Darwinism, Democracy, and Race examines the development and defence of an argument that arose at the boundary between anthropology and evolutionary biology in twentieth-century America. In its fully articulated form, this argument simultaneously discredited scientific racism and defended free human agency in Darwinian terms. The volume is timely because it gives readers a key to assessing contemporary debates about the biology of race. By working across disciplinary lines, the book's focal figures--the anthropologist Franz Boas, the cultural anthropologist Alfred Kroeber, the (...) geneticist Theodosius Dobzhansky, and the physical anthropologist Sherwood Washburn--found increasingly persuasive ways of cutting between genetic determinist and social constructionist views of race by grounding Boas's racially egalitarian, culturally relativistic, and democratically pluralistic ethic in a distinctive version of the genetic theory of natural selection. Collaborators in making and defending this argument included Ashley Montagu, Stephen Jay Gould, and Richard Lewontin. Darwinism, Democracy, and Race will appeal to advanced undergraduates, graduate students, and academics interested in subjects including Philosophy, Critical Race Theory, Sociology of Race, History of Biology and Anthropology, and Rhetoric of Science. (shrink)

A new axiomatization of set theory, to be called Bernays-Boolos set theory, is introduced. Its background logic is the plural logic of Boolos, and its only positive set-theoretic existence axiom is a reflection principle of Bernays. It is a very simple system of axioms sufficient to obtain the usual axioms of ZFC, plus some large cardinals, and to reduce every question of plural logic to a question of set theory.

While we are commonly told that the distinctive method of mathematics is rigorous proof, and that the special topic of mathematics is abstract structure, there has been no agreement among mathematicians, logicians, or philosophers as to just what either of these assertions means. John P. Burgess clarifies the nature of mathematical rigor and of mathematical structure, and above all of the relation between the two, taking into account some of the latest developments in mathematics, including the rise of experimental (...) mathematics on the one hand and computerized formal proofs on the other hand. Along the way, a great many historical developments in mathematics, philosophy, and logic are surveyed. Yet very little in the way of background knowledge on the part of the reader is presupposed. (shrink)

Critics of organ donation after circulatory death (DCD) argue that, even if donors are past the point of autoresuscitation, they have not satisfied the “irreversibility” requirement in the circulatory and respiratory criteria for determining death, since their circulation and respiration could be artificially restored. Thus, removing their vital organs violates the “dead-donor” rule. I defend DCD donation against this criticism. I argue that practical medical-ethical considerations, including respect for do-not-resuscitate orders, support interpreting “irreversibility” to mean permanent cessation of circulation and (...) respiration. Assuming a consciousness-related formulation of human death, I then argue that the loss of circulation and respiration is significant, because it leads to the permanent loss of consciousness and thus to the death of the human person. The DNR request by an organ donor should thus be interpreted to mean “do not restore to consciousness.” Finally, I respond to an objection that if “irreversibility” has a medical-ethical meaning, it would entail the absurd possibility that one of two individuals in the same physical state could be alive and the other dead—an implication that some think is inconsistent with understanding death as an objective biological state of the organism. I argue that advances in medical technology have created phenomena that challenge the assumption that human death can be understood in strictly biological terms. I argue that ethical and ontological considerations about our nature bear on the definition and determination of death and thus on the permissibility of DCD. (shrink)

This volume reprints a dozen of the author’s papers, most with substantial postscripts, and adds one new one. The bulk of the material is on topics in philosophy of language, but there are also two papers on philosophy of mathematics written after the appearance of the author’s collected papers on that subject, and one on epistemology. As to the substance of Field’s contributions, limitations of space preclude doing much more below than indicating the range of issues addressed, and the general (...) orientation taken towards them. As to the style of his writing, it well exhibits the first of the two virtues, clarity and conciseness, that one looks for in philosophical prose. (shrink)

How far does a researcher’s responsibility extend when an incidental finding is identified? Balancing pertinent ethical principles such as beneficence, respect for persons, and duty to rescue is not always straightforward, particularly in neuroimaging research where empirical data that might help guide decision making are lacking. We conducted a systematic survey of perceptions and preferences of 396 investigators, research participants, and Institutional Review Board members at our institution. Using the partial entrustment model as described by Richardson, we argue that our (...) data supports universal reading by a neuroradiologist of all research MRI scans for incidental findings and providing full disclosure to all participants. (shrink)

Cognitive Science, Volume 46, Issue 5, May 2022.

Medical necessity (claiming that a medical intervention or care is – at minimum – reasonable, appropriate and acceptable) depends on empirical evidence and on the interpretation of that evidence. Evidence and its interpretation define the standard of care. This commentary argues that both the evidence base and its interpretation are currently weak gatekeepers. Empirical meta-research suggests that very few medical interventions have high quality evidence in support of their effectiveness and very few of them also have relatively thorough assessments of (...) their potential harms. Therefore, evidence on the risk-benefit ratios carries almost always very large uncertainty. Arbitration about medical necessity is thus left to the interpretation process. Professional guidelines are notoriously unreliable and biased in this regard. Regulatory approval ends up being the key arbitrator, but over the years the regulatory process has been subverted. Regulatory approval currently does not mean that an intervention has a favourable risk-benefit ratio, but simply that it can be marketed, sold and made profit from. The process leads to a tragedy of commons where the final victim is society at large: medical necessity is invoked as an alibi for medicine to absorb societal resources. (shrink)

The most important distinctively American contribution to philosophy is the pragmatist tradition. In this short, lucid, and completely convincing exposition, Professor John P. Murphy begins by exploring the roots of this tradition as found in the work of Peirce, James, and Dewey, demonstrating its power and originality. Historians of philosophy will appreciate the insight Murphy brings to these figures, but the special value of this book lies in his discussion of how the pragmatist spirit has flowered in contemporary philosophy (...) in the work of Quine, Rorty, and Davidson.Throughout, Murphy emphasizes the logic and structure of the views held by these six philosophers and what it is they have in common that makes their work especially “pragmatist.” There is no better introduction to this historical tradition and perhaps no better way into the philosophies of the contemporaries whom Murphy discusses.Interest in pragmatist ideas is undergoing a revival at present, and this book shows us why. It will be of interest to both historians of philosophy and students of contemporary philosophy. (shrink)

Hintikka and Sandu have recently claimed that Frege's notion of function was substantially narrower than that prevailing in real analysis today. In the present note, their textual evidence for this claim is examined in the light of relevant historical and biographical background and judged insufficient.

This paper is the third of a multi-part examination of the Babylonian mathematical lunar theories known as Systems A and B. Part I (Britton, AHES 61:83–145, 2007) addressed the development of the empirical elements needed to separate the effects of lunar and solar anomaly on the intervals between syzygies, accomplished in the construction of the System A lunar theory early in the fourth century B.C. Part II (Britton, AHES 63:357–431, 2009) examines the accomplishment of this separation by the construction of (...) a successful theory depicting the variations due to lunar anomaly in System A and its subsequent adaptation in System B. The present paper examines the introduction of the uniform zodiac, necessary for any theory depicting variations depending on the position of syzygy. It addresses three questions: (1) In light of all available evidence, what is the magnitude of the constant term in the expression Δλ* = C − 1.3828°Y, describing the difference between the Babylonian sidereal longitudes and modern tropical longitudes? (2) What considerations governed the placement of the Babylonian sidereal zodiac relative to the fixed stars? (3) When was the uniform zodiac introduced? To the first question it finds C = 3.20° ± 0.1°, scarcely different from Huber’s (Centaurus 5:192–208, 1958) estimate of 3.08°, essentially confirming Huber’s result obtained from much less data. For the second it shows that accommodating the three asterisms comprising Taurus limited the placement of the zodiac to within 3°, while the prominence of half sign multiples among the measured intervals between prominent Normal Stars led irresistibly to the choice adopted. Finally, it finds that the zodiac was introduced between −408 and −397 and probably within a very few years of −400. (shrink)

Scientific authorship has become a contested terrain in contemporary science. Based on a survey of authors across fields, we measure the likelihood of specialist authors : people who only made specialized contributions, such as data, materials, or funding; and “nonauthor collaborators” : those who did significant work on the project but do not appear as authors, across different research contexts, including field, size of the project team, commercial orientation, impact of publication, and organization of the collaboration. We find that guest (...) and ghost authors are common, with about one-third of publications having at least one specialist author and over half having at least one nonauthor collaborator. We see significant cross-field variations in both overall rates and types of specialist authors and nonauthor collaborators. We find there are generally fewer specialist authors among highly cited papers and more graduate student nonauthor collaborators in single location projects. The results suggest authorship practices vary across fields, and by project characteristics, complicating the use of authorship lists as a basis for evaluation. We discuss implications of these findings for interpreting author lists in the context of science policy. (shrink)

The great logician Gottlob Frege attempted to provide a purely logical foundation for mathematics. His system collapsed when Bertrand Russell discovered a contradiction in it. Thereafter, mathematicians and logicians, beginning with Russell himself, turned in other directions to look for a framework for modern abstract mathematics. Over the past couple of decades, however, logicians and philosophers have discovered that much more is salvageable from the rubble of Frege's system than had previously been assumed. A variety of repaired systems have been (...) proposed, each a consistent theory permitting the development of a significant portion of mathematics. This book surveys the assortment of methods put forth for fixing Frege's system, in an attempt to determine just how much of mathematics can be reconstructed in each. John Burgess considers every proposed fix, each with its distinctive philosophical advantages and drawbacks. These systems range from those barely able to reconstruct the rudiments of arithmetic to those that go well beyond the generally accepted axioms of set theory into the speculative realm of large cardinals. For the most part, Burgess finds that attempts to fix Frege do less than advertised to revive his system. This book will be the benchmark against which future analyses of the revival of Frege will be measured. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:John P. Anton C. P. CAVAFY'S ARS POETICA ' It is generally recognized that Constantine P. Cavafy (1863-1933) was not born a poet but became one only through persistence and labor, reaching his "first step" sometime after the midpoint of his life. In his effort to assess the quality of his earlier poetic production and sharpen his sensitivity in facing self-criticism, he decided to put in writing his (...) personal thoughts on his work sometime in 1903. The text was written in English in a personal shorthand Cavafy had devised for his own use. It was found among the papers he left to A. Sengopoulos and published for the first time in 1963 by M. Peridis, who also supplied the suitable title Ars Poetica. It falls outside the scope of this essay to discuss the antecedents of this document. Taken as a whole, the text has all the clarity and directness required of a testament designed to serve as a personal guide and handbook. The problems it discusses are limited to the needs of the poet. In this regard, the Ars Poetica has neither the range of topics nor the theoretical scope of, for instance, Aristotle's Poetics. It is quite certain that the ideas that preoccupy Cavafy in the Ars Poetica had been on his mind for a period of years. However, the Ars Poetica is his first prose piece where he gives a systematic treatment to technical and critical issues directly related to the assessment of his work and his role as a poet. In order to project here a clear image of Cavafy's struggle to reach his technical maturity which came after 1910, we need first to discuss the persistent problems he faced during this crucial decade, then to examine the attitudes and values he embodied in certain representative early poems, and finally to relate them to the guiding principles he formulated in his self-addressed poetics of 1903. A number of interrelated problems confronted Cavafy in his late twenties and throughout his thirties. They emerged one by one, to 85 86Philosophy and Literature make more pressing the demand for a consistent solution and a complete recasting of his outlook. Coming to terms with them was extremely difficult. Aside from the emotional and sexual pressures he had to face alone, there was the absence of suitable ideas and conceptual tools to provide him with even the rudiments of an intellectual framework. Whatever he borrowed from Europe and England, or resurrected from his own Hellenic heritage, proved either beyond assimilation or insufficiently digested. The lingering issues fell roughly into four areas. (i) Despite his determination to devote his life to the writing of poetry, the quality of his work was discouraging. He knew this and as a result he often expressed uncertainty about his ability to proceed. Time and again he appeared suffering from a feeling of inadequacy, but nevertheless he sought to engage a reflective mood from which to draw encouragement and hope. (ii) On the theoretical side, he identified with the long tradition which assigned a coveted cultural role to the savant-poet as discloser of truth and spokesman for humanity; this despite the prevailing climate of opinion in his immediate environment which recognized no such high position in his case. Cavafy knew that his standing with the Greek community of Alexandria had gradually dwindled with the loss of family wealth and his lowly employment, and also that his expectations to be respected in his role as a poet and leader in communal affairs were futile. This denial of personal recognition in a society dominated by commerce and finance contributed to his mood of depression. The feeling of being an outcast, despite his associations with the upper social circles of Alexandria, became a constant irritant to his sense of pride. (iii) The course of culture, the destiny of human institutions and the workings of history, became puzzles as he tried to view them through the opaque glass of disillusionment. These were the grand themes actively discussed in the writings of leading European intellectuals, but to the young poet they had a different personal urgency. His vital concern in this connection was not understanding science... (shrink)

Dummett's case against platonism rests on arguments concerning the acquisition and manifestation of knowledge of meaning. Dummett's arguments are here criticized from a viewpoint less Davidsonian than Chomskian. Dummett's case against formalism is obscure because in its prescriptive considerations are not clearly separated from descriptive. Dummett's implicit value judgments are here made explicit and questioned. ?Combat Revisionism!? Chairman Mao.

In their target article, Nielsen Busch and Mjaaland seek to shift focus away from controversy over whether donors in protocols of controlled donation after circulatory death (cDCD) are dead. Citing...

This article considers the Undercover Surrealism exhibition curated at London’s Hayward Gallery (from May to July 2006) and reflects on the practices of documentation, archiving and exhibition when the topic of the exhibition, as in this case, is a journal that in its most radical intention was set up to critique the practices of exhibition and documentation. The short and controversial life of Georges Bataille’s Documents unfolds as an often deliberately confusing juxtaposition of images and articles. The exhibition aims to (...) represent both the sometimes incompatible interests of the journal’s collaborators and the public dispute between Bataille and Breton over the aims of Surrealism. The article explores the intentions, risks, and possible effects of the exhibition in the context of Bataille’s own philosophy and his own peculiar part in the publication of Documents, which in its time was a contemporary review of diverse cultural phenomena interspersed with subversive dictionary entries. The article thus raises the question of what happens to the subversive intentions of a project like Documents in the scholarly historicist environment of public exhibition space. (shrink)

Quine correctly argues that Carnap's distinction between internal and external questions rests on a distinction between analytic and synthetic, which Quine rejects. I argue that Quine needs something like Carnap's distinction to enable him to explain the obviousness of elementary mathematics, while at the same time continuing to maintain as he does that the ultimate ground for holding mathematics to be a body of truths lies in the contribution that mathematics makes to our overall scientific theory of the world. Quine's (...) arguments against the analytic/synthetic distinction, even if fully accepted, still leave room for a notion of pragmatic analyticity sufficient for the indicated purpose. (shrink)

This commentary challenges the conclusions reached by Franklin Miller and Robert Truog in their criticism of the President's Council's White Paper, "Controversies in the Determination of Death." I agree with much of Miller and Truog's criticism of the rationale offered by the President's Council for accepting neurological criteria for determining death but argue that they too quickly dismiss the alternative rationale of determining death by neurological criteria-i.e., the destruction of the psychophysical integrity of the human being that occurs when the (...) potential for consciousness and every other mental function is lost due to catastrophic injury to the brain. By focusing on the death of bodies instead of human beings, their view absurdly implies that decapitation would not necessarily result in one's death. Since total brain failure is a form of physiological decapitation, the neurological criterion coheres perfectly well with the ordinary understanding of decapitation as death. (shrink)

One approach to the problem of differentiating a religious from a non- religious ethic would be to formulate a definition of religion that would clearly distinguish between religious and nonreligious traditions; however, a broad definition of religion would include some moral traditions, such as Marxism, commonly thought to be forms of secular humanism. A second approach would argue that some moral beliefs are independent, both in content and justification, of religious convictions; such a set of moral beliefs could be described (...) as a secular version of natural law. This approach would be rejected by those who argue that religious convictions go "all the way down." While the first can be debated by appealing to the heuristic value of various definitions of religion, the second involves familiar issues of moral epistemology. The author explores the consequences of holding a broad definition of religion and an "all the way down" epistemology. (shrink)

Used as the basis of the program at the Equinox Holistic Alternative School in Toronto, The Holistic Curriculum advocates for an integrative approach to teaching and learning with a focus on developing a deep connection between mind and body.

That the result of flipping quantifiers and negating what comes after, applied to branching-quantifier sentences, is not equivalent to the negation of the original has been known for as long as such sentences have been studied. It is here pointed out that this syntactic operation fails in the strongest possible sense to correspond to any operation on classes of models.

This essay reevaluates the Weimar writings of Carl Schmitt and Leo Strauss, specifically, their intellectual efforts to replace the political authority of Kantian liberalism with, respectively, a ‘political theology’ and ‘Biblical atheism’ derived from the thought of early-modern state theorists like Hobbes and Spinoza. Schmitt and Strauss each insisted that post-Kantian Enlightenment rationality was unraveling into a way of thinking that violently rejected ‘form’ of any kind, fixated myopically on material things and lacked any conception of the external constraints that (...) invariably condition the possibilities of philosophy, morality and politics. They considered Kantian reason and liberal politics to pose serious threats to ‘genuine’ expressions of rationality and as dangerous obfuscations of the necessity of political order—of the brute fact that human beings stand in need of ‘being ruled,’ as such. (shrink)

The increasingly pervasive practice of veiling among Muslim women has stimulated a great deal of scholarly investigation and debate. This study brings empirical evidence to bear on current debates about the meaning of the veil in Islam. This article first examines the conflicting meanings of the veil among Muslim religious elites and Islamic feminists. Although the dominant gender discourse among Muslim elites strongly favors this cultural practice, an antiveiling discourse promulgated by Islamic feminists has gained ground within recent years. This (...) study then examines how these discursive disputes affect gender identity negotiation among veiled and unveiled Muslim women living in Austin, Texas. Interviews with these women highlight how their gender identities reproduce and reformulate existing Muslim gender discourses. Special attention is paid to the subjective disparities and points of congruence between both groups of respondents. This study concludes by suggesting avenues for future research on the intersection of gender, religion, and cultural difference. (shrink)

This chapter traces Carl Schmitt’s attempt, in his 1932 book The Concept of the Political, to quell the near civil war circumstances of the late Weimar Republic and to reinvigorate the sovereignty of the German state through a reappropriation of Thomas Hobbes’s political philosophy. The chapter then examines Schmitt’s reconsideration of the Hobbesian state, and his own recent reformulation of it, in light of the rise of the “Third Reich,” with particular reference to Schmitt’s 1938 book The Leviathan in the (...) State Theory of Thomas Hobbes. (shrink)

This paper challenges the recommendation of 1981 President's Commission for the Study of Ethical Problems in Medicine and Biomedical and Behavioral Research that all jurisdictions in the United States should adopt the Uniform Determination of Death Act, which endorses a whole-brain, rather than a higher-brain, definition of death. I argue that the Commission was wrong to reject the "personhood argument" for the higher-brain definition on the grounds that there is no consensus among philosophers or the general population as to what (...) constitutes "personhood". I claim that philosophers agree that some potential for cognitive function is necessary for personhood and that, when this is absent in cases of anencephaly and persistent vegetative state (PVS), the individual should be considered dead. I further argue that the lack of consensus among the general population is due in large measure to misunderstandings about the medical reality of PVS and beliefs influenced by feelings for a specific individual in PVS. I also examine and reject two tutiorist arguments which have been used to support the Commission's position: that the higher-brain definition would threaten the severely senile and severely retarded, and that there are not currently adequate medical techniques for determining when all higher-brain activities have ceased. Keywords: death, personhood, persistent vegetative state, anencephaly CiteULike Connotea Del.icio.us What's this? (shrink)

In this paper, I defend brain death as a criterion for determining death against objections raised by Don Marquis, Michael Nair-Collins, Doyen Nguyen, and Laura Specker Sullivan. I argue that any definition of death for beings like us relies on some sortal concept by which we are individuated and identified and that the choice of that concept in a practical context is not determined by strictly biological considerations but involves metaphysical, moral, social, and cultural considerations. This view supports acceptance of (...) a more pluralistic legal definition of death as well as acceptance of brain death as death. (shrink)

A comprehensive look at the intellectual and cultural innovations of the Weimar period During its short lifespan, the Weimar Republic witnessed an unprecedented flowering of achievements in many areas, including psychology, political theory, physics, philosophy, literary and cultural criticism, and the arts. Leading intellectuals, scholars, and critics—such as Hannah Arendt, Walter Benjamin, Ernst Bloch, Bertolt Brecht, and Martin Heidegger—emerged during this time to become the foremost thinkers of the twentieth century. Even today, the Weimar era remains a vital resource for (...) new intellectual movements. In this incomparable collection, Weimar Thought presents both the specialist and the general reader a comprehensive guide and unified portrait of the most important innovators, themes, and trends of this fascinating period. The book is divided into four thematic sections: law, politics, and society; philosophy, theology, and science; aesthetics, literature, and film; and general cultural and social themes of the Weimar period. The volume brings together established and emerging scholars from a remarkable array of fields, and each individual essay serves as an overview for a particular discipline while offering distinctive critical engagement with relevant problems and debates. Whether used as an introductory companion or advanced scholarly resource, Weimar Thought provides insight into the rich developments behind the intellectual foundations of modernity. (shrink)

Genetic changes arising in human pluripotent stem cells (hPSC) upon culture may bestow unwanted or detrimental phenotypes to cells, thus potentially impacting on the applications of hPSCs for clinical use and basic research. In the 20 years since the first report of culture‐acquired genetic aberrations in hPSCs, a characteristic spectrum of recurrent aberrations has emerged. The preponderance of such aberrations implies that they provide a selective growth advantage to hPSCs upon expansion. However, understanding the consequences of culture‐acquired variants for specific (...) applications in cell therapy or research has been more elusive. The rapid progress of hPSC‐based therapies to clinics is galvanizing the field to address this uncertainty and provide definitive ways both for risk assessment of variants and reducing their prevalence in culture. Here, we aim to provide a timely update on almost 20 years of research on this fascinating, but a still unresolved and concerning, phenomenon. (shrink)

In this paper we introduce a system S5U, formed by adding to the modal system S5 a new connective U, Up being read “probably”. A few theorems are derived in S5U, and the system is provided with a decision procedure. Several decidable extensions of S5U are discussed, and probability logic is related to plurality quantification.

U.S. federal research funding is generally justified by promises of public benefits, but the specific natures and distribution of such benefits often remain vague and ambiguous. Furthermore, the metrics by which outcomes are reported often do not necessarily or strongly imply the achievement of public benefits. These ambiguities and discontinuities make it difficult to assess the public outcomes of federal research programs. This study maps the terms in which the purposes and the outcomes of Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy -a relatively (...) young and innovatively structured federal research agency-have been discussed and reported. I find that ARPA-E’s creation and funding have been justified with reference to a broad repertoire of economic, environmental, and national security values, but that the agency has been evaluated only through intermediate scientific and economic metrics and study of internal organizational structure. I suggest that these means of assessment elide ARPA-E’s lack of the financial scale, long time horizon, built-in customer, and radical vision which have been historically important to high-impact federal innovation, and I recommend the tracking of metrics more directly related to ARPA-E’s public value purposes as the agency grows older. This discussion illustrates the inadequacy of currently widespread metrics and conventional wisdom for the design and assessment of societally relevant research. (shrink)