In At the Will of the Body , Arthur Frank told the story of his own illnesses, heart attack and cancer. That book ended by describing the existence of a "remission society," whose members all live with some form of illness or disability. The Wounded Storyteller is their collective portrait. Ill people are more than victims of disease or patients of medicine they are wounded storytellers. People tell stories to make sense of their suffering when they turn their diseases (...) into stories, they find healing. Drawing on the work of authors such as Oliver Sacks, Anatole Broyard, Norman Cousins, and Audre Lorde, as well as from people he met during the years he spent among different illness groups, Frank recounts a stirring collection of illness stories, ranging from the well-known--Gilda Radner's battle with ovarian cancer--to the private testimonials of people with cancer, chronic fatigue syndrome, and disabilties. Their stories are more than accounts of personal suffering: they abound with moral choices and point to a social ethic. Frank identifies three basic narratives of illness in restitution, chaos, and quest. Restitution narratives anticipate getting well again and give prominence to the technology of cure. In chaos narratives, illness seems to stretch on forever, with no respite or redeeming insights. Quest narratives are about finding that insight as illness is transformed into a means for the ill person to become someone new. (shrink)

"More than any thing else technology creates our world. It creates our wealth, our economy, our very way of being," says W. Brian Arthur. Yet, until now the major questions of technology have gone unanswered. Where do new technologies come from -- how exactly does invention work? What constitutes innovation, and how is it achieved? Why are certain regions -- Cambridge, England, in the 1920s and Silicon Valley today -- hotbeds of innovation, while others languish? Does technology, like biological (...) life, evolve? How do new industries, and the economy itself, emerge from technologies? In this groundbreaking work, pioneering technology thinker and economist W. Brian Arthur sets forth a boldly original way of thinking about technology that gives answers to these questions. The Nature of Technology is an elegant and powerful theory of technology's origins and evolution. It achieves for the progress of technology what Thomas Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions did for scientific progress. Arthur explains how transformative new technologies arise and how innovation really works. Conventional thinking ascribes the invention of technologies to "thinking outside the box," or vaguely to genius or creativity, but Arthur shows that such explanations are inadequate. Rather, technologies are put together from pieces -- themselves technologies -- that already exist. Technologies therefore share common ancestries and combine, morph, and combine again to create further technologies. Technology evolves much as a coral reef builds itself from activities of small organisms -- it creates itself from itself; all technologies are descended from earlier technologies. Drawing on a wealth of examples, from historical inventions to the high-tech wonders of today, and writing in wonder fully engaging and clear prose, Arthur takes us on a mind-opening journey that will change the way we think about technology and how it structures our lives. (shrink)

Arthur Collins's succinct, revisionist exposition of Kant's _Critique of Pure Reason_ brings a new clarity to this notoriously difficult text. Until recently most readers, ascribing broadly Cartesian assumptions to Kant, have concluded that the _Critique_ advances an idealist philosophy, because Kant calls it "transcendental idealism" and because the work abounds in apparent confirmations of that interpretation. Collins maintains not only that this reading of Kant is false but also that it conceals Kant's real achievements. To counter it, he addresses (...) the themes and passages in the _Critique_ that seem to require an idealist thesis and shows how they may be better understood without ascribing any idealist philosophy to Kant. His account coheres with Kant's explicit "refutations" of idealism, it fits Kant's rejection of the imputation of idealism to him by early critics and readers, and it validates Kant's contention that the second edition of the _Critique_ changes the expression but not the doctrine of the first. (shrink)

Contemporary health care often lacks generosity of spirit, even when treatment is most efficient. Too many patients are left unhappy with how they are treated, and too many medical professionals feel estranged from the calling that drew them to medicine. Arthur W. Frank tells the stories of ill people, doctors, and nurses who are restoring generosity to medicine--generosity toward others and to themselves. The Renewal of Generosity evokes medicine as the face-to-face encounter that comes before and after diagnostics, pharmaceuticals, (...) and surgeries. Frank calls upon the Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius, philosopher Emmanuel Levinas, and literary critic Mikhail Bakhtin to reflect on stories of ill people, doctors, and nurses who transform demoralized medicine into caring relationships. He presents their stories as a source of consolation for both ill and professional alike and as an impetus to changing medical systems. Frank shows how generosity is being renewed through dialogue that is more than the exchange of information. Dialogue is an ethic and an ideal for people on both sides of the medical encounter who want to offer more to those they meet and who want their own lives enriched in the process. The Renewal of Generosity views illness and medical work with grace and compassion, making an invaluable contribution to expanding our vision of suffering and healing. (shrink)

It is commonly held that there is no place for the 'now’ in physics, and also that the passing of time is something subjective, having to do with the way reality is experienced but not with the way reality is. Indeed, the majority of modern theoretical physicists and philosophers of physics contend that the passing of time is incompatible with modern physical theory, and excluded in a fundamental description of physical reality. This book provides a forceful rebuttal of such claims. (...) In successive chapters the author explains the historical precedents of the modern opposition to time flow, giving careful expositions of matters relevant to becoming in classical physics, the special and general theories of relativity, and quantum theory, without presupposing prior expertise in these subjects. Analysing the arguments of thinkers ranging from Aristotle, Russell, and Bergson to the proponents of quantum gravity, he contends that the passage of time, understood as a local becoming of events out of those in their past at varying rates, is not only compatible with the theories of modern physics, but implicit in them. (shrink)

One task of logic, Peirce held, is to classify arguments so as to determine the validity of each kind. His own classification is interesting because it includes a novel type of argument in addition to the two traditionally recognized types. It is the purpose of this paper to discuss what Peirce thought to be sufficiently distinctive about abduction to warrant calling it a new kind of argument. But since one finds in his writings on abduction a number of different views (...) it is first necessary to make a few remarks concerning the unity of Peirce's thought. (shrink)

The narrative ethicist imagines life as multiple points of view, each reflecting a distinct imagination and each more or less capable of comprehending other points of view and how they imagine. Each point of view is constantly being acted out and then modified in response to how others respond. People generally have good intentions, but they get stuck realizing those intentions. Stories stall when dialogue breaks down. People stop hearing others' stories, maybe because those others have quit telling their stories. (...) The narrative ethicist's job is to help people generate new imaginations that can restart dialogues. (shrink)

The literary criticism of the Greeks and Romans furnishes some of the most baffling documents which have come down to us from antiquity. Nor could it be otherwise. Few elements of language can be at once so ephemeral and so elusive as the overtones of words used in aesthetic contexts; even in our own language it is only with a conscious effort that the appropriate overtones of words used by quite recent critics can be recalled. Such recall must be much (...) more difficult where the reader is concerned with a dead language; in the case of some terms it may well be virtually impossible; but where the ancient critic is discussing ethical criteria for literature, as Aristotle does in Poetics 13, the modern interpreter is in a somewhat better position, for ethical terms are used in wider contexts, contexts which involve action, and there is more opportunity for studying their usage and endeavouring to recapture their elusive overtones. (shrink)

This book gathers together for the first time an important body of texts written between 1672 and 1686 by the great German philosopher and polymath Gottfried Leibniz. These writings, most of them previously untranslated, represent Leibniz's sustained attempt on a problem whose solution was crucial to the development of his thought, that of the composition of the continuum. The volume begins with excerpts from Leibniz's Paris writings, in which he tackles such problems as whether the infinite division of matter entails (...) perfect points, whether matter and space can be regarded as true wholes, whether motion is truly continuous, and the nature of body and substance. Comprising the second section is Pacidius Philalethi, Leibniz's brilliant dialogue of late 1676 on the problem of the continuity of motion. In the selections of the final section, from his Hanover writings of 1677-1686, Leibniz abandons his earlier transcreationism and atomism in favor of the theory of corporeal substance, where the reality of body and motion is founded in substantial form or force.Leibniz's texts (one in French, the rest in Latin) are presented with facing-page English translations, together with an introduction, notes, appendixes containing related excerpts from earlier works by Leibniz and his predecessors, and a valuable glossary detailing important terms and their translations. (shrink)

Action explanations like ‘I am heading to the ferry because the bridge is closed,’ are supposed to require restatement: ‘I am... because I believe the bridge is closed,’ because (i) the objective claim may be false though the intended explanation is correct, and (ii) because objective circumstances have to be cognitively mediated if they are to bear on action. This supposition is rejected here. Restatements cannot withdraw the objective claim without withdrawing the explanation. In the context of reason‐giving, belief statements (...) do not function as assertions about the inner life. The fact that belief statements may be true though the belief itself is false creates the illusion of distinctive subject matters. The illusion is exploited by conceptions of belief positing stored representations. Even if there were such representations, retrieved for the sake of expressing previously acquired beliefs, the expression of belief must endorse p and cannot merely advert to the existence and content of a representation. The reverse of the standard philosophical view about restatement is actually correct. Wherever an agent correctly adduces a belief that an objective circumstance obtains in explaining his action, a de‐psychologizing restatement that merely makes the objective claim must be ascribable to the agent. (shrink)

Because statements like ‘This object is soluble in aqua regia’ involve the causal modalities, we call them causal dispositional statements. Now while this involvement has long been recognized, no thorough examination of its exact nature has ever been made. One purpose of this paper is to begin such an examination. In Sec. 2 we will suggest an analysis of causal dispositional statements, and in Sec. 3 we will discuss some philosophic issues to which this analysis is relevant.

Narrative ethics holds that if you ask someone what goodness is, as a basis of action, most people will first appeal to various abstractions, each of which can be defined only by other abstractions that in turn require further definition. If you persist in asking what each of these abstractions actually means, eventually that person will have to tell you a story and expect you to recognize goodness in the story. Goodness and badness need stories to make them thinkable and (...) to translate them into individual and collective actions. Yet after more than two decades of considering the issue, I do not believe that a collection of stories can by itself guide actions in ways that are sufficient to respond to ethical troubles in institutional settings. The question will always remain open for me, but my present belief is that narrative bioethics is always hyphenated, in the sense that guidance from stories needs to be allied with other ethical guidance. Each side of the hyphen qualifies the other side. The hyphenation I will argue for in this essay is “narrative-deontology.”. (shrink)

In Minkowski spacetime, because of the relativity of simultaneity to the inertial frame chosen, there is no unique world-at-an-instant. Thus the classical view that there is a unique set of events existing now in a three dimensional space cannot be sustained. The two solutions most often advanced are that the four-dimensional structure of events and processes is alone real, and that becoming present is not an objective part of reality; and that present existence is not an absolute notion, but is (...) relative to inertial frame; the world-at-an-instant is a three dimensional, but relative, reality. According to a third view, advanced by Robb, Capek and Stein, what is present at a given spacetime point is, strictly speaking, constituted by that point alone. I argue here against the first of these views that the four-dimensional universe cannot be said to exist now, already, or indeed at any time at all; so that talk of its existence or reality as if that precludes the existence or reality of the present is a non sequitur. The second view assumes that in relativistic physics time lapse is measured by the time co-ordinate function; against this I maintain that it is in fact measured by the proper time, as I argue by reference to the Twin Paradox. The third view, although formally correct, is tarnished by its unrealistic assumption of point-events. This makes it susceptible to paradox, and also sets it at variance with our normal intuitions of the present. I argue that a defensible concept of the present is nonetheless obtainable when account is taken of the non-instantaneity of events, including that of conscious awareness, as that region of spacetime comprised between the forward lightcone of the beginning of a small interval of proper time t and the backward lightcone of the end of that interval. This gives a serviceable notion of what is present to a given event of short duration, as well as saving our intuition of the “reality” or robustness of present events. (shrink)

Using an idea developed in joint work with Shelah, we show how to redefine Laver's notion of forcing making a supercompact cardinal $\kappa$ indestructible under $\kappa$-directed closed forcing to give a new proof of the Kimchi-Magidor Theorem in which every compact cardinal in the universe satisfies certain indestructibility properties. Specifically, we show that if K is the class of supercompact cardinals in the ground model, then it is possible to force and construct a generic extension in which the only strongly (...) compact cardinals are the elements of K or their measurable limit points, every $\kappa \in K$ is a supercompact cardinal indestructible under $\kappa$-directed closed forcing, and every $\kappa$ a measurable limit point of K is a strongly compact cardinal indestructible under $\kappa$-directed closed forcing not changing $\wp$. We then derive as a corollary a model for the existence of a strongly compact cardinal $\kappa$ which is not $\kappa^+$ supercompact but which is indestructible under $\kappa$-directed closed forcing not changing $\wp and remains non-$\kappa^+$ supercompact after such a forcing has been done. (shrink)

1. Introduction. It is generally admitted that a large part of man's knowledge is based on inductive arguments. Hence any philosophical theory concerning the nature of inductive arguments constitutes an epistemological theory. Any such philosophical theory of induction must, if it is to be satisfactory, take adequate account of Hume's criticism of inductive arguments. One way of treating his criticism is to say that the validity of inductive arguments is in an important sense relative to some broad factual assumptions about (...) the general nature of the universe and that these general factual assumptions are presupposed in a certain way by the users of inductive arguments. Let us call any theory of this general type a postulate theory of induction. (shrink)

Dimensions of character are often overlooked in professional practice at the expense of the development of technical competence and operational efficiency. Drawing on philosophical accounts of virtue ethics and positive psychology, the present work attempts to elevate the role of ‘good’ character in the professional domain. A ‘good’ professional is ideally one that exemplifies dimensions of character informed by sound judgement. A total of 2340 professionals, from five discrete professions, were profiled based on their valuation of qualities pertaining to character (...) and judgement. Profile differences were subsequently examined in the self-reported experience of professional purpose towards a wider societal ‘good’. Analysis of covariance, controlling for stage of career, revealed that professionals valuing character reported higher professional purpose than those overweighting the importance of judgement or valuing neither character nor judgement, F = 7.92, p <.001. No differences were found between the two groups valuing character, irrespective of whether judgement was valued simultaneously. This profiling analysis of entry-level and in-service professionals, based on their holistic character composition, paves the way for fresh philosophical discussion regarding what constitutes a ‘good’ professional and the interplay between character and judgement. The empirical findings may be of substantive value in helping to recognise how the dimensions of character and judgement may impact upon practitioners’ professional purpose. (shrink)

In contrast with some recent theories of infinitesimals as non-Archimedean entities, Leibniz’s mature interpretation was fully in accord with the Archimedean Axiom: infinitesimals are fictions, whose treatment as entities incomparably smaller than finite quantities is justifiable wholly in terms of variable finite quantities that can be taken as small as desired, i.e. syncategorematically. In this paper I explain this syncategorematic interpretation, and how Leibniz used it to justify the calculus. I then compare it with the approach of Smooth Infinitesimal Analysis, (...) as propounded by John Bell. I find some salient differences, especially with regard to higher-order infinitesimals. I illustrate these differences by a consideration of how each approach might be applied to propositions of Newton’s Principia concerning the derivation of force laws for bodies orbiting in a circle and an ellipse. “If the Leibnizian calculus needs a rehabilitation because of too severe treatment by historians in the past half century, as Robinson suggests (1966, 250), I feel that the legitimate grounds for such a rehabilitation are to be found in the Leibnizian theory itself.”—(Bos 1974–1975, 82–83). (shrink)

It is well known that Leibniz advocated the actual infinite, but that he did not admit infinite collections or infinite numbers. But his assimilation of this account to the scholastic notion of the syncategorematic infinite has given rise to controversy. A common interpretation is that in mathematics Leibniz’s syncategorematic infinite is identical with the Aristotelian potential infinite, so that it applies only to ideal entities, and is therefore distinct from the actual infinite that applies to the actual world. Against this, (...) I argue in this paper that Leibniz’s actual infinite, understood syncategorematically, applies to any entities that are actually infinite in multitude, whether numbers, actual parts of matter, or monads. It signifies that there are more of them than can be assigned a number, but that there is no infinite number or collection of them, which notion involves a contradiction. Similarly, to say that a magnitude is actually infinitely small in the syncategorematic sense is to say that no matter how small a magnitude one takes, there is a smaller, but there are no actual infinitesimals. In geometry one may calculate with expressions apparently denoting such entities, on the understanding that they are fictions, standing for variable magnitudes that can be made arbitrarily small, so as to produce demonstrations that there is no error in the resulting expressions. (shrink)

. From a proper class of supercompact cardinals, we force and obtain a model in which the proper classes of strongly compact and strong cardinals precisely coincide. In this model, it is the case that no strongly compact cardinal \documentclass[12pt]{minimal} \usepackage{amsmath} \usepackage{wasysym} \usepackage{amsfonts} \usepackage{amssymb} \usepackage{amsbsy} \usepackage{mathrsfs} \usepackage{upgreek} \setlength{\oddsidemargin}{-69pt} \begin{document} $\kappa$\end{document} is \documentclass[12pt]{minimal} \usepackage{amsmath} \usepackage{wasysym} \usepackage{amsfonts} \usepackage{amssymb} \usepackage{amsbsy} \usepackage{mathrsfs} \usepackage{upgreek} \setlength{\oddsidemargin}{-69pt} \begin{document} $2^\kappa = \kappa^+$\end{document} supercompact.

The ethics of telling stories about other people become questionable as soon as humans learn to talk. But the stakes get higher when health care professionals tell stories about those whom they serve. But for all the problems that come with such stories, I do not believe it is either practical or desirable for bioethicists to attempt to legislate an end to this storytelling. What we need instead is narrative nuance. We need to understand how to tell respectful stories in (...) which the patients are fully acknowledged fellow participants, not one‐dimensional objects of a knowing gaze. The problem is not narration itself but a particular version of narrational privilege, and getting rid of that would have benefits far beyond practices of writing case studies. In this essay, I first offer four considerations that I have found either omitted or underemphasized in discussions of the ethics of telling stories about patients. I then sketch a model of medical storytelling that might be the basis for shifting the ethical question from whether to how. (shrink)

Combining techniques of the first author and Shelah with ideas of Magidor, we show how to get a model in which, for fixed but arbitrary finite n, the first n strongly compact cardinals κ 1 ,..., κ n are so that κ i for i = 1,..., n is both the i th measurable cardinal and κ + i supercompact. This generalizes an unpublished theorem of Magidor and answers a question of Apter and Shelah.

We show the consistency, relative to a supercompact cardinal, of the least measurable cardinal being both strongly compact and fully Laver indestructible. We also show the consistency, relative to a supercompact cardinal, of the least strongly compact cardinal being somewhat supercompact yet not completely supercompact and having both its strong compactness and degree of supercompactness fully Laver indestructible.