History of Logic in China: 5 Questions is a collection of short interviews based on 5 questions presented to some of the most influential and prominent scholars in the field. We hear their views on the field, the aim, the scopes, the future direction of research and how their work fits in these respects. Interviews with Rens Bod, Chung-Ying Cheng, Cui Qingtian, Dong Zhitie, Chris Fraser, Yiu-Ming Fung, Jane Geaney, Chad Hansen, Christoph Harbsmeier, Ju Zhonglin, Hsien-Chung Lee, Jer-Shiarn Lee, (...) Michiel Leezenberg, Liu Peiyu, Thierry Lucas, Gregor Paul, Dan Robins, Shen Jianying, Sun Zhongyuan, Wang Kexi, Yang Wujin, Zhai Jincheng, Zheng Weihong, Zhou Shan and Zhou Yunzhi. (shrink)

This paper discusses Wittgenstein understood the language of the dimensions of the human form of life point of view, we oppose the idea and the text is the interpretation of the relationship between the nature of the argument. Move to reposition Wittgenstein language, means the direct meaning of the moment, rather than explain, and not because of our shortage of facts and work to a standstill. The main thrust of this significance and the fact that a direct interaction between the (...) current text of the practice of continuing involvement, the text was able to express the meaning of the moment between the facts and narrative unity. In other words, Wittgenstein on the rules, customs, or life in the form of reflection, allows us to claim the author intended meaning of the text depends on the point of view, and negative with the intention of the author of a variety of relativism between the interpretation of , the transfer can be prudent to try to speculate Huan room. For example, Stanley Xu fee claim, meaning diverse, according to the interests of our interests, goals and assumptions of the "default" of the "premise" and different. But Wittgenstein's writings, pointed out that the rules in order to grasp the meaning of such person does not involve the "premise" of the argument. Is a form of life on our training the next day, and thus to control of both the immediate and direct facts and meaning. This allows us to re-confirm, indeed, does not rely on the text to explain the fact that there is, in fact and thus understand the text for further explanation for the fact that between the true distinction. Meaning and truth of the "total structure" does not eliminate the practice of interpretation, but will be classified as appropriate Field, is the world we start to go beyond the immediate text directly taken to the open practice. • We will be reading Jane Austen's "Mansfield Park", for example, to influence our thinking about changing the form of text to read way to view this view. This paper argues that a Wittgensteinian understanding of language as an integral dimension of human forms of life speaks against the view that our relationship to texts is interpretive in nature. Wittgenstein's re-orientation to language entails that meaning is immediate rather than interpretive, and that our works don't stop short of the facts. The aim of this paper is to show that the immediate mutuality of meanings and facts carries over to our textual practices so that our texts make available immediate unities of meanings and narrative facts. That is, Wittgenstein's reflections on following rules, customs or forms of life allow us to steer a careful course between the view that a text is determined by the author's intentions and a relativism of variable interpretations that results from denying the relevance of authorial intentions. For example, Stanley Fish holds that meanings vary insofar as they are "predetermined 'by our" presuppositions "-our interests, goals and assumptions. But Wittgenstein's work suggests that following rules, and hence grasping meanings, does not involve something as variable as individual" presuppositions. "Rather , our training into forms of life opens up a second-nature where grasp of both facts and meanings is immediate. This allows us to re-affirm the view that there are textual facts that do not depend on interpretation; that there is a difference between apprehending the facts of a text and going on to provide further interpretations of those facts. The 'co-constitution' of meanings and facts does not foreclose interpretive practices but allocates them to their proper sphere-as practices that we may wish to undertake in order to go beyond the initial immediate openness of the world of a text. We can test this view by considering the way our changing forms of forms affect the way we read a text such as Jane Austen's Mansfied Park. (shrink)

Call the norms of inquiry zetetic norms. How are zetetic norms related to epistemic norms? At first glance, they seem quite closely connected. Aren't epistemic norms norms that bind inquirers qua inquirers? And isn't epistemology the place to look for a normative theory of inquiry? While much of this thought seems right, this paper argues that the relationship between the epistemic and the zetetic is not as harmonious as one might have thought and liked. In particular, this paper argues that (...) some familiar contemporary epistemic norms are in tension with, and even in conflict with, central zetetic norms. (shrink)

In this paper I argue that suspension of judgment is intimately tied to inquiry and in particular that one is suspending judgment about some question if and only if one is inquiring into that question.

Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, EarlyView.

The essays trace, from the ancient Greeks to the present, the use of self-interest to explain political life.

In this paper I explore the contours of a picture of normative epistemology that speaks centrally to the question of how to inquire rather than just the question of what to believe. What if normative epistemology were expanded to encompass inquiry in full? I argue that while a 'zetetic epistemology' builds on traditional normative epistemology in many appealing ways, it also faces some challenges.

In this paper we investigate the locus of believability effects in syllogistic reasoning. We identify three points in the reasoning process at which such effects could occur: the initial interpretation of premises, the examination of alternative representations of them (in all of which any valid conclusion must be true), and the “filtering” of putative conclusions. The effect of beliefs at the first of these loci is well established. In this paper we report three experiments that examine whether beliefs have an (...) effect at the other two loci. In experiments 1 and 2 subjects drew their own conclusions from syllogisms that suggested believable or unbelievable ones. In the third experiment they evaluated conclusions that were presented to them. The data show that beliefs both affect the examination of alternative models and act as a filter on putative conclusions. We conclude by showing how some types of problem and some problem contents make the existence of alternative models more obvious than others. (shrink)

Examines the theories of Plato, Rousseau, Mary Wollstonecraft, Catherine Beecher, and Charlotte Perkins Gilman concerning the education of women.

It is typically thought that some epistemic states are valuable—knowing, truly or accurately believing, understanding. These are states it’s thought good to be in and it’s also said that we aim or want to be in them. It is then sometimes claimed that these sorts of thoughts about epistemic goods or values ground or explain our epistemic norms. For instance, we think subjects should follow their evidence when they form their beliefs. But why should they? Why not believe against the (...) evidence or ignore it completely in deciding what to believe? Here’s a compelling sort of answer: because epistemic subjects are or ought to be trying to know more and following their evidence is a means to that end or to fulfilling that obligation. In this paper I argue that this compelling thought cannot be right. Subjects who are trying to know more will regularly fail to conform to some of our most familiar epistemic norms. (shrink)

The abortion debate rages on. Yet the two most popular positions seem to be clearly mistaken. Conservatives maintain that a human life begins at conception and that therefore abortion must be wrong because it is murder. But not all killings of humans are murders. Most notably, self defense may justify even the killing of an innocent person.Liberals, on the other hand, are just as mistaken in their argument that since a fetus does not become a person until birth, a woman (...) may do whatever she pleases in and to her own body. First, you cannot do as you please with your own body if it affects other people adversely. Second, if a fetus is not a person, that does not imply that you can do to it anything you wish. Animals, for example, are not persons, yet to kill or torture them for no reason at all is wrong. (shrink)

A high profile context in which physics and biology meet today is in the new field of systems biology. Systems biology is a fascinating subject for sociological investigation because the demands of interdisciplinary collaboration have brought epistemological issues and debates front and centre in discussions amongst systems biologists in conference settings, in publications, and in laboratory coffee rooms. One could argue that systems biologists are conducting their own philosophy of science. This paper explores the epistemic aspirations of the field by (...) drawing on interviews with scientists working in systems biology, attendance at systems biology conferences and workshops, and visits to systems biology laboratories. It examines the discourses of systems biologists, looking at how they position their work in relation to previous types of biological inquiry, particularly molecular biology. For example, they raise the issue of reductionism to distinguish systems biology from molecular biology. This comparison with molecular biology leads to discussions about the goals and aspirations of systems biology, including epistemic commitments to quantification, rigor and predictability. Some systems biologists aspire to make biology more similar to physics and engineering by making living systems calculable, modelable and ultimately predictable—a research programme that is perhaps taken to its most extreme form in systems biology’s sister discipline: synthetic biology. Other systems biologists, however, do not think that the standards of the physical sciences are the standards by which we should measure the achievements of systems biology, and doubt whether such standards will ever be applicable to ‘dirty, unruly living systems’. This paper explores these epistemic tensions and reflects on their sociological dimensions and their consequences for future work in the life sciences. (shrink)

The author of The Death and Life of Great American Cities looks at business fraud and criminal enterprise, overextended government farm subsidies and zealous transit police, to show what happens when the moral systems of commerce collide with those of politics.

Emerging infectious diseases (EIDs) remain a significant and dynamic threat to the health of individuals and the well-being of communities across the globe. Over the last decade, in response to these threats, increasing scientific consensus has mobilised in support of a One Health (OH) approach so that OH is now widely regarded as the most effective way of addressing EID outbreaks and risks. Given the scientific focus on OH, there is growing interest in the philosophical and ethical dimensions of this (...) approach, and a nascent OH literature is developing in the humanities. One of the key issues raised in this literature concerns ethical frameworks and whether OH merits the development of its very own ethical framework. In this paper, we argue that although the OH approach does not demand a new ethical framework (and that advocates of OH can coherently adhere to this approach while deploying existing ethical frameworks), an OH approach does furnish the theoretical resources to support a novel ethical framework, and there are benefits to developing one that may be lost in its absence. We begin by briefly explaining what an OH approach to the threats posed by EIDs entails before outlining two different ways of construing ethical frameworks. We then show that although on one account of ethical frameworks there is no need for OH to generate its own, there may be advantages for its advocates in doing so. (shrink)

The role of culture in shaping folk psychology and mindreading has been neglected in the philosophical literature. This paper shows that there are significant cultural differences in how psychological states are understood and used by drawing on Spaulding’s recent distinction between the ‘goals’ and ‘methods’ of mindreading to argue that the relations between these methods vary across cultures; and arguing that differences in folk psychology cannot be dismissed as irrelevant to the cognitive architecture that facilitates our understanding of psychological states. (...) The paper concludes that any good account of social cognition must have the conceptual resources to explain how culture affects our understanding of psychological states, and that this explanandum should not be an after-thought but instead a guiding feature for those accounts. (shrink)

The ArgumentThis paper argues that different epistemic styles exist in science, and that these make up an important unit of analysis for studying science. On occasion these different sets of commitments to ways of doing and knowing about the world may fall along national boundaries. The case presented here examines German and American embryology around 1900 and shows that differences in goals and approaches make up different epistemic styles.In particular, the Germans sought causal mechanical explanations of as many phenomena as (...) possible, guided by strong theories which achieved confirmation when they fit with as much of the available data as possible. The Americans, in contrast, sought definitive facts, as many as possible, which might be quite specific or narrowly based. These facts could lead to empirical generalizations which, in turn, could guide the generation of new knowledge in the form of new facts. Thus, the two epistemic styles emphasized different goals, processes of investigation, and standards of evidence. (shrink)

Recent work in the philosophy of biology argues that we must rethink the biological individual beyond the boundary of the species, given that a key part of our essential functioning is carried out by the bacteria in our intestines in a way that challenges any strictly genetic account of what is involved for the biological human. The gut is a kind of ambiguous other within our understanding of ourselves, particularly when we also consider the status of gastro-intestinal disorders. Hegel offers (...) us theoretical tools to describe and understand our relationship to our gut. His description of our selves as continually mediated through otherness is strikingly compatible with the kind of structure contemporary biology presents us with. His accounts of digestion and habit, contextualized by his logic, help point toward an understanding of selfhood as porous and yet still capable of being sufficiently unified for us to make sense of ourselves, one which allows us to acknowledge otherness within us while still having enough unity for agency. (shrink)

_Disputed Subjects_ analyzes some of the assumptions behind the contemporary attraction to rationalistic notions of justice and knowledge and discusses why modernity cannot be emancipatory. The effects of gender relations in constituting modern political ideas and theories of knowledge are explored, while at the same time the author identifies problematic aspects of discourses such as psychoanalysis, postmodernism and feminist theorizing. Flax pays special attention to recurrent difficulties concerning maternity, sexuality and race within feminist theorizing, and she addresses the inadequacies of (...) postmodernist accounts of subjectivity and gender. She analyzes psychoanalysis as a discursive formation to identify its particular organization of knowledge and power. (shrink)

We spend a lot of time thinking about other people: their motivations, what they are thinking, why they want particular things. Sometimes we are aware of it, but it often occurs without conscious thought, and we can respond appropriately to other people's thoughts in a diverse range of situations. The Social Mind: A Philosophical Introduction examines the cognitive capacities that facilitate this amazing ability. It explains and critiques key philosophical theories about how we think about other people's minds, measuring them (...) against empirical findings from neuroscience, anthropology, developmental psychology and cognitive ethology. Some of the fascinating questions addressed include: How do we think about other people's minds? Do we put ourselves in another's shoes to work out what they think? When do we need to think about another person's thoughts? What kinds of thoughts do we attribute to others? Are they propositional attitudes like beliefs and desires as analytic philosophers have often assumed, or could they be something else? What sorts of neural mechanisms underlie our ability to think about other people's thoughts? How is the ability to think about other minds different for individuals on the autism Spectrum? Is a preoccupation with other people's thoughts a Western phenomenon or is it found in all cultures? How do children learn to think about other minds? Can non-human animals think about other minds? These questions are applied to case studies throughout the book, including mirror neurons, recent research on infant social cognition, false belief tasks, and cross-cultural studies. Covering complex interdisciplinary debates in an accessible and clear way, with chapter summaries, annotated further reading, and a glossary, The Social Mind: A Philosophical Introduction is an ideal entry point into this fast-moving and exciting field. It is essential reading for students of philosophy of mind and psychology, and also of interest to those in related subjects such as cognitive science, social and developmental psychology, and anthropology. (shrink)

In 1936 Tarski sketched a rigorous definition of the concept of logical consequence which, he claimed, agreed quite well with common usage-or, as he also said, with the common concept of consequence. Commentators of Tarski's paper have usually been elusive as to what this common concept is. However, being clear on this issue is important to decide whether Tarski's definition failed (as Etchemendy has contended) or succeeded (as most commentators maintain). I argue that the common concept of consequence that Tarski (...) tried to characterize is not some general, all-purpose notion of consequence, but a rather precise one, namely the concept of consequence at play in axiomatics. I identify this concept and show that Tarski's definition is fully adequate to it. (shrink)

Background/purpose: Research from other disciplines demonstrates that ethical position, idealism, or relativism predicts ethical decision-making. Individuals from diverse cultures ascribe to various religious beliefs and studies have found that religiosity and culture affect ethical decision-making. Moreover, little literature exists regarding undergraduate nursing students’ ethical position; no studies have been conducted in the United States on students’ ethical position, their self-identified culture, and intrinsic religiosity despite an increase in the diversity of nursing students across the United States. Participants and Research Context (...) Objectives: The study’s two aims were to determine the relationship of self-identified culture, religiosity, and ethics position of undergraduate nursing student and whether students’ level of education and past ethics courses taken related to idealism. Two hundred and twelve volunteer undergraduate students participated. Research design: A descriptive cross-sectional study was designed for participants who completed the Ethical Position Questionnaire, The intrinsic subscale of the Religious Orientation Scale, and a Demographic, Cultural, Ethnicity Form. To test the five hypotheses, analyses included t-tests, correlations, and ANOVA. Ethical Considerations: The study was approved by the Institutional Review Board at Adelphi University. Results: Idealism and intrinsic religiosity were significantly related. Differences were observed for intrinsic religiosity and idealism for cultural identity and cultural dimensions such as parents’ place of birth, and if participants were US born. Students’ level of education or participation in past courses on ethics did not influence idealism. Conclusions: The study’s findings were similar to most of the research from other disciplines on culture, ethics position, and religiosity. Generic courses on ethics taken prior to clinical work may not assist nursing students in integrating principles into complex ethical dilemmas. Self-identified culture, religion, and intrinsic religiosity related to ethics position; completing ethics courses and level of education, juniors compared with seniors, did not influence idealism. Faculty should consider integrating students’ culture, religious orientation, and ethics position into teaching ethics for all levels of nursing education. (shrink)

There is an apparent tension between the open-ended aspect of the ordinal sequence and the assumption that the set-theoretical universe is fully determinate. This tension is already present in Cantor, who stressed the incompletable character of the transfinite number sequence in Grundlagen and avowed the definiteness of the totality of sets and numbers in subsequent philosophical publications and in correspondence. The tension is particularly discernible in his late distinction between sets and inconsistent multiplicities. I discuss Cantor’s contrasting views, and I (...) conclude that his account of that distinction is only tenable if the definiteness of the set-theoretical universe is rejected. (shrink)

Biobanks are proliferating rapidly worldwide because they are powerful tools and organisational structures for undertaking medical research. By linking samples to data on the health of individuals, it is anticipated that biobanks will be used to explore the relationship between genes, environment and lifestyle for many diseases, as well as the potential of individually-tailored drug treatments based on genetic predisposition. However, they also raise considerable challenges for existing legal frameworks and research governance structures. This book critically examines the current governance (...) structures in place for biobanks in England and Wales. It shows that the technologies, techniques and practices involved in biobanking do not always conform neatly to existing legal principles and frameworks that apply to other areas of medical research. Using a socio-legal approach, including interview data gathered from the scientific community, this book provides unique insights and makes recommendations about appropriate governance mechanisms for biobanking in the future. It also explores the issues around the secondary use of information, such as consent and how to protect privacy, when biobanks are accessed by a number of different third parties. These issues have relevance both within England and Wales and to a wide international audience, as well as for other areas where large datasets are used.--Back cover. (shrink)

: In response to allegations that China is a "shame culture," scholars of Confucian ethics have made use of new studies in psychology, anthropology, and philosophy that present shame in a more favorable light. These studies contend that shame involves internalization of social moral codes. By adapting these new internal models of shame, Confucian ethicists have attempted to rehabilitate the emphasis on shame in early Confucianism, but in doing so they have inadvertently highlighted the striking absence in early Confucian texts (...) of such prominent shame metaphors as being seen, particularly with genitals exposed. This essay analyzes these visual metaphors for shame, in contrast to contact metaphors, and considers the implications for Confucian ethics that they might be two different types of shame. (shrink)

While it is widely acknowledged that psychology is in the throes of a replication ‘crisis’, relatively little attention has been paid to the role theory plays in our evaluation of replications as ‘failed’ or ‘successful’. This paper applies well-known arguments in philosophy of science about the interplay between theory and experiment to a contemporary case study of infants’ understanding of false belief (Onishi and Baillargeon [2005]), and attempts to replicate it. It argues that the lack of consensus about over-arching theories (...) informing both the concepts under study and the methodologies used to track them means that researchers disagree over which experiments constitute replications of the original. The second part of the paper places this specific debate within a broader discussion of the replication crisis as a crisis of ‘theory’, developing work by Muthukrishna and Henrich ([2018]) and Bird ([2018]). Bird argues that the lack of agreed over-arching theories in psychology means that a high rate of replication failure is to be expected; this paper agrees with his diagnosis but challenges his proposal that more replication will resolve the problem. (shrink)

This paper offers one explanation for the institutional basis of food insecurity in Australia, and argues that while alternative food networks and the food sovereignty movement perform a valuable function in building forms of social solidarity between urban consumers and rural producers, they currently make only a minor contribution to Australia’s food and nutrition security. The paper begins by identifying two key drivers of food security: household incomes (on the demand side) and nutrition-sensitive, ‘fair food’ agriculture (on the supply side). (...) We focus on this second driver and argue that healthy populations require an agricultural sector that delivers dietary diversity via a fair and sustainable food system. In order to understand why nutrition-sensitive, fair food agriculture is not flourishing in Australia we introduce the development economics theory of urban bias. According to this theory, governments support capital intensive rather than labour intensive agriculture in order to deliver cheap food alongside the transfer of public revenues gained from rural agriculture to urban infrastructure, where the majority of the voting public resides. We chart the unfolding of the Urban Bias across the twentieth century and its consolidation through neo-liberal orthodoxy, and argue that agricultural policies do little to sustain, let alone revitalize, rural and regional Australia. We conclude that by observing food system dynamics through a re-spatialized lens, Urban Bias Theory is valuable in highlighting rural–urban socio-economic and political economy tensions, particularly regarding food system sustainability. It also sheds light on the cultural economy tensions for alternative food networks as they move beyond niche markets to simultaneously support urban food security and sustainable rural livelihoods. (shrink)

The use of genome-wide association studies in medical research and the increased ability to share data give a new twist to some of the perennial ethical issues associated with genomic research. GWAS create particular challenges because they produce fine, detailed, genotype information at high resolution, and the results of more focused studies can potentially be used to determine genetic variation for a wide range of conditions and traits. The information from a GWA scan is derived from DNA that is a (...) powerful personal identifier, and can provide information not just on the individual, but also on the individual's relatives, related groups, and populations. Furthermore, it creates large amounts of individual-specific digital information that is easy to share across international borders. This paper provides an overview of some of the key ethical issues around GWAS: consent, feedback of results, privacy, and the governance of research. Many of the questions that lie ahead of us in terms of the next generation sequencing methods will have been foreshadowed by GWAS and the debates around ethical and policy issues that these have created. (shrink)

This paper is based on case-study research in four English secondary schools. It explores the pressure placed on English and mathematics departments because of their results being reported in annual performance tables. It examines how English and maths departments enact policies of achievement, the additional power and extra resources the pressure to achieve brings and the possibility of resistance.

Often when a new scientific theory is introduced, new terms are introduced along with it. Some of these new terms might be given explicit definitions using only terms that were in currency prior to the introduction of the theory. Some of them might be defined using other new terms introduced with the theory. But it frequently happens that the standard formulations of a theory do not define some of the new terms at all; these terms are adopted as primitives. The (...) audience is expected to come to grasp the meanings of the primitive terms by learning the role they play in the theory and its applications. I shall call such new and undefined terms, as well as new terms that are defined using them, theoretical terms. [1] If T is a theory, the T-terms are the theoretical terms introduced by T. A theoretical term need not be a word new to human language; it might be an old term that is employed in a new and specialized sense, not equivalent to any of its familiar senses; e.g. “color” in quantum chromodynamics. (shrink)

Breath is invisible and yet ever present and vital for living beings. The concept of invisibility in relation to breath operates in concrete and metaphorical ways to extend ideas about breath and breathlessness across disciplines, in clinical spaces and in life experience. Using a critical medical humanities approach, I demonstrate that the poverty of narrative accounts and language for breath outside the health context have had a crucial influence enabling clinically mediated interpretations and accounts to dominate. These third-person accounts are (...) important in the articulation of the ‘lived body’, but I balance this with a consideration of the subjective sensation of interoception, which has important implications for the visibility of breathlessness in both clinical and lay contexts. This article illustrates the rich potential of the subjects of breath and breathlessness within body studies and this special issue is a key step in making breath such an emergent topic. (shrink)

There has been much attention devoted in recent years to the question of whether our moral principles can be related to our biological nature. This collection of new essays focuses on the connection between biology, in particular evolutionary biology, and foundational questions in ethics. The book asks such questions as whether humans are innately selfish, and whether there are particular facets of human nature that bear directly on social practices. The volume is organised historically beginning with Aristotle and covering such (...) major figures as Hume and Darwin down to the present and the work of Harvard sociobiologist, E. O. Wilson. This is the first book to offer this historical perspective on the relation of biology and ethics, and has been written by some of the leading figures in the history and philosophy of science, whose work stands very much at the cutting edge of these disciplines. (shrink)