The use of Web 2.0 technologies in the classroom is becoming more widespread, as educators begin to recognise their use as effective learning and teaching tools. Web 2.0 facilitates new modes of social interaction that offer the potential to enrich university educational activities. New roles, structures and activities can be enabled, engendering new forms of creativity and increasing the availability of and extent of access to information. Yet in achieving this, such platforms shift the traditional boundaries between educators and their (...) students, between personal and professional lives, raising issues of integrity and pedagogy in unexpected ways. This paper reflects on three personal narratives to examine some of these challenges; the authors conclude by highlighting concerns that universities need to address. (shrink)

The move online of almost all meetings in 2020 in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic threw into sharp relief the taken-for-granted centrality of conferences within scientific culture. While its impact on science has yet to be fully grasped, for the authors of this special issue, this situation held heuristic power for understanding the meanings and functions, now and historically, of international scientific conferencing. Ongoing discussions in the academic world about the pros and cons of virtual meetings bring out the (...) central place of presence in these events and its mediation across space and time by modern infrastructures and technologies. From their rise in the mid-nineteenth century to the experiences of the present day, as well as in imagined futures, international conferences have been about communication. Following James Carey, they can be considered both as places for sharing knowledge and as rituals aimed at fostering and performing communities. (shrink)

This article focuses on three themes concerning determinism and indeterminism. The first theme is observational equivalence between deterministic and indeterministic models. Here I discuss several results about observational equivalence and present an argument on how to choose between deterministic and indeterministic models involving indirect evidence. The second theme is whether Newtonian physics is indeterministic. I argue that the answer depends on what one takes Newtonian mechanics to be, and I highlight how contemporary debates on this issue differ from those in (...) the nineteenth century. The third major theme is how the method of arbitrary functions can be used to make sense of deterministic probabilities. I discuss various ways of interpreting the initial probability distributions and argue that they are best understood as physical, biological etc. quantities characterising the particular situation at hand. Also, I emphasise that the method of arbitrary functions deserves more attention than it has received so far. (shrink)

The Critical Graduate Experience is a collection of scholarly reflections on the possibilities of a new vision for critical studies. It is a remarkable book that provides daring analyses from the vantage of the graduate student experience. Drawing from individual knowledge and research, the authors invite you to re-imagine education for justice. Barry Kanpol opens the work with a brilliant meditation on joy and cynicism in university classrooms and educational theory. The book continues to unfold as an open and honest (...) conversation with doctoral students and recent graduates concerning the ethics of higher education. In a true critical approach, each chapter problematizes a new facet of academic assumptions and practices as they touch the lives of students. The authors explore the ethical implications of acknowledging student spirituality and expanding the role of critical education studies. The book concludes with a transparent self-critique on the process and ethics of graduate students writing for publication. This is a wonderful text, guiding students and professors as they enter into dialogue on the ethics of an authentic critical education studies. Classes on practical ethics, educational spirituality, student voice, collaborative publishing, and critical pedagogy could benefit from the insights offered here. Daring to believe that student experience and knowledge have a place in the world of academic publishing, this book is both a prophetic proclamation of and humble invitation to a new future in the field. (shrink)

Critics of theological accounts of the nature of morality have argued that such accounts must be rejected, even by theists, because such accounts (i) have the unacceptable implication that nothing is morally wrong in possible worlds in which atheism is true, (ii) render the substantive content of morality arbitrary, and (iii) make it impossible or redundant to attribute moral properties to God or God’s actions. I argue that none of these criticisms constitute good reason for theists to abandon theological accounts (...) of the nature of morality. (shrink)

The aim of the article is to provide a clear and thorough conceptual analysis of the main candidates for a definition of climate and climate change. Five desiderata on a definition of climate are presented: it should be empirically applicable; it should correctly classify different climates; it should not depend on our knowledge; it should be applicable to the past, present, and future; and it should be mathematically well-defined. Then five definitions are discussed: climate as distribution over time for constant (...) external conditions; climate as distribution over time when the external conditions vary as in reality; climate as distribution over time relative to regimes of varying external conditions; climate as the ensemble distribution for constant external conditions; and climate as the ensemble distribution when the external conditions vary as in reality. The third definition is novel and is introduced as a response to problems with existing definitions. The conclusion is that most definitions encounter serious problems and that the third definition is most promising. 1 Introduction2 Climate Variables and a Simple Climate Model3 Desiderata on a Definition of Climate4 Climate as Distribution over Time4.1 Definition 1: Distribution over time for constant external conditions4.2 Definition 2: Distribution over time when the external conditions vary as in reality4.3 Definition 3: Distribution over time for regimes of varying external conditions4.4 Infinite versions5 Climate as Ensemble Distribution5.1 Definition 4: Ensemble distribution for constant external conditions5.2 Definition 5: Ensemble distribution when the external conditions vary as in reality5.3 Infinite versions6 ConclusionAppendix. (shrink)

Garrett Cullity contends that fairness is appropriate impartiality (See Cullity (2004) Chapters 8 and 10 and Cullity (2008)). Cullity deploys his account of fairness as a means of limiting the extreme moral demand to make sacrifices in order to aid others that was posed by Peter Singer in his seminal article ‘Famine, Affluence and Morality’. My paper is founded upon the combination of (1) the observation that the idea that fairness consists in appropriate impartiality is very vague and (2) the (...) fact that psychological studies show the self-serving bias is especially likely to infect one’s judgements when the ideas involved are vague. I argue that Cullity’s solution to extreme moral demandingness is threatened by these findings. I then comment on whether some other theories of fairness are vulnerable to the same objection. (shrink)

Translation has long been viewed as ‘code-switching’ either within or between languages. Hence, most translation discussions center on its linguistic and cultural aspects. However, the fundamental mechanism of ‘translation as interpretative semiosis’ has yet to be studied with appropriate rigor. Susan Petrilli (2008) has identified ‘iconicity’ as the key that enables translative semiosis. Nevertheless, as her model is restricted to a discussion of literary translation activity in verbal sign systems, a fundamental mechanism to explain translation as interpretative semiosis is still (...) needed. By analyzing the interactions between the source sign (the translated) and the target sign (the translatant) in the translating process, it can be discerned that Humberto Maturana’s notion of autopoiesis may provide some crucial insights into translative semiosis. By identifying the autopoietic nature of translation, that is, the interlocked structural coupling between the Translated and Translatant, translation is no longer the ‘one-to-one-correspondence’ between sign systems, but rather a recursive process of interpretation—an interpretive semiosis. Moreover, it is by this autopoietic, self-productive mechanism of translation that I would suggest translation becomes a recursive generation of new inter-connections between semiotics systems. (shrink)

Following years of debate over the effectiveness of cognitive behavioural therapy for myalgic encephalomyelitis/chronic fatigue syndrome (ME/CFS), public health bodies in the UK and beyond have determined that no psychotherapy is clinically proven for this patient group. In the field of ME/CFS and the wider arena of ‘medically unexplained symptoms’ (MUS), patient survey data and qualitative research capturing patient experiences and psychotherapist attitudes suggest that therapeutic practice may sometimes fall short of required ethical standards. This raises questions about how psychotherapists (...) can safely support, as opposed to treat, people with these debilitating conditions. We consider four ethical principles that feature throughout psychotherapists’ codes of practice, those of respect, competence, responsibility and integrity, and discuss examples of good and poor practice in this arena as evinced by recent empirical literature. Following this, we offer a variety of suggestions to help strengthen ethical psychotherapy practice with patients with ME/CFS and other MUS. In terms of practitioner education, we recommend greater emphasis on humility, reflexivity and disability-affirming practices, exploration of personal as well professional ethics, and integration of patient expertise-by-experience, accompanied with the latest evidence, into foundational and ongoing training. In terms of ongoing practice, we suggest consideration of formalised patient-focused feedback systems and greater transparency vis-à-vis patient access to clinical notes. Finally, we underline the importance of elevating patients from mere subjects to co-producers of psychotherapy research. (shrink)

ExtractThis essay is about liberal and conservative views of marriage. I'll begin by mentioning that I would really, really like to avoid use of the terms ‘liberal’ and ‘conservative’, but when push comes to shove, I know of no better labels for the positions that will be discussed in what follows. I would like to avoid these labels for a simple reason: many people strongly self-identify as liberals or as conservatives, and this can undermine our ability to investigate the topic (...) in a sane, rational way. Politics, at least in the contemporary English-speaking world, functions a lot like the world of sports. Many people have a particular team to which their allegiance has been pledged, and the team's successes and failures on the field are shared in the hearts and minds of its loyal followers. In my own case – and here, I ask for your pity – I am a fan of the National Football League's Cleveland Browns. As much as I might wish things were otherwise, I rejoice in the Browns' triumphs and suffer when they lose. I do not wait to see what happens in the game before I decide which team to cheer for; if it's an NFL game, and I see orange and brown, I know where my allegiance lies. Furthermore, I identify with my fellow Browns fans in a way that I cannot identify with followers of, say, the Pittsburgh Steelers. Clevelanders are my people. We share something, and what we share unites us in opposition to Steeler Nation. Their victories are our defeats. It is a zero-sum game: for one of us to win, the other must lose.Send article to KindleTo send this article to your Kindle, first ensure [email protected] is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about sending to your Kindle. Find out more about sending to your Kindle. Note you can select to send to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be sent to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply. Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.LIBERAL AND CONSERVATIVE VIEWS OF MARRIAGEVolume 12, Issue 34Matthew Carey JordanDOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/S1477175613000067Your Kindle email address Please provide your Kindle [email protected]@kindle.com Available formats PDF Please select a format to send. By using this service, you agree that you will only keep articles for personal use, and will not openly distribute them via Dropbox, Google Drive or other file sharing services. Please confirm that you accept the terms of use. Cancel Send ×Send article to Dropbox To send this article to your Dropbox account, please select one or more formats and confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about sending content to Dropbox. LIBERAL AND CONSERVATIVE VIEWS OF MARRIAGEVolume 12, Issue 34Matthew Carey JordanDOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/S1477175613000067Available formats PDF Please select a format to send. By using this service, you agree that you will only keep articles for personal use, and will not openly distribute them via Dropbox, Google Drive or other file sharing services. Please confirm that you accept the terms of use. Cancel Send ×Send article to Google Drive To send this article to your Google Drive account, please select one or more formats and confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about sending content to Google Drive. LIBERAL AND CONSERVATIVE VIEWS OF MARRIAGEVolume 12, Issue 34Matthew Carey JordanDOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/S1477175613000067Available formats PDF Please select a format to send. By using this service, you agree that you will only keep articles for personal use, and will not openly distribute them via Dropbox, Google Drive or other file sharing services. Please confirm that you accept the terms of use. Cancel Send ×Export citation. (shrink)

Background: Background: In general, qualitative research design often involves merging together various data collection strategies, and researcher’s may need to be prepared to spend longer periods in the field to pursue data collection opportunities that were not foreseen. Furthermore, nurse researchers performing qualitative research among patients and their relatives often experience unforeseen ethical dilemmas. Aim: This paper aimed to explore aspects of ethical dilemmas related to qualitative nursing research among patients and their relatives in the intensive care unit (ICU). Research (...) design: This paper is based on a qualitative researcher’s personal experience during a hermeneutic phenomenological study involving close observation and in-depth interviews with 11 intensive care nurses. Data were collected at two ICUs in two Norwegian university hospitals. Ethical considerations: The study was approved by the Norwegian Social Science Data Services (NSD). The Regional Committee for Medical and Health Research Ethics (REK) granted dispensation to the project regarding health personnels confidentiality of the patients who were present during the observation (2012/622-4). Findings: Close observation with nurses in the ICU requires the researcher to balance being a qualitative researcher, an ICU nurse and a sensitive fellow human being open to the suffering of the other—that is, being embodied, engaged and affected by sensitive situations and simultaneously constantly stepping back and reflecting on the meaning of those situations. Conclusions: The qualitative researcher’s ethical awareness also entails knowing and acknowledging his or her own vulnerability, which becomes apparent in the researcher-participant relationship and settings in which being a fellow human always overrules the researcher’s role in ethical dilemmas. (shrink)

Healthcare providers face enormous pressure to save healthcare resources where possible. In this paper I explore the response that we should allocate resources fairly. What is a fair allocation of healthcare resources for children? First, I consider the luck egalitarianism approach of limiting resources to adult patients who are responsible for their conditions. A luck egalitarian distribution of healthcare resources to adults faces significant problems in application. I maintain that when we consider these problems with a focus on the just (...) distribution of healthcare resources to children, we gain valuable insights into the fairness of healthcare allocation for adults. (shrink)

Marcus Arvan’s Rightness as Fairness is a highly ambitious book. In fewer than 230 pages, hopes to demonstrate that we ought to evaluate moral theories in a similar manner to sciences, that existing moral theories fall short on that evaluation, that moral normativity reduces to instrumental rationality, and that a new theory of ‘rightness as fairness’ meets the scientific evaluative standards better than any of the alternatives.

Only human beings have a rich conceptual repertoire with concepts like tort, entropy, Abelian group, mannerism, icon and deconstruction. How have humans constructed these concepts? And once they have been constructed by adults, how do children acquire them? While primarily focusing on the second question, in The Origin of Concepts , Susan Carey shows that the answers to both overlap substantially. Carey begins by characterizing the innate starting point for conceptual development, namely systems of core cognition. Representations of (...) core cognition are the output of dedicated input analyzers, as with perceptual representations, but these core representations differ from perceptual representations in having more abstract contents and richer functional roles. Carey argues that the key to understanding cognitive development lies in recognizing conceptual discontinuities in which new representational systems emerge that have more expressive power than core cognition and are also incommensurate with core cognition and other earlier representational systems. Finally, Carey fleshes out Quinian bootstrapping, a learning mechanism that has been repeatedly sketched in the literature on the history and philosophy of science. She demonstrates that Quinian bootstrapping is a major mechanism in the construction of new representational resources over the course of childrens cognitive development. Carey shows how developmental cognitive science resolves aspects of long-standing philosophical debates about the existence, nature, content, and format of innate knowledge. She also shows that understanding the processes of conceptual development in children illuminates the historical process by which concepts are constructed, and transforms the way we think about philosophical problems about the nature of concepts and the relations between language and thought. (shrink)

While endorsing Gopnik's proposal that studies of the emergence and modification of scientific theories and studies of cognitive development in children are mutually illuminating, we offer a different picture of the beginning points of cognitive development from Gopnik's picture of "theories all the way down." Human infants are endowed with several distinct core systems of knowledge which are theory-like in some, but not all, important ways. The existence of these core systems of knowledge has implications for the joint research program (...) between philosophers and psychologists that Gopnik advocates and we endorse. A few lessons already gained from this program of research are sketched. (shrink)

Charlotte Wolff was born in Riesenburg, West Prussia into a middle-class Jewish family. She studied philosophy and then medicine at several German universities, completing her doctorate in Berlin in 1926. Working in various institutions over the next few years, she was also interested in psychotherapy and had a small private medical and psychotherapeutic practice. In 1933 she was forced to leave Germany because of the Nazi regime, and settled for a few years in Paris. As a German refugee she (...) was unable to practice medicine, so she began her research into the correlation between hand traits and personality. In 1936 she went to London to continue her research work and lived there until her death. An active lesbian from an early age, her later research turned to sexology and her writing on lesbianism and bisexuality were influential early works in the field. This is a great opportunity to rediscover her early work, including her first autobiography. (shrink)

Standard accounts of misinformation require that it is either false or misleading, in the sense that it leads people to false beliefs. But many examples of misinformation involve true information that leads people to true beliefs. So, I propose a new theory of misinformation: misinformation is information that is epistemically harmful in the sense that it is disposed to reduce the overall quality of a subject’s epistemic position. This includes not only causing the subject to form a false belief, but (...) also causing the subject to form beliefs that are otherwise epistemically deficient or to abandon or reduce confidence in epistemically good beliefs. This account improves on standard accounts in two ways. First, it more closely matches intuitive judgments about what counts as misinformation, including cases of failed deception and information that is spread without regard for its truth. Second, it provides a natural account of what is wrong with spreading misinformation: it contributes to an epistemically hostile environment in which we are more likely to become epistemically worse off when we gather more information. (shrink)

Does strolling through an art museum, admiring the old masters, improve us morally and spiritually? Would government subsidies of "high art" (such as big-city opera houses) be better spent on local community art projects? In What Good are the Arts? John Carey--one of Britain's most respected literary critics--offers a delightfully skeptical look at the nature of art. In particular, he cuts through the cant surrounding the fine arts, debunking claims that the arts make us better people or that judgements (...) about art are anything more than personal opinion. Indeed, Carey argues that there are no absolute values in the arts and that we cannot call other people's aesthetic choices "mistaken" or "incorrect," however much we dislike them. Along the way, Carey reveals the flaws in the aesthetic theories of everyone from Emanuel Kant to Arthur C. Danto, and he skewers the claims of "high-art advocates" such as Jeannette Winterson. But Carey does argue strongly for the value of art as an activity and for the superiority of one art in particular: literature. Literature, he contends, is the only art capable of reasoning, and the only art that can criticize. Language is the medium that we use to convey ideas, and the usual ingredients of other arts--objects, noises, light effects--cannot replicate this function. Literature has the ability to inspire the mind and the heart towards practical ends far better than any work of conceptual art. Here then is a lively and stimulating invitation to debate the value of art, a provocative book that will pique the interest of anyone who loves painting, music, or literature. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy and Literature 25.2 (2001) 350-353 [Access article in PDF] Book Review The Ways of Naysaying: No, Not, Nothing, and Nonbeing, The Ways of Naysaying: No, Not, Nothing, and Nonbeing, by Eva T. H. Brann; xviii & 249 pp. Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2001, $35.00. This, the third of Eva Brann's trilogy on imagination, time, and naysaying respectively, is described by one of her colleagues as her (...) "cradle-to-grave book" (p. xvi). The word "naysaying" plays felicitously on the sound of the English word "nay" and the cognate Indo-European root "ne," which gives Brann a convenient starting-point for discerning what various forms of naysaying have in common. Note that this is saying rather than thinking, being, or doing, although the relations among these acts are a recurring concern in her discussion. Unlike some "postmoderns," Brann does not regard language as a self-contained arena with no reference outside of itself. Rather, for her, language is a convenient medium for thinking about what is extralinguistic, whether in the mind or elsewhere.Nor does she think that a word must necessarily have some underlying unity beneath its various meanings. In fact, heeding Wittgenstein's warning, she admits that "it is a pathologically bad craving to want a word to have one ultimate meaning, worse to look for one meaning over many words, and worst to assume that such a meaning may apply to a something beyond the realm of language." Nevertheless, she suggests, "this craving to look for one truth behind many appearances may be simply irradicable, being nothing less than the philosophical impulse" (p. xiv).Where does her "philosophical impulse" focus, on texts or on things? She explicitly tells us that texts are indispensable (at least for her) to get very far with the things themselves (p. 2). And so, in the course of her investigation, she attends to Parmenides, Plato, Aristotle, Anselm, Kant, Fichte, Hegel, Bergson, Frege, Meinong, Russell, Whitehead, Dewey, Heidegger, and Wittgenstein, among others. Nonetheless, she begins by noticing a sort of willful denial that is pre-linguistic and "speechless" (the contrariness of an infant), and she ends with the nothingness that is void of all language and everything else. These two topics, expressed by the words "No" (Chapter One) and "Nothing" (Chapter Six) respectively, "frame" her inquiry (p. 42). Along the way she always has an eye to what lies behind or beyond language, in the world or in the mind, with a chapter each for "Not," "Nonexistence," "Nonbeing," and "Negativity." She [End Page 350] says that Chapter Four, concerning "Nonbeing," is the center and philosophic focus of her study. Brann's chapters thus represent the six big divisions for organizing her observations. Indeed, for Brann, the plurality of naysayings "seems to fall naturally" into her sixfold division (p. xiv).Thoughtfully pondering this structure takes the reader a long way toward understanding the work (in both senses of "work": the thought itself and the text which records that thought). The chapter divisions progress from the willful, through the logical, the imaginative, the philosophic, and the dialectical, to end, as we noted, in the absolute Nothing, the "antagonist of Being." For instance, the distinction between the first two--the willful and the logical--is the distinction between the personal (denial) and the impersonal (negation). In considering willful denial, Brann understands the will to be a "willingness, inclination, readiness"--usually "determinate," "focused and active" (p. 7). Likewise, negation also has a personal origin: "Negation arises from the human desire and ability to make distinctions; it is (most likely) grounded in the opposition and polarities that belong to beings (of which the first... is surely that of thinking itself to its object, be it ideal or real)" (p. 29f.). Thus, although logical negation seems to originate in the personal subject there is something quite detachable and impersonal about logical formulations, so that Heraclitus "bids people hear his truth 'not listening to me but to the logos,' the cosmic collecting and distinguishing power" (p. 128). So the logos that begins for us as "reason manifested in... (shrink)

On entend montrer que la réécriture heideggérienne de la notion husserlienne d’intentionnalité, réécriture herméneutique, contextuelle et pratique de 1919 à 1923, réécriture ontologique et temporelle de 1923 à 1929 aboutit à une double dissolution de la notion qui témoigne de l’irréductible divergence entre la pensée de Heidegger et la phénoménologie husserlienne.

Masculinities vary by organizational context, demonstrating that organizational culture shapes the gendering of work even within the same occupation. The author draws on comparative and ethnographic data collected in two retail environments to understand how a common organizational culture is differently gendered by the organization of work. In these music stores, organizational culture is driven by masculinist fantasies of the rock musician lifestyle. As the products and knowledge of the rock musician lifestyle are made popularly accessible and retail work is (...) deskilled, a style of masculinity based on fraternization and competition takes the place of formal knowledge and experience—reaffirming rock musician as a populist, but exclusively male identity. The article concludes with a consideration of how the de-skilling of retail work reproduces gendered interactions that affirm men’s control over work and its products, even as retail work is presumed to be feminizing. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Journal of the History of Philosophy 38.1 (2000) 103-110 [Access article in PDF] Hutcheson's Moral Sense and the Problem of Innateness Daniel Carey National University of Ireland Francis Hutcheson's philosophy arguably represented a delicate, and at times precarious, synthesis of positions laid out by John Locke and the third Earl of Shaftesbury. From Shaftesbury, whose influence he acknowledged explicitly in the title page of the first edition of (...) the Inquiry into the Original of our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue (1725), Hutcheson gained an appreciation of the dignity of human nature, reflected in sociable instincts, benevolent impulses, and the moral sense. From Locke he adopted the bias of empiricism, placing moral philosophy on an observational footing, ostensibly free from a priori assumptions.1 The challenge posed by integrating the work of these two mentors arose from their deep incompatibility, evident in Shaftesbury's declared opposition to Locke's mode of philosophizing and rejection of his disagreeable representation of human nature. Nowhere was Hutcheson's combination of Locke and Shaftesbury more difficult to sustain than over the issue of innateness. Locke was intent on jettisoning innate ideas, but Shaftesbury remained keen to rescue them.Of course there are different versions and definitions of innateness at stake here: on one account, it entailed the possession of particular, specifiable ideas or conceptions, somehow inscribed in the soul which might or might not require the trigger of experience to emerge (for example, ideas of God, good and, evil); on another, a predisposition to hold certain beliefs and make certain judgments, provided that 'normal' conditions of maturity and rationality have been met; finally, a faculty, that is, an inborn structure enabling the subject to experience the world in a moral way, and to register ethical responses to it, whatever they may be.2 All of these orientations on innateness impinge on Hutcheson's approach to the problem. On the one hand, he conceded Locke's critique as consistent with modern philosophizing, but he restricted its force to innate ideas or propositions, leaving the moral sense conveniently exempt from the [End Page 103] objection. On the other hand, Hutcheson was determined to reintroduce the content of innate ideas if not the name, assigning the moral sense a familiar, normative role in underwriting perceptions and judgments.The intricacy of the issue has led critics to arrive at contradictory assessments of Hutcheson's outlook on innateness. Stephen Buckle and Knud Haakonssen take Hutcheson at his word and argue that he abandoned innate ideas altogether.3 David Fate Norton agrees that Hutcheson found Locke's critique persuasive, at least against neo-Platonic theories of ethics (such as Cudworth's), but elsewhere Norton maintains that Hutcheson sets up the moral sense as an "innate and independent" moral faculty.4 Charles Taylor, meanwhile, stresses the dispositional inclination of Hutcheson's argument: "Goodness and generosity are natural to us. He might have been tempted in an earlier generation to say 'innate,' but he has internalized enough of the Lockean psychology to shy away from this. So he claims that these sentiments are ones we naturally grow to have, just as we develop to our normal stature and shape."5 Given the disparate of conclusions drawn by historians of philosophy, the issue clearly merits reinvestigation. Differing lines of interpretation have emerged precisely because Hutcheson frequently changed his tack. His shifting strategy appears both in the revisions he made to later editions of the Inquiry, and in the development of his work over the course of his career. Closer attention to these considerations offers an insight into the predicament of moral philosophy in the early decades of the eighteenth century.In the critique of innate practical ideas launched in the first book of the Essay concerning Human Understanding (1690), Locke took a sceptical view of Stoic assertions about human uniformity and the existence of "common notions" indicating moral consensus around the world.6 Evidence drawn from contemporary travelers suggested the absence of any moral agreement of this kind; Locke based his conclusion on an investigation of human practice influenced by techniques... (shrink)

This article explores the ethical challenges of providing Medical Assistance in Dying (MAID) in a paediatric setting. More specifically, we focus on the theoretical questions that came to light when we were asked to develop a policy for responding to MAID requests at our tertiary paediatric institution. We illuminate a central point of conceptual confusion about the nature of MAID that emerges at the level of practice, and explore the various entailments for clinicians and patients that would flow from different (...) understandings. Finally, we consider the ethical challenges of building policy on what is still an extremely controversial social practice. While MAID is currently available to capable patients in Canada who are 18 years or older—a small but important subsection of the population our hospital serves—we write our policy with an eye to the near future when capable young people may gain access to MAID. We propose that an opportunity exists for MAID-providing institutions to reduce social stigma surrounding this practice, but not without potentially serious consequences for practitioners and institutions themselves. Thus, this paper is intended as a road map through the still-emerging legal and ethical landscape of paediatric MAID. We offer a view of the roads taken and considered along the way, and our justifications for travelling the paths we chose. By providing a record of our in-progress thinking, we hope to stimulate wider discussion about the issues and questions encountered in this work. (shrink)

In this paper, we elucidate the moral psychology and what we might call the moral sociology of Mencius and of Hume, and we argue for three claims. First, we demonstrate that there are strong similarities between Mencius and Hume concerning some of the principal psychological sources of the virtue of humanity. Second, we show that there are strong similarities between the two concerning some of the principal social sources of the virtue of humanity. Third, we argue that there are related, (...) though weaker, similarities between Mencius and Hume concerning some of the principal cognitive sources of the virtue of humanity. We conclude by suggesting that the number and nature of these similarities demonstrate the need for future research on the conceptual connections between Confucian and Humean moral philosophy, especially on the psychological and social sources of benevolent moral development. (shrink)

Building on work by Popper, Schweber, Nozick, Sober, and others in a still-growing literature, I explore here the conceptual kinship between Adam Smith''s ''invisible hand'' and Darwinian natural selection. I review the historical ties, and examine Ullman -Margalit''s ''constraints'' on invisible-hand accounts, which I later re-apply to natural selection, bringing home the close relationship. These theories share a ''parent'' principle, itself neither biological no politico-economic, that collective order and well-being can emerge parsimoniously from the dispersed action of individuals. The invisible (...) hand operates on ''memes'' the way natural selection operates on genes. Like Darwin''s concept, it brings together traditional opposites, ''nature'' and ''selection,'' forming a saltation-mitigating transition between biological instinct and full-blown conscious design. Herschel''s criterion of confirmation, which Darwin long strove to satisfy, is itself an invisible hand-like meme – a ''Midas effect'' revealing and rewarding the fittest theories, Darwin''s and Smith''s emphatically among them. (shrink)

Major depressive disorder is not only the most widespread mental disorder in the world, it is a disorder on the rise. In cases of particularly severe forms of depression, when all other treatment options have failed, the use of electroconvulsive therapy (ECT) is a recommended treatment option for patients. ECT has been in use in psychiatric practice for over 70 years and is now undergoing something of a restricted renaissance following a sharp decline in its use in the 1970s. Despite (...) its success in treating severe depression there is continued debate as to the effectiveness of ECT: in some studies, it is argued that ECT is marginally more effective than sham ECT. In addition, there is still no clear explanation of how ECT works; among the range of hypotheses proposed it is claimed that ECT may work by harnessing placebo effects. In light of the uncertainties over the mechanism of action of ECT and given the risk of serious side effects that ECT may produce, I contend that the process of informed consent must include comprehensive accounts of these uncertainties. I examine the possible consequences of providing adequate information to potential ECT patients, including the consideration that ECT may still prove to be effective even if physicians are open about the possibility of it working as a placebo. I conclude that if we value patient autonomy as well as the professional reputation of medical practitioners, a fuller description of ECT must be provided to patients and their carers. (shrink)

Some nonlinguistic systems of representation display some of the six features of a language-of-thought (LoT) delineated by Quilty-Dunn et al. But they conjecture something stronger: That all six features cooccur homeostatically in nonlinguistic thought. Here I argue that there is no good evidence for nonlinguistic deductive reasoning involving the disjunctive syllogism. Animals and prelinguistic children probably do not make logical inferences.