The long tradition of pessimism in philosophy and poetry notoriously laments suffering caused by vulnerabilities of the human body. The most familiar and contemporary version is antinatalism, the view that it is wrong to bring sentient life into existence because birth inevitably produces suffering. Technotopianism, which stems from a similarly negative view of embodied limitations, claims that we should escape sickness and death through radical human-enhancement technologies. In Embodiment and the Meaning of Life Jeff Noonan presents pessimism and technotopianism (...) as two sides of the same coin, as both begin from the premise that the limitations of embodied life are inherently negative. He argues that rather than rendering life pointless, the tragic failures that mark life are fundamental to the good of human existence. The necessary limitations of embodied being are challenges for each person to live well, not only for their own sake, but for the sake of the future of the human project. Meaning is not a given, Noonan suggests, but rather the product of labour upon ourselves, others, and the world. Meaningful labour is threatened equally by unjust social systems and runaway technological development that aims to replace human action, rather than liberate it. Calling on us to draw conceptual connections between finitude, embodiment, and the meaning of life, this book shows that seeking the common good is our most viable and materially realistic source of optimism about the future. (shrink)

Current patterns of global economic activity are not only unsustainable, but unethical - this claim is central to Materialist Ethics and Life-Value. Grounding the definition of ethical value in the natural and social requirements of life-support and life-development shared by all human beings, Jeff Noonan provides a new way of understanding the universal conception of "the good life." Noonan argues that the true crisis affecting the world today is not sluggish rates of economic growth but the model of measuring (...) economic and social health in terms of money-value. In response, he develops an alternative understanding of good societies where the breadth and depth of life-activity and enjoyment are dependent on dominant institutions. The more social institutions satisfy the necessary requirements of human life, the more they empower each person to develop and enjoy the capacities that make human life valuable and meaningful. A well-reasoned synthesis of traditional philosophical concerns and contemporary critiques of global capitalism, this book is a forward-looking treatise that defends political struggle and reconsiders what is most important for a happy life. (shrink)

John Dewey's Experience and Education is an important book, but first-time readers of Dewey's philosophy can find it challenging and not meaningfully related to the contemporary landscape of education. Jeff Frank's Teaching in the Now aims to reanimate Dewey's text--for first-time readers and anyone who teaches the text or is interested in appreciating Dewey's continuing significance--by focusing on Dewey's thinking on preparation. Frank, through close readings of Dewey, asks readers to wonder: How much of what we justify as preparation (...) in education is actually necessary? That is, every time we catch ourselves telling a student--you need to learn this in order to do something else--we need to stop and reflect. We need to reflect, because when we always justify the present moment of a student's education in terms of what will happen in the future, we may lose out on the ability to engage students' attention and interest now, when it matters. Dewey asks his readers to trust that the best way to prepare students for an engaging and productive future is to create the most engaging and productive present experience for students. We learn to live fully in the future, only by practicing living fully in the present. Although it can feel scary to stop thinking of the work of education in terms of preparation, when educators reclaim the present for students, new opportunities--for teachers, students, schools, democracy, and education--emerge. Teaching in the Now explores these opportunities in impassioned and engaging prose that makes Experience and Education come alive for readers new to Dewey or who have taught and read him for many years. (shrink)

The study of expertise is difficult to do in a laboratory environment due to the challenge of finding people at different skill levels and the lack of time for participants to acquire mastery. In this paper, we report on two studies that analyze naturalistic gameplay data using cohort analysis to better understand how skill relates to practice and habit. Two cohorts are analyzed, each from two different games. Our work follows skill progression through 7 months of Halo matches for a (...) holistic perspective, but also explores low-level in-game habits when controlling game units in StarCraft 2. Players who played moderately frequently without long breaks were able to gain skill the most efficiently. What set the highest performers apart was their ability to gain skill more rapidly and without dips compared to other players. At the beginning of matches, top players habitually warmed up by selecting and re-selecting groups of units repeatedly in a meaningless cycle. They exhibited unique routines during their play that aided them when under pressure. (shrink)

Four experiments examined how accurately participants can report the times of their own decisions. Within an auditory reaction time task, participants reported the time at which the tone was presented, they decided on the response, or the response key was pressed. Decision time reports were checked for plausibility against the actual RTs, and we compared the effects of experimental manipulations on these two measures to see whether the reported decision times showed appropriate effects. In addition, we estimated the amount of (...) error associated with individual decision time reports by checking how often participants’ decision time reports were implausibly early or late , and by using several quantitative models. Overall, the results suggest that decision time reports are not very accurate but they may be usable for some purposes. (shrink)

Global Cumulative Treatment Analysis is a novel clinical research model combining expert knowledge, and treatment coordination based upon global information-gain, to treat every patient optimally while efficiently searching the vast space that is the realm of cancer research.

The article argues that historical materialism is not only a theory of historical change but more generally a mediation between the natural foundations of human life and its meaningful symbolic expressions. The article begins with an interpretation of the general philosophical significance of the basic premises of historical materialism as they are sketched in the German Ideology. I argue that these premises point us in two different directions: down, towards a scientific understanding of the natural world, and up, towards interpretations (...) of meaningful human expressions. Reductionist scientific models are appropriate for the understanding of natural forces, but these reveal their own limitations when applied to social life. Social life cannot be understood outside its symbolic expressions, but these are not free floating ideal abstractions, but remain connected to fundamental human purposes and must be understood as such. (shrink)

In this paper I show that two arguments for the inconsistency of skeptical theism fail. After setting up the debate in Introduction section, I show in The initial debate section why Mylan Engel’s argument (Engel 2004) against skeptical theism does not succeed. In COST section I strengthen the argument so that it both avoids my reply to Engel and parallels Jon Laraudogoitia’s argument against skeptical theism (Laraudogoitia 2000). In COST* section, I provide three replies—one by an evidentialist theist, one by (...) a closure-denying theist, and one by a necessitarian theist, and argue that the necessitarian’s reply successfully rebuts the inconsistency charge. I conclude that skeptical theism which accepts God’s necessary existence is immune to both kinds of arguments for its inconsistency. (shrink)

This narrative ethics exploration stems from my happy prostate-specific antigen (PSA) story, though it should not have been, as I annually refuse my family physician’s recommendation to purchase PSA screening. The reason for my refusal is I teach ethics to medical students and of course must walk the talk, and PSA screening is not publicly funded in the province of Ontario, Canada. In addition, I might have taken false comfort in ‘but all you need is a good index finger’ to (...) detect prostate cancer, expounded by a senior physician at a national medical conference in 2010, and applauded by the large audience of physicians. I was compelled to begin this exploration out of survivor guilt, although I will not be a survivor for long, and as a mea culpa to the men similarly situated to me in having late diagnosis of prostate cancer, aggressive tumours and multiple metastases, but who unlike me are dead because they did not experience the physician–educator-based exceptionisms and coincidences that permit me to still be alive. Although my PSA story will always be a happy story, even when my life ends in a few years, the initiation of public funding of PSA screening for all men over 50 would make my PSA story an even happier story. (shrink)

In the original publication the title reads “The Right to Know and the Right Not to Know Revisited: Part One”. The paper consisted of both Part One and Part Two hence the title has to be corrected.

Science is a form of distributed analysis involving both individual work that produces new knowledge and collaborative work to exchange information with the larger community. There are many particular ways in which individual and community can interact in science, and it is difficult to assess how efficient these are, and what the best way might be to support them. This paper reports on a series of experiments in this area and a prototype implementation using a research platform called CACHE. CACHE (...) both supports experimentation with different structures of interaction between individual and community cognition and serves as a prototype for computational support for those structures. We particularly focus on CACHE‐BC, the Bayes community version of CACHE, within which the community can break up analytical tasks into “mind‐sized” units and use provenance tracking to keep track of the relationship between these units. (shrink)

Weight of evidence continues to be a powerful metaphor within formal approaches to epistemology. But attempts to construe the metaphor in precise and useful ways have encountered formidable obstacles. This paper shows that two quite different understandings of evidential weight can be traced back to one 1878 article by C.S. Peirce. One conception, often associated with I.J. Good, measures the balance or net weight of evidence, while the other, generally associated with J.M. Keynes, measures the gross weight of evidence. Conflations (...) of these two notions have contributed to misunderstandings in the literature on weight. This paper shows why Peirce developed each conception of weight, why he distinguished them, and why they are easily mistaken for one another. (shrink)

While Roman Ingarden remains best known among English‐speaking philosophers and literary theorists for his work in aesthetics, and primarily for his study of the literary work of art, his studies in aesthetics and art belong in fact to the comprehensive program of phenomenological research in ontology and metaphysics that occupied him for his entire career. In this article I briefly describe this program of phenomenological research, then I discuss some of the major features of Ingarden’s analyses of works of art (...) and the aesthetic experience. (shrink)

Journal of Social Philosophy, EarlyView.

Resolves the fundamental debate between cognitivists and social constructionists concerning the metaphysics of human psychology, and offers new insights into therapy, education, and creativity.

This innovative book proposes that what we think of as “moral conscience” is essentially the exercise of reflective judgment on the goods and ends arising in interpersonal relations, and that such judgment constitutes a form of taste. Through an historical survey Mitchell shows that the constant pendant to taste was an educational and cultural ideal, namely, that of the gentleman, whether he was an ancient Greek citizen-soldier, Roman magistrate, Confucian scholar-bureaucrat, Renaissance courtier, or Victorian grandee. Mitchell argues that it was (...) neither an ethical doctrine nor methodology that provided the high cultures with moral and political leadership, but rather an elite social order. While the gentry in the traditional sense no longer exists, it nevertheless made significant historical contributions, and insofar as we are concerned to understand the present state of human affairs, we need to grasp the nature and import of said contributions. (shrink)

Despite its prominence in Peirce’s best-known works, the notion of fixed, stable, or settled belief (I will follow Peirce in using these terms more or less interchangeably) has received relatively little explicit attention. Need a belief be permanently stable in order to count as fixed? Or, to take the other extreme, does a belief count as fixed as long as it is currently stable? More fundamentally, what is involved in predicating stability of a belief? Talk of stability suggests a disposition (...) to resist being undermined, and so the question arises of how resistant to what sorts of undermining influences a belief needs to be in order to count as fixed in Peirce’s sense. Does Peirce, especially in “The Fixation of.. (shrink)

In the ever-expanding field of nuclear history, studies of ‘nuclear culture’ are becoming increasingly popular. Often situated within national contexts, they typically explore responses to the nuclear condition in the cultural modes of literature, art, music, theatre, film and other media, as well as nuclear imagery more generally. This paper offers a critique of current conceptions of ‘nuclear culture’, and argues that the term has little analytical coherence. It suggests that historians of ‘nuclear culture’ have tended to essentialize the nuclear (...) to the detriment of historical analysis, and that the wide variety of methodological approaches to ‘nuclear culture’ are simultaneously a strength and a more significant weakness, in that they have little shared sense of the meaning of the term, its theoretical underpinnings or its analytical purchase. The paper then offers a study of Ewan MacColl's 1946 playUranium 235, whose career reveals much about the diversity of cultures of the nuclear in post-war Britain. The study moves us away from a single, homogeneous ‘British nuclear culture’ towards a pluralistic critical history of cultural responses to nuclearization. These responses, I conclude, should be seen as collectively constitutive of the nuclear condition rather than as passive reflections of it. (shrink)

Next SectionCharlie Pelling presents an impropriety paradox for the truth account of assertion. After solving his paradox I show that it is a version of the liar paradox. I then show that for any account of truth there is a strengthened liar-like paradox, and that for any solution to the strengthened liar paradox, there is a parallel solution to each of these “new” paradoxes.

While Ingarden makes only infrequent reference to Aristotle, The Philosopher’s presence can be discerned throughout his published works. Perhaps mostsignificantly, when Ingarden returned to work on Controversy over the Existence of the World in 1938, he immersed himself in the study of Aristotle’s Metaphysics, and the entire framework of Controversy appears to have been inspired by reflection on central Aristotelian concepts. Ingarden’s understanding of the Aristotelian conception of the relation between form and matter, and indeed the Aristotelian character of Ingarden’s (...) ontology as a whole, stands in sharp contrast not only to Husserl’s transcendental idealism, but also to the materialist orientation of current mainstream research in cognitive science. It is hoped that this brief examination might serve to introduce to this research a realist phenomenological orientation that is capable of embracing and elucidating insights from both materialist and idealist approaches to the study of cognition. (shrink)

Volume 29, Issue 7-8, November - December 2024.

With the cure rate for many pediatric malignancies now between 70% and 90%, infertility becomes an increasingly important issue. Strategies for preserving fertility in girls and adolescent women occur in two distinct phases. The first phase includes oophorectomy and cryopreservation of ovarian cortex slices or individual oocytes; ultrasound-guided needle aspiration of oocytes, with or without in vitro maturation, followed by cryopreservation; and ovarian autografting to a distant site. The second phase occurs if the woman chooses to pursue pregnancy, and includes (...) IVM of the oocytes, followed by in vitro fertilization and transfer of any created embryos to the woman's uterus. For ovarian autografting, the woman would undergo menotropin ovarian stimulation and retrieval of matured oocytes. The ethical challenges with each of these phases are many of fertility preservation and include issues of informed choice. The lack of proven benefit with these strategies and the associated potential physical and psychological harms require careful attention to the key elements of informed choice, which include decisional capacity, disclosure, understanding and voluntariness, and to the benefits of in-depth counseling to promote free and informed choice at a time that is emotionally difficult for the decision makers. (shrink)

I apply the Zhuangzi 莊子 to assess the contemporary value of personal autonomy. Focusing on two concepts, wuwei 無為 and you 遊, I clarify the “wandering ideal” in the Zhuangzi to challenge the ideal of autonomy as central to a well-lived life. Drawing on Sneddon’s persuasive recent account of autonomy, the Inner Chapters of the Zhuangzi, as well as recent secondary scholarship on the text, I show that the wandering ideal suggests a stark move away from the controlled and self-reflective (...) life of the autonomous person. My goal is to draw on the Zhuangzi to contribute to dialogue on the ideal of autonomy, rather than to provide an innovative way of reading the Zhuangzi. I argue that both autonomy and wandering are higher-order ideals that can be applied to individual actions and to a person’s form of life, but at both levels, wandering and personal autonomy are in tension. The conclusion briefly reflects on the significance of the tension. (shrink)

In his Nobel Prize acceptance speech in 1987, the Russian-born American poet Joseph Brodsky argued that aesthetics is the mother of ethics. However, there is an ambiguity in his use of the term aesthetics. In the first part of this article, I distinguish between Brodsky’s narrow use of aesthetics, which refers to problems of beauty, and the broader sense, which refers to the cognitive function of sensibility and feeling. I then suggest that good sense can be made of the claim (...) about the origins of ethics only if we employ the broader sense of aesthetics. The second part draws on examples from Brodsky and the American poet Jorie Graham to illustrate the ways in which the feelings generated by human sensuous receptivity transform the world from a meaningless physical system into meaningful sets of life-valuable relationships. The third part sharpens this conclusion by considering the conditions under which the world can appear to be meaningless. In the final section I link Brodsky’s poetic responsiveness to the world to John McMurtry’s philosophical analysis of “the felt side of being.” Poetic evocation and philosophical argument are two approaches to the same problem which, when brought together, provide a comprehensive explanation of why aesthetics is the mother of ethics. (shrink)

The article features an analytic protocol for examining controversial criminal cases in critical thinking courses. The rubric has been designed to be useful to busy critical thinking teachers who wish to draw on student interest in true crime. Six guidelines are presented that are intended to provide the instructor with a convenient scheme for quickly and easily framing classroom discussions. Due to their generality, the guidelines can be readily applied to a wide-range of cases, giving educators a high degree of (...) flexibility in the selection of criminal affairs. (shrink)

This paper is a review essay of two collections of essays focused on the work of Alasdair MacIntyre. The review focuses on three core themes. First, it discusses those papers that explore the central role that the relationship between practices and institutions plays in MacIntyre’s critique of modernity. Second, it turns to those papers that examine the foundational role that human needs play in MacIntyre’s ethics. Third, it places in dialogue those papers that defend MacIntyre’s politics as a form of (...) ‘revolutionary Aristotelianism’ with those that contest the soundness of this categorization. (shrink)

This essay focuses on the purported duty—defended by Walter Benjamin but widely assumed in much political theory and practice—of the living to redeem the suffering of those who died as a consequence of oppression, exploitation, and political violence. I consider the cogency and ethical value of this duty from the perspective of a politics grounded in the equal life-value of human beings. For both metaphysical and ethical reasons I conclude that this duty does not obtain, first because the dead cannot (...) experience redemption, and secondly because it is politically counterproductive: it personalizes a pathological form of political resistance which may easily incite further violence and thus perpetuate human suffering and oppression. (shrink)

Volume 25, Issue 7-8, November - December 2020, Page 880-881.

Volume 24, Issue 3-4, May - June 2019, Page 437-445.

Volume 25, Issue 2, February - March 2020, Page 217-224.