Aristotle's treatise De Interpretatione is one of his central works; it continues to be the focus of much attention and debate. C. W. A. Whitaker presents the first systematic study of this work, and offers a radical new view of its aims, its structure, and its place in Aristotle's system, basing this view upon a detailed chapter-by-chapter analysis.By treating the work systematically, rather than concentrating on certain selected passages, Whitaker is able to show that, contrary to traditional opinion, it forms (...) an organized and coherent whole. He argues that the De Interpretatione is intended to provide the underpinning for dialectic, the system of argument by question and answer set out in Aristotle's Topics; and he rejects the traditional view that the De Interpretatione concerns the assertion and is oriented towards the formal logic of the Prior Analytics. In doing so, he sheds valuable new light on some of Aristotle's most famous texts. (shrink)

This paper challenges the traditional assumption that descriptive and prescriptive sciences are essentially distinct by presenting a study on the implicit normativity of the production and presentation of biomedical scientific facts within evidence-based medicine. This interdisciplinary study serves as an illustration of the potential worth of the concept of implicit normativity for bioethics in general and for integrated empirical ethics research in particular. It demonstrates how both the production and presentation of scientific information in an evidence-based decision-support contain implicit presuppositions (...) and values, which pre-structure the moral environment of the clinical process of decision-making. As a consequence, the evidence-based decision support did not only support the clinical decision-making process; it also transformed it in a morally significant way. This phenomenon undermines the assumption within much of the literature on patient autonomy that information disclosure is a conditional requirement before patient autonomy even starts; patient autonomy is already influenced during the production and presentation of information. These results imply an increased responsibility of those who produce and present evidence-based facts(i.e. scientists in general and physicians in particular). The insights of this study not only involve a different focus on both theory and practice of patient autonomy and informed consent, but they also call for a broader scope of morality than does traditional empirical research in bioethics. The concept of implicit normativity within integrated empirical ethics research calls for a strong cooperation between bioethicists and descriptive scientists, i.e., a cooperation that goes beyond the discipline-specific epistemic values and that takes place during all phases of the research process. (shrink)

C W Evers, J C Walker; Knowledge, Partitioned Sets and Extensionality: a refutation of the forms of knowledge thesis, Journal of Philosophy of Education, Volume.

Empirical Logic and Public Debate supplies a large number of previously unpublished papers that together make up a survey of recent developments in the field of empirical logic. It contains theoretical contributions, some of a more formal and some of an informal nature, as well as numerous contemporary and historical case studies. The book will therefore be attractive both to those who wish to focus upon the theory and practice of discussion, debate, arguing, and argument, as well as to those (...) readers who are primarily interested in applications to a particular field, such as ethics, political philosophy, feminist philosophy, or the history of philosophy. (shrink)

Iphigenia at aulis presents many problems to the literary and textual critic. Among these the problem of the prologue is as clear-cut as it is controversial. It may be summarized as follows: Our text opens abruptly with an anapaestic dialogue between Agamemnon and the Retainer, instead of the usual monologue in trimeters.In reply to a question from the Retainer, Agamemnon launches into a long iambic narrative, describing much that the Retainer must know already, and with no sign, for more than (...) sixty lines, that the Retainer is being addressed. Moreover 49 {Ἐγ⋯νοντο ۸ήδαι…) reads like the first line of a conventional opening monologue. (shrink)

A proof is given that there does not exist an event, that is not already in the past for some possible distant observer at the (our) moment that the latter is "now" for us. Such event is as "legally" past for that distant observer as is the moment five minutes ago on the sun for us (irrespective of the circumstance that the light of the sun cannot reach us in a period of five minutes). Only an extreme positivism: "that which (...) cannot yet be observed does not yet exist", can possibly withstand the conclusion concerned. Therefore, there is determinism, also in micro-physics. (shrink)

We abandon as redundant the assumption that there exists something more in the physical world than action quanta, which constitute the atoms of the events of which the four-dimensional world consists. We derive metric, energy, matter, etc., from action and the structure formed by the quanta. In the microworld thequantization of space so introduced implies deviations from conventional metrics that make it possible in particular to explain nonlocality. The uncertainty relations, then, in conjunction with the action-based metric, appear to play (...) an essential role in making direct physical contact between emission and absorption events (i.e., retroactivity) possible, which concretely answers Bohr's conjecture that microprocesses constitute “wholes.” All of this appears to afford a realistic explanation of wave-particle “duality,” the EPR and other quantum paradoxes, the hidden variable problem, the “collapse” of wave packets, and the wave interference mechanism with the ¦ ϕ ¦2 rule. (shrink)