The Moral Habitat offers a new and systematic interpretation of Kant's moral and political philosophy. Herman introduces the idea of a moral habitat to examines the dynamic system of duties that exists between individuals and civic institutions.

Essays by Jurgen Habermas on truth, objectivity, normativity, naturalism, and realism after the linguistic turn.

This paper examines the efforts of contractualists to develop an alternative to aggregation to govern our duty not to harm (duty to rescue) others. I conclude that many of the moral principles articulated in the literature seem to reduce to aggregation by a different name. Those that do not are viable only as long as they are limited to a handful of oddball cases at the margins of social life. If extended to run-of-the-mill conduct that accounts for virtually all unintended (...) (in the sense of undesired) harm to others—noncriminal activities that impose some risk of harm on others—they would rule out all action. Moreover, because such conduct poses an irreducible conflict between freedom of action and freedom from expected harm, it can be regulated only by principles that accept the necessity of making precisely the sorts of interpersonal trade-offs that contractualism is foundationally committed to reject: trade-offs in which the numbers count, such that a risk of serious harm to one person can be justified by small benefits to the many. (shrink)

Most of us have been brought up on the idea that moral theories divide as they are, at the root, either deontological or consequentialist. A new point of division has been emerging that places deontological and consequentialist theories together against theories of virtue, or a conception of morality constrained at the outset by the requirements of the “personal.” In a series of important essays Bernard Williams has offered striking arguments for the significance of the personal in moral thought based on (...) the role of integrity in human activity and character. His criticisms of both Kantian and utilitarian theories for their deep-seated tendencies to undermine the integrity of persons brings to a new level of seriousness and subtlety long-standing complaints against these theories—the invasive do-gooding of utilitarianism, the coldness and severity toward normal human concerns of Kantian theory. Although Williams is inclined to find the sources of the attack on integrity in these different features of the two traditional theories, in the end his complaint against both of them turns on their demand that the moral agent submit himself to the authority of impartial value. (shrink)

This paper presents problems for Stalnaker’s common ground theory of presupposition. Stalnaker (Linguist and Philos 25:701–721, 2002) proposes a 2-stage process of utterance interpretation: presupposed content is added to the common ground prior to acceptance/rejection of the utterance as a whole. But this revision makes presupposition difficult to distinguish from assertion. A more fundamental problem is that the common ground theory rests on a faulty theory of assertion—that the essence of assertion is to present the content of an utterance as (...) new information. Many examples are presented of utterances which are felicitous but not informative in this way. (shrink)

Kant's concept of autonomy and the Kantian notion of autonomy are often conflated in bioethics. However, the contemporary Kantian notion has very little at all to do with Kant's original. In order to further bioethics discourse on autonomy, I critically distinguish the contemporary Kantian notion from Kant's original concept of moral autonomy. I then evaluate the practical relevance of both concepts of autonomy for use in bioethics. I argue that it is not appropriate to appeal to either concept toward assessing (...) which patients we ought to respect as autonomous. Finally, I sketch criteria for what I take to be a more promising concept of autonomy for patients. (shrink)

This would have been a better book if Sampson had argued his main point, the usefulness of the Simonian principle as an explanation of the evolution, structure, and acquisition of language, on its own merits, instead of making it subsidiary to his attack on ‘limited-minders’ (e.g., Noam Chomsky). The energy he has spent on the attack he might then have been willing and able to employ in developing his argument at reasonable length and detail. He might then have found that (...) argument faulty, or even wrong. Underdeveloped as it is, however, his point about the Simonian principle does seem to have thepossibility of some significance in understanding the empirical issues of this book (and the dichotomy of ‘limited’ and ‘creative’ minds is certainly not one of these).What Sampson has done inMaking Sense has the appearance of science, and theoretical linguistics, and therefore it is somewhat puzzling to find the conclusions that the human mind cannot be scientifically studied (p. 10), and that theoretical linguistics is a “mirage” (p. 210). His statement that It may still seem worthwhile to some to work out the exact implications for present-day linguistic structure of the fact that languages are evolved systems, but I cannot see that there is much glamour or, indeed, much substance in this task (p. 210) would surely be surprising to a geneticist or ethologist. We hope his apparent misunderstanding on this point will not lead him to give up his profession, in which he seems willing and able to make a significant contribution.What in particular is required is a clear indication of how the Simonian principle imposes itself in the ontogenesis of language. Consider Chomsky's example of the rule for forming questions in English. For sentence (1) below, children able to deal with such examples would give (2) but not (3) as the corresponding question (Chomsky, 1975, p. 31).The man who is tall is in the room.Is the man who is tall in the room?*Is the man who tall is in the room?Now compare Sampson's evolutionary explanation for the structure-dependence of rules which is illustrated in (1)-(3): “once a behavior-pattern has become thoroughly established, it will tend to be treated as a fixed given when used as a constituent of a more complex, later-learned behavior-pattern” (p. 183). In order for this to account for Chomsky's example it would have to be the case that children learn relative clauses before they learn questions, which simply isn't true.In conclusion, we wish not to seem unaware of the problems with the position Sampson is attacking, or unaware of the sometimes dogmatic way it too has been presented. Chomsky's hypothesis of innate linguistic ideas seems, fundamentally, to derive from the claimed rapidity and uniformity of language acquisition in the face of limited and degenerate data. Chomsky appears to have been unwilling to argue these points directly or to show their relation to others, for which he has argued, for example, the implausibility of some abstract constraint's having been learned (cf. 1971, pp. 22–44; 1975, pp. 30–33; 1980, pp. 35–52). And almost from his first invoking of rationalism in support of his linguistic method, Chomsky has himself resorted to an unnecessarily polemical attack on empiricism (cf. 1965, p. 58, n. 33). The innateness issue is just not clear or simple enough to justify so much animus, or even conviction. (shrink)

A one-of-a-kind reference to the international vocabulary of the humanities This is an encyclopedic dictionary of close to 400 important philosophical, literary, and political terms and concepts that defy easy—or any—translation from one language and culture to another. Drawn from more than a dozen languages, terms such as Dasein (German), pravda (Russian), saudade (Portuguese), and stato (Italian) are thoroughly examined in all their cross-linguistic and cross-cultural complexities. Spanning the classical, medieval, early modern, modern, and contemporary periods, these are terms that (...) influence thinking across the humanities. The entries, written by more than 150 distinguished scholars, describe the origins and meanings of each term, the history and context of its usage, its translations into other languages, and its use in notable texts. The dictionary also includes essays on the special characteristics of particular languages—English, French, German, Greek, Italian, Portuguese, Russian, and Spanish. Originally published in French, this one-of-a-kind reference work is now available in English for the first time, with new contributions from Judith Butler, Daniel Heller-Roazen, Ben Kafka, Kevin McLaughlin, Kenneth Reinhard, Stella Sandford, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Jane Tylus, Anthony Vidler, Susan Wolfson, Robert J. C. Young, and many more.The result is an invaluable reference for students, scholars, and general readers interested in the multilingual lives of some of our most influential words and ideas. Covers close to 400 important philosophical, literary, and political terms that defy easy translation between languages and cultures Includes terms from more than a dozen languages Entries written by more than 150 distinguished thinkers Available in English for the first time, with new contributions by Judith Butler, Daniel Heller-Roazen, Ben Kafka, Kevin McLaughlin, Kenneth Reinhard, Stella Sandford, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Jane Tylus, Anthony Vidler, Susan Wolfson, Robert J. C. Young, and many more Contains extensive cross-references and bibliographies An invaluable resource for students and scholars across the humanities. (shrink)

General Ontological Language (GOL) is a formal framework for representing and building ontologies. The purpose of GOL is to provide a system of top-level ontologies which can be used as a basis for building domain-specific ontologies. The present paper gives an overview about the basic categories of the GOL-ontology. GOL is part of the work of the research group Ontologies in Medicine (Onto-Med) at the University of Leipzig which is based on the collaborative work of the Institute of Medical Informatics (...) (IMISE) and the Institute for Computer Science (IfI). It represents work in progress toward a proposal for an integrated family of top-level ontologies and will be applied to several fields of medicine, in particular to the field of Clinical Trials. (shrink)

Bioethics education now takes place outside universities as well as within them. How should clinicians, ethics committee members, and policymakers be taught the ethics they need, and how may their progress best be evaluated?

In a provocative book, Andrew Carstairs- McCarthy argues that the apparently universal distinction in human languages between sentences and noun phrases cannot be assumed to be inevitable for languages with the expressive power of human languages, but needs explaining. His work suggests, but does not explicitly state, that there is also no conceptual necessity for the distinction between basic types e and t, a distinction argued for by Frege and carried into formal semantics through the work of Montague. Pragmatic distinctions (...) among various kinds of speech acts, including asserting, questioning, commanding, and pointing things out are assumed in Carstairs- McCarthy ’s work, as are expressions of functional types; what is questioned is whether a syntacticized sentence-NP distinction is essential. (shrink)

An extended analysis and account of the psychological/social/cognitive dynamics of intellectual controversy. The immediate focus is the recurrent failure of intellectual engagement, in encounters having to do with with truth, knowledge, language, science, and/or objectivity, between, on the one hand, rationalist-realist-objectivist philosophers and/or those they have instructed and, on the other hand, constructivist-pragmatist ("postmodern") theorists and/or those persuaded by their critiques and/or alternative views. Individual chapters examine critiques and defenses of objectivist-rationalist views in law, politics, literary studies, ethics, communication theory, (...) and philosophy of science. Theorists whose views are discussed critically at some length include legal scholar Robin West and philosophers Jürgen Habermas, Karl-Otto Apel, and Philip Kitcher. (shrink)

The phrase "natural kind term" has come into the linguistic and philosophical literature in connection with well-known work of Kripke (1972) and Putnam (1970, 1975a). I use that phrase here in the sense it has acquired from those and subseqnent works on related topics. This is not the transparent sense of the phrase. That is, if I am right in what follows there are words for kinds of things existing in nature which are not natural kind terms in the current (...) sense - e.g. planet, woman, and weed. I use the term "nondescriptional", following Salmon (1981), to mean "lacking a Fregean sense", where a Fregean sense is taken to be a property or group of properties semantically associated with an expression which determines its denotation. I hope that the term "nondescriptional" will be clarified in subsequent discussion, but perhaps a few words about it and its opposite, "descriptional", would be useful here. These terms (as Salmon notes (p.15, n. 11)) should be taken as technical terms. The idea is that descriptional words, of which bachelor is the overwhelmingly favorite example, express a semantic content, or sense, which is what mediates their denotation. Entities fall in their denotation in virtue of possessing the property or properties expressed as their sense. (It is not necessary, however, that this sense be as easily paraphrasable with descriptive synonyms as it is typically held to be in the case of bachelor, or even that it be paraphrasable at all.) In the case of nondescriptional words there is no Fregean sense to mediate the link between word and object. Hence such terms are described by what Salmon, following Kaplan, calls "the theory of direct reference". What it is that does associate such terms with their denotations is another question which will be touched on briefly at the end. I have several aims in this paper. The first is to defend a conservative position on nondescriptionality. I will argue that relatively few natural language words have this property. My other aims are primarily clarificatory. Among the issues I would like to clarify are those connected with the determination of this property and flae explanation of why it exists, its relationship with other properties such as rigid designation and essentiality, and its significance for lexical semantics. The organization of the paper is as follows. The first section identifies the position taken here on the question of which expressions are nondescriptional and provides a general defense of it. The second section is a critical examination of criteria associated with nondescriptionality. In the third section provide further defense for the conservative position, and in the fourth section we turn to related issues in lexical semantics. (shrink)

We investigated the interface between biomedia and humans by inviting participants to interact with biometric devices that measured and visualized their body data. At first, they struggled with the alienating and disembodying nature of the devices and the constrained, reductionist representation of data. Through their bodily interactions with these devices, however, participants reframed the data and inserted their bodies into the process of data collection. Drawing on the ideas of Bergson, Grosz, Merleau-Ponty and Bachelard, we argue that by working with (...) their subjectivity in a mediated process of becoming, participants ‘filled in the intervals’ of the visual representations of their bodies to interpret them in ways that marked the duration and meaning of their selves. We conclude that even when presented with artificial representations, individuals convert the representation of the data into narratives inspired by their embodied experience, and the ‘virtual’ pasts of their own lives. (shrink)

The controversies related to John Taurek’s rescue case concern the importance of numbers in deciding about whom to help in situations in which there is a shortage of means. Taurek thinks that the number of the needy does not matter; we can save one person rather than many people. Since both common sense and the duty to responsibly administer help make us approve the decision to help those who are more in number, Taurek’s thesis seems counterintuitive. The majority of authors (...) discussing Taurek’s thesis defend the importance of numbers in such decisions, and few are inclined to accept some of his intuitions, recognizing the counting of people who need help as morally problematic. However, the authors who defend the importance of numbers reject a simple utilitarian approach and try to justify the claim that the majority should have priority in such a way that no person involved in the conflict of distribution could charge the rescuer with not having taken his or her claims into account. (shrink)

SummaryCross-sectional studies in Australia and the Philippines and a longitudinal prospective study in a selected Australian sample of breast-feeding mothers have shown that basal serum prolactin concentrations are elevated during 15–21 months of lactational amenorrhoea.A predictive model of serum PRL levels and return of cyclic ovarian activity during full breast-feeding, partial breast-feeding and weaning has been developed from the results of breast-feeding behaviour and serum PRL, gonadotrophin and oestradiol measurements in 34 mothers breast-feeding on demand for a mean of 67 (...) weeks.Breast-feeding patterns influence serum PRL levels. Important factors during full breast-feeding are the age of the baby, the longest interval between feeds at night and total 24-hr suckling time, and following the introduction of supplements, the mean interval between feeds, together with the total 24-hr suckling time and the number of solid supplements per day.The precise mechanisms whereby breast-feeding regulates cyclic ovarian activity remain unknown. Gonadotrophin secretion appears to be quantitatively normal, but qualitative changes, secondary to altered hypothalamic activity, may be the most important factor. A direct inhibitory effect of PRL on ovarian follicular development and steroidogenesis remains possible.Ovulation with a normal luteal phase is probable for 30% of breast-feeding mothers before the first menses, but is unlikely before 6 months, provided breast-feeding is frequent day and night.Measurement of serum PRL is a sensitive index of the return of menstruation and fertility during lactation in the population studied. (shrink)

Every day we are confronted with numerous alienating phenomena and equally alienating ways of dealing with them. The question is: How we can deal with them in a positive way? In his latest book, Bernhard Waldenfels powerfully demonstrates that it is not enough to only examine the otherness of the other if we disregard the stranger in ourselves. He argues for a responsive stance that dares to confront the uncanniness of our experience. How valuable this is—for psychiatric contexts, sociopolitical challenges (...) and also for philosophy itself—clearly shows in the contributions to this discursive volume, which attempt a response from their own perspectives. (shrink)

This article argues that changes in the organization of social reproduction, defined to include the activities, attitudes, behaviors, emotions, responsibilities, and relationships involved in maintaining daily life, can explain historical differences in women's political self-organization. Examining the Progressive period, the 1930s, and the 1960s and 1970s, the authors suggest that the conditions of social reproduction provide the organizational resources for and legitimation of women's collective action.

I consider the contrast between Leibniz's relational concept of spacetime and Einstein's special and general theories of relativity. I suggest that there are two interpretations of Leibniz's view, which I call L1 and L2. L1 amounts to saying that there is no real inertial structure to spacetime, whereas in general relativity the inertial structure is dynamical or real in Lande's sense ; i.e., it can be ‘kicked’ and ‘kicks back,’ causing gravitational effects. If there is no real inertial structure to (...) space-time then, as Weyl points out, the concept of the relative motive of several bodies has no more foundation than the concept of absolute motion for a single body. Thus, L1 seems to be untenable. L2 is a more sophisticated view which rejects the geometrical aspect of Newtonian space-time as a container for events, but accepts the existence of a real structure which determines the inertial properties of matter. (shrink)

The aim of Schunn, Crowley and Okada's (1998) study is to address the question of whether the current state of cognitive science, as represented by Cognitive Science and the Cognitive Science Society, “reflects the multidisciplinary ideals of its foundation.” To properly interpret and respond to their results, we need to ask a prior question: What is cognitive science's multidisciplinary ideal? There are at least two conceptions—a “localist” conception, which seems to be implicit in Schunn, Crowley and Okada's discussion, and a (...) “holist” conception. I argue that while both have been endorsed by some cognitive scientists, there are reasons for preferring the holist conception. I then consider what Schunn, Crowley and Okada's findings tell us about the state of cognitive science in light of a holist approach and report on an analysis of the journal's contents which looks at the domain, subdomain, and cognitive capacity investigated. (shrink)

In the early 12th century, a Jewish community first settled in the medieval city of Erfurt (Thuringia). The synagogue, the mikvah (ritual bath), and several private dwellings of this community are preserved until today. A room in one of the private houses formerly inhabited by Jews has a wooden beam ceiling, dating from 1244, which is colourfully painted with tendrils, leaves and blossoms. This ceiling was added to the room together with other extensive refurbishments: the former door in the eastern (...) wall was replaced with a built-in cupboard, a new door as well as a recess for an oil lamp were added to the northern wall, and the room received an oriel window. Furthermore, the ceiling shows the remains of suspensions for lamps, and traces of shelves are still visible on the walls. As an ensemble, these alterations suggest that the chamber was converted into a prayer room in the mid-13th century. As the only preserved example of a medieval Jewish private room for prayer, it constitutes an important source for understanding Jewish piety in the German-speaking lands. (shrink)