The principle of exchange seems to be limited in its application, and it cannot serve as a link between utilitarianism and the idea of a market for interpersonal relations. Our preferences concern the inner states of other people as well as their overt behavior. The neglect of this aspect of our preferences is a result of the coupling of utilitarianism with behaviorism. The problem is thus behaviorism, not consequentialism. It might be argued that commensurability is wrong because it sanctions impure (...) practices - aside from any principle of exchange. In reply, it may be argued that the principle of purity is an intuitive one, which must be justified at a higher level. At the intuitive level, the purity principle competes with the view that practices are in some cases too pure already, and that blind purity cannot be maintained without educational deception. The apparent difficulty of making tradeoffs among different kinds of consequences is a problem in practice, not a problem in principle. The difficulty may indeed justify certain prescriptive rules, but a blanket prohibition against impure practices would seem to require considerable defense. (shrink)

Are there independent standards of justice by which we are to measure our activities, or is justice itself to be understood in relativistic terms that vary with locality or historical period? I wish to examine briefly how far two inconsistent positions can both be accepted. I suggest that perhaps our ordinary understanding of reality itself—and in particular political reality—is essentially the outcome of a time of contest, and that there are areas of political reality where matters may be best seen (...) as still being contested. I thus question the need for a single internally consistent point of view, as if it alone were the answer to any particular political problem, and propose that a shared belief that reality is inconsistent may be a viable solution. Using the political scenario of Northern Ireland, I argue that justice requires the deliberate and institutionalised toleration of inconsistent views of the world. (shrink)

A detailed consideration of a number of problems concerning the meaning of moral judgements and the justification of morality, and the usefulness and origin of the institution of morality.

This article argues against the case for regarding bodies and parts of bodies to be property. It claims that doing so assumes an individualistic conception of the body. It fails to acknowledge that our bodies are made up of non-human material; are unbounded; constantly changing and deeply interconnected with other bodies. It also argues that holding that our bodies are property does not recognise the fact that we have different attitudes towards different parts of our removed bodies and the contexts (...) of their removal. The appropriate legal reform should, therefore, be to produce a statute which can provide a balance between the competing personal, social and interpersonal interests in different body parts. (shrink)

Cet article rend compte du lien mère-enfant et des effets des confinements sur les fantasmes œdipiens. Nous partirons de notre pratique de psychologue dans un centre médico-psychologique et plus particulièrement de l’analyse d’un cas clinique d’un jeune garçon et de sa mère que nous avons pu suivre avant et après la période des confinements. Nous nous appuierons sur la parole de l’enfant qui évoque, au sortir du confinement, une certaine « nostalgie » de ce moment où la place du tiers (...) (social et familial), comme possible agent séparateur, a été mise de côté. Ceci nous permettra de faire des hypothèses quant aux effets de ce huis clos familial et de mettre en avant le vécu de menace d’une réalisation du fantasme œdipien qui a pu faire violence à l’enfant. (shrink)

ABSTRACTNovelty held a special attraction for book buyers in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, but new texts carried more risk for the publisher than titles already proven to be good sellers. Canny bookseller-publishers therefore adopted a publishing strategy that would benefit from the commercial safety of proven sellers while simultaneously exploiting the cachet of the ‘new’. They could maximise the sales potential of a book by reprinting an already market-tested text but repackaging it with new and improved ingredients, often provided (...) by the text's original author. Such enlargements were never left unpublicised on the title page which, as the primary means of marketing texts in the early modern book trade, had to function both as a dust-jacket-style advertisement intended for bookstall browsers, and as a discrete advertisement posted remote from the physical volume. Given the safe bet of reprints and the marketability of new material, the promotional nature of title pages therefore necessitated revised, augmented, or otherwise enlarged editions to be produced by the author and bookseller to attract attention and sales. (shrink)

This edited volume aims to better understand the multifaceted phenomenon we call health. -/- Going beyond simple views of health as the absence of disease or as complete well-being, this book unites scientists and philosophers. The contributions clarify the links between health and adaptation, robustness, resilience, or dynamic homeostasis, and discuss how to achieve health and healthy aging through practices such as hormesis. -/- The book is divided into three parts and a conclusion: the first part explains health from within (...) specific disciplines, the second part explores health from the perspective of a bodily part, system, function, or even the environment in which organisms live, and the final part looks at more clinical or practical perspectives. It thereby gathers, across 30 chapters, diverse perspectives from the broad fields of evolutionary and systems biology, immunology, and biogerontology, more specific areas such as odontology, cardiology, neurology, and public health, as well as philosophical reflections on mental health, sexuality, authenticity and medical theories. -/- The overarching aim is to inform, inspire and encourage intellectuals from various disciplines to assess whether explanations in these disparate fields and across biological levels can be sufficiently systematized and unified to clarify the complexity of health. It will be particularly useful for medical graduates, philosophy graduates and research professionals in the life sciences and general medicine, as well as for upper-level graduate philosophy of science students. (shrink)

The *Kāśyapaparivarta, an early Mahāyāna sūtra, has a complex history. Sanskrit and Tibetan versions, and some of its Chinese translations, have been available to scholars for almost a century, thanks to Staël-Holstein’s 1926 editio princeps. Yet no comprehensive survey of available sources, or critical appraisal of their antecedants, has been published, and most importantly, essential Chinese materials have long been overlooked. The present contribution focuses most centrally on the Chinese translations of the scripture. In addition, the relation of the sūtra (...) to the Mahāratnakūṭa collection of forty-nine texts and the possible Indic origins of the latter are explored. (shrink)

I am justified in believing that my lottery ticket—call it t1—will not win, on statistical grounds. Those grounds apply equally to any other ticket, so I am justified in believing of any other ticket ti (let i take values from 2 to 1000000) that it will not win. I am not, however, justified in believing the giant conjunctive proposition that t1 will not win & t2 will not win & . . . & t1,000,000 will not win. On the contrary, (...) I am justified in believing that some ticket will win, hence that one of those conjuncts is false. Suggested solution: justified belief is not closed under conjunction. It does not follow from the fact that I am justified in believing p and justified in believing q that I am justified in believing p & q. (shrink)

Name der Zeitschrift: Semiotica Jahrgang: 2015 Heft: 207 Seiten: 567-581.

Draws on the book of Job as a touchstone for the contradictions and polemics that infect various eighteenth-century works - poetry, philosophy, political oratory, accounts of exploration, commentaries on criminal law - which try to account for the relations between human suffering and systems of secular and divine justice.

This poem is a reflection on finishing medical school and starting residency.

Much of the critical praise for the film concerns the first of these aims. Bigelow’s use of at least four film crews for every scene affords the sense of being present in the situation, continuously shifting perspective, alert to possible danger. The relative anonymity of the scenery, clearly somewhere in the Middle East but not clearly anywhere in particular, fosters this uneasy sense of immersion in an unfamiliar scenario where the sources of danger are unpredictable. Protracted periods of silence, punctuated (...) by incidental sounds that often turn out to be irrelevant, increase this tension. The occasional quiet ring of tinnitus imparts a sense of the incessant nature of the soldiers’ anxiety. Much of the negative criticism of the film, on the other hand, concerns the psychology of its central characters. Some veterans of the war in Iraq have claimed that it is a wildly inaccurate portrayal of the attitudes and behaviour of professional soldiers. (shrink)

Much of the philosophical discussion of explanations has centered around two broad conceptions of what sorts of ‘things’ explanations are – namely, the descriptive and ontic conceptions. Defenders of each argue that scientific psychology has at best little to contribute to the study of explanations. These anti-psychologistic arguments come in two main varieties, the metaphysical and the epistemic. Both varieties trace back to Hempel and recur in the more recent writings of prominent mechanists. The metaphysical arguments attempt to combat psychologism (...) about explanation by doubly dissociating explanations themselves from the commonly associated phenomenology of explanation. The epistemic arguments attempt to combat psychologism by doubly dissociating the good-making features of explanations from the CAPE. I focus on the metaphysical arguments here, for only they directly concern the nature of, as opposed to the evaluation conditions for, explanations. The metaphysical arguments are all shown to equivocate over ‘explanation’, and thus they are no threat to the proposal that sometimes explanations just are psychological events. Such arguments do, nonetheless, gesture towards something important – namely, that the CAPE is neither necessary nor sufficient for explanation in any sense. Similar considerations lead another latter-day mechanist to conclude that no phenomenology of any sort is essential for explanation. What all of these thinkers overlook, however, is that there is another important phenomenological correlate of explanation – namely, finding a happening intelligible or understanding how or why-possibly – and it may well be of the very essence of explanation, at least in the psychological sense. I propose a psychomechanistic theory of intelligibility that accounts for how we can, through finite means, make boundless, endlessly qualified inferences about the implications of our explanations. In closing I note that, although finding a happening intelligible does sometimes engender an unjustified confidence in correctness, we should not overlook how attaining this state does at least put us in a kind of epistemic base camp. I also hint at how intelligibility could turn out to be the ultimate source of the descriptive and ontic conceptions of explanation. (shrink)

In these notes, unadorned page numbers under 350 refer to Dennett (1987) - The Intentional Stance, hereafter referred to as Stance - and ones over 495 refer to Dennett (1988) - mostly to material by him but occasionally to remarks of his critics. Since the notes will focus on disagreements, I should say now that I am in Dennett’s camp and am deeply in debt to his work in the philosophy of mind, which I think is wider, deeper, more various (...) and more fruitful than mine or anyone else’s. Still, I have some ideas and emphases that I think he could profit from. In the final chapter of Stance Dennett compares his work with that of several others, including me. He sees me as having a position like his, the main difference being that I think (as he doesn’t) that our attributions of mental content can always be highly determinate (pp. 347f). In fact, there are differences between us but this isn’t one of them. I want to get this straight, so as to clear the decks for the positive points I am going to make. There is some indeterminacy and there could be lots of it; Dennett’s case for that is unanswerable. As for how much there actually is: I don’t know and don’t even suspect; there is simply no declared issue between Dennett and myself on that. Nor do we disagree on a related matter. If there is no evidence that settles whether the animal believes that P or believes that Q, should we say that nevertheless one of these is right, and it’s just that we can’t know which it is? Dennett says No. I perfectly agree. (shrink)

ḥeleḳ 1. Adam -- ḥeleḳ 2. Maʼamarim -- ḥeleḳ 3. Ḳol setarim.