulties for metaethical nonnaturalists. The expanded scope enables the story to be anchored in negative claims about value, making room for novel epistemological and metaphysical challenges that are more threatening than extant evolutionary debunking arguments. (shrink)

The central question in this paper is the following: how does Nietzsche use history in his critique of morality? The answer, in sum: interestingly, not how you (i.e. most Nietzsche scholars) think, and not well enough. My focus is on The Antichrist, not his Genealogy of Morality, which is more commonly used to answer this question. And I look, in particular, at Nietzsche’s use of good, contemporary scholarship on the origins of Judaism. The chapter also examines the so-called 'genetic (...) fallacy', arguing that Nietzsche has a provisional response to it, but that this response leads to further complications. (shrink)

Holmes Rolston challenges the sociobiological orthodoxy that would naturalize science, ethics, and religion. The book argues that genetic processes are not blind, selfish, and contingent, and that nature is therefore not value-free. The author examines the emergence of complex biodiversity through evolutionary history. Especially remarkable in this narrative is the genesis of human beings with their capacities for science, ethics, and religion. A major conceptual task of the book is to relate cultural genesis to natural genesis. There is also (...) a general account of how values are created and transmitted in both natural and human cultural history. The book is written by one of the most well-respected figures in the philosophy of biology and religion. (shrink)

Recent authors hold that the role of historical scholarship within contemporary philosophical practice is to question current assumptions, to expose vestiges or to calibrate intuitions. On these views, historical scholarship is dispensable, since these roles can be achieved by nonhistorical methods. And the value of historical scholarship is contingent, since the need for the role depends on the presence of questionable assumptions, vestiges or comparable intuitions. In this paper I draw an analogy between scientific and philosophical practice, in order to (...) float one role for historical scholarship that is nonreplicable and noncontingent. It has long been acknowledged that cognitive values – features of theories that facilitate understanding, such as ontological parsimony, ideological simplicity, computational ease and fecundity – play a key role within science. The role of some of these values within philosophy also has received attention but left understudied are the values of novelty and conservativeness. These values influence theory choice, the selection of methodology, the setting of research agenda, and the presentation of results; and are best assessed with a historically informed evaluation. This role for historical scholarship is not replicable by nonhistorical methods, and is not contingent on the presence of questionable assumptions, vestiges or comparable intuitions. (shrink)

Holmes Rolston challenges the sociobiological orthodoxy that would naturalize science, ethics, and religion. The book argues that genetic processes are not blind, selfish, and contingent, and that nature is therefore not value-free. The author examines the emergence of complex biodiversity through evolutionary history. Especially remarkable in this narrative is the genesis of human beings with their capacities for science, ethics, and religion. A major conceptual task of the book is to relate cultural genesis to natural genesis. There is also (...) a general account of how values are created and transmitted in both natural and human cultural history. The book is thoroughly up-to-date on current biological thought and is written by one of the most well-respected figures in the philosophy of biology and religion. (shrink)

This book aims at six important conceptual tools developed by philosophers. The author develops each particular view in a chapter, hoping to constitute at the end a concise, interesting and easily readable whole. These concepts are: 1. Ethics and realism: elucidation of the distinction between understanding and explanation – the lighthouse type of normativity. 2. Leadership, antirealism and moral psychology – the lightning rod type of normativity. 3. Bright light on self-identity and positive reciprocity – the reciprocity type of normativity. (...) 4. The virtue of generosity and its importance for inclusive education – the divine will type of normativity. 5. Ethical education as normative philosophical perspective. The normativity of self-transformation in education. 6. Aesthetics as expression of human freedom and concern for the whole world in which we live. (shrink)

Vittorio Hösle’s evaluation of the Soviet Revolution on the ground of the philosophy of history can be usefully examined from the value-pluralist perspective of Isaiah Berlin. Although Berlinwould agree with most ofHösle’s judgements on the Revolution, he would do so for very different reasons. Most importantly, Berlin would not accept the teleology that lies at the heart of the philosophy of history. For Berlin, the notion of a human telos to be realized at the end of history (...) is a species of moral monism, and so falsified, indeed rendered incoherent, by the deeply pluralist reality of human values. However, Berlin’s pluralism also seems to present a problem for the justification of liberalism, and I consider a range of responses to this difficulty. (shrink)

In this article I consider whether there is a process of repression occurring in definitions of citizenship and frameworks of citizenship education, which involves a forgetting of history. By focusing on recently troubled countries I identify how the force of history comes to play, and from that I consider how, in relatively stable liberal democracies such as England, the repression of history is more complete. I suggest that this repression leads to an impoverished definition of citizenship in (...) terms of values and ethical considerations, resulting in an antiseptic curriculum which fails to address some of the sharper issues that lie deep in the complexity of experience and identity, issues that should be addressed in the pursuit of being-together in a pluralist society. (shrink)