Philosophical Foundations of Precedent offers a broad, deep, and diverse range of philosophical investigations of the role of precedent in law, adjudication, and morality. The forty chapters present the work of a large and inclusive group of authors which comprises of well-established leaders in the discipline and new voices in legal philosophy. The magnitude of the resulting project is extraordinary, presenting a diverse array of innovative and creative philosophical investigations of the practice of adhering to past decisions, in law and (...) allied fields of practical reasoning. And by the same token, the contributions elucidate the reasons that courts and other decision-makers may have for departing from what has been done before. The phenomena under investigation include the law and practice of common law and civil jurisdictions around the world. In addition to its fundamental relevance to common law jurisdictions, this work will be of broad and significant interest to theoretically minded audiences in continental Europe, Latin America, and Asia because it involves an extensive study of practices of precedent in civil law systems as well as common law systems. (shrink)

This book is the most comprehensive treatment available of one of the most urgent - and yet in some respects most neglected - problems in bioethics: decision-making for incompetents. Part I develops a general theory for making treatment and care decisions for patients who are not competent to decide for themselves. It provides an in-depth analysis of competence, articulates and defends a coherent set of principles to specify suitable surrogate decisionmakers and to guide their choices, examines the value of advance (...) directives, and investigates the role that considerations of cost ought to play in decisions concerning incompetents. Part II applies this theoretical framework to the distinctive problems of three important classes of individuals, many of whom are incompetent: minors, the elderly and psychiatric patients. The authors' approach combines a probing analysis of fundamental issues in ethical theory with a sensitive awareness of the concrete realities of health care institutions and the highly personal and individual character of difficult practical problems. Its broad scope will appeal to health professionals, moral philosophers and lawyers alike. (shrink)

This book, written by four internationally renowned bioethicists and first published in 2000, was the first systematic treatment of the fundamental ethical issues underlying the application of genetic technologies to human beings. Probing the implications of the remarkable advances in genetics, the authors ask how should these affect our understanding of distributive justice, equality of opportunity, the rights and obligations as parents, the meaning of disability, and the role of the concept of human nature in ethical theory and practice. The (...) book offers a historical context to contemporary debate over the use of these technologies by examining the eugenics movement of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The questions raised in this book will be of interest to any reflective reader concerned about science and society and the rapid development of biotechnology, as well as to professionals in such areas as philosophy, bioethics, medical ethics, health management, law, and political science. (shrink)

Some medical services have long generated deep moral controversy within the medical profession as well as in broader society and have led to conscientious refusals by some physicians to provide those services to their patients. More recently, pharmacists in a number of states have refused on grounds of conscience to fill legal prescriptions for their customers. This paper assesses these controversies. First, I offer a brief account of the basis and limits of the claim to be free to act on (...) one’s conscience. Second, I sketch an account of the basis of the medical and pharmacy professions’ responsibilities and the process by which they are specified and change over time. Third, I then set out and defend what I call the “conventional compromise” as a reasonable accommodation to conflicts between these professions’ responsibilities and the moral integrity of their individual members. Finally, I take up and reject the complicity objection to the conventional compromise. Put together, this provides my answer to the question posed in the title of my paper: “Conscientious refusal by physicians and pharmacists: who is obligated to do what, and why?”. (shrink)

Preface Part One Buddhism and Phenomenology Ch.1Buddhism and Phenomenology Ch.2 Husserl and Merleau-Ponty Part Two The Four Basic Buddhist Models in India Introduction Ch.3 Model One: The Five Skandhas Ch.4 Model Two: Pratitya-samutpada Ch.5 Model Three: Tridhatu Ch.6 Model Four: Sila-Samadhi-Prajna Ch.7 Asamjni-samapatti and Nirodha-samapatti Ch.8 Summary of the Four Models Part Three Karma, Meditation, and Epistemology Ch.9 Karma Ch.10 Madhyamikan Issues Ch.11 The Privilaging of Prajna-paramita Part Four Trimsika and Translations Ch.12 Texts and Translations Part Five The Ch’eng Wei-Shih (...) Lun and the Problem of Psychosophical Closure: Yogacara in China Ch.13 Ch.14 Seven Trajectories Ch.15 The Legend of the Transmission of the Ch’eng Wei-Shih Lun Ch.16 Alterity: Parinama Ch.17 Why Consciousness in Not Empty Ch.18 On Rupa Ch.19 Externality Ch.20 The Four Conditions Ch.21 Mirror Knowing: Soteric Alterations Ch.22 Language, Avijnapti-Rupa and Vijnapti-Rupa Ch.23 Is What is Ultimately Real Itself Ultimately Real? Conclusions Appendices Bibliography Index. (shrink)

Our main aim in this paper is to show that constructing an adequate theory of communication involves going beyond Grice’s notion of speaker’s meaning. After considering some of the difficulties raised by Grice’s three-clause definition of speaker’s meaning, we argue that the characterisation of ostensive communication introduced in relevance theory can provide a conceptually unified explanation of a much wider range of communicative acts than Grice was concerned with, including cases of both ‘showing that’ and ‘telling that’, and with both (...) determinate and indeterminate import. (shrink)

Richard Nisbett and Dov Cohen’s (1996) influential account of “cultures of honor” speculates that honor norms are a socially-adaptive deterrence strategy. This theory has been appealed to by multiple empirically-minded philosophers, and plays an important role in John Doris and Alexandra Plakias’ (2008) antirealist argument from disagreement. In this essay, I raise four objections to the Nisbett-Cohen deterrence thesis, and offer another theory of honor in its place that sees honor as an agonistic normative system regulating prestige competitions. Since my (...) account portrays honor norms as radically different from liberal ones, it actually strengthens Doris and Plakias’ case in some respects: cultures of honor are not merely superficially different from Western liberal ones. Nonetheless, the persistent appeal of honor’s principles, and their moral plausibility in certain contexts, suggests not antirealism, but pluralism—a reply on behalf of realism that itself has considerable empirical support. (shrink)

This article argues in defence of the minimal self and discusses the phenomenological objection to the Buddhist no-self view. It considers the distinction made by Miri Albahari between two forms of the sense of body ownership: personal ownership and perspectival ownership. It suggests that there is an important contrast between this Buddhist conception and the phenomenological conception of nonegological consciousness as found by Edmund Husserl and Jean-Paul Sartre.

Commonsense psychology and cognitive science both regularly assume the existence of representational states. I propose a naturalistic theory of representation sufficient to meet the pretheoretical constraints of a "folk theory of representation", constraints including the capacities for accuracy and inaccuracy, selectivity of proper objects of representation, perspective, articulation, and "efficacy" or content-determined functionality. The proposed model states that a representing device is a device which changes state when information is received over multiple information channels originating at a single source. The (...) changed state of a representing device is a representation. The unitary information source which would give rise to the information impinging on the representing device, and hence, give rise to the representation, is the content of the representation. The model meets the pretheoretic constraints, and also conforms to available neurobiological data for two invertebrate species. (shrink)

Intrinsicality is a central notion in metaphysics that can do important work in many areas of philosophy. It is not widely appreciated, however, that there are in fact a number of different notions of intrinsicality, and that these different notions differ in what work they can do. This paper discusses what these notions are, describes how they are related to each other, and argues that each of them can be analysed in terms of a single notion of intrinsic aboutness that (...) relates states of affairs to the things they are intrinsically about. (shrink)

The Oxford Handbook of Contemporary Phenomenology presents twenty-eight essays by some of the leading figures in the field, and gives an authoritative overview of the type of work and range of topics found and discussed in contemporary phenomenology. It is the definitive guide to what is currently going on in phenomenology, and offers a rich source of insight and stimulation for philosophers, students of philosophy, and for people working in other disciplines of the humanities, social sciences, and sciences, who are (...) interested in the state of phenomenology today. The essays explore a diverse range of topics, including intentionality, embodiment, perception, naturalism, temporality, self-consciousness, language, knowledge, ethics, politics, art and religion, and will make it clear that phenomenology, far from being a tradition of the past, is alive and in a position to make valuable contributions to contemporary thought. (shrink)

& Functional brain imaging offers new opportunities for the begin with single-subject (preprocessed) scan series, and study of that most pervasive of cognitive conditions, human consider the patterns of all voxels as potential multivariate consciousness. Since consciousness is attendant to so much encodings of phenomenal information. Twenty-seven subjects of human cognitive life, its study requires secondary analysis from the four studies were analyzed with multivariate of multiple experimental datasets. Here, four preprocessed methods, revealing analogues of phenomenal structures, datasets from the (...) National fMRI Data Center are considered: particularly the structures of temporality. In a second Hazeltine et al., Neural activation during response competi- interpretive approach, artificial neural networks were used tion; Ishai et al., The representation of objects in the human to detect a more explicit prediction from phenomenology, occipital and temporal cortex; Mechelli et al., The effects of namely, that present experience contains and is inflected by presentation rate during word and pseudoword reading; and past states of awareness and anticipated events. In all of 21 Postle et al., Activity in human frontal cortex associated with subjects in this analysis, nets were successfully trained to spatial working memory and saccadic behavior. The study of extract aspects of relative past and future brain states, in consciousness also draws from multiple disciplines. In this comparison with statistically similar controls. This exploratory article, the philosophical subdiscipline of phenomenology study thus concludes that the proposed methods for provides initial characterization of phenomenal structures ‘‘neurophenomenology’’ warrant further application, includ- conceptually necessary for an analysis of consciousness. These ing the exploration of individual differences, multivariate structures include phenomenal intentionality, phenomenal differences between cognitive task conditions, and explora- superposition, and experienced temporality.. (shrink)

The paper proposes and defends the following characterization of response dependent property: a property is response-dependent iff there is a response-dependence biconditional for a concept signifying it which holds in virtue of the nature of the property. Finding out whether a property is such is to a large extent a posteriori matter. Finally, colors are response dependent: they are essentially tied to issuing the relevant experiences, so that having those experiences does give access to their, dispositional, nature. Finally, some important (...) contrary views are critically discussed in the paper. (shrink)

This paper examines the notion of tolerance in education. In general, tolerance is perceived as a means to resist hostility, raise awareness of cultural differences, mitigate violence, and maintain liberal and democratic values. In education, there are various initiatives, such as the International Day for Tolerance (UNESCO in Declaration of principles on tolerance, 1995), that aim to build resilience against different forms of hate and cultivate openness and acceptance of the other. Yet the idea of tolerance includes different understandings and (...) interpretations. This paper argues that cultivating an embodied sense of tolerance among students, in particular in divisive communities, requires us to move beyond deliberative interpretations of tolerance and to advance a pragmatic understanding of tolerance through an agonistic lens. This paper starts with a review of several dominant interpretations of tolerance. The heart of the paper focuses on interpreting Dewey’s pragmatism as a theoretical basis for advancing tolerance. The final part of the paper explores how pragmatism through an agonistic lens can support a more flexible and humane approach to dealing with political conflicts. (shrink)

The concept of performance has gradually become established in health policies. Presented as necessary and positive, it is often reduced to efficiency, which results in policies and management styles aimed at optimisation. While they are supposed to guarantee the sustainability of our healthcare systems, these practices have made them fragile. Insights from the life sciences help us understand why. Indeed, biologists observe that living beings do not prioritise optimisation but robustness. To cope with fluctuations, a robust organisation operates with redundancies, (...) apparent waste, heterogeneity, organised fluctuations, slowness, and hesitation. It functions sub‐optimally. This article offers a theoretical reflection and management directions for more robust healthcare systems. (shrink)

The article revisits the old controversy concerning the relation of the mother's brother and sister's son in patrilineal societies in the light both of anthropological criticisms of the very notion of kinship and of evolutionary and epidemiological approaches to culture. It argues that the ritualized patterns of behavior that had been discussed by Radcliffe-Brown, Goody and others are to be explained in terms of the interaction of a variety of factors, some local and historical, others pertaining to general human dispositions. (...) In particular, an evolved disposition to favor relatives can contribute to the development and stabilization of these behaviors, not by directly generating them, but by making them particularly "catchy" and resilient. In this way, it is possible to recognize both that cultural representations and practices are specific to a community at a time in its history (rather than mere tokens of a general type), and that they are, in essential respects, grounded in the common evolved psychology of human beings. (shrink)

A standard view about criminal law distinguishes between two kinds of offenses, “mala in se” and “mala prohibita.” This view also corresponds to a distinction between two bases for criminalization: certain acts should be criminalized because they are moral wrongs; other acts may be criminalized for the sake of promoting overall welfare. This paper aims to show two things: first, that allowing for criminalization for the sake of promoting welfare renders the category of wrongfulness crimes largely redundant. Second, and more (...) importantly, accepting welfare as a legitimate ground for criminalization implies a certain view about legitimate state action, which makes criminalization for wrongfulness more difficult to justify. If I am right, the view that keeps the two categories of criminalization as largely separate is untenable. I conclude with some remarks about the advantages of welfare as the basis for criminalization. (shrink)

It is widely held that the Experience Machine is the basis of a serious objection to Hedonistic theories of welfare. It is also widely held that Desire Satisfactionist theories of welfare can readily avoid problems stemming from the Experience Machine. But in this paper, we argue that if the Experience Machine poses a serious problem for Hedonism, it also poses a serious problem for Desire Satisfactionism. We raise two objections to Desire Satisfactionism, each of which relies on the Experience Machine. (...) The first is very much like the well-known Experience Machine objection to Hedonism. The second asks whether someone who accepts Desire Satisfactionism should want to form a desire to plug into the Experience Machine. (shrink)

In this paper I argue against Nancy Cartwright's claim that we ought to abandon what she calls "fundamentalism" about the laws of nature and adopt instead her "dappled world" hypothesis. According to Cartwright we ought to abandon the notion that fundamental laws apply universally, instead we should consider the law-like statements of science to apply in highly qualified ways within narrow, non-overlapping and ontologically diverse domains, including the laws of fundamental physics. For Cartwright, "laws" are just locally applicable refinements of (...) a more open-ended concept of capacities. By providing a critique of the dappled world approach's central notion of open ended capacities and substituting this concept with an account of properties drawn from recent writing on the subject of structural realism I show that a form of fundamentalism is viable. I proceed from this conclusion to show that this form of fundamentalism provides a superior reading of case studies, such as the effective field theory program in quantum field theory, than the "dappled world" view. The case study of the EFT program demonstrates that ontological variability between theoretical domains can be accounted for without altogether abandoning fundamentalism or adopting Cartwright's more implausible theses. (shrink)

We present a novel generative model for natural language tree structures in which semantic (lexical dependency) and syntactic (PCFG) structures are scored with separate models. This factorization provides conceptual simplicity, straightforward opportunities for separately improving the component models, and a level of performance comparable to similar, non-factored models. Most importantly, unlike other modern parsing models, the factored model admits an extremely effective A* parsing algorithm, which enables efficient, exact inference.

Summary Kant's critique of corpuscular theory created a tabula rasa situation in natural philosophy and opened up a vast new field of research, particularly related to the study of heat, light, electricity and magnetism. ?rsted introduced Kantian epistemology in Scandinavia and made friends with J. W. Ritter, an outstanding experimenter who was the first to make dynamical philosophy productive. The ?rsted?Ritter partnership aimed at the construction of a cosmology based on dynamical philosophy as well as galvanic interpretations of the Lichtenberg (...) and Chladni patterns. It is suggested that Kantian critique and dynamical cosmology provided the framework within which ?rsted and Ritter made their epochal discoveries as well as their bold speculations. Finally, it is argued that the Romantics widened the scope of natural philosophy itself. (shrink)

Dan Arbib | Résumé : Nous proposons ici une analyse du concept cartésien d’infini à partir de trois paradoxes : 1) du point de vue du corps cartésien, l’infini occupe deux places peu compatibles, à la fois fondateur de la rationalité et inséré en elle ; 2) du point de vue de l’histoire de l’histoire de la métaphysique, l’infini apparaît pour satisfaire l’exigence de la représentation et pour y déroger ; 3) du point de vue de l’histoire des noms divins, (...) les enjeux du nom de l’infini se trouvent par deux fois neutralisés, d’une part par le scotisme contre l’effort thomiste ou bonaventurien, d’autre part par les post-cartésiens contre les plus grandes audaces cartésiennes. — Ces trois paradoxes superposables questionnent la cohérence du dispositif cartésien dont l’infini constitue le coeur. |: I propose here an analysis of the Cartesian concept of infinity based on three paradoxes : 1) from a Cartesian viewpoint, infinity occupies two places which are potentially incompatible, both as founder of rationality and inserted in it ; 2) from the viewpoint of the history of metaphysics, infinity appears to satisfy the requirement of representation and to break it ; 3) from the viewpoint of the history the divine names, the stakes of the name of infinite are twice neutralized, first by scoticism against Thomas Aquinas or Bonaventure, then by post-Cartesian philosophers against Descartes’ boldness. — These three superposable paradoxes question the coherence of the Cartesian system of which infinity constitutes the centre. (shrink)

This article aims to show why Sellars' critique of epistemic givenness has proven so apt in characterizing the philosophical problems that confront the project of Dignaga and Dharmakirti -- problem that result from the etent to whih these buddhists valorized "non-conceptual awareness.

Moral minds -- Fear morality -- Humanistic morality.

It is natural to think of legal positivism and jurisprudential naturalism as intellectually allied ideas. Legal positivism is associated with the idea that law is a matter of social fact; naturalism is a philosophical tenet that, among other things suggests the importance of scientific findings and methods to philosophy. At the very least, there seems to be a close family resemblance between the two views. In this essay, I challenge this view from a naturalistic perspective. I show that the best-known (...) proponents of legal positivism in the twentieth century all rejected naturalism. I dedicate most of my discussion to H.L.A. Hart’s version of legal positivism, as it appears superficially friendly to naturalism. I show that throughout his career and in writings on a wide range of topics, Hart consistently argued against the applicability of the methods of science to the explanation of social phenomena. This is not a small matter: I argue that it is this anti-naturalistic stance that contributed to his descriptively faulty account of adjudication. After reviewing more briefly the work of other leading legal positivists, I argue in my conclusion that those seeking to advance a naturalistic approach to law should turn their backs of much of twentieth-century legal positivism, which in various guises has been hostile to naturalism. (shrink)

Competent adults should be permitted to determine the course of their own lives. We may try to influence them. We may ask them, perhaps even implore them, to change their minds. But in the end, they are in charge of their lives. They get to choose their careers, whether and whom to marry, whether to exercise, and whether to have surgery.This emphasis on respect for patients’ autonomy may seem to imply that allowing patients to make their own decisions should always (...) take precedence over other considerations. Given this presumption, there has been almost no discussion in the medical literature or elsewhere about how important this value is and whether it should sometimes be balanced against and give way to other values. This absence of guidance is especially problematic in cases where respect for patient autonomy conflicts with promoting patients’ clinical interests. (shrink)

The COVID-19 pandemic has revealed the vulnerability of the US generic drug supply chain to foreign production. Many policies have been proposed to mitigate this vulnerability. In this article, we argue that nonprofit drug manufacturers have the potential to make important contributions.

I take a close look at Bernard Williams’s paper "Moral Luck," which put this notion on the philosophical agenda. Williams’s focal example is the painter Paul Gauguin. According to Williams, Gauguin’s morally dubious decision to desert his family so as to pursue an artistic career can be redeemed only by his partially fortuitous success as a painter. This is shown by the consideration that a successful Gauguin would not be able to regret his decision, whereas failure would have prompted regret. (...) I suggest that the best way to understand this claim is to see Gauguin’s decision to become an artist as a constitutive decision, which launches what for him proved to be a defining project. One cannot coherently regret the realization of such a project or the decision that gave rise to it because that would amount to wishing to be someone else: conditions of personal identity set the limits on the counterfactuals about ourselves that we can intelligibly entertain. However, not being able to regret the constitutive elements of one’s life is not the same as approving of these elements. So I disagree with Williams’s ultimate conclusion that the inability to regret a decision signals some justification for it, no matter how attenuated. (shrink)

The information processing that constitutes accessconsciousness is not sufficient to make a representational state conscious in any sense. Standard examples of computation without consciousness undermine A-consciousness, and Block's cases seem to derive their plausibility from a lurking phenomenal awareness. That is, people and other minded systems seem to have access-consciousness only insofar as the state accessed is a phenomenal one, or the state resulting from access is phenomenal, or both.

The claim presented here is that aesthetic considerations are an essential part of place narrative, and are thus essential to ethical environmental decision-making. Holland’s narrative-based approach to nature conservation is taken as a starting point from which an argument is developed to show how his approach can be extended to include the aesthetic. Aesthetic experience of place is important because it gives us knowledge by acquaintance of the place, because it gives meaning to our relationship to the place, and because (...) it reveals and gives insight to meaningful relationships within the place. The narrative approach allows these experiences and meanings, which are problematic to other approaches, to be captured and included in environmental decision-making. (shrink)

We integrate information from distinct domains, especially in metaphor. What sort of cognitive architecture underlies this kind of integration? Fodor (1983) argued that it involves nonmodular mechanisms. He also contended that the nonmodular mechanisms evolved from modular ones through a process of demodularization, a position elaborated by Mithen (1996). In this article, I defend Fodor and Mithen from criticisms offered by Sperber (1994). Sperber suggested that nonmodular mechanisms are unlikely to have evolved because an increasingly large database would incapacitate the (...) cognitive system due to combinatorial explosion and the frame problem. Moreover, he argued that nonmodular mechanisms are not required to explain our ability to integrate information. I argue that proponents of demodularization can respond to Sperber's criticisms by assuming that either an expanding database co-evolved with increasingly sophisticated search mechanisms or the cognitive system evolved along connectionist lines. Moreover, I argue that Sperber's modular account of conceptual integration fails to satisfy the criteria for modularity-namely, information encapsulation. (shrink)

For Hume virtues are character traits that are useful and agreeable to ourselves and to others. Such traits are wide-ranging, from moral virtues such as benevolence to intellectual virtues such as courage of mind and penetration. This paper focuses on Hume’s account of the latter. I argue that Hume is a virtue epistemologist, principally interested in the role that intellectual character traits play in social interactions rather than in the justifiedness of particular beliefs. I shall argue that this interpretation is (...) consonant with his mitigated skepticism, and that it calls for a reappraisal of the marshalling of Hume and Reid into the contemporary debate between reductionists and non-reductionists with respect to the epistemology of testimony. (shrink)

An integrative psychological concept that bridges the sciences and humanities, narrative identity is the internalized and evolving story a person invents to explain how he or she has become the person he or she is becoming. Combining the selective reconstruction of the past with an imagined anticipated future, narrative identity provides human lives with a sense of unity, moral purpose, and temporal coherence. In this article, I discuss how the evolution of human storytelling provides the basic tools for constructing self-defining (...) life narratives. I then consider theory and research on the development of narrative identity over the human life course, socially consequential variations in narrative identity, and how culture shapes the stories people tell about themselves. My overall perspective on narrative identity was formulated within the fields of personality and developmental psychology, but it is also informed by concepts and constructs in evolutionary biology, cognitive neurosci­ence, philosophy, and literary studies. (shrink)

Lisciandra poses a challenge for robustness analysis as applied to economic models. She argues that substituting tractability assumptions risks altering the main mathematical structure of the model, thereby preventing the possibility of meaningfully evaluating the same model under different assumptions. In such cases RA is argued to be inapplicable. However, Lisciandra is mistaken to take the goal of RA as keeping the mathematical properties of tractability assumptions intact. Instead, RA really aims to keep the modeling component while varying the corresponding (...) mathematical formulation. Thus, her argument concerning whether the associated mathematical properties of certain assumptions can be kept intact is irrelevant to the success of RA. Furthermore, we explicate and develop Lloyd’s account of “model robustness” to provide solutions to Lisciandra’s challenges. Our solutions are, namely, error analysis and independent empirical support. We conclude that although complex economic models do face potential dangers, there are solutions and robustness analysis need not be given up.. (shrink)

Critical notica (in Spanish) of *Relativism and Monadic Truth* (OUP 2009), by Cappelen and Hawthorne.