Undergraduate projects may contribute new knowledge, but commonly their main purpose is an exercise in learning and applying simple research methods. They are usually short term and a first step into the research field. Support for undergraduate research experience is simple enough. However, integral to the research process is ethical scrutiny. A high standard of conduct of research is essential. The question of whether undergraduate student projects should be subject to full ethical review, to the same extent as that undertaken (...) for full scale academic work, is a matter of debate. The purpose of this study was to explore the views of academics on the nature and extent of ethical review considered appropriate for undergraduate research projects. This was done in order to identify which side of the above debate was favoured. Participants were undergraduate research project supervisors, drawn from a range of disciplines where research on human subjects is undertaken. A series of focus groups were undertaken, transcribed and subjected to thematic analysis. There was general consensus that some consideration should be given to the ethical issues relating to student projects. However, participants were limited in their explicit identification of such issues, with only extreme examples being specifically described. Some favoured a ‘light touch’ proportional to the size of the project as appropriate, while others considered the level ethical scrutiny not related to the size, duration or outcome of the work. Opinions were divided on where responsibility ultimately lay. Some considered it to belong at departmental, faculty or institutional level, but others held the individual supervisor accountable. The degree of involvement of undergraduate research in ethical review and approval is clearly an issue amongst academics. This study helps raise awareness of these issues and promotes debate on the appropriate level and format of review needed for undergraduate research training. (shrink)

Understanding why individuals opt out of living donation is crucial to enhancing protections for all living donors and to identify modifiable barriers to donation. We developed an ethical approach to conducting research on individuals who opted out of living kidney donation and applied it in a small-scale qualitative study at one US transplant centre. The seven study participants had varied reasons for opting out, the most prominent of which was concern about the financial burden from lost wages during the postoperative (...) period. Several reported feeling alone during their decision-making process. Although no participants used an alibi, a centre-provided statement of non-eligibility to donate, all believed that centres should offer alibis to help preserve donor autonomy. Given the complexity of participants' decisions and the emotions they experienced before and after deciding not to donate, we suggest approaches for independent living donor advocates to support this population. This study demonstrates that research on individuals who opt out of donation is feasible and yields valuable insight into methods to improve the evaluation experience for potential living donors. (shrink)

"A valuable contribution to the existing literature on Edith Stein. These quality essays are written by a well-established international network of commentators and translators of Stein." —_Elisabeth Young-Bruehl, author of _Hannah Arendt: For Love of the World__ "We badly need this new book on Edith Stein, so that we may ponder how a brilliant Jewish woman in Weimar Germany could become a Carmelite nun, yet retain a vivid Jewish identity and close ties to her family. The essays help us synthesize (...) Stein's troubling legacy as an accomplished philosopher, a Catholic saint, a Jewish daughter, and a stubborn feminist who was trapped in very dark times indeed." —_Deborah Hertz, Herman Wouk Chair in Modern Jewish Studies, University of California at San Diego, and author of _Jewish High Society in Old Regime Berlin__ "Readers will be fascinated by this multidisciplinary, state-of-the-art, well-contextualized essay collage on the life and writings of Edith Stein. A remarkable woman in every respect, the deeply spiritual Edith Stein crossed many seemingly uncrossable boundaries—national, linguistic, religious, intellectual—in her search for understanding of the human condition. This volume, ably orchestrated by Joyce Berkman, provides English-language readers an excellent introduction to a brilliant, complex, twentieth-century European woman: intellectual, philosopher, feminist, Jew, Christian, and Catholic saint." —_Karen Offen, Ph.D., Institute for Research on Women and Gender, Stanford University_ Controversy surrounding the beatification and canonization of Edith Stein, a Catholic convert of Jewish heritage who was murdered at Auschwitz, has eclipsed scholarly and public attention to Stein’s extraordinary development as a philosopher. Divided into three sections—biographical explorations, Stein's feminist theory and pedagogy, and her creative philosophical contributions—the sixteen essays in this volume represent the first comprehensive interdisciplinary analysis in English of Stein’s life and philosophical writings. (shrink)

Persons and passions : an introduction / Christopher Williams What are the passions doing in the Meditations? / Lisa Shapiro Love in the ruins : passion in Descartes’ Meditations / William Beardsley The passionate intellect : reading the opposition of reason and emotions in Descartes / Amy Schmitter Material falsity and the arguments for God’s existence in Descartes’ Meditations / Cecilia Wee Reason unhinged : passion and precipice from Montaigne to Hume / Saul Traiger Reflection and ideas in Hume’s account (...) of the passions / Lilli Alanen Sympathy and the unity of Hume’s idea of self / Donald Ainslie Hume’s voyage / Janet Broughton Artifice, desire, and their relationship : Hume against Aristotle / Alasdair MacIntyre Hume and morality’s "useful purpose" / David Gauthier Reflection and well-being / Robert Shaver Friendship and the law of reason : Baier and Kant on love and principles / Sergio Tenenbaum Cruelty, respect, and unsentimental love / Michele Moody-Adams Trust as an affective attitude / Karen Jones Trusting "first" and "second" selves : Aristotelian reflections on Virginia Woolf and Annette Baier / Jennifer Whiting. (shrink)

The author would like to thank Karen Offen, David Nye and her husband Johannes Pedersen for helpful criticisms they offered of an earlier draft of this essay.

Background and AimsEnd-of-life discussions can be difficult for seriously ill adolescents and young adults. Researchers aimed to determine whether completing Voicing My CHOiCES —a research-informed advance care planning guide—increased communication with family, friends, or health care providers, and to evaluate the experience of those with whom VMC was shared.MethodsFamily, friends, or HCPs who the AYAs had shared their completed VMC with were administered structured interviews to assess their perception of the ACP discussion, changes in their relationship, conversation quality, and whether (...) the discussion prompted changes in care. Open-ended responses underwent thematic analysis.ResultsOne-month post-completion, 65.1% of AYA had shared VMC completion with a family member, 22.6% with a friend, and 8.9% with an HCP. Among a sample of respondents, family and friends reported a positive change in their relationship with the AYA. Participant descriptions of the experience fell into five themes: positive experience, difficult experience, appreciated a guide to facilitate discussion, provided relief, and created worry/anxiety. Only 1 HCP noted a treatment change. Family, friends, and HCP did not think the AYA would have discussed EoL preferences without completing VMC.ConclusionsVMC has potential to enhance communication about ACP between AYA and their family and friends, though less frequently with HCPs. Participants reported a positive change in their relationship with the AYA after discussing VMC, and described experiencing the conversation as favorable, even when also emotionally difficult. (shrink)

BackgroundPeople with upper extremity amputations report receiving insufficient information about treatment options. Furthermore, patients commonly report not knowing what questions to ask providers. A question prompt sheet, or list of questions, can support patient-centered care by empowering patients to ask questions important to them, promoting patient-provider communication, and increasing patient knowledge. This study assessed information needs among people with UE amputations about UE vascularized composite allotransplantation and developed a UE VCA-QPS.MethodsThis multi-site, cross-sectional, mixed-methods study involved in-depth and semi-structured interviews with (...) people with UE amputations to assess information needs and develop a UE VCA-QPS. Qualitative data were analyzed by thematic analysis; quantitative data were analyzed by descriptive statistics. The initial UE VCA-QPS included 130 items across 18 topics.ResultsEighty-nine people with UE amputations participated. Most were male, had a mean age of 46 years, and had a unilateral and below-elbow amputation. Participants desired information about UE VCA eligibility, evaluation process, surgery, risks, rehabilitation, and functional outcomes. After refinement, the final UE VCA-QPS included 35 items, across 9 topics. All items were written at a ≤ 6th grade reading level. Most semi-structured interview participants reported being ‘completely’ or ‘very’ likely to use a UE VCA-QPS.ConclusionPeople with UE amputations have extensive information needs about UE VCA. The UE VCA-QPS aims to address patients’ information needs and foster patient-centered care. Future research should assess whether the UE VCA-QPS facilitates patient-provider discussion and informed decision-making for UE VCA. (shrink)

The study of anarchism as a philosophical, political, and social movement has burgeoned both in the academy and in the global activist community in recent years. Taking advantage of this boom in anarchist scholarship, Nathan J. Jun and Shane Wahl have compiled twenty-six cutting-edge essays on this timely topic in New Perspectives on Anarchism.

This innovative critical study reinterprets Ludwig Wittgenstein's philosophy for the study of modernist and contemporary literature and brings Wittgenstein into literary conversations around problems of difficulty, ethical instruction, and the yearning for transformation. Central to Karen Zumhagen-Yekple͹'s book are her critical readings of key modernist texts by Franz Kafka, Virginia Woolf, and James Joyce. Throughout, Zumhagen-Yekplé brings to bear an interpretive framework that she derives from Wittgenstein's gnomic "Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus" (first published in English in 1922, the "annus mirabilis" (...) of modernism), which she treats not as a theory of logic or metaphysics but as a complex mock-theoretical puzzle. The book's final chapter turns to recent fiction by J. M. Coetzee, a living author conscious of his debts both to Wittgenstein and his modernist literary precursors. This book will interest students of literary modernism, Wittgenstein, and the interconnections between fiction and ordinary language philosophy. (shrink)

Ludwig Wittgenstein famously declared that philosophy “ought really to be written only as a form of poetry,” and he even described the Tractatus as “philosophical and, at the same time, literary.” But few books have really followed up on these claims, and fewer still have focused on their relation to the special literary and artistic period in which Wittgenstein worked. This book offers the first collection to address the rich, vexed, and often contradictory relationship between modernism—the twentieth century’s predominant cultural (...) and artistic movement—and Wittgenstein, one of its preeminent and most enduring philosophers. In doing so it offers rich new understandings of both. Michael LeMahieu Karen Zumhagen-Yekplé bring together scholars in both twentieth-century philosophy and modern literary studies to put Wittgenstein into dialogue with some of modernism’s most iconic figures, including Samuel Beckett, Saul Bellow, Walter Benjamin, Henry James, James Joyce, Franz Kafka, Adolf Loos, Robert Musil, Wallace Stevens, and Virginia Woolf. The contributors touch on two important aspects of Wittgenstein’s work and modernism itself: form and medium. They discuss issues ranging from Wittgenstein and poetics to his use of numbered propositions in the Tractatus as a virtuoso performance of modernist form; from Wittgenstein’s persistence metaphoric use of religion, music, and photography to an exploration of how he and Henry James both negotiated the relationship between the aesthetic and the ethical. Covering many other fascinating intersections of the philosopher and the arts, this book offers an important bridge across the disciplinary divides that have kept us from a fuller picture of both Wittgenstein and the larger intellectual and cultural movement of which he was a part. (shrink)

Large language models (LLMs) produce sequences learned as statistical patterns from large corpora. Their emergent status as representatives of the advances in artificial intelligence (AI) have led to an increased attention to the possibilities of regulating the automated production of linguistic utterances and interactions with human users in a process that computer scientists refer to as ‘alignment’—a series of technological and political mechanisms to impose a normative model of morality on algorithms and networks behind the model. Alignment, which can be (...) viewed as the superimposition of normative structure onto a statistical model, however, reveals a conflicted and complex history of the conceptualisation of an interrelationship between language, mind and technology. This relationship is shaped by and, in turn, influences theories of language, linguistic practice and subjectivity, which are especially relevant to the current sophistication in artificially produced text. In this paper, we propose a critical evaluation of the concept of alignment, arguing that the theories and practice behind LLMs reveal a more complex social and technological dynamic of output coordination. We examine this dynamic as a two-way interaction between users and models by analysing how ChatGPT4 redacts perceived ‘anomalous’ language in fragments of Joyce’s Ulysses. We then situate this alignment problem historically, revisiting earlier postwar linguistic debates which counterposed two views of meaning: as discrete structures, and as continuous probability distributions. We discuss the largely occluded work of the Moscow Linguistic School, which sought to reconcile this opposition. Our attention to the Moscow School and later related arguments by Searle and Kristeva casts the problem of alignment in a new light: as one involving attention to the social regulation of linguistic practice, including rectification of anomalies that, like the Joycean text, exist in defiance of expressive conventions. The “problem of alignment” that we address here is, therefore, twofold: on one hand, it points to its narrow and normative definition in current technological development and critical research and, on the other hand, to the reality of complex and contradictory relations between subjectivity, technology and language that alignment problems reveal. (shrink)

In her recent book, A Different Order of Difficulty, Karen Zumhagen-Yekplé uses a resolute reading of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus to highlight similarities between Wittgenstein’s work and his contemporaries Virginia Woolf, James Joyce and Franz Kafka. On the basis of this reading, she claims that Wittgenstein’s early masterpiece is a modernist work. -/- This article argues that there are profound problems with the resolute reading that she offers, and it suggests that ‘traditional’ readings of the Tractatus survive the criticisms (...) she makes of them. Nonetheless, a case can still be made that Wittgenstein’s work is a modernist one, and it is a useful exercise to compare the Tractatus with modernist works from the 1920s. -/- Philosophical Investigations, Volume 45, Issue 3, Page 274-296, July 2022. (NOTE: This article was mistakenly given the title 'Theologico-Philological Investigations: Is Wittgenstein's Tractatus a Modernist Work?' in the print edition of Philosophical Investigations. The online version has been corrected. (shrink)

This essay is the journal editor's introduction to part 3 of an ongoing symposium on quietism. With reference to writings of James Joyce, Francis Picabia, J. M. Coetzee, Charles Taylor, Alasdair MacIntyre, Elaine Pagels, and Karen King—and with extended reference to Jonathan Lear's study of “cultural devastation,” Radical Hope—Jeffrey Perl explores the possibility that the fear of anomie (“anomiphobia”) is misplaced. He argues that, in comparison with the violence and narrowness of any given social order, anomie may well (...) be preferable, and, in any case, may be no more than another name for quietism. (shrink)

Machine generated contents note: Part I. Introduction: 1. Personal epistemology in the classroom: a welcome and guide for the reader Florian C. Feucht and Lisa D. Bendixen; Part II. Frameworks and Conceptual Issues: 2. Manifestations of an epistemological belief system in pre-k to 12 classrooms Marlene Schommer-Aikins, Mary Bird, and Linda Bakken; 3. Epistemic climates in elementary classrooms Florian C. Feucht; 4. The integrative model of personal epistemology development: theoretical underpinnings and implications for education Deanna C. Rule and Lisa D. (...) Bendixen; 5. An epistemic framework for scientific reasoning in informal contexts Fang-Ying Yang and Chin-Chung Tsai; Appendices; 6. Who knows what and who can we believe? Epistemological beliefs are beliefs about knowledge (mostly) to be attained from others Rainer Bromme, Dorothe Kienhues, and Torsten Porsch; Part III. Students' Personal Epistemology, its Development, and Relation to Learning: 7. Stalking young persons' changing beliefs about belief Michael J. Chandler and Travis Proulx; 8. Epistemological development in very young knowers Leah K. Wildenger, Barbara K. Hofer, and Jean E. Burr; 9. Beliefs about knowledge and revision of knowledge: on the importance of epistemic beliefs for intentional conceptual change in elementary and middle school students Lucia Mason; 10. The reflexive relation between students' mathematics-related beliefs and the mathematics classroom culture Erik De Corte, Peter Op 't Eynde, Fien Depaepe, and Lieven Verschaffel; 11. Examining the influence of epistemic beliefs and goal orientations on the academic performance of adolescent students enrolled in high-poverty, high-minority schools P. Karen Murphy, Michelle M. Buehl, Jill A. Zeruth, Maeghan N. Edwards, Joyce F. Long, and Shinichi Monoi; 12. Using cognitive interviewing to explore elementary and secondary school students' epistemic and ontological cognition Jeffrey A. Greene, Judith Torney-Purta, Roger Azevedo, and Jane Robertson; Part IV. Teachers' Personal Epistemology and its Impact on Classroom Teaching: 13. Epistemological resources and framing: a cognitive framework for helping teachers interpret and respond to their students' epistemologies Andrew Elby and David Hammer; 14. The effects of teachers' beliefs on elementary students' beliefs, motivation, and achievement in mathematics Krista R. Muis and Michael J. Foy; Appendices; 15. Teachers' articulation of beliefs about teaching knowledge: conceptualizing a belief framework Helenrose Fives and Michelle M. Buehl; Appendices; 16. Beyond epistemology: assessing teachers' epistemological and ontological world views Lori Olafson and Gregory Schraw; Part V. Conclusion: 17. Personal epistemology in the classroom: what does research and theory tell us and where do we need to go next? Lisa D. Bendixen and Florian C. Feucht. (shrink)

Ulysses is certainly the greatest novel in the English language, and one might argue for its being the greatest single work of art in our tradition. How significant, then, and how teasing, that this masterwork should be a comedy, and that its creator should have explicitly valued the comic "vision" over the tragic—how disturbing to our predilection for order that, with an homage paid to classical antiquity so meticulous that it is surely a burlesque, Joyce's exhibitionististicicity is never so (...) serious as when it is most outrageously comic. Joyce might have been addressing his readers when he wrote to Nora in 1909: "Now . . . I want you to read over and over all I have written to you. Some of it is ugly, obscene, and bestial, some of it is pure and holy and spiritual: all of it is myself." Joyce Carol Oates is the author of, among others, them, Wonderland, and The Assassins. "Jocoserious Joyce" is part of a book on tragedy and comedy. Her contributions to Critical Inquiry, include "Lawrence's Gotterdammerung" and “The Picture of Dorian Gray: Wilde's Parable about the Fall". (shrink)

Moral thinking pervades our practical lives, but where did this way of thinking come from, and what purpose does it serve? Is it to be explained by environmental pressures on our ancestors a million years ago, or is it a cultural invention of more recent origin? In The Evolution of Morality, Richard Joyce takes up these controversial questions, finding that the evidence supports an innate basis to human morality. As a moral philosopher, Joyce is interested in whether any (...) implications follow from this hypothesis. Might the fact that the human brain has been biologically prepared by natural selection to engage in moral judgment serve in some sense to vindicate this way of thinking--staving off the threat of moral skepticism, or even undergirding some version of moral realism? Or if morality has an adaptive explanation in genetic terms--if it is, as Joyce writes, "just something that helped our ancestors make more babies"--might such an explanation actually undermine morality's central role in our lives? He carefully examines both the evolutionary "vindication of morality" and the evolutionary "debunking of morality," considering the skeptical view more seriously than have others who have treated the subject.Interdisciplinary and combining the latest results from the empirical sciences with philosophical discussion, The Evolution of Morality is one of the few books in this area written from the perspective of moral philosophy. Concise and without technical jargon, the arguments are rigorous but accessible to readers from different academic backgrounds. Joyce discusses complex issues in plain language while advocating subtle and sometimes radical views. The Evolution of Morality lays the philosophical foundations for further research into the biological understanding of human morality. (shrink)

In The Myth of Morality, Richard Joyce argues that moral discourse is hopelessly flawed. At the heart of ordinary moral judgements is a notion of moral inescapability, or practical authority, which, upon investigation, cannot be reasonably defended. Joyce argues that natural selection is to blame, in that it has provided us with a tendency to invest the world with values that it does not contain, and demands that it does not make. Should we therefore do away with morality, (...) as we did away with other faulty notions such as witches? Possibly not. We may be able to carry on with morality as a 'useful fiction' - allowing it to have a regulative influence on our lives and decisions, perhaps even playing a central role - while not committing ourselves to believing or asserting falsehoods, and thus not being subject to accusations of 'error'. (shrink)

The pragmatic character of the Dutch book argument makes it unsuitable as an "epistemic" justification for the fundamental probabilist dogma that rational partial beliefs must conform to the axioms of probability. To secure an appropriately epistemic justification for this conclusion, one must explain what it means for a system of partial beliefs to accurately represent the state of the world, and then show that partial beliefs that violate the laws of probability are invariably less accurate than they could be otherwise. (...) The first task can be accomplished once we realize that the accuracy of systems of partial beliefs can be measured on a gradational scale that satisfies a small set of formal constraints, each of which has a sound epistemic motivation. When accuracy is measured in this way it can be shown that any system of degrees of belief that violates the axioms of probability can be replaced by an alternative system that obeys the axioms and yet is more accurate in every possible world. Since epistemically rational agents must strive to hold accurate beliefs, this establishes conformity with the axioms of probability as a norm of epistemic rationality whatever its prudential merits or defects might be. (shrink)

It has been almost twenty‐five years since Huberman and Riggs first showed that there are multiple bidirectional origins of replication scattered at ∼100 kb intervals along mammalian chromosomal fibers. Since that time, every conceivable physical property unique to replicating DNA has been taken advantage of to determine whether origins of replication are defined sequence elements, as they are in microorganisms. The most thoroughly studied mammalian locus to date is the dihydrofolate reductase domain of Chinese hamster cells, which will be used (...) as a model to discuss the various methods of investigation. While several laboratories agree on the rough location of the [initiation locus] in this large chromosomal domain, different experimental approaches paint different pictures of the mechanism by which initiation occurs. However, a variety of new techniques and synchronizing agents promises to clarify the picture for this particular locus, and to provide the means for identifying and isolating other origins of replication for comparison. (shrink)

This book defends the view that any adequate account of rational decision making must take a decision maker's beliefs about causal relations into account. The early chapters of the book introduce the non-specialist to the rudiments of expected utility theory. The major technical advance offered by the book is a 'representation theorem' that shows that both causal decision theory and its main rival, Richard Jeffrey's logic of decision, are both instances of a more general conditional decision theory. The book solves (...) a long-standing problem for Jeffrey's theory by showing for the first time how to obtain a unique utility and probability representation for preferences and judgements of comparative likelihood. The book also contains a major new discussion of what it means to suppose that some event occurs or that some proposition is true. The most complete and robust defence of causal decision theory available. (shrink)

More than a decade of exacting scientific research involving paleontological fragments and ancient DNA has lately produced a series of pronouncements about a purportedly novel population of archaic hominins dubbed “the Denisova.” The science involved in these matters is both technically stunning and, socially, at times a bit reckless. Here I discuss the responsibilities which scientists incur when they make inductively risky pronouncements about the different relative contributions by Denisovans to genomes of members of apparent subpopulations of current humans. This (...) science is sensational: it is science which empirically speculates, to the public delight’s and entertainment, about scintillating topics such as when humans evolved, where we came from, and who else we were having sex with during our early hominin history. An initial characterization of sensational science emerges from my discussion of the case, as well as a diagnosis of an interactive phenomenon termed amplified inductive risk. (shrink)

Some Bayesians have suggested that beliefs based on ambiguous or incomplete evidence are best represented by families of probability functions. I spend the first half of this essay outlining one version of this imprecise model of belief, and spend the second half defending the model against recent objections, raised by Roger White and others, which concern the phenomenon of probabilistic dilation. Dilation occurs when learning some definite fact forces a person’s beliefs about an event to shift from a sharp, point-valued (...) subjective probability to an imprecise spread of probabilities. Some commentators find dilation disturbing, both from an epistemic and a decision-theoretic perspective, and place the blame on the use of sets of probabilities to model opinion. These reactions are based on an overly narrow conception of imprecise belief states which assumes that we know everything there is to know about a person’s doxastic attitudes once we have identified the spreads of values for her imprecise credences. Once we recognize that the imprecise model has the resources to characterize a much richer family of doxastic attitudes than this, we will see that White’s charges of epistemological and decision theoretic incoherence are unfounded. (shrink)

Many male traits are well explained by sexual selection theory as adaptations to mating competition and mate choice, whereas no unifying theory explains traits expressed more in females. Anne Campbell's “staying alive” theory proposed that human females produce stronger self-protective reactions than males to aggressive threats because self-protection tends to have higher fitness value for females than males. We examined whether Campbell's theory has more general applicability by considering whether human females respond with greater self-protectiveness than males to other threats (...) beyond aggression. We searched the literature for physiological, behavioral, and emotional responses to major physical and social threats, and found consistent support for females' responding with greater self-protectiveness than males. Females mount stronger immune responses to many pathogens; experience a lower threshold to detect, and lesser tolerance of, pain; awaken more frequently at night; express greater concern about physically dangerous stimuli; exert more effort to avoid social conflicts; exhibit a personality style more focused on life's dangers; react to threats with greater fear, disgust, and sadness; and develop more threat-based clinical conditions than males. Our findings suggest that in relation to threat, human females have relatively heightened protective reactions compared to males. The pervasiveness of this result across multiple domains suggests that general mechanisms might exist underlying females' unique adaptations. An understanding of such processes would enhance knowledge of female health and well-being. (shrink)

Following Kripke and Putnam, the received view of chemical kinds has been a microstructuralist one. To be a microstructuralist about chemical kinds is to think that membership in said kinds is conferred by microstructural properties. Recently, the received microstructuralist view has been elaborated and defended, but it has also been attacked on the basis of complexities, both chemical and ontological. Here, I look at which complexities really challenge the microstructuralist view; at how the view itself might be made more complicated (...) in order to accommodate such challenges; and finally, at what this increasingly complicated picture implies for our standard assessment of chemical kindhood—primarily, for the widespread assumption that chemical kinds in general are more neat and tidy than those messy biological ones. _1_ The Received View _2_ A Taxonomy of Chemical Kinds _3_ Atomic Number _4_ H2O, H3O+, OH−, and More _5_ Complicating the Microstructuralist Picture _6_ Concrete and Other Mixtures _7_ Macromolecules, Especially Proteins _8_ Abandoning Sameness of Elemental Composition _9_ Not So Different after All. (shrink)

There is a perennial philosophical dream of a certain natural order for the natural kinds. The name of this dream is ‘the hierarchy requirement’. According to this postulate, proper natural kinds form a taxonomy which is both unique and traditional. Here I demonstrate that complex scientific objects exist: objects which generate different systems of scientific classification, produce myriad legitimate alternatives amongst the nonetheless still natural kinds, and make the hierarchical dream impossible to realize, except at absurdly great cost. Philosophical hopes (...) for a certain order in nature cannot be fulfilled. Natural kinds crosscut one another, ubiquitously so, and this crosscutting spells the end of the hierarchical dream. (shrink)

Andy Egan has recently produced a set of alleged counterexamples to causal decision theory in which agents are forced to decide among causally unratifiable options, thereby making choices they know they will regret. I show that, far from being counterexamples, CDT gets Egan's cases exactly right. Egan thinks otherwise because he has misapplied CDT by requiring agents to make binding choices before they have processed all available information about the causal consequences of their acts. I elucidate CDT in a way (...) that makes it clear where Egan goes wrong, and which explains why his examples pose no threat to the theory. My approach has similarities to a modification of CDT proposed by Frank Arntzenius, but it differs in the significance that it assigns to potential regrets. I maintain, contrary to Arntzenius, that an agent facing Egan's decisions can rationally choose actions that she knows she will later regret. All rationality demands of agents it that they maximize unconditional causal expected utility from an epistemic perspective that accurately reflects all the available evidence about what their acts are likely to cause. This yields correct answers even in outlandish cases in which one is sure to regret whatever one does. (shrink)

Bayesianism claims to provide a unified theory of epistemic and practical rationality based on the principle of mathematical expectation. In its epistemic guise it requires believers to obey the laws of probability. In its practical guise it asks agents to maximize their subjective expected utility. Joyce’s primary concern is Bayesian epistemology, and its five pillars: people have beliefs and conditional beliefs that come in varying gradations of strength; a person believes a proposition strongly to the extent that she presupposes (...) its truth in her practical and theoretical reasoning; rational graded beliefs must conform to the laws of probability; evidential relationships should be analyzed subjectively in terms of relations among a person’s graded beliefs and conditional beliefs; empirical learning is best modeled as probabilistic conditioning. Joyce explains each of these claims and evaluates some of the justifications that have been offered for them, including “Dutch book,” “decision-theoretic,” and “non-pragmatic” arguments for and. He also addresses some common objections to Bayesianism, in particular the “problem of old evidence” and the complaint that the view degenerates into an untenable subjectivism. The essay closes by painting a picture of Bayesianism as an “internalist” theory of reasons for action and belief that can be fruitfully augmented with “externalist” principles of practical and epistemic rationality. (shrink)

In his paper ?The Error in the Error Theory?[this journal, 2008], Stephen Finlay attempts to show that the moral error theorist has not only failed to prove his case, but that the error theory is in fact false. This paper rebuts Finlay's arguments, criticizes his positive theory, and clarifies the error-theoretic position.

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.

Bleiman and Boisen offer a simple yet profound perceptual framework designed to lead us back to dominion -- the state where we feel balanced, connected and in harmony with ourselves and the world. People from all walks of life, from parents and teachers to couples and corporate executives, will find this a powerful tool for effecting change at the personal and global level.

This article analyzes how the family policing/regulation system utilizes disorientation as a tool to implement successive stages of surveillance, coercion, and control and to tear apart Black families while capturing children in the foster system. Through specific examples based on both the author’s own experiences and those she has witnessed in her work, the process of how families are targeted and ensnared in the family policing/regulation system becomes visible.

(1999). Love, politics, and the Victorians: Liberal feminism and the politics of social integration. The European Legacy: Vol. 4, Ideas and Beliefs of the Victorians, pp. 42-57.