A central contention of Quentin Skinner’s Liberty before Liberalism (1998) was that careful examination of parliamentarian political argument during the English revolution of the mid-seventeenth ce...

ABSTRACT The subject of this paper is the place of Hume in Nicholas Phillipson's account of the Scottish Enlightenment. I begin with Phillipson's reading of Hume as ‘civic moralist’. I then turn to his account of Hume the author of The History of England. And from there I proceed to the place of Hume in his intellectual biography of Adam Smith. I conclude with a brief description of Phillipson's understanding of Hume's place in the history of the Scottish Enlightenment as (...) it mutated in the late eighteenth century and came to an end in the early nineteenth. I show how just as Phillipson's Hume cannot be understood apart from the Scottish Enlightenment, so also Phillipson's Scottish Enlightenment cannot be understood without Hume. (shrink)

Diamond Sutra Narratives: Textual Production and Lay Religiosity in Medieval China. By Chiew Hui Ho. Sinica Leidensia, vol. 144. Leiden: Brill, 2019. Pp. xiv + 520. $159.

Empathy is the combined ability to interpret the emotional states of others and experience resultant, related emotions. The relation between prefrontal electroencephalographic asymmetry and emotion in children is well known. The association between positive emotion (assessed via parent report), empathy (measured via observation), and second-by-second brain electrical activity (recorded during a pleasurable task) was investigated using a sample of one hundred twenty-eight 6- to 10-year-old children. Contentment related to increasing left frontopolar activation (p < .05). Empathic concern and positive empathy (...) related to increasing right frontopolar activation (ps < .05). A second form of positive empathy related to increasing left dorsolateral activation (p < .05). This suggests that positive affect and (negative and positive) empathy both relate to changes in prefrontal activity during a pleasurable task. (shrink)

The practice of paying research subjects for participating inclinical trials has yet to receive an adequate moral analysis.Dickert and Grady argue for a wage payment model in whichresearch subjects are paid an hourly wage based on that ofunskilled laborers. If we accept this approach, what follows?Norms for just working conditions emerge from workplacelegislation and political theory. All workers, includingpaid research subjects under Dickert and Grady''s analysis,have a right to at least minimum wage, a standard work week,extra pay for overtime hours, (...) a safe workplace, no faultcompensation for work-related injury, and union organization.If we accept that paid research subjects are wage earners likeany other, then the implications for changes to current practiceare substantial. (shrink)

In this article, we comment on Ciaffa’s article ‘The Ethics of Unilateral Do-Not-Resuscitate Orders for COVID-19 Patients.’ We summarize his argument criticizing futility and utilitarianism as the key ethical justifications for unilateral do-not-resuscitate orders for patients with COVID-19.

The commentaries by Rimé and Scherer underscore and extend many of the central themes discussed in our target article. This response filters the commentaries through the lens of our review article and highlights the core idea that relationships provide a vital context for the types of emotional responding outlined in the commentaries, including the social sharing of emotion as well as the link between emotional competence and physical health.

As an essential companion to Plato's Apology and Crito, Socrates Against Athens provides valuable historical and cultural context to our understanding of the trial.

It is, we think, fair to say that scholarship on post-Kantian philosophy1 has traditionally tended to focus on theoretical philosophy rather than on practical philoso...

In this paper we explain our pretense account of truth-talk and apply it in a diagnosis and treatment of the Liar Paradox. We begin by assuming that some form of deflationism is the correct approach to the topic of truth. We then briefly motivate the idea that all T-deflationists should endorse a fictionalist view of truth-talk, and, after distinguishing pretense-involving fictionalism (PIF) from error- theoretic fictionalism (ETF), explain the merits of the former over the latter. After presenting the basic framework (...) of our PIF account of truth-talk, we demonstrate a few advantages it offers over T-deflationist accounts that do not explicitly acknowledge pretense at work in the discourse. In turning to the Liar Paradox, we explain how the quasi-anaphoric functioning that our account attributes to truth-talk provides a diagnosis of the Liar Paradox (and other instances of semantic pathology) as having no content—in the sense of not specifying any of what we call M-conditions. At the same time, however, we vindicate the intuition that we can understand liar sentences, thereby avoiding one standard objection to “meaningless strategy” responses to the Liar Paradox. With this diagnosis in place, we then, by way of treatment, introduce a new predicate, ‘semantically defective’, and show how the explanation we give for its application allows for a consistent, yet revenge-immune, (dis)solution of the Liar Paradox, and semantic pathology generally. (shrink)

The presidential address of 2000, in which the author suggests emendations and/or explanations of seven proper names in the Koran, which have not been satisfactorily identified. These are: Ṭuwan, al-Jibt, Āzar, Idrīs, ʿUzayr, al-Rass, and ʿĪsā.

A proven classic, this anthology stimulates readers' interest in philosophy through an innovative ldquo;sides of the argumentrdquo; presentation, representing positions on each of the fundamental philosophical principles. Each reading contains a biographical sketch of the author, with a group of further readings for those wishing to pursue issues in further depth. Using debate and argument as a vehicle, the eleventh edition ofClassic Philosophical Questionssimultaneously gives readers the fundamentals of philosophy while demonstrating that philosophy is a discourse that has spanned centuries. (...) Topics covered include knowledge, metaphysics, religion, ethics, social and political philosophy, aesthetics, and the meaning of life. This anthology offers both classic and contemporary selections that challenge readers with the basic inquiries that philosophers have discussed throughout the ages. (shrink)