Doctors form an essential part of an effective response to the COVID-19 pandemic. We argue they have a duty to participate in pandemic response due to their special skills, but these skills vary between different doctors, and their duties are constrained by other competing rights. We conclude that while doctors should be encouraged to meet the demand for medical aid in the pandemic, those who make the sacrifices and increased efforts are owed reciprocal obligations in return. When reciprocal obligations are (...) not met, doctors are further justified in opting out of specific tasks, as long as this is proportionate to the unmet obligation. (shrink)

Since Plato wrote of political obligation in his dialogue Crito, obligation in general has been of ongoing interest to philosophers. In that dialogue, Socrates argues that he was under an obligation to obey the laws of Athens and comply with a sentence of death. During the course of the argument, he raises and offers solutions to many of the central issues about obligation that philosophers still puzzle over. For instance, how can obligations have the grip on us that they do—in (...) some cases, so that we are willing to die rather than not fulfill them? What is the nature and justification of moral and legal obligations? Do we have an obligation to obey the state, and if so, why? (shrink)

Integrating race and gender in a social constructionist framework, the authors examine the way that second-generation Asian American young women describe doing gender across ethnic and mainstream settings, as well as their assumptions about the nature of Asian and white femininities. This analysis of interviews with 100 daughters of Korean and Vietnamese immigrants finds that respondents narratively construct Asian and Asian American cultural worlds as quintessentially and uniformly patriarchal and fully resistant to change. In contradistinction, mainstream white America is constructed (...) as the prototype of gender equality. Hence, Asian American and white American women serve in these accounts as uniform categorical representations of the opposing forces of female oppression and egalitarianism. The authors consider how the relational construction of hegemonic and subordinated femininities, as revealed through controlling images that denigrate Asian forms of gender, contribute to internalized oppression and shape the doing of ethnicity. (shrink)

Human experts are the source of knowledge required to develop computer systems that perform at an expert level. Human beings are not, however, able to reliably express what they know. As a result, experts often develop non-authentic accounts of their own expertise. These accounts, here termed reconstructed methods of reasoning, lead to computer systems that perform at a high level of proficiency but have the disadvantage that they often do not reflect the heuristics and processing constraints of a system user. (...) Reconstructed methods of reasoning are compared with authentic methods derived from the study of expert human behavior. Tests are proposed to establish the authenticity of reasoning methods and examples from medical diagnosis are used to illustrate how authentic methods of reasoning can be incorporated into an expert computer system. CiteULike Connotea Del.icio.us What's this? (shrink)

In the post-War decades political science in the United States has been animated by two seemingly incompatible aims. On the one hand, the discipline is committed to scientific inquiry interpreted in largely positivist terms. On the other hand, the discipline aspires to generate knowledge that might improve democratic politics. I start by sketching pragmatist interpretations of social and political inquiry, of democratic politics, and of how the two are related. Problems of complexity and visibility emerge as central to those interpretations. (...) I then indicate how Edward Tufte’s theoretical analysis of data graphics and the visual politics of the aids activist group ACT UP offer examples of how it is possible to envision complex social and political phenomena in ways that might sustain a democratic relation between inquiry and politics. (shrink)

Johnson (English, U. of Kansas) explores the present crisis in education, especially in the US, by surveying broad changes in recent curricular and pedagogical theory and practice. These changes entail a shift from teaching to instructing from students learning what the teacher knows to learning.

Archytas of Tarentum, a contemporary and associate of Plato, was a famous Pythagorean, mathematician, and statesman of Tarentum. Although his works are lost and most of the fragments attributed to him were composed in later eras, they nevertheless contain valuable information about his thought. In particular, the fragments of On Law and Justice are likely based on a work by the early Peripatetic biographer Aristoxenus of Tarentum. The fragments touch on key themes of early Greek ethics, including: written and unwritten (...) laws; freedom and self-sufficiency; moderation of the emotions and cultivation of virtues; equality and the competence of the majority to participate in government; criticism of “rule by an individual”; a theory of the ideal “mixed constitution”; distributive and corrective justice and punishment, and of the rule of law. The fragments also contain one of the only positive accounts of democracy in ancient Greek philosophy. (shrink)

ACCORDING to one of the weirder interpretations of quantum theory, electrons and the other subatomic particles that make up creation don't really come into existence -- taking on definite positions in time and space -- until they are beheld by a conscious observer. Extending this notion to a cosmic scale, the most radical proponents of what has come to be called the anthropic cosmological principle argue for a dizzying symbiosis in which the universe gives rise to conscious beings who in (...) turn give rise to the universe through the act of observation. (shrink)

Copi's method of deduction is formalized and shown to be complete.

This article defends a new model of personal privacy. Privacy should be understood as demarcating culturally defined aspects of an individual's life in which he or she is granted immunity from the judgment of others. Such an analysis is preferable to either of the two favorite models of privacy in the current literature. The judgment of others model preserves all of the insights of the liberty and information models of privacy, But avoids the obvious problems and counterexamples. In addition, This (...) model allows us to better see the normative importance of privacy. A final section discusses the notion of sexual privacy in connection to the proposed model. (shrink)

The last several years have seen vibrant debates among policymakers and scholars on whether to craft new human rights (or novel interpretations of existing ones) around neurotechnologies. These con...

This paper addresses the relationship between psychological capacities, as they are understood within cognitive psychology, and neurobiological activities. First, Lycan’s (1987) account of this relationship is examined and certain problems with his account are explained. According to Lycan, psychological capacities occupy a higher level than neurobiological activities in a hierarchy of levels of nature, and psychological entities can be decomposed into neurobiological entities. After discussing some problems with Lycan’s account, a similar, more recent account built around levels of mechanisms is (...) examined (Craver 2007). In the second half of this paper, an alternative is laid out. This new account uses levels of organization and levels of explanation to create a two-dimensional model. Psychological capacities occupy a high level of explanation relative to the cellular and molecular levels of organization. As a result, according to this model, psychological capacities are a particular way of describing the activities that occur at the cellular and molecular levels of organization. (shrink)

In reaction to a particularly scathing review of his Practice in Christianity, Kierkegaard postulated what he called a ‘preacher-machine.’ As we will see, the preacher-machine is only one type of character-machine, for, in Practice in Christianity, there are five other such machines. Starting up these character-machines will allow for an analysis of the repulsion of the God-man, Christ himself. This repulsion is important because Kierkegaard claims that it is the condition for the emergence of faith. After discussing repulsion, Kierkegaard will (...) locate a singular mistake of Christendom, which will allow him to offer his remedy to this problem. In doing so, I will claim, Kierkegaard makes a particularly forceful claim about the true status of Christianity. We begin by attempting an articulation of a definition of monstrosity before setting the scene of these six machines. (shrink)

Merleau-Ponty has long been known as one of the most important philosophers of aesthetics, yet most discussions of his aesthetics focus on visual art. This book corrects that balance by turning to Merleau-Ponty's extensive engagement with literature. From Proust, Merleau-Ponty developed his conception of "sensible ideas," from Claudel, his conjoining of birth and knowledge as "co-naissance," from Valéry came "implex" or the "animal of words" and the "chiasma of two destinies." Literature also provokes the questions of expression, metaphor, and truth (...) and the meaning of a Merleau-Pontian poetics. The poetic of Merleau-Ponty is, the book argues, a poetic of the flesh, a poetic of mystery, and a poetic of the visible in its relation to the invisible. Ultimately, theoretical figures or "figuratives" that appear at the threshold between philosophy and literature enable the possibility of a new ontology. What is at stake is the very meaning of philosophy itself and its mode of expression. (shrink)

This research examines the integration of medical simulators into medical education. Training on a haptic-enabled surgery simulator has been observed with an eye to the context of the medical apprenticeship. Videotape of simulations and ethnographic observations at the simulator center are analyzed using the theoretical tools of legitimate peripheral practice and identity construction. In doing so, it becomes apparent that simulations are much more than just a forum for the transfer of specific medical skills. Although they may be designed to (...) facilitate discrete aspects of surgical practice, when in use, the simulators are surrounded by the rich and varied social interactions that make up the medical apprenticeship. These social aspects contribute to the creation of medical practices out of simulator practices, so that working on the simulator can still be experienced as part of the situated learning otherwise conducted during the internship of medical training. (shrink)

This article discusses the relationship between Eleanor Antin’s Carving: A Traditional Sculpture (1973) and Elizabeth Manchester’s All My Dresses With All My Shoes (2002) in terms of the differently structured temporalities of making and viewing through which the concept of femininity materializes in each work. Diachronic understandings of post-feminism, as a concept emptied of a former moment of political consciousness, are contested through my readings of artworks that call forth a complexity of tenses. The article argues that the connections and (...) tensions between the two works, which are generationally distinct in terms of the political and cultural climate of their production, require a critical apparatus that suggests the simultaneity of differently valued temporal experiences. The notion of temporal play is further explored in relation to Vanessa Beecroft’s performance and film works VB29 (1997) and VB35 (1998). Here the traces of earlier feminist strategy, in which femininity is cast in relation to loss, are reconfigured in the failure to achieve the stasis of the photographic moment. (shrink)

EVEN more than the separation of church and state, the separation between church and laboratory is supposed to be absolute. Science is to concentrate on describing how the universe works, leaving questions of who or what created it and why it exists to the dens of the metaphysicians. Once they agree to play by these rules, scientists the world over can worship different gods while contemplating the same equations.

The structure of words is often thought to provide important evidence regarding the structure of concepts. At the same time, most contemporary linguists posit a great deal of structure in words. Such a trend makes some atomists about concepts uncomfortable. The details of linguistic methodology undermine several strategies for avoiding positing structure in words. I conclude by arguing that there is insufficient evidence to hold that word-structure bears any interesting relation to the structure of concepts.

Wielding his philosophical razor, William of Ockham declared, in the early 14th century, that in slicing the world into categories, thou shalt not multiply entities needlessly. He might have been pleased when, half a millennium later, James Clerk Maxwell helped tidy things up by writing the equations that show magnetism and electricity as perpendicular shadows cast by light beams, radio waves, X-rays and other forms of what we now call electromagnetic radiation. Einstein did Maxwell one better by equating mass with (...) energy. And today the physicists promise us that once we give them their superconducting supercollider, they will take a giant step toward the day when they can unify light with gravity and the two forces at work inside the nuclei of atoms -- showing how everything, even the geometry of space and time, crystallized from the primordial flash of the big bang. (shrink)

Individualist ethical analyses in the enhancement debate have often prioritised or only considered the interests and concerns of parents and the future child. The collectivist critique of the human enhancement debate argues that rather than pure individualism, a focus on collectivist, or group-level ethical considerations is needed for balanced ethical analysis of specific enhancement interventions. Here, I defend this argument for the insufficiency of pure individualism. However, existing collectivist analyses tend to take a negative approach that hinders them from adequately (...) contributing to balanced ethical analysis, and often leads to a prohibitive stance. I argue this is due to two common problems with collectivist analyses: inappropriate acceptance of individualist assumptions, and failure to appropriately weigh individual vs collective ethical considerations. To further develop the collectivist critique in the enhancement debate, I suggest we may look to collectivism in public health ethics, which avoids these problems. (shrink)

For evolutionary biologists, the concept of chance has always played a significant role in the formation of evolutionary theory. As far back as Greek antiquity, chance and "luck" were key factors in understanding the natural world. Chance is not just an important concept; it is an entire way of thinking about nature. And as Curtis Johnson shows, it is also one of the key ideas that separates Charles Darwin from other systematic biologists of his time. Studying the concept of (...) chance in Darwin's writing reveals core ideas in his theory of evolution, as well as his reflections on design, purpose, and randomness in nature's progression over the course of history.In Darwin's Dice: The Idea of Chance in the Thought of Charles Darwin, Curtis Johnson examines Darwin's early notebooks, his collected correspondence, and most of his published writing to trace the evolution of his ideas about chance in evolution. This proved to be one of Darwin's most controversial ideas among his reading public, so much so that it drew hostile reactions even from Darwin's scientific friends, not to mention the more general reader. The firestorm of criticism forced Darwin to forge a retreat, not in terms of removing chance from his theory--his commitment to it was unshakable--but in terms of how he chose to present his theory. Briefly, by changing his wording and by introducing metaphors and images, Darwin succeeded in making his ideas seem less threatening than before without actually changing his views. Randomness remained a focal point for Darwin throughout his life. Through the lens of randomness, Johnson reveals implications of Darwin's views for religion, free will, and moral theory. Darwin's Dice presents a new way to look at Darwinist thought and the writings of Charles Darwin. (shrink)

Drawing on philosophical thought from the eighteenth century as well as conceptual frameworks developed in the twenty-first century, the essays in Beyond Sense and Sensibility examine moral formation as represented in or implicitly produced by literary works of late eighteenth-century British authors.

Advancing civic learning and competence remains a fundamental objective in social studies education. Persistent civic performance outcome gaps, similar to other educational achievement disparities, are influenced by race, class, and other social constraints. Charter schools, known for their innovative structures and curricula, are often proposed as a solution for enhancing civic outcomes, particularly for Black and Hispanic youth. This study analyzes the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) 2014 and 2018 Civics Grade 8 results using a multilevel regression model to (...) assess whether charter schools improve civic outcomes compared to traditional public and private schools. Key variables examined include race/ethnicity, school type, and teacher credentials. The findings reveal that charter schools perform comparably to traditional public schools in fostering civic knowledge and skills. Teacher time spent on civics instruction nor teacher credentials relate to student civic performance outcomes. (shrink)

This article highlights local government responses to the opioid crisis in Northern Kentucky through a series of interviews with county-level officials. The author's discussions with civic leaders reflect the challenges faced by local communities and the new approaches implemented to stem the epidemic.

Anthropologists tell us that every known culture has had something that we would recognize as religion, and that this has been true for at least 50,000 years. The best explanation for this is a genetic predisposition for religious sympathy and practice, hard-wired into the human brain by the forces of natural selection; it is part of our basic human nature. We can therefore treat religion as a natural kind--similar to gold or water--and attempt to articulate this neurobiological essence in everyday (...) language. Such an articulation would yield an empirically driven definition of religion. (shrink)