This is the first scholarly study of Atlas Shrugged, covering in detail the historical, literary, and philosophical aspects of Ayn Rand's magnum opus. Topics explored in depth include the history behind the novel's creation, publication, and reception; its nature as a romantic novel; and its presentation of a radical new philosophy.

This collection of essays by American philosopher Alain Locke makes readily available for the first time his important writings on cultural pluralism, value relativism, and critical relativism. As a black philosopher early in this century, Locke was a pioneer: having earned both undergraduate and doctoral degrees at Harvard, he was a Rhodes scholar at Oxford, studied at the University of Berlin, and chaired the Philosophy Department at Howard University for almost four decades. He was perhaps best known as a (...) leading figure in the Harlem Renaissance. Locke’s works in philosophy—many previously unpublished—conceptually frame the Harlem Renaissance and New Negro movement and provide an Afro-American critique of pragmatism and value absolutism, and also offer a view of identity, communicative competency, and contextualism. In addition, his major works on the nature of race, race relations, and the role of race-conscious literature are presented to demonstrate the application of his philosophy. Locke’s commentaries on the major philosophers of his day, including James, Royce, Santayana, Perry, and Ehrenfels help tell the story of his relationship to his former teachers and his theoretical affinities. In his substantial Introduction and interpretive concluding chapter, Leonard Harris describes Locke’s life, evaluates his role as an American philosopher and theoretician of the Harlem Renaissance, situates him in the pragmatist tradition, and outlines his affinities with modern deconstructionist ideas. A chronology of the philosopher’s life and bibliography of his works are also provided. Although much has been written about Alain Locke, this is the first book to focus on his philosophical contributions. (shrink)

History and chronicle, by B. Croce.--History as a system, by J. Ortega y Gasset.--The idea of history, by R. G. Collingwood.--The historian's purpose; history and metahistory, by A. Bullock.--What are historians trying to do? By H. Pirenne.--What are historical facts? By C. Becker.--The concept of scientific history, by I. Berlin.--Reason in history, by G. W. F. Hegel.--The hedgehog and the fox, by I. Berlin.--What is history? By E. H. Carr.--Faith and history, by R. Niebuhr.--The world and the west, (...) by A. Toynbee.--Debates with historians, by P. Geyl.--Has history any meaning? By K. R. Popper.--Historical inevitability, by I. Berlin.--On fortune and misfortune in history, by J. Burckhardt.--Selected readings (p. 179-181). (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Requiem for a Garden:Terraces of the Shrine of the Báb or Revisiting Alain Locke's "Impressions of Haifa" 1923 (Palestine) in 2023 (Israel)Leonard HarrisLouis Gregory, who first introduced Alain Locke to the Bahá'í faith in 1912, succeeded in convincing him to chair the first racial Amity Convention in 1921 in Washington, DC. Locke published annual reports of this committee in the Bahá'í News Letter until late in his life. (...) The Racial Amity Committee, of which Locke was a lifelong member, promoted racial amity and racial eliminativism through dialogue, personal example, interracial marriage, and cultural exchange. In 1924, Locke's "Impressions of Haifa" described his 1923 visit to Haifa and meeting—via an invitation likely arranged by Louis Gregory—the Guardian of the Faith, Shoghi Effendi, the great-grandson of Bahá'u'lláh, founder of the faith, who received revelations from God.1Why would a 38-year-old African American Harvard PhD in Philosophy (1918), former Oxford University Rhodes Scholar (1907–1910), University of Berlin student (1911), and English- and French-speaking scholar versed in Romance language literature and Greek philosophy seek the grace of the Guardian of the Faith? Why would he travel to Haifa, a place that required a circuitous route to reach, and meet, in 1923, a little-known shy Guardian of the Faith? He traveled from Vienna by train on 4 October to Trieste, then Greece, and then took a steamer to Alexandria, Egypt, for a few days before taking off on another steamer to the islands of Piraeus, Lesbos, and Chanak, and arrived in the ancient Byzantine capital of Constantinople (Istanbul), Turkey, on 14 October. After two days in the ancient capital, he was off again by steamer and train to Haifa, remaining there as a guest of the Guardian of the Faith until early November.Christopher Buck has consistently argued that Locke was a faithful Bahá'í, meaning that Locke was a doctrinaire believer that Bahá'u'lláh was the last messenger of God, as foretold by the Báb, Ali Muhammad. Buck has effectively described Locke's views via re-published core articles by Locke on [End Page 97] democracy, commentaries on Bahá'í ideas, and pictures of Locke with Bahá'í members at Bahá'í events. Buck has authored, among other works, Alain Locke: Faith and Philosophy (2005); "Alain Locke in His Own Words" (2005); "Alain Locke: Race Leader, Social Philosopher, Bahá'í Pluralist" (2005); "Alain Locke: Dean of the Harlem Renaissance and Bahá'í Race-Amity Leader" (2005); and "Alain Locke: Four Talks Redefining Democracy, Education, and World Citizenship" (2006/2007). Buck contends that a "Bahá'í Historical Record"—which Locke completed and signed in 1935—proves that Locke was a Bahá'í. Note Item #13: "Date of acceptance of the Bahá'í Faith": Locke answered: "1918." Under Item #14: "Place of acceptance of the Bahá'í Faith": Locke wrote: "Washington, D.C." (Buck, "Race Amity & the Bahai Faith" 5).2 At the January 1927 National Spiritual Assembly, Locke—along with Agnes Parsons, Louis Gregory, and others—was appointed to the membership committee.I have argued that Locke was a participant in the Bahá'í community, but evidence that he was a doctrinaire religious believer is lacking. As a pragmatist, Locke was steadfastly against metaphysical absolutism (that a particular belief is true beyond reasonable doubt) and foundationalism (that a First principle is the basis of truth); he favored "truth" as a sort of value, and thereby, a plurality of possible "faiths" could make sense. Locke authored critical pragmatism because he promoted the value of aesthetic virtues and rejected the classical pragmatist reliance on the scientific method to guide our preferences. That is, Locke cannot be a fallibilist and a value relativist while (at the same time) committing himself to one true approach to salvation, one true value ultimate, or one true/foundational divinity. I have co-authored Alain L. Locke: Biography of a Philosopher (2010), one anthology of Locke's philosophic works (1999), and two anthologies of articles about Locke's philosophy (1989, 2010). In each publication, I have assumed that philosophic commitments define what type of faith is acceptable. Are Locke's philosophic commitments and his commitments to Bahá'í principles or faith incompatible? Buck and... (shrink)

Este artículo quisiera introducir al corazón de «la cosa misma». Esta «cosa» no es aquí el sistema hegeliano propiamente en su totalidad. Ello sería pretencioso. Se trata más bien de la estructura de este sistema, es decir de la forma especulativa que determina el desarrollo y el ordenamiento de su contenido y permite captar, en su coherencia específica, las distintas obras donde se expone la sistemática hegeliana. Estas obras son principalmente la Fenomenología del espíritu, la Enciclopedia de las ciencias filosóficas (...) y los diversos Cursos de Berlín. En las obras restantes encontramos todavía la Ciencia de la lógica –que es el despliegue detallado de lo que en forma abreviada encontramos en la lógica de la Enciclopedia– y los Principios de la filosofía del derecho, que constituyen una elaboración más profunda de la parte consagrada al espíritu objetivo en la Enciclopedia. (shrink)

Naturwissenschaften, Mathematik und Logik waren für Nelson von zentraler Bedeutung. Er pflegte bereits als Jugendlicher intensive Kontakte zu Naturwissenschaftlern und Mathematikern. Dadurch erhielt er Anregungen, die von Anfang an seine philosophischen Ansätze beeinflussten. Inspiriert von der Kant-Fries’schen Philosophie und der Axiomatik der Mathematik, konzipierte Nelson seine Philosophie als exakte Wissenschaft. Wie Kant und Fries betrachtete Nelson die Suche nach den allgemeinen Prinzipien der Naturwissenschaften als Hauptaufgabe der Naturphilosophie. Ergebnis dieser kritischen Analyse ist ein System von metaphysischen Grundsätzen der Naturwissenschaft. Nelson (...) übernimmt Kants Lehre von den Grundsätzen des reinen Verstandes. Keine empirisch gefundene Gesetzmäßigkeit könne diesen Grundsätzen widersprechen. Für die Gesetze der Newton’schen Mechanik hätten, so meint Nelson, Kant und Fries diesen Nachweis erbracht. Deshalb formulierte Nelson das sogenannte Postulat der Mechanistik, gemäß dem alle Naturerscheinungen auf mechanische Vorgänge zurückgeführt werden können. Das starre Festhalten an diesem Postulat veranlasste ihn zur Ablehnung bedeutsamer physikalischer Konzeptionen (z. B. des auf der Elektrodynamik basierenden Relativitätsprinzips, des Nahwirkungskonzepts und des Atommodells). Das „Relativitätsprinzip der Elektrodynamik“ lehnte er mit dem Argument ab, es verhindere die Anwendung der dritten Analogie der Erfahrung, da es den Verzicht auf den Begriff der Gleichzeitigkeit von Naturerscheinungen erzwinge. Eine kritische Nelson-Rezeption muss der Historizität etlicher Thesen Nelsons Rechnung tragen, aber zugleich die Bedeutsamkeit von Kernaussagen Nelson’scher Naturphilosophie im Hinblick auf die modernen Naturwissenschaften untersuchen. Das ist auch die Zielrichtung des vorliegenden Beitrages. Der erste Teil beleuchtet Nelsons wissenschaftliches Umfeld. Einerseits wird untersucht, welche Wissenschaftler Nelson beeinflussten, andererseits soll dargestellt werden, welcher Personenkreis an der Fortentwicklung der Nelson’schen Naturphilosophie beteiligt war. Beispielhaft sollen daran anschließend zwei Themenbereiche aus seinem reichhaltigen Werk disktiert werden, denen besonders im Hinblick auf aktuelle philosophische Diskussionsschwerpunkte Bedeutsamkeit zukommt. Im zweiten Teil werden nämlich Nelsons Betrachtungen zum Verhältnis von Freiheit und Naturnotwendigkeit sowie seine Unterscheidung zwischen wissenschaftlicher und ästhetischer Naturbetrachtung besprochen. Der Beitrag beansprucht nicht, die Rezeptionssgeschichte und den Inhalt von Nelsons Naturphilosophie sowie die aktuelle Bedeutsamkeit seiner Thesen im Detail darzustellen aufzuarbeiten. Vielmehr geht es darum, Ansätze für eine zeitgemäße Interpretation Rezeption aufzuzeigen und anhand von Beispielen zu erörtern. (shrink)

Jakob Friedrich Fries (1773–1843) was the most prolific German philosopher of science in the nineteenth century who strived to synthesize Kant’s philosophical foundation of science and mathematics and the needs or practised science and mathematics in order to gain more comprehensive conceptual frameworks and greater methodological flexibility for those two disciplines. His original contributions anticipated later developments, to some extent, though they received comparatively little notice in the later course of the nineteenth century—a fate which partly can be explained by (...) the unfortunate development of the so-called ‘First Friesian School,’ founded by E. F. Apelt, M. J. Schleiden and O. X. Schlömilch. This situation changed temporarily when Leonard Nelson (1882–1927) arrived on the philosophical stage and founded a second, so-called, ‘New Friesian School’ in 1903. In the following two decades, Fries’ specific transformation of Kantian philosophy gained influence within the vigorous discussions about ‘new’ foundations of mathematics and, thus, also played a role within the Berlin Group surrounding Hans Reichenbach, though his work had no direct impact on the philosophy of physics being expounded therein. -/- This essay will first outline some characteristics of Fries’ development of the Kantian approach. Then it will point out the limited impact of the ‘New Friesian School’ on the Berlin Group, while highlighting some missed chances for fruitful exchange. As the originality of this school and its importance for the development of logic and philosophy of mathematics—by and large merits of its early members Walter Dubislav and Kurt Grelling —is dealt with in separate chapters of this volume, and elsewhere, this article will focus on what Fries called the ‘mathematical philosophy of nature’ (i. e. the philosophical foundations of physics). More specifically, it will show how the New Friesian School reacted to Einstein’s theories of relativity, in a way that contrasts with the approach of the Berlin Group. This discussion about relativity will also be used to reveal different understandings of the nature of ‘scientific philosophy’ in general, as well as different models of how philosophy and the empirical sciences should interact. (shrink)

Leonard Berlin (2014) reports that neuroscientific data have been presented in court by lawyers wishing to argue that their clients have reduced or absent moral responsibility for their behaviour b...

This is an important volume for rounding out our understanding of the origins and dimensions of the logical empiricist project. While the existence of a Berlin wing of logical empiricism—personified principally in Hans Reichenbach and Carl G. Hempel—has been well known, in the recent reappraisal literature the spotlight has been firmly on the Vienna Circle. [...] The essays give an expansive sense of the German-Berlin context of the work of not only Reichenbach and Hempel but also their philosophical (...) colleagues Kurt Grelling, Walter Dubislav, and Paul Oppenheim, their philosophical mentors and influences including Leonard Nelson and the Friesian School and Ernst Cassirer, their scientific and mathematical influences including Albert Einstein, David Hilbert, and Bertrand Russell, as well as their scientific colleagues such as Kurt Lewin and Wolfgang Köhler. (shrink)

Classic analysis of the subject and the development of personal probability; one of the greatest controversies in modern statistcal thought.

Thought-intrusions, automatic inferences, and other unintended thought are beginning to play an important role in the study of psychiatric disease as well as normal thought processes. We examine one method for study of task-unrelated imagery and thought . TUIT likelihood was shown to be reliably measured over a wide range of vigilance tasks, to have high short-term and long-term test-retest reliability, and to be sensitive to information processing demands. Likelihood of TUITs was shown to be different as a function of (...) aging, hyperactivity, time of day, and level of depression. Thus, we now can reliably measure the influence of endogenous and exogenous influences on TUITs. In addition, TUIT measurement was proposed as a minimally interfering and natural second task for determining resource utilization in a primary task. Finally, this method was offered as a reliable approach to quantification of such mental states as obsessions and drug craving and addiction. (shrink)

1. Reference and modality by W. V. O. Quine.--2. Modality and description by A. F. Smullyan.--3. Extensionality by R. B. Marcus.--4. Quantification into causal contexts by D. Føllesdal.--5. Semantical considerations on modal logic by S. A. Kripke.--6. Essentialism and quantified modal logic by T. Parsons.--7. Reference, essentialism, and modality by L. Linsky.--8. Quantifiers and propositional attitudes by W. V. O. Quine.--9. Quantifying in by D. Kaplan.--10. Semantics for propositional attitudes by J. Hintikka.--11. On Carnap's analysis of statements of assertion and (...) belief by A. Church.--Bibliography (p. [173]-175). (shrink)

This paper is about epistemic dilemmas, i.e., cases in which one is doomed to have a doxastic attitude that is rationally impermissible no matter what. My aim is to develop and defend a position according to which there can be genuine rational indeterminacy; that is, it can be indeterminate which principles of rationality one should satisfy and thus indeterminate which doxastic attitudes one is permitted or required to have. I am going to argue that this view can resolve epistemic dilemmas (...) in a systematic way while also enjoying some important advantages over its rivals. (shrink)

According to one of the more popular endurantist packages on the market, a package I will call multilocational endurantism, enduring objects are exactly located at multiple instantaneous regions of spacetime. However, for all we know, the world might turn out to be spatiotemporally gunky and spatiotemporal gunk entails that this package is false. The goal of this paper is to sketch a view which retains the spirit of multilocational endurantism while also recognizing the possibility of certain types of objects which (...) endure through gunk. (shrink)

Classic analysis of the subject and the development of personal probability; one of the greatest controversies in modern statistcal thought. New preface and new footnotes to 1954 edition, with a supplementary 180-item annotated bibliography by author. Calculus, probability, statistics, and Boolean algebra are recommended.

Say that mereological harmony is the view that there is at least some mirroring between the mereological structure of material objects and the mereological structure of their locations: each, in some way, mirrors the other. As it turns out, there is a confusing array of systems of harmony available to the substantivalist. In this paper, I attempt to bring some order to these systems. I explore some systems found in the literature, as well as some natural systems which haven’t been (...) discussed. Along the way, I explore a number of metaphysical consequences of the different systems of harmony. The paper ends with a roadmap of possible views for the substantivalist. (shrink)

Dr Brandwood's book presents a factual and critical account of the more important of the various attempts that have been made to establish the order of composition of Plato's dialogues by analysing his diction and prose style. Plato's literary activity covered fifty years and there is almost no direct evidence, either external or internal, to help in establishing the relative order of his writings. Until the middle of the nineteenth century people were dependent on personal interpretation of the probable line (...) of development of Plato's thought and doctrines, but then a less subjective method was discovered, which relied instead on the observation of changes in Plato's prose style. Dr Brandwood examines the investigations of each scholar individually, checking the correctness of the methodology and the accuracy of the statistics, before arriving at fairly definite conclusions of his own, at least as far as the works of Plato's middle and old age are concerned. (shrink)

Can material objects be weakly located at regions of spacetime and yet fail to be exactly located anywhere? In this paper, I discuss a case which, at least according to one interpretation, answers affirmatively: the case of blending gunky water and wine, in gunky space. Perhaps after such a blend, the water and wine aren't exactly located anywhere while being weakly located at the location of the blend and any region which overlaps it. I show that the case is interesting (...) and complicated, and has consequences for some ideas found in papers by Daniel Nolan and Josh Parsons. (shrink)

This edited volume focuses on what Hannah Arendt famously called “the raison d’être of politics”: freedom. The unique collection of essays clarifies her flagship idea of political freedom in relation to other key Arendtian themes such as liberation, revolution, civil disobedience, and the right to have rights. -/- In addressing these, contributors to this volume juxtapose Arendt with a number of thinkers from Isaiah Berlin, John Rawls and Philip Pettit to Karl Marx, Frantz Fanon and Geoffroy de Lagasnerie. They (...) also consider the continuing relevance of Arendt’s work to some of the most dramatic events in recent years, including the current global refugee crisis, the Arab uprisings of the 2010s, and the ongoing crisis of liberal democracy in the West and beyond. -/- Contributors include Keith Breen, Joan Cocks, Tal Correm, Christian J. Emden, Patrick Hayden, Kei Hiruta, Anthony F. Lang Jr., Shmuel Lederman, Miriam Leonard, Natasha Saunders, William Smith, and Shiyu Zhang. (shrink)

Pleasure, in the inclusive usages most important in moral psychology, ethical theory, and the studies of mind, includes all joy and gladness — all our feeling good, or happy. It is often contrasted with similarly inclusive pain, or suffering, which is similarly thought of as including all our feeling bad. Contemporary psychology similarly distinguishes between positive affect and negative affect.[1..

We statisticians, with our specific concern for uncertainty, are even more liable than other practical men to encounter philosophy, whether we like it or not. For my part, I like it comparatively well. That is why the honor of opening this session of discussion has come to me, though my background makes my knowledge and idiom somewhat different from your own.

The Implications of Immanence develops a philosophy of life in opposition to the notion of “bio-power,” which reduces the human to the question of power over what Giorgio Agamben terms “bare life,” mere biological existence. Breaking with all biologism or vitalism, Lawlor attends to the dispersion of death at the heart of life, in the “minuscule hiatus” that divides the living present, separating lived experience from the living body and, crucially for phenomenology, inserting a blind spot into a visual field.Lawlor (...) charts here a post-phenomenological French philosophy. What lies beyond phenomenologyis “life-ism,” the positive working out of the effects of the “minuscule hiatus” in a thinking that takes place on a “plane of immanence,” whose implications cannot be predicted. Life-ism means thinking life and death together, thinking death as dispersed throughout life. In carefully argued and extensively documented chapters, Lawlor sets out the surpassing of phenomenology and the advent of life-ism in Merleau-Ponty, Derrida, and Foucault, with careful attention to the writings by Husserl and Heidegger to which these thinkers refer.A philosophy of life has direct implications for present-day political and medical issues. The book takes its point of departure from the current genocide in Darfur and provides conceptual tools for intervening in such issues as the AIDS epidemic and life-support for the infirm. Indeed, the investigations contained in The Implications of Immanence are designed to help us emerge once and for all out of the epoch of bio-power.“Lawlor’s novel way of treating the concept of life is stimulating, original, and necessary for the social well being of our time.”—Fred Evans, Duquesne University“The Implications of Immanence continues the most promising, rigorous, and fruitful ongoing research project among scholars of twentieth-century philosophy. . . .A wonderful new book.”—John Protevi, Louisiana State University. (shrink)

According to the Interpersonal View of Testimony, testimonial justification is non-evidential in nature. I begin by arguing that the IVT has the following problem: If the IVT is true, then young children and people with autism cannot participate in testimonial exchanges; but young children and people with autism can participate in testimonial exchanges; thus, the IVT should be rejected on the grounds that it has over-cognized what it takes to give and receive testimony. Afterwards, I consider what I take to (...) be the two best motivations for the IVT and argue that they both fail. The overarching lesson, then, is that the IVT is unmotivated and false; we should think of testimonial justification as being evidential in nature. (shrink)

It is plausible that there is a contrast between the rich emotional content which is often connected to laypeople’s interest in philosophy and the emotional austerity of doing academic philosophy. We propose the hypothesis that this contrast is one cause of the disappointment some students experience when they begin to study philosophy in college. We also propose a more demanding hypothesis, according to which this emotional contrast is confused with a semantic difference, which misleads students to think that the questions (...) which initially caused their interest in philosophy are not even considered by academic philosophy research. Moreover, we provide a list of concrete empirical research questions which need to be answered to establish whether these hypotheses are true, and we argue that, if they are true, they give rise to a hitherto unnoticed and important challenge to the teaching of philosophy. (shrink)

This paper is about an anti-expertise paradox that arises because of self-referential sentences like: = I do not believe that is true. The first aim is to motivate, develop, and defend a novel view of epistemic rationality according to which there can be genuine rational indeterminacy, i.e., it can be indeterminate which doxastic states an agent is rationally permitted or required to have. The second aim is to show how this view can provide a solution to this paradox while also (...) avoiding the problems that plague its rivals. (shrink)

Can Rawlsian public reason sufficiently justify public policies that regulate or restrain controversial medical and technological interventions in bioethics (and the broader social world), such as abortion, physician aid-in-dying, CRISPER-cas9 gene editing of embryos, surrogate mothers, pre-implantation genetic diagnosis of eight-cell embryos, and so on? The first part of this essay briefly explicates the central concepts that define Rawlsian political liberalism. The latter half of this essay then demonstrates how a commitment to Rawlsian public reason can ameliorate (not completely resolve) (...) many of the policy disagreements related to bioethically controversial medical interventions today. The goal of public reason is to reduce the size of the disagreement by eliminating features of the disagreement that violate the norms of public reason. The norms of public reason are those norms that are politically necessary to preserve the liberal, pluralistic, democratic character of this society. What remains is reasonable disagreement to be addressed through normal democratic deliberative processes. Specific issues addressed from a public reason perspective include personal responsibility for excessive health costs, the utility of a metaphysical definition of death for organ transplantation, and the moral status of excess embryos generated through IVF and/or their use in medical research. (shrink)

Abstract:In this paper, I offer my reading of John Dewey's Art as Experience and propose implications for music education based on Dewey's ideas. Three principal questions guide my task: What are some key ideas in Dewey's theory of art? How does Dewey's theory of art fit within his larger theory of experience? What are the implications of Dewey's ideas for music education? As I shall show, art for Dewey is rooted in nature, civilizes humans, serves as social glue, and has (...) an important role in society throughout most of human history. Modern life, however, separates art and life; there is a need to restore the continuity between art and the ordinary processes of living, a task that Dewey undertakes by positing the notion of art as experience. Dewey's ideas support an expanded curriculum in music education, one in which popular music may be included alongside Western classical music and music from diverse cultures. However, artistic and educational discernment are needed, which necessitates the need for music educators to be sufficiently steeped in varied musical traditions and styles. (shrink)

Issues of academic integrity, specifically knowledge of, perceptions and attitudes toward plagiarism, are well documented in post-secondary settings using case studies for specific courses, recording discourse with focus groups, analyzing cross-cultural education philosophies, and reviewing the current literature. In this paper, the authors examine the perceptions of graduate students in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics disciplines at the University of Florida regarding misconduct and integrity issues. Results revealed students’ perceptions of the definition and seriousness of potential academic misconduct, knowledge of (...) institutional procedures, and views on faculty actions, all with a focus on divergences between US and internationally-educated students. The open-ended questions provide anecdotal evidence to highlight personal experiences, positive and negative, aimed at the faculty, international students and undergraduates. Combined, these findings outline an important part of the campus academic integrity culture at a major American university. Recommendations for local actions also are discussed. (shrink)

One well-known objection to supersubstantivalism is that it is inconsistent with the contingency of location. This paper presents a new objection to supersubstantivalism: it is inconsistent with the vagueness of location. Though contingency and vagueness are formally similar, there are important philosophical differences between the two. As a result, the objection from vague location will be structurally different than the objection from contingent location. The paper explores these differences and then defends the argument that supersubstantivalism is inconsistent with the plausible (...) thesis that it is vague where I am located. (shrink)

Accelerated approval of aducanumab for mild Alzheimer's by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration on June 7, 2021, has generated substantial medical, scientific, and ethical controversy. That approval was contrary to the nearly unanimous judgment of the FDA's Advisory Committee that little reliable evidence existed of significant benefit, even though the drug did reduce β‐amyloid. Three major ethical problems were created by this approval: (1) Medicare resources would be unjustly squandered, given the drug's $56,000 annual price and the 3.1 million (...) older potential American patients needing the drug; (2) physicians will feel ethically compelled to provide the drug to desperate, insistent patients, given FDA approval and in spite of side effects of brain bleeds and brain swelling; (3) and false hopes are generated for patients. A needed corrective by the federal government would reduce reimbursement to the bare cost of producing the drug (plus only a modest profit) until a phase IV trial has been successfully completed. (shrink)

Scientific method interests the linguist not only as it interests every scientific worker, but also in a special way, because the scientist, as part of his method, utters certain very peculiar speech-forms. The linguist naturally divides scientific activity into two phases: the scientist performs “handling” actions and utters speech. The speech-forms which the scientist utters are peculiar both in their form and in their effect upon hearers.

Park and Davies (2024) address the question of whether vaccine status can be an ethically legitimate criterion for the allocation of scarce medical resources, such as access to an ICU bed and venti...

This scarce antiquarian book is a facsimile reprint of the original. Due to its age, it may contain imperfections such as marks, notations, marginalia and flawed pages. Because we believe this work is culturally important, we have made it available as part of our commitment for protecting, preserving, and promoting the world's literature in affordable, high quality, modern editions that are true to the original work.

De Bie et al. (2023) call attention at the conclusion of their essay to the “novel questions” generated by complete ectogenesis. The question I explore is how complete ectogenesis from conception t...