Chronic and current epistemological controversies, with particular attention to the development of pragmatist/historicist/constructivist reconceptions of knowledge and science in the 20th century and the scandalized responses to them by defenders of more traditional rationalist/objectivist/realist conceptions. Individual chapters deal with complex and confused relations among epistemic skepticism, relativism, and constructivist epistemology ; 20th-century "postmodern" relativism and anti-relativism; Ludwik Fleck and constructivist views of truth, science, and knowledge; attacks on and disavowals of constructivism and/or relativism by established and feminist philosophers; the Science (...) Wars and fraught relations between the humanities and the sciences; the problematic claims of Evolutionary Psychology; and chronic problems and contemporary views of animal-human relations. (shrink)

This paper proposes an approach to narrative deixis which offers a coherent analysis of the respective roles of proximal and distal deictic expressions. The paper starts by arguing that fictional narratives require an approach to deixis which modifies a number of broadly held assumptions, especially as regards the interaction between tense and other deictic forms. It then considers the widely discussed instance of the temporal adverb now in the context of Past Tense. The second part of the paper gives special (...) focus to demonstratives in narrative fiction, showing their role in temporal construals. It argues that both temporal and demonstrative expressions are primarily used to serve narrative viewpoint construction. Examples from several novels are then used to show how the proximal and distal choices of demonstratives, temporal adverbs and locative adverbs structure narrative viewpoint, including narrative representation of character experience. The paper concludes by proposing that in the context of fictional narratives the proximal/distal contrast is more relevant to meaning emergence than individual aspects of deixis, and that the construal of time can be achieved through the whole spectrum of deictic forms, not just tense and temporal adverbs such as now and then. (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)

This collection breaks new ground in four key areas of feminist social thought: the sex/gender debates; challenges to liberalism/equality; feminist ethics; and feminist perspectives on global ethics and politics in the 21st century. Altogether, the essays provide an innovative look at feminist philosophy while making substantive contributions to current debates in gender theory, ethics, and political thought.

Considerable ethics-related focus has been directed to the pharmaceutical industry’s relationship with physicians, in part because physicians have the only profession able to prescribe much of what the industry manufactures. In Alberta, however, pharmacists have recently been permitted to modify physician prescriptions for a patient and even to prescribe without physician involvement. This paper will examine how this change in responsibilities could change pharmacists’ relationships with the industry.

While public health ethics typically deals with issues wherein individual well-being competes with the population’s wellbeing, it also deals with competing groups’ well-being. Public health responses to the Chicago heat wave and Hurricane Katrina were strongly criticized, in part, because certain groups of people experienced far greater and longer-lasting losses compared to others. Diff erences in experience were largely due to socio-economic-political disadvantages or vulnerabilities. This article is written in light of the recent fi rst and second “waves” of the (...) H1N1 pandemic in Canada. Its focus is on people living in the community with a mental health or addiction problem during the pandemic and, more specifi cally, in the context of supplies of anti-viral medications and vaccines being limited. The article explores how certain social justice concerns may increase the risks of serious illness or death for these people and the kinds of compensatory responses that might be implemented. (shrink)

This hypothesis is that anorexia nervosa is a biologically driven disorder, and mammalian hibernation may offer clues to its pathogenesis. Using this approach, this hypothesis offers suggestions for employing heart rate variability as an early diagnostic test for anorexia nervosa; employing the ketogenic diet for refeeding patients, attending to omega 3:6 ratio of polyunsaturated fatty acids in the refeeding diet; and exploring clinical trials of the endocannabinoid-like agent, palmitoylethanolamde for patients with anorexia nervosa. This hypothesis also explores the role of (...) lipids and autoimmune phenomena in anorexia nervosa, and suggest a lipodomics study to search for antibodies in the serum on patients with anorexia nervosa. (shrink)

Divination has been practiced as a way of knowing and communicating for millennia. Diviners are experts who embrace the notion of moving from a boundless to a bounded realm of existence in their practice. They excel in insight, imagination, fluency in language, and knowledge of cultural traditions and human psychology. During a divination, they construct usable knowledge from oracular messages of various sorts. To do so, they link diverse domains of representational information and symbolism with emotional or presentational experience. Their (...) divinatory acts involve complementary modes of cognition associated with these rather different symbolic forms. In representational symbolism, intentional reference, within a relatively controlled inductive reality, is paramount, while in presentational symbolism, implicit experiential immersion, within a free‐flowing context, is grasped intuitively. Wherever a theory of divination has been elicited from diviners, there is a clear recognition of the overlapping of inductive, intuitive, and interpretive techniques and ways of knowing. In order to arrive at a theory of practice for divination, as a form of practical consciousness or knowledge within different modes of cognition, one must take what diviners say and do seriously. Recent scientific studies reveal that consciousness is connected both to electrical information in the brain and nervous system and to electronic semi‐conduction in body tissues. Brain consciousness is embedded in body consciousness and coupled to it. This validates the experience of mind‐body consciousness diviners have used for millennia in their performances. (shrink)

First, I love Greek language, a language which allow me to perceive what a language is, and what translation could mean. Then, I think it is because of Heidegger. At the time, we used to study classical antiquity and the pre-socratics through Heidegger and Nietzsche’s work. My own philosophical question was : « Is it possible to be Presocratic in some other way than the Heideggerian one? » The answer determinated my interest and passion for the sophists. I found it (...) extraordinary when I realized that Gorgias and his treatise « On Nature or the Non-Existent » presented a new way of thinking about Parmenides. If you are a Heideggerian, Parmenides is the origin of philosophy, the origin of thought. But very quickly, only fifty years after Parmenides, Gorgias came and said: « Look, what Parmenides says about Being, he could say about Non-being, and I myself can say it about Non-being. So, is Being an origin, an “Es gibt”, "There Is", just needing to be unconcealed? Or is it simply a product of Parmenides’ poem : Being is an effect of saying, and I can show it ». And he did show it, quite critically. This was my first insight. (shrink)

In this paper, we argue that trust is an important aspect of social reality, one that realist social theory has paid little attention to but which clearly resonates with a realist social ontology. Furthermore, the emergence of an interest in trust in specific subject fields such as organization theory indicates the growing significance of issues of trust as market liberalism has developed. As such, the emergence of an interest in trust provides support for Archer's characterisation of late modernity in The (...) Reflexive Imperative as a period of heterogeneity and greater incongruity. Commenting on this provides an opportunity to discuss the issue of habit in relation to trust and also the importance of the analysis of integration as a means to explain problems of trust. The commentary draws on examples from finance. (shrink)

We reviewed literature to understand when a spatial map for time is available in the brain. We carefully defined the concepts of metrical map of time and of conceptual representation of time as the mental time line (MTL) in order to formulate our position. It is that both metrical map and conceptual representation of time are spatial in nature. The former should be innate, related to motor/implicit timing, it should represent all magnitudes with an analogic and bi-dimensional structure. The latter (...) MTL should be learned, available at about 8–10 years-old and related to cognitive/explicit time. It should have uni-dimensional, linear and directional structure (left-to-right in Western culture). We bear the centrality of the development of number cognition, of time semantic concepts and of reading/writing habits for the development of ordinality and linearity of the MTL. (shrink)

The term ‘parenthetical’ is applied to an almost unlimited range of linguistic phenomena, which share but one common feature, namely their being used parenthetically. Parenthetic use is mostly described in terms of embedding an expression into some host sentence. Actually, however, it is anything but clear what it means for an expression to be used parenthetically, from both a syntactic and a semantic point of view.Given that in most, if not all, cases the alleged host sentence can be considered syntactically (...) and semantically complete in itself, it needs to be asked what kind of information the parenthetical contributes to the overall structure. Another issue to be addressed concerns the nature of the relation between parenthetical and host and the question what is it that holds them together.Trying to figure out the basic function of parentheticals, the present paper proposes a semiotic analysis of parenthetically used expressions. This semiotic analysis is not intended to replace linguistic approaches, but is meant to elaborate on why parentheticals are so hard to capture linguistically. Taking a dynamic conception of signs and sign processes as starting point, parentheticals are argued to render explicit the inherent dialogicity of signs and utterances. This inherent dialogicity is hardly ever taken into consideration in linguistic analyses, which take the two-dimensional linearity of language as granted. (shrink)

Resumo: Neste artigo apresentamos um quadro geral da defesa de Aristóteles da teleologia natural em Physica II 8, analisando a aporia que ele levanta, neste contexto, no que diz a respeito do fenômeno da chuva e do vir a ser das partes dos animais. Em primeiro lugar, indicaremos os problemas envolvidos, e logo em seguida apresentaremos a nossa soluçáo para eles. Palavras-chave: Causas. Fenômeno acidental. Necessidade. Teleologia.

DESCARTES’S CONCEPTION OF ANIMAL-MACHINE AND ITS CONSEQUENCES Descartes claims that an animal is an automaton that operates by laws of mechanics. It doesn’t think, it doesn’t feel, and, therefore, it doesn’t suffer. So animals can be exploited without a guilty conscience and scientific experiments can be carried out on them. This view, very convenient for people, has followers nowadays, too. Keywords: DESCARTES, ANIMAL-MACHINE, PEOPLE.

The contrast between man's amazing ability to manipulate his world and his pitiful incompetence in managing his own affairs is now as commonplace as it is tragic. It is by rigorous devotion to scientific method that we have made our conquests over the material environment; it is obvious that this method is not normally applied to the field of relations of human beings, individual and collective. These are conducted in a quite different way, governed by a medley of primitive impulses (...) set in a framework of a traditional morality that varies from place to place and age to age. In these matters science plays little part; yet more than a century has passed since Auguste Comte said that the rational reform of society must be brought about by the application of scientific method to social problems. It is, therefore, the first purpose of this essay to ask how far social problems might be tackled by the methods of science. (shrink)

The subject of the article is the relationship of the human entity to other entities and to the world as a whole. The author discusses the problem within the ontological, political and moral contexts. She is interested in the status of the monad as an isolated being, separating itself from the other and in the conditions necessary for its integration with others. The author turns particular attention to a “social monad” i.e. a set of beings locked in their collective solitude (...) due to the rejection of anything foreign. “The social monad” constitutes a category that makes xenophobic attitudes and causes of social exclusion susceptible to analysis. (shrink)

Prenatal screening and testing are preference‐based health care options. They are offered so that pregnant women and their partners can learn genetic information about the developing fetus. In this literature review, I summarize studies of women’s and their partners’ psychological responses to prenatal testing and screening. These studies investigate the experiences of pregnant women, largely in the United States, who have access to health care services. Although the results indicate that these women are receptive to prenatal testing and screening and (...) seem to have limited negative psychological consequences, pregnant women without access to these services are not represented and may have different experiences. With that caveat in mind, based on the evidence, women generally do well psychologically as they manage the options that arise for them in the prenatal context. (shrink)

Com a filosofia de Simone Weil, este artigo propõe discutir a perspectiva filosófica da atenção. Para tal, argumenta que a condição da atenção demanda e sustenta um estado de graça que, ao dispor à consciência o sentimento de participação na beleza da natureza, vincula ser e mundo. Debate, a partir da perspectiva weiliana, um princípio intermediador entre a contemplação das formas da natureza, a afeição ao sagrado e o engajamento com a alteridade como condição da atenção. Busca-se inferir que a (...) familiarização da consciência às instâncias fundamentais do ser é capaz de fazer frente aos sequestros atencionais do presente e recuperar um estado de graça suficiente a desembrutecer a vida. O objetivo está em tecer a crítica ao mundo moderno a partir da afirmação de uma atenção que, diferente das técnicas de focalização instrumentalizadas, demanda a confiança na experiência capaz de vincular o sentir, o pensar e o agir na defesa ético-política do amor ao mundo. (shrink)

The paper addresses charges of risk and loss aversion as well as of irrationality directed against the precautionary principle, by providing an epistemic analysis of its specific role in the safety law system. In particular, I contend that: 1) risk aversion is not a form of irrational or biased behaviour; 2) both risk and loss aversion regard the form of the utility function, whereas PP rather regards the information on which to base the decision; 3) thus PP has formally nothing (...) to do with risk or loss aversion but rather with risk awareness; 4) PP removes a fictional construct in the legal system, according to which any hazard should be ignored and denied until it is scientifically proven; 5) the quandary originates in the tension between current methods of evidence evaluation, and the logic underlying PP which demands for a probabilistic epistemology. (shrink)

In this paper we shall give a characterization of D-algebras in terms of lattice ordered abelian groups. To make this paper self-contained we shall recall some notations from [4]. The symbols !; ^; _; serve as implication, conjunction, disjunction, and negation, respectively. By D we mean a set of connectives from the list above containing the implication connective !. By a D-formula we mean a formula built up in a usual way from an innite set of the propositional variables and (...) connectives from D. (shrink)

A juxtaposition of Frege’s and Heidegger’s conceptions of reference (Bedeutung and Verweisung) shows them to be complementary. The thesis that meaning determines reference has been attributed to both Frege and Heidegger. Contrary to the view that this commits them to linguistic idealism, I defend a weak version of the determination thesis according to which both Fregean and Heideggerian reference allow for the possibility of error and for the objectivity of discourse. Thus, what we refer to is accessible to us only (...) by our grasping its sense of meaning; sense is a way of fixing reference, but does not constitute the referent as what it is. (shrink)

Incorporating patients' spiritual beliefs into health care decision making is essential for ethically good care. Gadow's three-level ethical framework of ethical immediacy, ethical universalism, and relational narrative is presented as a tool for enhancing nurses' ability to explore and deepen understandings of patients' spiritual beliefs, given that these and their experiences are often expressed in a language that seems foreign to nurses. The demographic and cultural shifts that lead to the necessity to understand patients who use principles and metaphors that, (...) while commonly understood within their spiritual tradition, may seem incomprehensible to outsiders, are here set in the Canadian context. A case study on palliative sedation is used to illustrate how the ethical framework can help to reveal the spiritual certainties, principles and narratives patients bring to their health care experiences. (shrink)

Background: The aim of the study is to clarify the beliefs and numerous doubts about the possible identification of personality in handwriting. The purpose of the described studies was to show an association between personality traits and handwriting features. The author aimed to verify whether or not there are any specific characteristics of writing in relation to personality traits. | Method: Two different studies have been described. A different number of subjects participated in the investigations and different techniques for personality (...) assessment were used; however, the same set of handwriting features was analyzed in each study. In the first study the NEO-FFI was used, while the EPQ-R was used in the second study. The graphic characteristics of the handwriting samples were examined by forensic experts. | Results: The correlations between the personality traits and handwriting features were counted. The results showed that there were few significant correlations between handwriting parameters and personality traits, as measured by the NEO-FFI and EPQ-R. | Conclusions: No writing characteristics were specific to personality traits. There is no evidence for assessment of personality on the base of handwriting. (shrink)

The article provides a critical analysis and a comparison of G. E. Moore and Ch. L. Stevenson’s accounts of meaning of evaluative terms. The author shows how these two accounts are interrelated and points out that although Moore never accepted emotivism himself he did not preclude the recognition of that theory as true in the future.