Background: Falls in older adults are a major public health problem. White matter hyperintensities are highly prevalent in older adults and are a risk factor for falls. In the absence of a cure for WMHs, identifying potential strategies to counteract the risk of WMHs on falls are of great importance. Physical activity is a promising countermeasure to reduce both WMHs and falls risk. However, no study has yet investigated whether PA attenuates the association of WMHs with falls risk. We hypothesized (...) that PA moderates the association between WMHs and falls risk.Methods: Seventy-six community-dwelling older adults aged 70–80 years old were included in this cross-sectional study. We indexed PA using the Physical Activity Score for the Elderly Questionnaire. Falls risk was assessed using the Physiological Profile Assessment, and WMH volume was determined by an experienced radiologist on T2-weighted and PD-weighted MRI scans. We first examined the independent associations of WMH volume and PASE score with PPA. Subsequently, we examined whether PASE moderated the relationship between WMH volume and PPA. We plotted simple slopes to interpret the interaction effects. Age, sex, and Montreal Cognitive Assessment score were included as covariates in all models.Results: Participants had a mean age of 74 years and 54 were female. Forty-nine participants had a Fazekas score of 1, 19 had a score of 2, and 6 a score of 3. Both PASE and WMH volume were each independently associated with PPA score. The interaction model indicated that PASE score moderated the association between WMH volume and PPA, whereby higher PASE score attenuated the association between WMHs and falls risk.Conclusion: PA is an important moderator of falls risk. Importantly, older adults with WMH can reduce their risk of falls by increasing their PA. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Buddhist and Catholic Monks Talk about CelibacyThomas Ryan, CSPThe electronic sign at the Minneapolis–St. Paul airport was flashing "Orange Alert" as a dozen Buddhist monks arrived in their burnt orange robes from around the country for three days of dialogue on celibacy with a similar number of Catholic monastics come together from various monasteries at St. John's Abbey in Collegeville, Minnesota. As he opened the October 26–29, 2006, (...) meeting, Rev. William Skudlarek, executive director of Monastic Interreligious Dialogue (MID), said, "You (Buddhists) have been at this for some five-to-seven hundred years longer than we have. We have something to learn."This was the second Monks in the West interreligious dialogue. The first took place in 2004 at the City of Ten Thousand Buddhas in northern California. On the Catholic side, the participants came from the Benedictine, Cistercian, and Camaldolese monasteries. On the Buddhist side, they came from the Theravada, Mahayana, and Tibetan traditions. Through the event, participants began the day with an hour of quiet sitting in meditation and joined the monastic community at St. John's for their rhythm of daily prayer.The first session dealt with theory, the "why" of celibacy. Buddhist participants explained that their teachings focus on seeing how suffering is created and cured. Attachments give rise to suffering, so advancement in the spiritual life requires letting go of one's attachments. Attachment to desires, among which are sexual desires, is a hindrance to spiritual progress. "Raging desire takes away choice, freedom," said Rev. Kusala Bhikshu, a Buddhist chaplain at UCLA, in his opening presentation. "The senses must be controlled in order to be free."Brother Gregory Perron from St. Procopius monastery in Indiana spoke of how monastic life demands a profound understanding and acceptance of solitude. "Celibacy is a tool," offered Perron, "a skillful means like intentional simplicity of life, by which our heart is burrowed out and the core of our being laid bare. By embracing it, the monk accepts the aloneness that characterizes every human being."In response to Buddhist reflections on the illusory nature of the body, Catholic participants pointed out Christianity's remarkably positive evaluation of the [End Page 143] body in the doctrines of the Incarnation, the bodily Resurrection and Ascension of Jesus, and the indwelling of the Holy Spirit. Both sides acknowledged balancing points of reference as well, such as, in Christianity, Paul's "Who will rescue me from this body of death?" (Rom 7:24). Though humankind ranks eighth from the bottom in Buddhism's thirty-two-realm cosmology, that level is the only one where spiritual growth can happen. Thus human form is in the end praised by the Buddha.In the second session, the participants moved from theory to practice. Rev. Jisho Perry from the Shasta Buddhist Abbey in California said that "the whole thrust of training is not to give in to desire that arises." He described the Buddhist method of accepting sexual feelings without either acting on them or repressing them, but just letting them pass through. "The right use of will is willingness, not willpower—the willingness to sit there and let that feeling pass through," he said.Fr. Skudlarek expressed appreciation for this Buddhist approach to transforming the sexual energy. "I never got a sense in our training of accepting the feeling with awareness and letting it pass without acting on it. You had to fight it! And the more you resisted, the stronger it got!"Rev. Heng Sure, who teaches at the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley, presented celibacy as the first step in a three-step process that goes from celibacy to stillness to insight. "It should not be seen just as a difficult adjunct to the spiritual path, but as essential to it," he said. The practice of meditation represents daily periods when the senses are stilled and not allowed to pursue sense objects. "Something happens to the energy in the stillness; the pressure goes away." In married life, he explained, spiritual practice is "partial and piecemeal," making celibacy a more effective means to move toward insight and the peace and happiness that flow from it. In the discussion, Benedictine Fr. Mark... (shrink)

Dans la Partie X des Dialogues sur la religion naturelle, Philon, le sceptique, rejoint Demea, le défenseur de l’orthodoxie chrétienne, en dressant un catalogue effrayant des peines et des misères qui marquent la condition humaine. Cet article tend à démontrer que la source principale de leurs arguments est le débat à trois voix entre Bayle, Leibniz et William King sur la question de savoir si le bien ou le mal prédomine dans la vie humaine. De plus, nous suggérons que Philon, (...) intentionnellement et non sans malveillance, exagère la prévalence de la misère et de la souffrance afin de souligner la ressemblance entre l’orthodoxie chrétienne et les sceptiques religieux comme Bayle. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Berkeley au siècle des Lumières: Immatérialisme et scepticisme au XVIIIe siècleTodd RyanSébastien Charles. Berkeley au siècle des Lumières: Immatérialisme et scepticisme au XVIIIe siècle. Preface by Geneviève Brykman. Paris: Vrin, 2003. Pp. 368. Paper, € 28,00.The reception accorded to Berkeley's immaterialism by eighteenth-century philosophers constitutes one of the great puzzles of early modern philosophy. How is it possible that Berkeley, whose announced purpose in both the Principles and (...) Three Dialogues was to refute "Skeptics and Atheists," should quickly come to be seen as the foremost champion of Pyrrhonian skepticism, and indeed of atheistic solipsism? To be sure the caricature of philosophical opponents for polemical purposes is hardly limited to Berkeley. Yet from the [End Page 495] modern point of view Berkeley, the "good Bishop" who tirelessly insisted on the consonance of immaterialism with common sense, as well as the indispensable role of God as cause of our ideas of sense, seems a rather unlikely candidate for the near universal hostility—one might even say vilification—that was to be his lot.Forty years ago Harry M. Bracken attempted to unravel this paradox in his classic study The Early Reception of Berkeley's Immaterialism. Through a careful and philosophically informed examination of early accounts of Berkeley's immaterialism, Bracken argued that the distorted image of Berkeley that was to become the common currency of Enlightenment thinkers had its origin in the earliest accounts of Berkeley's work, most notably a pair of reviews in the Jesuit journal Mémoires de Trévoux, and a vituperative attack on "the atheism of the Immaterialists" by Father Tournemine. According to Bracken, the image of Berkeley as a radical disciple of Malebranche who pushed the Oratorian's philosophy to its logical conclusion by denying the existence of matter was promoted by the Jesuits as part of their theological and political struggle against Cartesianism. It was also in these early reviews that Berkeley's name was first associated with the legendary "egoist" philosopher who in addition to denying the existence of material substance, further claimed that his was the only created spirit in existence.Sébastien Charles's impressive new study extends Bracken's work by carefully documenting the dissemination of this distorted image of Berkeley throughout the intellectual world of eighteenth-century Europe. Charles's book is a comprehensive and impressively erudite survey of the use (and misuse) of Berkeley in the writings of the philosophes, as well as later thinkers, including the Idéologues and members of the Berlin Academy. Sadly, though perhaps not unexpectedly, the texts that Charles surveys afford little critical insight to interpreters of Berkeley. The misreadings of Berkeley are so egregious and so pervasive that the philosophy of the Principles and Three Dialogues is generally disfigured beyond recognition. Indeed, even to speak of a "misreading" of Berkeley is somewhat misleading, since many of those who took up the task of refuting immaterialism seem not to have read him at all.However, Charles's aim is much less to shed interpretive light on Berkeley's philosophy than to rectify the long-standing image of the eighteenth century as an era of unbridled epistemological optimism. Emphasizing the confrontations with radical skepticism to be found in the writings of thinkers as diverse as Rousseau and Diderot, La Mettrie and Destutt de Tracy, Charles argues that far from ignoring the threat of radical skepticism, materialists and dualists, deists and Christians made common cause in their struggle against what they took to be Berkeley's alleged "egoism." Indeed, for Charles, "the question of solipsism was the central problem for the metaphysics of the Enlightenment."The ubiquity of references to Berkeley among these thinkers certainly argues in favor of Charles's thesis. Yet the attempt to survey such a large number of authors frequently necessitates an abbreviated treatment that renders difficult the task of assessing the relative importance of the confrontation with radical skepticism in any individual thinker's system. Further, the very weakness and formulaic character of the attempted refutations might reasonably raise suspicions as to whether the threat of solipsism was taken as seriously as Charles maintains... (shrink)

Todd Ryan - Berkeley et Les Philosophes du XVIIe Siecle: Perception et Scepticisme - Journal of the History of Philosophy 40:3 Journal of the History of Philosophy 40.3 402-404 Book Review Berkeley et Les Philosophes du XVIIe Siècle: Perception et Scepticisme Richard Glauser. Berkeley et Les Philosophes du XVIIe Siècle: Perception et Scepticisme. Sprimont: Mardaga, 1999. Pp. 352. Paper, NP. One of the central criticisms Berkeley makes of his materialist opponents is that they are inevitably committed to skepticism concerning (...) both the existence and nature of physical objects. This accusation is all the more striking for its uncompromising universality. Berkeley maintains that by virtue of their distinguishing between sensible ideas and the sensible qualities they represent, all materialist philosophers of the seventeenth century are either.. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Buddhist and Catholic Monks Talk about CelibacyThomas Ryan, CSPThe electronic sign at the Minneapolis–St. Paul airport was flashing "Orange Alert" as a dozen Buddhist monks arrived in their burnt orange robes from around the country for three days of dialogue on celibacy with a similar number of Catholic monastics come together from various monasteries at St. John's Abbey in Collegeville, Minnesota. As he opened the October 26–29, 2006, (...) meeting, Rev. William Skudlarek, executive director of Monastic Interreligious Dialogue (MID), said, "You (Buddhists) have been at this for some five-to-seven hundred years longer than we have. We have something to learn."This was the second Monks in the West interreligious dialogue. The first took place in 2004 at the City of Ten Thousand Buddhas in northern California. On the Catholic side, the participants came from the Benedictine, Cistercian, and Camaldolese monasteries. On the Buddhist side, they came from the Theravada, Mahayana, and Tibetan traditions. Through the event, participants began the day with an hour of quiet sitting in meditation and joined the monastic community at St. John's for their rhythm of daily prayer.The first session dealt with theory, the "why" of celibacy. Buddhist participants explained that their teachings focus on seeing how suffering is created and cured. Attachments give rise to suffering, so advancement in the spiritual life requires letting go of one's attachments. Attachment to desires, among which are sexual desires, is a hindrance to spiritual progress. "Raging desire takes away choice, freedom," said Rev. Kusala Bhikshu, a Buddhist chaplain at UCLA, in his opening presentation. "The senses must be controlled in order to be free."Brother Gregory Perron from St. Procopius monastery in Indiana spoke of how monastic life demands a profound understanding and acceptance of solitude. "Celibacy is a tool," offered Perron, "a skillful means like intentional simplicity of life, by which our heart is burrowed out and the core of our being laid bare. By embracing it, the monk accepts the aloneness that characterizes every human being."In response to Buddhist reflections on the illusory nature of the body, Catholic participants pointed out Christianity's remarkably positive evaluation of the [End Page 143] body in the doctrines of the Incarnation, the bodily Resurrection and Ascension of Jesus, and the indwelling of the Holy Spirit. Both sides acknowledged balancing points of reference as well, such as, in Christianity, Paul's "Who will rescue me from this body of death?" (Rom 7:24). Though humankind ranks eighth from the bottom in Buddhism's thirty-two-realm cosmology, that level is the only one where spiritual growth can happen. Thus human form is in the end praised by the Buddha.In the second session, the participants moved from theory to practice. Rev. Jisho Perry from the Shasta Buddhist Abbey in California said that "the whole thrust of training is not to give in to desire that arises." He described the Buddhist method of accepting sexual feelings without either acting on them or repressing them, but just letting them pass through. "The right use of will is willingness, not willpower—the willingness to sit there and let that feeling pass through," he said.Fr. Skudlarek expressed appreciation for this Buddhist approach to transforming the sexual energy. "I never got a sense in our training of accepting the feeling with awareness and letting it pass without acting on it. You had to fight it! And the more you resisted, the stronger it got!"Rev. Heng Sure, who teaches at the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley, presented celibacy as the first step in a three-step process that goes from celibacy to stillness to insight. "It should not be seen just as a difficult adjunct to the spiritual path, but as essential to it," he said. The practice of meditation represents daily periods when the senses are stilled and not allowed to pursue sense objects. "Something happens to the energy in the stillness; the pressure goes away." In married life, he explained, spiritual practice is "partial and piecemeal," making celibacy a more effective means to move toward insight and the peace and happiness that flow from it. In the discussion, Benedictine Fr. Mark... (shrink)

Étude de l'influence sur les commentateurs du Haut Moyen Âge des ouvrages d'Ambroise sur la Genèse. Leur impact fut profond, mais d'un autre côté il semble qu'ils n'étaient pas amplement lus. Cette impression est confirmée par la tradition manuscrite. Claude de Turin découvrit certaines des sources des commentaires d'Isidore sur la Genèse, au nombre desquelles figure Ambroise.

Nichols offers the first comprehensive interpretation of the eighteenth-century Scottish philosopher Thomas Reid's theory of perception - by far the most important feature of his philosophical system. Nichols's consummate knowledge of Reid's texts, lively examples, and plainspoken style make this book especially readable. It will be the definitive analysis for a long time to come.

The impact of our desires and preferences upon our ordinary, everyday beliefs is well-documented [Gilovich, T. . How we know what isn’t so: The fallibility of human reason in everyday life. New York: The Free Press.]. The influence of such motivational factors on delusions, which are instances of pathological misbelief, has tended however to be neglected by certain prevailing models of delusion formation and maintenance. This paper explores a distinction between two general classes of theoretical explanation for delusions; the motivational (...) and the deficit. Motivational approaches view delusions as extreme instances of self-deception; as defensive attempts to relieve pain and distress. Deficit approaches, in contrast, view delusions as the consequence of defects in the normal functioning of belief mechanisms, underpinned by neuroanatomical or neurophysiological abnormalities. It is argued that although there are good reasons to be sceptical of motivational theories , recent experiments confirm that motives are important causal forces where delusions are concerned. It is therefore concluded that the most comprehensive account of delusions will involve a theoretical unification of both motivational and deficit approaches. (shrink)

In this article, I describe a novel position on the semantics of artificial intelligence. I present a problem for the current artificial neural networks used in machine learning, specifically with relation to natural language tasks. I then propose that from a metasemantic level, meaning in machines can best be interpreted as radically contextualist. Finally, I consider what this might mean for human‐level semantic competence from a comparative perspective.

Words form a fundamental basis for our understanding of linguistic practice. However, the precise ontology of words has eluded many philosophers and linguists. A persistent difficulty for most accounts of words is the type-token distinction [Bromberger, S. 1989. “Types and Tokens in Linguistics.” In Reflections on Chomsky, edited by A. George, 58–90. Basil Blackwell; Kaplan, D. 1990. “Words.” Aristotelian Society Supplementary Volume LXIV: 93–119]. In this paper, I present a novel account of words which differs from the atomistic and platonistic (...) conceptions of previous accounts which I argue fall prey to this problem. Specifically, I proffer a structuralist account of linguistic items, along the lines of structuralism in the philosophy of mathematics [Shapiro, S. 1997. Philosophy of Mathematics: Structure and Ontology. Oxford University Press], in which words are defined in part as positions in larger linguistic structures. I then follow Szabò [1999. “Expressions and Their Representations.” The Philosophical Quarterly 49 (195): 145–163] and Parsons [1990. “The Structuralist View of Mathematical Objects.” Synthese 84: 303–346] in further defining words as quasi-concrete objects according to a representation relation. This view aims for general correspondence with contemporary generative linguistic approaches to the study of language. (shrink)

Deep brain stimulation is an experimental procedure for treatment-resistant depression. Some results show promise, but blinded trials had limited success. Ethical questions center on vulnerability: especially on whether depressed patients can weigh the risks and benefits effectively, whether depression causes “desperation,” and whether media portrayals create unrealistic hopes. We interviewed 24 psychiatric inpatients with treatment-resistant depression, qualitatively analyzing their comments. Most had minimal interest in deep brain stimulators. Some might consider them if their depression worsened, if alternatives were exhausted, or (...) if the evidence were stronger. Fears focused on the surgery, adverse effects, and the novelty of the device. Patients felt the depression interfered with their ability to weigh the risks and benefits. Patients seemed highly attuned to the risks, and were skeptical that the treatment would be effective. We conclude that ethical concerns about vulnerability remain, yet patients with treatment-resistant depression were thoughtful and cautious about trying a novel therapy. (shrink)

Early in the COVID-19 pandemic in the United States, concern that there could be a shortage of ventilators raised the possibility of rationing care. Denying patients life-saving care captures our moral imagination, prompting the demand for a defensible framework of ethical principles for determining who will live and who will die. Behind the moral dilemma posed by the shortage of a particular medical good lies a broad moral geography encompassing important and often unarticulated societal values, as well as assumptions about (...) the nature and purpose of health care and the consequences of long-standing choices about health care as a social good. This article explores what COVID-19 has exposed concerning values and choices around health care in the United States. Employing the lens of Catholic Social Thought, it argues for an approach to rationing that is grounded in respect for human dignity, committed to distributing social goods in light of the common good, and self-conscious about the construction of vulnerability to illness and death. (shrink)

Robert Sparrow argues that several initially plausible arguments in favor of the deployment of autonomous weapons systems (AWS) in warfare fail, and that their deployment faces a serious moral objection: deploying AWS fails to express the respect for the casualties of war that morality requires. We critically discuss Sparrow’s argument from respect and respond on behalf of some objections he considers. Sparrow’s argument against AWS relies on the claim that they are distinct from accepted weapons of war in that they (...) either fail to transmit an attitude of respect or they transmit an attitude of disrespect. We argue that this distinction between AWS and widely accepted weapons is illusory, and so cannot ground a moral difference between AWS and existing methods of waging war. We also suggest that, if deploying conventional soldiers in some situation would be permissible, and if we could expect deploying AWS to cause fewer civilian casualties, then it would be consistent with an intuitive understanding of respect to deploy AWS in this situation. (shrink)

In the philosophical debate about the desirability of immortality it is argued that immortality could never be desirable, since it requires us to either take on a life where none of our projects or interests stimulate us anymore, or else to loosen our connections to our past selves and no longer survive. I argue that both concerns can be met by considering the role that partial forgetting of past experiences would play in the immortal life. One who loses some non‐essential (...) memories of their past stands to be able to enjoy experiences that have grown tiresome with age. My contribution is to clarify how partial forgetting of only the non‐essential memories allays concerns about our potentially loosened connections to our earlier states. I then consider an objection to my account, that since the standards governing collective memory might be more demanding than those governing individual memory, immortal people might sacrifice aspects of their collective lives to render their own immortal lives enjoyable. (shrink)

Work done within the realm of what is sometimes called ‘descriptive ethics’ brings two questions readily to mind: How can empirical findings, in general, inform normative debates? and How can these empirical findings, in particular, inform the normative debate at hand? Brick et al 1 confront these questions in their novel investigation of public views about lives worth living and the permissibility of withdrawing life-sustaining treatment from critically ill infants. Mindful of the is-ought gap, the authors suggest modestly that their (...) data ‘may be useful when constructing guidelines for clinical practice’. In this commentary, I consider some potential limitations on the generalisability of these data in the context of policy and clinical practice, limitations which may in turn serve as directions for future empirical research. The authors’ study presented participants six case scenarios, five of which involved the possibility of withdrawing life-sustaining treatment from critically ill infants. The results revealed that “[a]lmost all respondents agreed that at some level of quality of life, life may be of no benefit or worse than death for an infant” and that “participants significantly favoured withdrawal of treatment for the most severe cases.” One salient detail in these scenarios …. (shrink)

Scholars employing ossified ‘close reading’ methods generate countless articles that drop down into a gravity vortex, circling themselves for a self-referential eternity. After arguing that the study of texts in the humanities, especially literature and philosophy, makes no progress, I set this controversy in the light of a distinction between the Soft and Hard Humanities. This is not an a priori argument from an ivory tower. Rather than tell, I show. I present data from the testing of a hypothesis drawn (...) from genre theory about science fi ction, then say a few words about the uncertain future of philosophy and literature. (shrink)

Australian immigration detention has been called state sanctioned abuse, cruel and degrading and likened to torture. Clinicians have long worked both within the system providing healthcare and outside of it advocating for broader social and political change. It has now been over 25 years and little, if anything, has changed. The government has continued to consolidate power to enforce these policies and has continued to attempt to silence dissent. It was in this context that a boycott was raised as a (...) possible course of action. Despite discussions among the healthcare community about the merits of such action, a number of questions have been overlooked. In this article, I will examine whether a boycott is both ethical and feasible. Taking into account the costs and benefits of current engagement and the potential impact of a boycott, more specifically the potential it has to further harm those detained, I conclude that under current circumstance a boycott cannot be justified. This however does not mean that a boycott should be dismissed completely or that the status quo should be accepted. I discuss potential ways forward for those seeking change. (shrink)

Many argue that an important goal of campaign finance reform should be to ensure that competing candidates have roughly equal financial resources with which to contest campaigns. Although there are...

John Stuart Mill (1806–1873) was born in London, son of the Scottish historian of India and philosopher, James Mill, by whom he was educated in, among other things, the principles of British empiricism and Benthamite utilitarianism. Like his father, he worked for the East India Company, being in charge of the Company's relations with the native states 1836–1856, and head of the examiner's office from 1856 until the powers of the Company were transferred in 1858. The book which established Mill (...) as a philosopher was his System of Logic (1843), described in its full title as ‘a connected view of the principles of evidence and the methods of scientific investigation’. Book 6 of the System of Logic was ‘On the logic of the moral sciences’, and at the end of it Mill declared, without trying to justify it, his opinion that there is a ‘general principle to which all rules of practice ought to conform’; namely that of ‘conduciveness to the happiness of mankind, or rather, of all sentient beings’. For example, we should keep our promises not because we can see intuitively the truth of the precept, but because it passes the utilitarian test. Mill's justification for this opinion was in his Utilitarianism (1863). Mill's version of utilitarianism differed from Bentham's in that he recognized not only quantitative but also qualitative differences between pleasures. (shrink)

Few sectors are more affected by COVID-19 than higher education. There is growing recognition that reopening the densely populated communities of higher education will require surveillance technologies, but many of these technologies pose threats to the privacy of the very students, faculty, and staff they are meant to protect. The authors have a history of working with our institution’s governing bodies to provide ethical guidance on the use of technologies, especially including those with significant implications for privacy. Here, we draw (...) on that experience to provide guidelines for using surveillance technologies to reopen college campuses safely and responsibly, even under the specter of covid. We aim to generalize our recommendations, so they are sensitive to the practical realities and constraints that universities face. (shrink)

Explores Russell's activities as a polemicist, agitator, educator, and popularizer and discusses the evolution of his moral philosophy and its application, including his final battle against American intervention in Vietnam.

Beginning with an analysis of the problematic relation of ‘the particular’ to ‘the universal’ in canonical political texts, this paper explores a variety of frameworks for the study of classical Greek political thought. Specifically, after investigating the influence of Quentin Skinner’s contextualism, the paper examines the ideas, approaches, and methods of Bernard Williams, Leo Strauss, and Josiah Ober. I draw attention to each figure’s distinctive motivations for returning to ancient Greece and to the influence of particular political ideals on those (...) motivations. I also assess their strengths and weaknesses and offer a critical commentary on their chief ideas. Toward the end of the paper, I outline a novel dialectical framework for the study of classical Athens – one that emphasizes the remoteness of the ancient past and the contribution that our studies might make to self-knowledge. In sketching this framework, I focus on what I call ‘ethical Athens’, ‘philosophical Athens’, and ‘critical Athens’. (shrink)

Ludwig Feuerbach's work is often too easily dovetailed with the works of Hegel and Marx and therefore read teleologically as an intermediary step between the two “major” figures. By re-interpreting Feuerbach more as a system critic than as a system builder, this article attempts to elucidate his relationships to the other two. It will also point up the gendered articulation of his critiques of religion and philosophy. The article will show how Feuerbach's use of gender, though remaining fixed within a (...) predictably hierarchical binary, is more than simply symptomatic of its context and offers significant resources for critical re-readings of nineteenth-century German philosophy. (shrink)

Scholars have extensively debated the family’s place within liberalism, generally, and specific attention and critique has been given to the family in Rawls’ work. What has received less focus are the requirements of parents in a Rawlsian polity and, further, what those requirements might imply for the one case where states explicitly regulate the process of becoming parents: adoption. This paper seeks to discover what might be required of parents, adoptive or otherwise, in a Rawlsian social contract state. Second, it (...) considers adoptive parent selection in light of these requirements as well as Rawls’ arguments regarding merit and fair equality of opportunity. Finally, it considers what such a merit-based selection of adoptive parents implies for the disputed rights of same-sex couples to adopt children. Further, because the question of merit in this case will hinge upon what it means to be a “fit parent,” it also draws upon relevant empirical social science studies regarding gay and lesbian parents. The paper, then, evaluates both the theoretical and empirical validity of generalized claims that same-sex couples are less fit to be parents than are heterosexual couples. (shrink)

On what basis should we judge whether a parent’s medical decision for their child is morally acceptable? In a recent article, Johan Bester attempts to answer this question by defending a version of the Best Interest Standard for parental decision making. The purpose of this paper is to identify a number of problems faced by Bester’s version of BIS and to suggest ways to redress these problems. Accordingly, we intend to advance the project of formulating a method for guiding parents’ (...) medical decision making for their children. We argue that Bester’s standard fails to accommodate the autonomy of the child and that his criteria for assessing the reasonableness of the parents’ argument for their decision is too weak. We conclude that properly addressing these worries renders his test otiose and that it ought to be replaced with the three commonly held principles of bioethics—the principles of autonomy, beneficence, non-maleficence—and a standard of reasonableness. (shrink)

A sociological revision of Aron Gurwitsch provides a helpful layered theory of conscious experience as a four-domain structure: _the theme_, _the thematic field_, _the halo_, and _the social horizon_. The social horizon—the totality of the social world that is unknown, vaguely known, taken for granted, or ignored by the subject despite objectively influencing the thoughts and actions of the subject—, helps conceptualize how everyday human–computer interaction (HCI) can obscure social structures. Two examples illustrate the usefulness of this framework: (1) illuminating (...) new forms of social control known as “surveillance capitalism” that influence the other domains of consciousness despite being invisible to the subject and (2) explaining how computer use tends to “hide” the ecological impacts of digital-technological systems from the attention of subjects. A sociological four-domain theory of consciousness supplements ethnomethodological HCI research by preserving the field’s long-standing focus on micro-level interactions and user experience while simultaneously drawing attention to a “commonsense ignorance of social structure”—in this case, the invisibility of the social structures behind personal computer use. Social structure can be reproduced even when actors are unaware of engaging in its reproduction. (shrink)