Metaphysics and language: Quine, W. V. O. On the individuation of attributes. Körner, S. On some relations between logic and metaphysics. Marcus, R. B. Does the principle of substitutivity rest on a mistake? Van Fraassen, B. C. Platonism's pyrrhic victory. Martin, R. M. On some prepositional relations. Kearns, J. T. Sentences and propositions.--Basic and combinatorial logic: Orgass, R. J. Extended basic logic and ordinal numbers. Curry, H. B. Representation of Markov algorithms by combinators.--Implication and consistency: Anderson, A. R. Fitch (...) on consistency. Belnap, N. D., Jr. Grammatical propaedeutic. Thomason, R. H. Decidability in the logic of conditionals. Myhill, J. Levels of implication.--Deontic, epistemic, and erotetic logic: Bacon, J. Belief as relative knowledge. Wu, K. J. Believing and disbelieving. Kordig, C. R. Relativized deontic modalities. Harrah, D. A system for erotetic sentences. (shrink)

The Ontology for Biomedical Investigations (OBI) is an ontology that provides terms with precisely defined meanings to describe all aspects of how investigations in the biological and medical domains are conducted. OBI re-uses ontologies that provide a representation of biomedical knowledge from the Open Biological and Biomedical Ontologies (OBO) project and adds the ability to describe how this knowledge was derived. We here describe the state of OBI and several applications that are using it, such as adding semantic expressivity to (...) existing databases, building data entry forms, and enabling interoperability between knowledge resources. OBI covers all phases of the investigation process, such as planning, execution and reporting. It represents information and material entities that participate in these processes, as well as roles and functions. Prior to OBI, it was not possible to use a single internally consistent resource that could be applied to multiple types of experiments for these applications. OBI has made this possible by creating terms for entities involved in biological and medical investigations and by importing parts of other biomedical ontologies such as GO, Chemical Entities of Biological Interest (ChEBI) and Phenotype Attribute and Trait Ontology (PATO) without altering their meaning. OBI is being used in a wide range of projects covering genomics, multi-omics, immunology, and catalogs of services. OBI has also spawned other ontologies (Information Artifact Ontology) and methods for importing parts of ontologies (Minimum information to reference an external ontology term (MIREOT)). The OBI project is an open cross-disciplinary collaborative effort, encompassing multiple research communities from around the globe. To date, OBI has created 2366 classes and 40 relations along with textual and formal definitions. The OBI Consortium maintains a web resource providing details on the people, policies, and issues being addressed in association with OBI. (shrink)

We are developing the Neurological Disease Ontology (ND) to provide a framework to enable representation of aspects of neurological diseases that are relevant to their treatment and study. ND is a representational tool that addresses the need for unambiguous annotation, storage, and retrieval of data associated with the treatment and study of neurological diseases. ND is being developed in compliance with the Open Biomedical Ontology Foundry principles and builds upon the paradigm established by the Ontology for General Medical Science (OGMS) (...) for the representation of entities in the domain of disease and medical practice. Initial applications of ND will include the annotation and analysis of large data sets and patient records for Alzheimer’s disease, multiple sclerosis, and stroke. (shrink)

In environmental ethics, many approaches are searching for a justification of the protection of nature and biodiversity via an account of the intrinsic or inherent value of non-human nature, i. e. a justification that does not rely on the perspective of human beings. This leads to intricate problems regarding value theory. This paper proposes to avoid those problems by investigating explicitly anthropocentric pathways. It discusses what kinds of reasons for the protection of nature can be developed from the consistent practical (...) self-understanding of agents. First, it is argued that the practical commitments of agents necessarily involve some normative commitments to the protection of the generic conditions of agency, which are particularly relevant for the ecological conditions that enable us to act and to realise goals. Second, it is discussed whether the presence of non-human nature is particularly relevant from the perspective of philosophical anthropology. Is it not important for human beings to experience non-human nature as an environment that is not fully planned and designed by human beings? The general aim is to show that it is worthwhile to search for justifications of the protection of nature and biodiversity from the practical self-understanding of human beings. (shrink)

Though ‘evil’ is often used loosely as merely the generic opposite of ‘morally good’, used precisely it is the worst possible term of opprobrium available. In this essay it is taken as applying primarily to persons, secondarily to conduct; evil deeds must flow from the volition to do something evil. An evil action is one so horrendously bad that no ordinary decent human being can conceive of doing it, and an evil person is one who knowingly wills or orders such (...) actions. Malignant evil—doing evil because it is evil—is not just possible but real, and is one of several kinds of evil delineated. There are incidental discussions of cruelty, Rosenbaum on Explaining Hitler, Baumeister on Evil, and Benn on wickedness. Footnotes1 Dedicated to Alan Gewirth, in honour of his 90th birthday, and in appreciation of his superb, illuminating, and ground-breaking philosophical work over many years. (shrink)

Kant's correspondence with his colleague and zealous disciple, Marcus Herz, was prophetic: only a few will understand the Critique of Pure Reason. Unfortunately, the problems are intractable and the necessary conceptual scheme to deal with the problems requires a "complete change of thinking in this part of human knowledge". But eventually people will "get over the initial numbness" Kant reassures another correspondent, Christian Garve. Fortunately, he suggests, there is a central question at the foundation of his difficult thought - (...) a question that is the key to his ideas. So what is this important question that Kant insists has been "stated clearly enough"? And how clear is it? I explore these issues in my paper. (shrink)

This paper analyses the main challenges to the idea that we should and can represent future generations in our present policymaking. It argues that these challenges can and should be approached from the perspective of human rights. To this end it introduces and sketches the main features of a human rights framework derived from the moral theory of Alan Gewirth. It indicates how this framework can be grounded philosophically, sketches the main features and open questions of the framework and (...) its grounding, and shows how it can be used to deal with the challenges to the idea that future generations have rights that can be represented in our policymaking. (shrink)

This paper is written from a perspective that is sympathetic to the basic idea of the capability approach. Our aim is to compare Martha Nussbaum’s capability theory of justice with Alan Gewirth’s moral theory, on two points: the selection and the justification of a list of central capabilities. On both counts, we contend that Nussbaum’s theory suffers from flaws that Gewirth’s theory may help to remedy. First, we argue that her notion of a (dignified) human life cannot fulfill the (...) role of a normative criterion that Nussbaum wants it to play in selecting capabilities for her list. Second, we question whether Nussbaum’s method of justification is adequate, discussing both her earlier self-validating argumentative strategy and her more recent adherence to the device of an overlapping consensus. We conclude that both strategies fail to provide the capabilities theory with the firm foundation it requires. Next, we turn to Gewirth’s normative theory and discuss how it can repair these flaws. We show how his theory starts from a fundamental moral principle according to which all agents have rights to the protection of the necessary preconditions of their agency. Gewirth’s justification of this principle is then presented, using a version of a transcendental argument. Finally, we explicitly compare Nussbaum and Gewirth and briefly demonstrate what it would mean for Nussbaum to incorporate Gewirthian elements into her capabilities theory of justice. (shrink)

Computer simulations show that an unstructured neural-network model [Shultz, T. R., & Bale, A. C. (2001). Infancy, 2, 501–536] covers the essential features␣of infant learning of simple grammars in an artificial language [Marcus, G. F., Vijayan, S., Bandi Rao, S., & Vishton, P. M. (1999). Science, 283, 77–80], and generalizes to examples both outside and inside of the range of training sentences. Knowledge-representation analyses confirm that these networks discover that duplicate words in the sentences are nearly identical and that (...) they use this near-identity relation to distinguish sentences that are consistent or inconsistent with a familiar grammar. Recent simulations that were claimed to show that this model did not really learn these grammars [Vilcu, M., & Hadley, R. F. (2005). Minds and Machines, 15, 359–382] confounded syntactic types with speech sounds and did not perform standard statistical tests of results. (shrink)

In this essay I evaluate Larry Alan Busk’s critique of contemporary democratic theorists and contemporary “democratic” politics in Democracy in Spite of the Demos in the context of Carl Schmitt’s critique of modern democracy. I argue that Busk shares Schmitt’s general conception of democracy and of the dangers attending any appeal to it. Though Busk presents Herbert Marcuse and Theodor Adorno as alternatives to the current crop of democratic theorists, I demonstrate that Marcuse fell prey to the most significant (...) of the paradoxes and ambivalences that Schmitt prognosticated. Adorno, I argue, is less unsteady an ally, but one that stays further back from politics than Busk evidently wishes. In the end, Busk’s Schmittian critique of democracy and democratic theory extends further than he himself suggests and reveals, not to a solution to our problems, but a new way of understanding them and their severity. (shrink)

Illness creates a range of negative emotions in patients including anxiety, fear, powerlessness, and vulnerability. There is much debate on the ‘therapeutic’ or ‘helping’ nurse–patient relationship. However, despite the current agenda regarding patient-centred care, the literature concerning the development of good interpersonal responses and the view that a satisfactory nursing ethics should focus on persons and character traits rather than actions, nursing ethics is dominated by the traditional obligation, act-centred theories such as consequentialism and deontology. I critically examine these theories (...) and the role of duty-based notions in both general ethics and nursing practice. Because of well-established flaws, I conclude that obligation-based moral theories are incomplete and inadequate for nursing practice. I examine the work of Hursthouse on virtue ethics’ action guidance and the v-rules. I argue that the moral virtues and a strong (action-guiding) version of virtue ethics provide a plausible and viable alternative for nursing practice. I develop an account of a virtue-based helping relationship and a virtue-based approach to nursing. The latter is characterized by three features: (1) exercising the moral virtues such as compassion; (2) using judgement; and (3) using moral wisdom, understood to include at least moral perception, moral sensitivity, and moral imagination. Merits and problems of the virtue-based approach are examined. I relate the work of MacIntyre to nursing and I conceive nursing as a practice: nurses who exercise the virtues and seek the internal goods help to sustain the practice of nursing and thus prevent the marginalization of the virtues. The strong practice-based version of virtue ethics proposed is context-dependent, particularist, and relational. Several areas for future philosophical inquiry and empirical nursing research are suggested to develop this account yet further. (shrink)

In the paper I attempt to close the gap between the tradition of contemporary radical democracy and that of the ideology critique of Critical Theory which is opened by Larry Alan Busk in his Democracy in Spite of the Demos. I argue that, on the one hand, it is not necessarily the case that the affirmation of the two ontological hypotheses Busk identifies as essential to radical democracy – that of the autonomy of the political and that of the (...) universality of doxa – need generate the ambiguities that his text critiques. On the other hand, I show how Adorno and Marcuse themselves remain committed to democracy, seeing socialization in the practice of the latter as fundamental to the development of critical-reflective consciousness. In the final instance, both radical democracy and Critical Theory can be seen to as committed to the same ideal of human autonomy, and equally useful resources for emancipatory thinking. (shrink)

First published in 1991. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

This article examines discourses about mixed reality as a data-rich sensing technology – specifically, engaging with discourses of time as framed by developers, engineers and in corporate PR and marketing in a range of public facing materials. We focus on four main settings in which mixed reality is imagined to be used, and in which time was a dominant discursive theme – the development of mixed reality by big tech companies, the use of mixed reality for defence, mixed reality as (...) a technology for control of populations in civil society and mixed reality as a technology used in workplace settings. Across these settings, the broad narrative is that mixed reality technologies afford overwhelmingly positive benefits like efficiency and security through their capture, relay and rendition of data – affording a form of anticipatory power to the user. The framing of temporality, we argue, is underlain by social and political values, which represent certain interests, but leave others out in the imagination of mixed reality's technological advance. (shrink)

This paper investigates the relation of the Calculus of Individuals presented by Henry S. Leonard and Nelson Goodman in their joint paper, and an earlier version of it, the so-called Calculus of Singular Terms, introduced by Leonard in his Ph.D. dissertation thesis Singular Terms. The latter calculus is shown to be a proper subsystem of the former. Further, Leonard’s projected extension of his system is described, and the definition of an intensional part-relation in his system is proposed. The final section (...) discusses to what extend Goodman might have contributed to the formulation of the Calculus of Individuals. (shrink)

Scholars have long suggested that CEOs can benefit from corporate philanthropy. However, little is known about this relationship in contexts of authoritarian capitalism such as China, where the state not only uses its control of economic entities to pursue social goals but also plays a key role in CEOs’ careers. We theorize how corporate philanthropy among state-controlled firms increases the CEO’s likelihood of receiving career benefits from the state in the form of outside directorships. Outside directorships represent an important form (...) of social capital in the Chinese context, and corporate philanthropy is an important mechanism through which social capital can be acquired. In addition, we theorize how two factors—the degree of state ownership and the number of independent directors on the CEO’s board—moderate this relationship. Analyzing a 12-year panel of state-controlled, publicly-listed firms in China comprising 6,594 firm-year observations, we find general support for our ideas. In so doing, we contribute to scholarship on the business–society relationship and corporate governance in the context of authoritarian capitalism. (shrink)

Unlike some other reproductions of classic texts (1) We have not used OCR(Optical Character Recognition), as this leads to bad quality books with introduced typos. (2) In books where there are images such as portraits, maps, sketches etc We have endeavoured to keep the quality of these images, so they represent accurately the original artefact. Although occasionally there may be certain imperfections with these old texts, we feel they deserve to be made available for future generations to enjoy.

Plato’s Ion can be read as exposure of the relationship between text and performance. It’s a philosophical dialogue that exploits performative arguments and situations. I’ll make explicit these dramatic assumptions in the following translation of the Plato’s text.

Every perceptual experience has an objective and a subjective side. We see object size, independent of distance, but we also see that distant objects project smaller images. Early modern conceptions focused on local stimulation and thus on the subjective aspect. Helmholtz and Hering emphasized the objective aspect. Helmholtz split visual experience into two stages, with sensation representing the subjective side and perception, through cognitive processes, the objective side. Gestalt theory denied this dualism, rejecting both sensory and cognitive stages. Despite contrary (...) evidence, the sensation/perception dualism persists, in brightness models and past experience theories. That we can detect visual angle and luminance does not mean that these are raw sensations out of which perception of size and lightness is built. Size and color constancy are truly visual, not cognitive. Instructions to subjects in vision experiments must avoid the proximal mode on the one hand and cognitive judgments on the other. (shrink)

This article investigates the question of how forensic toxicologists established the credibility of chemical analytical methods in poisoning lawsuits in the nineteenth century. After encountering the problem of laypersons in court, forensic toxicologists attempted to find strategies to make their evidence compelling to an untrained audience. Three of these strategies are discussed here: redundancy, standard methods, and intuitive comprehensibility. Whereas redundancy was not very practical and legally prescribed standard methods were not very popular with most forensic toxicologists, intuitive comprehensibility proved (...) effective and popular. This strategy relied on employing methods which did not require chemical knowledge to be understandable. The methods aimed to generate a visual aid and to be obvious in their results. Two forms of this strategy are discussed here: the presentation of the actual material and explicit comparison. I argue that this shift towards presenting forensic toxicology expertise as evident represents an important step in the history of forensic expertise. (shrink)

This manuscript departs strongly from conventional accounts that ascribe a central role to war and the threat of war in Third World state building. Similarly, it challenges the conventional wisdom that abundant exportable natural resource wealth is likely to provoke institutional atrophy. Instead, it argues that a set of logically prior conditions—the social relations that govern the principal economic sectors and the pattern or intraelite conflict or compromise—launch path-dependent processes that help determine when, and if, either strategic conflict or resource (...) wealth contribute to, or impede, institutional development. The argument is tested in the comparative analysis of the state-building process in two Andean neighbors, both of which are situated in similar strategic and natural resource environments but which produced qualitatively different outcomes in terms of state capacity or “strength.”. (shrink)

Alan Stewart - Francis Bacon and the Transformation of Early-Modern Philosophy - Journal of the History of Philosophy 40:4 Journal of the History of Philosophy 40.4 542-543 Book Review Francis Bacon and the Transformation of Early-Modern Philosophy Stephen Gaukroger. Francis Bacon and the Transformation of Early-Modern Philosophy. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001. Pp. xii + 249. Cloth, $59.95. Paper, $21.95. In Stephen Gaukroger's new study, Francis Bacon is lauded all too familiarly as the inaugurator of "the transformation of (...) philosophy into science, and philosophers into scientists" . But it's far from the old story: Gaukroger sees Bacon not as progenitor of the Scientific Revolution or revered Father of Modern Science, but as launching "the first systematic, comprehensive attempt to transform the early-modern.. (shrink)