No doubt the years hunting monsters and saving the universe have had their toll on the Winchesters, but their toughest and most gruesome battles are contained in this book. Think Lucifer was diabolically clever? Think again. No son is more wayward than the one who squanders his intellect and academic career pursuing questions as poignant as “Half-awesome? That’s full-on good, right?” Gathered here for the first time since the formation of Purgatory, a collection of research so arcane and horrific that (...) it would make even the late, great Bobby Singer blush. _Supernatural and Philosophy_ tackles all the big ideas in the long-running hit show _Supernatural_, covering thorny issues in a fun and accessible way. Even those unfamiliar with the show will find fascinating insights into Heaven, Hell, Angels, Demons, God, and Lucifer. A unique collection of insights into the many philosophical, religious, and paranormal topics in the hit TV show, _Supernatural_ Accessible treatment of thorny issues for a general audience Written by philosophical fans of the show, for philosophical fans of the show Those unfamiliar with the show will still find fascinating insights into Heaven, Hell, Angels, Demons, God, Lucifer, and Good and Evil Contributors tackle issues ranging from the biological classifications of monsters, to the epistemological problems of ghost hunting. (shrink)

Following promulgation of the Nuremberg code in 1947, the ethics of research on human subjects has been a challenging and often contentious topic of debate. Escalation in the use of research participants in low-income countries over recent decades , has intensified the debate on the ethics of international research and led to increasing attention both to exploitation of vulnerable subjects and to considerations of how the 10:90 gap in health and medical research could be narrowed. In 2000, prompted by the (...) discussions over several years that led to the US NIH launching a capacity building programme on research ethics for members of research ethics committees in developing countries, we advanced a ‘new look’ for the ethics of international research.1 Since then progress has been made on several fronts.First, our ideas—considered somewhat radical and impractical at the time—have been provocatively addressed by scholars who have either contested them or advanced similar conceptions of what obligations international researchers have to research participants and communities in low income countries before, during and after clinical trials. Second, those researchers who have been sympathetic to our ideas have either endeavoured to put these into practice or have investigated the feasibility of doing so. Third, the intractability of the 10/90 gap and the escalation of interest in global health have sensitised many to the need to amplify the uptake of these ideas in practice.Here, we briefly review the conceptual and practical developments in international research ethics. While much conceptual progress has been made (and the concepts are now appearing …. (shrink)

This chapter talks about status anxiety by drawing examples from Veronica Mars. There are differences in status, in one's standing in society. Some are at the top, some are at the bottom, and some are in the middle. Everyone is worried about where he or she fits on the hierarchy of standing and importance. Some lower primates sort themselves, with alpha males beating their chests, feeding first, and claiming privileged mating rights. We humans would like to think we are above (...) such vulgar displays, yet a quick glance at Neptune or at our own town reveals that we may be more subtle, but only a little. Where we fit in, what our status is, matters. It matters to the way others treat us, but, maybe more importantly, it matters to the way we think of ourselves. The way others treat us influences the way we think of ourselves. (shrink)

When everyone can be a publisher, what distinguishes the journalist? This article considers contemporary challenges to institutional roles in a digital media environment and then turns to three broad journalistic normative values - authenticity, accountability, and autonomy - that affect the credibility of journalists and the content they provide. A set of questions that can help citizens determine the trustworthiness of information available to them emerges from the discussion.

The association of women with caring dispositions and thinking has become a persistent theme in recent feminist writing. There are a number of reasons for this. One reason is the impetus that has been provided by the empirical work of Carol Gilligan on women’s moral development. The fact that this association is not merely an ideologically or philosophically postulated one, but is argued for on empirical grounds, tends to add to its credibility. Another reason for the resilience of the association (...) is the existence of an increasingly prominent theme in feminist thought and action that focuses on the importance of women’s difference from men, both as a fact and as a goal. Within this theme, there are various views on what the relevant differences are between women and men, and why the differences ought to be emphasized and properly respected. Women’s caring, as will be seen, turns out to have a firm presence in all of these views, and as a result, many women argue that caring should form the basis of a distinctive feminist ethic. On these views, women’s approaches to understanding moral situations, defining selfconceptions, choosing goals and roles, and guiding behaviour, should all be informed by and based upon dispositions of caring. However, if this idea of a feminist ethic of care is to be plausible, it will need to be reconciled with another strong theme in feminism, according to which in fundamental moral respects women ought not be considered or treated differently from men. We will examine the standing of a feminist ethic of care in the context of this tension between the difference theme and the sameness theme in feminism. The discussion begins by re-characterizing the justice and care debate in terms of impartialist and partialist ethical perspectives, and it then goes on to indicate the various ways in which women’s presumed disposition to caring and partialism finds prominence within the difference theme. The central focus of the discussion, however, will be the question of how to reconcile the conflict that exists between impartialist, justice-based moral thinking, and a partialist, caring approach to morality.. (shrink)

In two recent court cases, Ms B, a paralysed competent adult, was allowed to end her life; Mrs Pretty, another paralysed competent adult, was not. In legal terms, the essential difference between the two cases is that Ms B was seeking the withdrawal of treatment, whereas Mrs Pretty was asking for assistance in ending her life. I argue that while this distinction may accurately state the law that governs these situations, it does not rest on a defensible moral basis. Both (...) the women should have been allowed to choose the manner in which they would die. (shrink)

Dying before one’s time has been a prominent theme in classic literature and poetry. Catherine Linton’s youthful death in Wuthering Heights leaves behind a bereft Heathcliff and generations of mourning readers. The author herself, Emily Brontë, died young from tuberculosis. John Keats’ Ode on Melancholy captures the transitory beauty of 19th century human lives too often ravished by early death. Keats also died of tuberculosis, aged 25. “The bloom, whose petals nipped before they blew, died on the promise of the (...) fruit” is how Percy Bysshe Shelley expressed his grief over Keats’ death. Emily Dickinson wrote So Has a Daisy Vanished, being driven into depression by the early loss of loved ones from typhoid and tuberculosis. (shrink)

This paper explores how emotions are expressed in the endangered Gunwinyguan language Kunbarlang and compares these expressions to those in the neighbouring Gunwinyguan language Bininj Kunwok, and neighbouring languages from other language families, Mawng (Iwaidjan) and Ndjébbana (Maningridan). As well as considering body-based emotion expressions and the tropes (metaphors and metonymies) they instantiate, we consider the range of other (non-body-based) expressions and tropes available in each language. These provide an important point of comparison with the body-part expressions, which are limited (...) to expressions based on noun incorporation in the Gunwinyguan languages and, correspondingly, a more limited range of tropes. By outlining and comparing the linguistic tropes used to express emotions in these four languages in the highly multilingual yet socioculturally unified context of western Arnhem Land, we aim to shed further light on the relationships between linguistic figurative features and conceptual representations of emotions. (shrink)

Erving Goffman’s “Asylums” is a key text in the development of contemporary, community-orientated mental health practice. It has survived as a trenchant critique of the asylum as total institution, and its publication in 1961 in book form marked a further stage in the discrediting of the asylum model of mental health care. In this paper, some responses from a range of disciplines to this text, 50 years on, are presented. A consultant psychiatrist with a special interest in cultural psychiatry and (...) mental health legislation, two collaborating psychotherapists in adult and forensic mental health, a philosopher, and a recent medical graduate, present their varying responses to the text. The editors present these with the hope of encouraging further dialogue and debate from service users, carers, clinicians, and academics and researchers across a range of disciplines. (shrink)

In Sebastian Thrun, Lawrence K. Saul, and Bernhard Schölkopf (eds), Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 16 (NIPS 2003). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, pp. 497-504.

Jonathan Singer's witty, erudite book is a celebration of rationality and an urgent call to make use of intelligence and reason to better cope with human problems. Emphasizing the importance of rationality's greatest achievement, modern science, Singer—one of the foremost biologists of our era—argues that for the first time in several million years humanity has at its disposal the tools for an objective understanding of the external world. Singer demonstrates that, today more than ever, the fullest exercise (...) of rationality is essential if humanity is to rein in a runaway technology and control an explosion of the human population that together threaten to devastate life on this planet within only a few more generations. The intrusion of reason and rationality into our largely irrational world has been painfully slow, uneven, and often unwelcome. Singer explains that for rationalists the founding of modern science—which took place only a few hundred years ago—has overthrown many of the myths of conventional wisdom and dogmas of traditional religions. Yet these beliefs still hold sway over the irrational world, obstructing efforts to deal sensibly with the problematic future of mankind. The core of _The Splendid Feast of Reason _is an engaging and accessible account of the knowledge that modern science provides. Singer offers an absorbing discussion of how life works, of the nature of reproduction, aging, and death, and of the necessary fragility of the individual life compared to the resilience of life itself. He emphasizes the primary role of the genes in determining the structural organization and the behaviors of living things, including humans. He also stresses the nature and mechanisms of biological evolution, mechanisms that have now been placed in jeopardy because of human ignorance and irrational appetites. Finally, Singer delves into the enigma of the real world with its irrational and chaotic operations and offers suggestions of how a rationalist can not only survive, but thrive in it. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:The Last Puritan: A Memoir in the Form of a NovelChristopher PerriconeThe Last Puritan: A Memoir in the Form of a Novel, by George Santayana; edited by H. J. Saatkamp and W. G. Holzberger; xli & 744 pp. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1994, $50.00.In 1936, Irwin Edman reviewed The Last Puritan for the New York Times. It was a sympathetic review. However, Edman was not blind to the (...) novel’s fundamental weakness: it is driven by ideas, “essences,” rather than characters, ones you might hate or love: “... this is a poet’s novel and philosopher’s tale.... If the characters do not come to life, they live as themes dramatized and as ‘human persuasions.’”This year Harold Bloom wrote in The Western Canon that canonical works are those works which deserve re-reading. As a novel, The Last Puritan does not deserve re-reading, as Tom Jones, The Trial, or Huckleberry Finn, do. But as a philosophy “not argued but presented as a picture” (Edman), The Last Puritan may be among Santayana’s best works. Yes, one reads and re-reads The Last Puritan because one wants to know the ideas of America’s great philosophical poet. Without the philosophy to support the novel, I am not sure it would have a reason for being. One is not interested per se in Santayana’s plot or characters, their friendships and failures, Oliver and Jim, their deaths, or Mario, his paganism and love of life. Rather one wants to be enchanted by [End Page 186] Santayana’s poetic voice; one wants to know what Santayana thinks about the play of spirit and matter and how “the genteel tradition” had so much promise and yet had gone bad. And these are, indeed, in principle, the very same reasons why one reads and rereads Plato, Lucretius, or Dante.The critical edition, put together by Saatkamp and Holzberger, with an introduction by Irving Singer, is a first-class piece of work. It is everything a Santayana scholar would want or need. Singer’s introduction provides the reader with a sound and well-researched background on Santayana and Oliver’s story, and anticipates some problems of aesthetics the reader will face, e.g., the problem of character development. Unlike me, Singer thinks Santayana’s “idealizations” bring vitality to character: “Far from being desiccated types, the great characters in fiction give one a sense of individuality that often seems more natural to us than what is found in nature itself” (p. xix). Notwithstanding my disagreement with Singer, his presentation is well thought-out and plausible.The “Editorial Appendix,” written by Saatkamp and Holzberger, is impeccable. In the “Notes to the Text” they provide the scholar or the curious reader with a marvelous wealth of information. They run down and support with convincing evidence every allusion in the novel. In the “Textual Commentary,” they provide a statement of textual principles and procedures, a description and development of the text, and an explanation of how the critical text was established; in effect, after one has read the product, one can then read about the process by which the product was brought about. Naturally, there are also lists of emendations and variants.As a philosophical novel, I recommend The Last Puritan to anyone who believes that “... what the realm of essence, in its mute eternity, chiefly adds to our notion of nature is the proof that nature is contingent. An infinite canvas is spread before us on which any world might have been painted. The actuality of things is sharpened and the possibilities of things are enlarged. We cease to be surprised or distressed at finding existence unstable and transitory. Why should it have been otherwise? Not only must our own lives be insecure, as earthly seasons change, but perhaps all existence is in flux, even down to its first principles. Dum vivimus, vivamus. Everything, so long as it recognizably endures, is free to deploy its accidental nature, and we may lead the life of reason with a good grace, harmonizing as well as possible our various impulses and opportunities, and exploring the realm of essence as our genius may prompt” (Santayana, “A General Confession... (shrink)

Building on the strengths of the first edition, the second edition of the Irwin Nicomachean Ethics features a revised translation (with little editorial intervention), expanded notes (including a summary of the argument of each chapter), an expanded Introduction, and a revised glossary.

ABSTRACT In Germany, applied ethics is under attack from a diverse coalition of left‐wing organisations, disability groups, and some conservative defenders of a strict doctrine of the sanctity of human life. The attack has been pressed to the point of forcing the cancellation of conferences and disrupting lectures or classes so that they cannot take place. This essay describes the extent and nature of the attack, and makes a preliminary assessment of its significance.

Contributing specialists survey Hispanic literature of New Mexico and its influence. No index. The prevailing view in the history of philosophy has been that time is not basically real but has a derivative status. In contrast, Lieb establishes the thesis that time is a fundamental reality: it is individuals.".

The concept of dominance is used in the behavioral and biological sciences to describe outcomes in a variety of competitive interactions. In some taxa, a history of agonistic encounters among individuals modifies the course of future agonistic encounters such that the existence of a certain type of relationship can be inferred. If one is to characterize such relationships as dominance, however, then they must be distinguished from other kinds of interaction patterns for which the term tends to be used, as (...) well as from factors such as territoriality and "trained" winners and losers, which may also influence the expression of agonistic behavior. Operational definitions based on causal, functional, evolutionary, and ontogenetic considerations have been proposed. Reliability and validity problems have been discussed, but the dominance concept has proved useful despite methodological difficulties. The confusion of dominance relationships (which involve two or more individuals) with dominance ranks (which are assigned to a single individual) has obscured the possible evolutionary basis of dominance relationships. If benefits accrue to dominant members of pairs, then those attributes which allow an animal to establish dominance can be selected. Dominance per se and dominance ranks, on the other hand, cannot be genetically transmitted since they constitute relationships with other individuals rather than absolute attributes. Dominance rankings in particular may be useful for describing behavioral patterns within a group, but they may reflect our own ability to count rather than any important variable in social organization. (shrink)

In his Axel Hägerström Lectures, given in Sweden in 1991, Dick Hare referred to Hägerström as a pioneer in ethics who had made the most important breakthrough that there had been in ethics during the twentieth century. Although Hägerström's development of a nondescriptivist approach to ethics certainly was pioneering philosophical work, when the history of twentieth century ethics comes to be written, I believe that it is Hare's own work that will be seen as having made the most important contribution.

Ng and singer derive the principle of utility from the fact of finite sensibility and another principle, weak majority preference: "for a community of n individuals choosing between two possibilities, x and y, if no individual prefers y to x, and at least n/2 individuals prefer x to y, then x increases social welfare and is preferable." this derivation is regarded as incorrect in a comment. this reply explains why the derivation is valid and shows that the comment is (...) based on confusing a general social ordering with a utilitarian one. (shrink)

WHY DO NATURAL THINGS act or behave according to laws? The answer, I think, is that the laws of nature make them act or behave so. If this answer can be made clear and plausible, it will help us to understand the reality of laws.

The differences in the styles of these books are only tokens of more important differences in their methods and results. To see this it might be useful to look at the theses about representation which are central to the Tractatus, but which Wittgenstein leaves altogether aside in his Investigations.

Digital Media: Human–Technology Connection examines the technologically textured world through case studies that illustrate the way humans and technology connect with each other and the world. An interdisciplinary array of sources from philosophy, postphenomenology, philosophy of technology, media studies, media ecology, and film studies shows that digital media and its content are not neutral. This technology textures the world in multiple and varied ways that transform human abilities, augment experience, and pattern the world.