This paper analyses the forgotten concept of “sperm-force” proposed by George Newport (1803–1854). Newport is known for his comprehensive microscopic examinations of sperm and egg interaction in amphibian fertilization between 1850 and 1854. My work with archival sources reveals that Newport believed fertilization was caused by sperm-force, which the Royal Society refused to publish. My reconstruction chronologically traces the philosophical and experimental origins of sperm-force to Newport’s 1830s entomological work. Sperm-force is a remnant of Newport’s speculations on the creation of (...) the active individual. I argue that sperm-force was rooted in British interpretations of German _Naturphilosophie_, which demonstrates Continental influences on mid-Victorian embryology, particularly the role of male generative power. This context provides further evidence that British versions of Romantic science fostered sophisticated experimental work. The refusal by Paleyite stalwarts of natural theology to publish Newport’s ideas illustrates the institutional resistance to German pantheistic and vitalistic influences. This reconstruction of sperm-force’s philosophical foundation and its reception offers new understandings of mid-Victorian attitudes toward the inheritance of mind and body. It situates Newport’s work within the nineteenth century’s scientific project to assign stereotypical genders to the gametes. (shrink)

As late as 1870 a Toronto professor, William Hincks, schooled pupils in a circular system of classification. Although his system was derived from Macleay's quinarianism of the 1820s, Hincks had altered it in several ways, influenced by botanical morphology. He persistently promoted it throughout the 1860s as an alternative to Darwinian evolution.

The central role of Health Care Analysis is to advance discourses between philosophy, health, and policy. Within that very wide-ranging agenda, perhaps the most complex challenges are in global health. In countries across the world, many, many populations are unable to enjoy conditions in which they can be healthy. The barriers to change are political, economic, social, regulatory, legal, and philosophical. Lawrence Gostin’s recent book on Global Health Law therefore marks a contribution of the highest importance, marrying practical and philosophical (...) agendas, and aiming at achieving global health with justice. -/- To progress the important work of Gostin’s book, the current journal issue draws together leading scholars in moral and political philosophy, economics, and law, with a shared interest in questions of global justice. In the first paper, Eric Friedman and Lawrence Gostin provide a clear overview of the practical and theoretical global health challenges and their response to these. Their analysis is followed by stimulating contributions from Norman Daniels, Jennifer Prah Ruger, Shawn Harmon, Attiya Waris and Laila Abdul Latif, Heather Widdows, and A.M. Viens, each engaging with questions raised by Global Health Law. The different papers underscore the significance of this area of inquiry, and the imperative to bring insights from scholarly work into global health practice. (shrink)

The rationality of concern for oneself has been taken for granted by the authors of western moral and political thought in a way in which the rationality of concern for others has not. While various authors have differed about the morality of self-concern, and about the extent to which such concern is rationally required, few have doubted that we have at least some special reasons to care for our selves, reasons that differ either in degree or in kind from those (...) we have to care for others. The rationality of prudence as traditionally conceived was thus taken to be threatened by Lockean accounts of personal identity. For taking a person’s identity through time to consist in psychological continuity is often thought to result in the numerical distinctness of his present and future selves, thus leaving his present self in the unsavoury position of having to ask, “Why care specially about my future self, if he won’t really be me?”. (shrink)

Upward mobility through the path of higher education has been an article of faith for generations of working-class, low-income, and immigrant college students. While we know this path usually entails financial sacrifices and hard work, very little attention has been paid to the deep personal compromises such students have to make as they enter worlds vastly different from their own. Measuring the true cost of higher education for those from disadvantaged backgrounds, Moving Up without Losing Your Way looks at the (...) ethical dilemmas of upward mobility—the broken ties with family and friends, the severed connections with former communities, and the loss of identity—faced by students as they strive to earn a successful place in society. -/- Drawing upon philosophy, social science, personal stories, and interviews, Jennifer Morton reframes the college experience, factoring in not just educational and career opportunities but also essential relationships with family, friends, and community. Finding that student strivers tend to give up the latter for the former, negating their sense of self, Morton seeks to reverse this course. She urges educators to empower students with a new narrative of upward mobility—one that honestly situates ethical costs in historical, social, and economic contexts and that allows students to make informed decisions for themselves. -/- A powerful work with practical implications, Moving Up without Losing Your Way paves a hopeful road so that students might achieve social mobility while retaining their best selves. (shrink)

Political corporate social responsibility (PCSR) calls for firms to implement and engage in deliberative democracy processes and structures, addressing governance gaps where governments are unwilling or unable to do so. However, an underlying assumption that the implementation of PCSR will enrich democratic processes in society has been exposed and challenged. In this conceptual article, we explore this challenge by developing a framework to reveal the dynamics of firms’ deliberative democratic processes and structures (meso level), and those at nation state (macro (...) level). Using existing cases as illustrative examples, we demonstrate that despite the public good premise of PCSR theory toward thickening the overall democracy in a society, corporate democratization at meso level can have the opposite effect and may actually erode macro-level democratic control of society and the economy. These findings imply a need for multilevel analysis in PCSR research and greater consideration of state-level public institutions and the responsibilities of business firms toward those institutions. Furthermore, we contribute to the PCSR literature by identifying the disruptive mechanisms associated with these dynamics and outline two alternative perspectives to allow firms to continue to take on political responsibilities. (shrink)

Professions have traditionally treated advocacy as a collective duty, best assigned to professional associations to perform. In North American nursing, advocacy for issues affecting identifiable patients is assigned instead to their nurses. We argue that nursing associations’ withdrawal from advocacy for patient care issues is detrimental to nurses and patients alike. Most nurses work in large institutions whose internal policies they cannot influence. When these create obstacles to good care, the inability of nurses to affect change can result in avoidable (...) distress for them and for their patients. We illustrate this point with a case study: the circumstances of the death of Michael Joseph LeBlanc, an inmate at Kingston Penitentiary Regional Hospital (Ontario). We conclude that patients and their nurses will suffer unnecessarily unless or until nursing associations cease to burden individual nurses with the responsibility for patient advocacy. (shrink)

It is commonly thought that moral rules and principles, such as ‘Keep your promises,’ ‘Respect autonomy,’ and ‘Distribute goods according to need ,’ should play an essential role in our moral deliberation. Particularists have challenged this view by arguing that principled guidance leads us to engage in worse decision making because principled guidance is too rigid and it leads individuals to neglect or distort relevant details. However, when we examine empirical literature on the use of rules and principles in other (...) domains, we find that people can learn to use rules discriminately and that rule-based models tend to outperform even expert judgment. I argue that this evidence poses a problem for the moral particularist. If the particularist claims that we should not rely on decision-making rules when making practical decisions and it turns out that these rules help us make better decisions, then the particularists’ prescriptive account is deficient. However, if the particularist claims that we should rely on practical decision-making rules but not on moral rules, she needs to explain how practical rules are different from moral rules and why we should rely on the former but not the latter. (shrink)

Three main themes emerge from this edited collection. First, there has been an increased incidence of intervention for humanitarian purposes since the end of the Cold War. In these cases, the alleged conflict between sovereignty and human rights has been addressed in one of two ways: through an evolution in the notion of sovereignty, from ‘sovereignty as authority’ to ‘sovereignty as responsibility’; and through an expanded definition of what constitutes a threat to international peace and security under Chapter VII of (...) the UN Charter. Second, despite this new climate of permissiveness, humanitarian intervention remains a controversial norm in international relations – largely because of continued opposition from certain members of international society, and concerns about its potentially negative consequences. Third, while the post Cold War period has seen some successful cases of intervention to address humanitarian catastrophes, the current capability of international organizations to undertake humanitarian interventions remains limited. Indeed, as the book demonstrates, the issue of humanitarian intervention has the potential to divide international institutions such as the UN and damage their credibility. (shrink)

Although gender differences in attitudes toward animal research have been reported in the literature for some time, exploration into the nature of these differences has received less attention. This article examines gender differences in responses to a survey of attitudes toward the use of animals in research. The survey was completed by college students and consisted of items intended to tap different issues related to the animal research debate. Results indicated that women were more likely than men to support tenets (...) of the animal protection movement. Likewise, women were more likely than men to favor increased restrictions on animal use and were more concerned than men about the suffering of research animals. Analysis of item contents suggested that women endorsed items reflecting a general caring for animals, were more willing than men to make personal sacrifices such as giving up meat and medical benefits in an effort to protect animals, and were more likely than men to question the use of animals in research on scientific grounds. Men, on the other hand, tended to emphasize the potential benefits arising from the use of animals in research. (shrink)

This volume argues that educational problems have their basis in an ideology of binary opposites often referred to as dualism, and that it is partly because mainstream schooling incorporates dualism that it is unable to facilitate the thinking skills, dispositions and understandings necessary for autonomy, democratic citizenship and leading a meaningful life. Bleazby proposes an approach to schooling termed social reconstruction learning, in which students engage in philosophical inquiries with members of their community in order to reconstruct real social problems, (...) arguing that this pedagogy can better facilitate independent thinking, imaginativeness, emotional intelligence, autonomy, and active citizenship. (shrink)

Mammals have an XX:XY system of chromosomal sex determination in which a small heterochromatic Y controls male development. The Y contains the testis determining factor SRY, as well as several genes important in spermatogenesis. Comparative studies show that the Y was once homologous with the X, but has been progressively degraded, and now consists largely of repeated sequences as well as degraded copies of X linked genes. The small original X and Y have been enlarged by cycles of autosomal addition (...) to one partner, recombination onto the other and continuing attrition of the compound Y. This addition–attrition hypothesis predicts that the pseudoautosomal region of the human X is merely the last relic of the latest addition. Genes (including SRY) on the conserved or added region of the Y evolved functions in male sex determination and differentiation distinct from the general functions of their X‐linked partners. Although the gonadogenesis pathway is highly conserved in vertebrates, its control has probably changed radically and rapidly in vertebrate – even mammalian – evolution. (shrink)

Returning to John P. Reeder's 1978 essay on “Religious Ethics as a Field and Discipline,” this essay explores debates surrounding the original intentions for the Journal of Religious Ethics (JRE) and for the field of religious ethics, as these have played out over the decades among an influential group of scholars involved with the JRE since its inception: Arthur Dyck, Ronald Green, Stanley Hauerwas, and Jeffrey Stout. While the JRE and its founding mission are in need of ongoing critique and (...) transformation, we might well still affirm the journal's ongoing importance as a site for the negotiation of a commons, the identification of possibilities for shared life, imagined beyond exclusion and domination. (shrink)

This book explores Hume's concern with the destructiveness of religious factions and his efforts to develop, in his moral philosophy, a solution to factional conflict. Sympathy and the related capacity to enter into foreign points of view are crucial to the neutralization of religious zeal and the naturalization of ethics. Jennifer Herdt suggests that Hume's preoccupation with religious faction is the key which reveals the unity of his varied philosophical, aesthetic, political and historical works.

Constitutivism locates the ground of practical normativity in features constitutive of rational agency and rests on the concept of a constitutive norm – a norm that is internal to a thing such that...

John Cooper and Pierre Hadot suggest that contemporary philosophy can no longer be regarded as a way of life as it has become an academic discipline of study that is theoretical and abstract. According to them, for philosophy to be considered a way of life, it has to be able to shape one’s understanding of the world, guide how one should respond from moment to moment, and reach an existential level in defining one’s being. In this article, I discuss how (...) Jean-Paul Sartre’s existentialist philosophy is a way of life that has been overlooked by Cooper and Hadot. I show that Sartre’s existentialism presents an interconnected perspective of human existence and human development in history, is able to guide our philosophical reasoning about our everyday decisions, and offers a practical guide to living an authentic life through assuming responsibility for our life choices and engaging with our situations. (shrink)

Person‐centred practice indubitably seems to be the antithesis of technology. The ostensible polarity of technology and person‐centred practice is an easy road to travel down and in their various forms has been probably travelled for decades if not centuries. By forging ahead or enduring these dualisms, we continue to approach and recede, but never encounter the elusive and the liminal space between technology and person‐centred practice. Inspired by Haraway's work, we argue that healthcare practitioners who critically consider their cyborg ontology (...) may begin the process to initiate and complicate the liminal and sought after space between technology and person‐centred practice. In this paper, we draw upon Haraway's idea that we are all materially and ontologically cyborgs. Cyborgs, the hybridity of machine and human, are part of our social reality and embedded in our everyday existence. By considering our cyborg ontology, we suggest that person‐centred practice can be actualized in the contextualized, embodied and relational spaces of technology. It is not a question of espousing technology or person‐centred practice. Such dualisms have been historically produced and reproduced over many decades and prevented us from recognizing our own cyborg ontology. Rather, it is salient that we take notice of our own cyborg ontology and how technological, habitual ways of being may prevent (and facilitate) us to recognize the embodied and contextualized experiences of patients. A disruption and engagement with the habitual can ensure we are not governed by technology in our logics and practices of care and can move us to a conscious and critical integration of person‐centred practice in the technologized care environments. By acknowledging ourselves as cyborgs, we can recapture and preserve our humanness as caregivers, as well as thrive as we proceed in our technological way of being. (shrink)

As Japan marks the 75th anniversary of World War II in 2020, Prime Minister Shinzo Abe did not offer a fresh apology and maintained that future generations should not have to keep apologizing for past mistakes. This paper uses the unresolved war issue of the military comfort women system as a context to discuss what it means for political apologies to be more than mere political gestures founded on political interests and discusses what it takes to facilitate forgiveness. It will (...) examine the features of a repentant wrongdoer who deserves forgiveness based on how one relates to one’s past wrongdoing in order to distinguish political apologies that are genuine from those that are mere gestures aimed at hasty reconciliation. This will be discussed through the works of Jacques Derrida and Vladimir Jankélévitch. Next, through Jankélévitch’s and Paul Ricoeur’s ideas of forgiveness, it will be discussed how matters of justice and forgiveness should be understood as well as how the history of past wrongs and injustice is necessary for a genuine apology and makes forgiveness possible. It is also a moral responsibility for both perpetrators and victims to remember history in order to achieve personal forgiveness as well as begin social and political reconciliation. (shrink)

Most Sartrean scholarship attributed Sartre’s ontology of hostile intersubjectivity to Hegel’s theory of recognition, and a Sartrean politics of violence to Hegel’s master-slave dyad. This article sets out to examine Sartre and Hegel in three areas of their work: first, a reassessment of Sartre’s ontology which was commonly thought to be founded on Hegel’s thymos; second, a reconsideration of Fukuyama’s conceptualisation of democracy as the end of Hegel’s historical progress and Sartre’s critique of democracy based on a humanist version of (...) Marxism as philosophy of our time; and finally, a re-evaluation of the conceptualisation of freedom through Hegel’s universal will and Sartre’s principle of universal fraternity. (shrink)

In this paper, we will examine the role that intuitions and responses to thought experiments play in confirming or disconfirming theories of reference, using insights from both debates as our starting point. Our view is that experimental evidence of the type elicited by MMNS does play a central role in the construction of theories of reference. This, however, is not because such theory construction is accurately characterized by "the method of cases." First, experimental philosophy does not directly collect data about (...) intuitions, but rather about peoples responses to thought experiments, which may reflect their intuitions but may well not. Second, unusually in the case of the theory of reference, experimental prompts involve elicitation of the phenomenon under investigation—that is, referring—and it is the reference facts rather than the intuitions that a theory of reference should capture. Finally, "best fit" models like the method of cases are inconsistent with the actual practice of semantic theorists, who appeal to general principles of theory construction as well as considerations native to the theory of reference, often in the service of rejecting intuitions. Indeed, Kripke himself viewed several claims of his theory as unintuitive, but felt no pressure to alter them on that account. These facts, we'll argue, suggest that the relevance of experimental methods in the theory of reference cannot be straightforwardly extended to other fields: an experimental prompt containing Newtons two rocks tied together in empty space may elicit referring, and may also elicit intuitions, but it doesn't also elicit the phenomenon under investigation. Furthermore, the considerations native to the theory of reference are not part of physics, which has its own distinct set of principles and considerations. This suggests that an evaluation of the centrality of intuitions/ responses to thought experiments in philosophical methodology must proceed in a piecemeal fashion. We conclude that the potential contributions of experimental philosophy will take different forms in different sub-fields of philosophical inquiry. (shrink)

In the closing years of the eighteenth century, a great intellectual and moral challenge to European empire was launched by many of the most innovative thinkers of the day, including Kant, Adam Smith, Bentham, Burke, Diderot, and Condorcet. They drew on a strikingly wide range of ideas to argue against empire: among others, the rights of man and the imperative of popular self‐determination, the economic wisdom of free trade and foolishness of conquest, the corruption of natural man by a degenerate (...) civilization, the hypocrisy required for self‐governing republics to rule despotically over powerless subjects, and the impossibility of sustaining freedom at home while practicing despotism abroad. (shrink)

One of the persistent features of historical writing about the sciences in the last twenty years has been the concern of a number of historians who insist on the need for a new awareness of the role of visual images and image making. The author believes that, rather than reducing the analysis of visual culture to a single set of principles, the point of the academic study of scientific images is the recognition of their heterogeneity, the different circumstances of their (...) production, and the variety of cultural and social functions they serve. This essay challenges historians to discover new ways of framing the historical meanings of scientific images within the larger contexts of signifying symbols, images, and mediations that make up culture. The study of nineteenth‐century practices of building collections of scientific photographs provides the background for a discussion of the significance of picture archives in the history of science, of the historical mechanisms that frame some pictures as “scientific” and others as “unscientific,” and of the need for further research on how scientific images generate meaning. (shrink)

If it's not good for something, then it's good for nothing. The Director of the Centre for Business and Professional Ethics at the University of Leeds continues her examination of basic terms frequently used in business ethics.

We can assent to a proposition, build a theory around it, base our actions on it, and affirm its truth—without ever taking it to heart. This frequently happens, for example, to recipients of bad news who figure out what is entailed by the news, make appropriate plans, and pass the news on to others—all without really "taking it in." It happens to those who accept a scientific claim without abandoning their more private views of how things work, and it happens (...) to members of a jury who confidently arrive at a verdict of "guilty" yet remain, on some deeper level, unconvinced. Conversely, people may dismiss their prejudices as mere prejudices while continuing to hold onto them, and a friend may acknowledge a remark to be innocuous yet be offended. Such phenomena are widespread, diverse, and philosophically intriguing. They are not simply cases of weak versus strong belief, or belief that something has a low probability versus a high probability ; nor are they cases of accepting on authority what we only partially understand. Rather, in each case, there is certain lack of depth to one's beliefs. (shrink)

Context plays a crucial role in our propositional attitude reporting practices. A belief-reporting sentence which seems true in one context may seem false in another, as Kripke showed us in ‘A Puzzle About Belief.’ To put it a bit sloppily, may seem true when we are discussing Peter's beliefs regarding Paderewski-the-pianist and false when we are discussing his beliefs regarding Paderewski-the-statesman. Peter believes that Paderewski is a fine musician.A number of recent theorists have taken this contextual variation very seriously, and (...) attempted to provide accounts which accommodate it in one way or another. Salmon and Soames accommodate the variation in pragmatics, arguing that our intuitions about attitude reporting often result from mistaking pragmatic implicatures for semantic content. Other theorists have offered semantic accounts which yield contextually varying truth conditions for belief reporting sentences. I have a great deal of sympathy for the project: I think the contextually varying intuitions do exist, and that they need to be accommodated, in one way or another. I am not so sure, however, that this can be done. (shrink)

Consecutive measurements performed on the same quantum system can reveal fundamental insights into quantum theory’s causal structure, and probe different aspects of the quantum measurement problem. According to the Copenhagen interpretation, measurements affect the quantum system in such a way that the quantum superposition collapses after each measurement, erasing any memory of the prior state. We show here that counter to this view, un-amplified measurements have coherent ancilla density matrices that encode the memory of the entire set of quantum measurements (...) that came before, and that the chain of this entire set is therefore non-Markovian. In contrast, sequences of amplified measurements are equivalent to a quantum Markov chain. We argue that the non-Markovian nature of quantum measurement has empirical consequences that are incompatible with the assumption of wave function collapse, thus elevating the collapse assumption into a testable hypothesis. Finally, we find that all of the information necessary to reconstruct an arbitrary non-Markovian quantum chain of measurements is encoded on the boundary of that chain, reminiscent of the holographic principle. (shrink)

This book offers an intelligent and thought-provoking analysis of the genealogy of Western capitalist 'development'. Jennifer Beard departs from the common position that development and underdevelopment are conceptual outcomes of the Imperialist Era and positions the genealogy of development within early Christian writings in which the western theological concepts of sin, salvation, and redemption are expounded. In doing so, she links the early Christian writings of theologians such as Augustine and , Anselm and Abelard to the processes of modern (...) identity formation of which the West, the First World, the Rule of Law and the individual subject and his or her freedoms are but a part. The concept of development is thus identified within western culture as a symptom of loss within the desire for completion; as the logic behind the economic restructuring of nations as underdeveloped is revealed as that ruthless imaginary by which First World nations maintain their ideal of themselves. Drawing upon anthropology, economics, historiography, philosophy of science, theology, feminism, cultural studies and development studies, this book contains the best of interdisciplinary work in international law. (shrink)

Economists often consult multiple models in order to combat model uncertainty in the face of misspecification. By examining modeling practices at the Bank of England, this paper identifies an important, but underappreciated modeling procedure. Sometimes an idealized model is manipulated to reproduce the results from another distinct auxiliary model, ones which it could not produce on its own. However, this procedure does not involve making the original model “more realistic,” insofar as this means adding in additional causal factors. This suggests (...) that there are ways to make models more representationally adequate that do not involve de-idealization in the straightforward sense. (shrink)

Modal primitivism is the view that there are modal features of the world which cannot be reduced to the non-modal. Theories which embrace primitive modality are often rejected for reasons of ideological simplicity: the fewer primitive notions a theory invokes, the better. Furthermore, modal primitivism is often associated with the view that all modal features of the world are irreducibly modal, which appears unsystematic and unexplanatory. As a result, many prefer modal reductionism. This work is an articulation and defense of (...) a modal primitivist theory of modality which requires minimal ideology and is systematic and explanatory. On this version of modal primitivism, only some modal features of the world are irreducibly modal—namely, incompatibilities between certain properties or relations. Other modal features of the world are reducible to a combination of primitive incompatibilities and the non-modal features of the world. In chapter 1, I introduce various issues in the metaphysics of modality, giving appropriate background for what follows. My modal primitivist theory of modality is introduced in chapters 2 and 3. In chapter 2, I argue that a well-known modal reductionist theory of modality is not as ideologically innocent as it’s thought to be: modal primitivism has the upper hand with respect to primitive notions. I then introduce the primitive notion of incompatibility and show how this notion can be used to account for de dicto modality, which concerns purely qualitative modal claims. In chapter 3, I present a theory of de re modality, that which concerns modal claims involving particular individuals. Since on this theory the de re is reducible to the de dicto, it requires no more primitive modality than that which appears at the level of the de dicto. I end in chapter 4 by arguing against a rival modal primitivist theory, showing that the primitive notion that it countenances, dispositionality, cannot account for all modal claims. (shrink)

The so-called "problem of religious language" is a philosophical problem generated by some of the doctrines of classical theism. For example, if one conceives of God as infinite, then it would seem that words used to describe finite creatures might not adequately describe him. The ambiguity in meaning with respect to the divine names is the "problem of religious language" or the "problem of naming God." ;There are three possible solutions to the problem of naming God: the equivocal approach, the (...) analogical approach, and the univocal approach. The equivocal view argues that words used with respect to God have a different meaning than the same words used with respect to creatures. After outlining Maimonides' view of equivocity, I argue that his approach limits speech about God to divine actions and negations. Given the richness of the monotheistic traditions and their assumption that truths about God can be communicated about God beyond the divine actions, this position seems unlikely. ;The univocal view argues that words used with respect to God are used in the same sense as when they are applied to creatures. After outlining William Alston's view of univocity, I argue that Alston's approach is to be rejected because it cannot accommodate the differences between God and human beings with respect to perfection. Alston's commitment to the functional interpretation of mental concepts permits him to predicate terms of God and of human beings that he alleges to be "partially univocal." I argue that on the basis of functionalism, only complete univocity could exist between God and human beings and that Alston, himself, rejects complete univocity between God and human beings on the basis of divine perfection. ;The analogical view argues that words used with respect to God signify the same thing as words used with respect to creatures, but in a different mode. I argue that the analogical approach of Thomas Aquinas provides the best means of naming God within the context of classical theism and that it does not fall prey to those problems faced by the equivocal and the univocal views. (shrink)

This chapter covers the development of Dewey's philosophy through 1890.