As editor of the National Anti-Slavery Standard in the early 1840s, Lydia Maria Child was responsible for keeping the abolitionist movement in the United States informed of relevant news. She also...

What is the difference between a performance of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony and the symphony itself? What does it mean for musicians to be faithful to the works they perform? To answer this question, Goehr combines philosophical and historical methods of enquiry. She describes how the concept of a musical work emerged as late as 1800, and how it subsequently defined the norms, expectations, and behavior characteristic of classical musical practice. Out of the historical thesis, Goehr draws philosophical conclusions about the (...) normative functions of concepts and ideals. She also addresses current debates amongst conductors, early-music performers, and avant-gardists. (shrink)

Two fragments of the Lydiaca attributed to Xanthus of Lydia preserve a curious claim that a king of Lydia was the first person to make eunuchs of women. In an attempt to make sense of these passages, it has been suggested that εὐνουχίζειν here refers not to castration, but rather to female genital cutting. If correct, this would provide our first evidence of this practice in Lydian culture or indeed anywhere in Anatolia. However, the assumption that what Xanthus (...) describes somehow related to real practices is highly questionable. Instead, we should re-contextualize this story in terms of other fifth-century representations of luxury and eunuchs and in terms of Xanthus’ own exemplary portraits of other Lydian kings. (shrink)

Physicians, philosophers, and theologians consider how to address death and dying for a diverse population in a secularized century.Most of us are generally ill-equipped for dying. Today, we neither see death nor prepare for it. But this has not always been the case. In the early fifteenth century, the Roman Catholic Church published the Ars moriendi texts, which established prayers and practices for an art of dying. In the twenty-first century, physicians rely on procedures and protocols for the efficient management (...) of hospitalized patients. How can we recapture an art of dying that can facilitate our dying well? In this book, physicians, philosophers, and theologians attempt to articulate a bioethical framework for dying well in a secularized, diverse society.Contributors discuss such topics as the acceptance of human finitude; the role of hospice and palliative medicine; spiritual preparation for death; and the relationship between community, and individual autonomy. They also consider special cases, including children, elderly patients with dementia, and death in the early years of the AIDS epidemic, when doctors could do little more than accompany their patients in humble solidarity.These chapters make the case for a robust bioethics—one that could foster both the contemplation of finitude and the cultivation of community that would be necessary for a contemporary art of dying well.ContributorsJeffrey P. Bishop, Lisa Sowle Cahill, Daniel Callahan, Farr A. Curlin, Lydia S. Dugdale, Michelle Harrington, John Lantos, Stephen R. Latham, M. Therese Lysaught, Autumn Alcott Ridenour, Peter A. Selwyn, Daniel Sulmasy. (shrink)

This book investigates the role of humor in the good life, specifically as discussed by three prominent French intellectuals who were influenced by Nietzsche's thought: Georges Bataille, Gilles Deleuze, and Clément Rosset. Lydia Amir begins by discussing Nietzsche's reception in France, and she explains why and how he came to be considered a "philosopher of laughter" in the French academe. Each of the subsequent three chapters focuses on the significance of humor and laughter in the good life as advocated (...) by Bataille, Deleuze, and Rosset. These chapters also explore the complex relationship between the comic and the tragic, and of humor and laughter to irony, satire, and ridicule. The Legacy of Nietzsche's Philosophy of Laughter makes an invaluable contribution to recent interpretive work done on Bataille and Deleuze, and offers further introduction to the relatively understudied Rosset. It illuminates the philosophies of these three thinkers, their connection to Nietzsche, and, overall, the significant role that humor plays in philosophy. (shrink)

The Marburg neo-Kantians argue that Hermann von Helmholtz's empiricist account of the a priori does not account for certain knowledge, since it is based on a psychological phenomenon, trust in the regularities of nature. They argue that Helmholtz's account raises the 'problem of validity' (Gueltigkeitsproblem): how to establish a warranted claim that observed regularities are based on actual relations. I reconstruct Heinrich Hertz's and Ludwig Wittgenstein's Bild theoretic answer to the problem of validity: that scientists and philosophers can depict the (...) necessary a priori constraints on states of affairs in a given system, and can establish whether these relations are actual relations in nature. The analysis of necessity within a system is a lasting contribution of the Bild theory. However, Hertz and Wittgenstein argue that the logical and mathematical sentences of a Bild are rules, tools for constructing relations, and the rules themselves are meaningless outside the theory. Carnap revises the argument for validity by attempting to give semantic rules for translation between frameworks. Russell and Quine object that pragmatics better accounts for the role of a priori reasoning in translating between frameworks. The conclusion of the tale, then, is a partial vindication of Helmholtz's original account. (shrink)

This volume presents a penetrating interview and sixteen essays that explore key intersections of medieval religion and philosophy. With characteristic erudition and insight, Rémi_ _Brague focuses less on individual Christian, Jewish, and Muslim thinkers than on their relationships with one another. Their disparate philosophical worlds, Brague shows, were grounded in different models of revelation that engendered divergent interpretations of the ancient Greek sources they held in common. So, despite striking similarities in their solutions for the philosophical problems they all faced, (...) intellectuals in each theological tradition often viewed the others’ ideas with skepticism, if not disdain. Brague’s portrayal of this misunderstood age brings to life not only its philosophical and theological nuances, but also lessons for our own time. (shrink)

Has inquiry into the meaning of life become outmoded in a universe where the other-worldiness of religion no longer speaks to us as it once did, or, as Nietzsche proposed, where we are now the creators of our own value? Has the ancient question of the "good life" disappeared, another victim of the technological world? For Luc Ferry, the answer to both questions is a resounding no. In _What Is the Good Life? _Ferry argues that the question of the meaning (...) of life, on which much philosophical debate throughout the centuries has rested, has not vanished, but at the very least the question is posed differently today. Ferry points out the pressures in our secularized world that tend to reduce the idea of a successful life or "good life" to one of wealth, career satisfaction, and prestige. Without deserting the secular presuppositions of our world, he shows that we can give ourselves a richer sense of life's possibilities. The "good life" consists of harmonizing life's different forces in a way that enables one to achieve a sense of personal satisfaction in the realization of one's creative abilities. (shrink)

Philosophers in the nineteenth century took laughter and its related concepts very seriously. Most philosophers before this period treated laughter as tangential to philosophy’s core concerns, but beginning with Kant’s immediate successors, the family of concepts relating to the laughable—including comedy, wit, irony, and ridicule—took on new significance. They went from describing something derivative about humans to telling us what we, in the most basic sense, are. Well-known philosophers such as Hegel, Schopenhauer, Kierkegaard, and Nietzsche offered substantial treatments of these (...) topics; they were also taken up by lesser-known thinkers such as Rosenkranz, Solger, Jean Paul, Bahnsen, and Bergson. The nineteenth century also saw the introduction of humor in particular as a new and distinct aesthetic category. For several philosophers of this period, humor described nothing less than the relationship between the human and the divine and its implications for how humans should live. It described our awareness of our finitude—our fallibility, our petty concerns, our meaningless obsessions—and the amusement tinged with melancholy this awareness elicits. Despite this wealth of theorizing, the nineteenth century is often neglected in studies of the philosophy of laughter and humor. This essay introduces a volume of articles intended to remedy that neglect. (shrink)

This essay interrogates the motives of eighteenth-century European naturalists to alternately show and hide their laboring-class fossil suppliers. Focusing on rare moments of heightened visibility, I ask why gentlemen naturalists occasionally, deliberately, and even performatively made visible the marginalized science workers on whom they crucially depended but more typically ignored or effaced. Comparing archival fragments from elite works of natural history across a considerable stretch of time and space, including Italy, France, Switzerland, Britain, Ireland, Germany, Spain, and French, Spanish, and (...) British America, this essay sketches the contours of a disparate group of people I term ‘earth workers’: laborers of very low social rank, such as quarrymen, shepherds, ditch-diggers, and fieldworkers, whose daily labor in and on the earth enabled the discovery of subterranean specimens. At the same time, archival traces of laboring lives ultimately reveal more about the naturalists who created them than they do about the marginalized laborers whose lives they faintly record. Cultural norms of elite masculinity and scholarly self-presentation in the Republic of Letters help us to understand why some eighteenth-century naturalists felt they had to publicly disavow a form of labor that would come to be recognized as a crucial and skilled part of scientific fieldwork in the modern era. Compared to other kinds of invisible labor that historians of science have brought into view, the social meaning of earth work rendered it uniquely visible in some ways and uniquely invisible in others. (shrink)

This paper investigates the claim that artificial Intelligence Systems cannot be held morally responsible because they do not have an ability for agential self-awareness e.g. they cannot be aware that they are the agents of an action. The main suggestion is that if agential self-awareness and related first person representations presuppose an awareness of a self, the possibility of responsible artificial intelligence systems cannot be evaluated independently of research conducted on the nature of the self. Focusing on a specific account (...) of the self from the phenomenological tradition, this paper suggests that a minimal necessary condition that artificial intelligence systems must satisfy so that they have a capability for self-awareness, is having a minimal self defined as ‘a sense of ownership’. As this sense of ownership is usually associated with having a living body, one suggestion is that artificial intelligence systems must have similar living bodies so they can have a sense of self. Discussing cases of robotic animals as examples of the possibility of artificial intelligence systems having a sense of self, the paper concludes that the possibility of artificial intelligence systems having a ‘sense of ownership’ or a sense of self may be a necessary condition for having responsibility. (shrink)

This paper will focus on a famous nineteenth century debate over the physiology of perception between Ewald Hering and Hermann von Helmholtz. This debate is often explained as a contest between empiricism (Helmholtz) and nativism (Hering) about perception. I will argue that this is only part of the picture. Hering was a pioneer of Lamarckian explanations, arguing for an early version of the biogenetic law. Hering explains physical processes, including perception, in terms of ‘organic memory’ that is supported by ‘vital (...) forces’ located throughout the body. Helmholtz, on the other hand, argues that vital forces are in direct conflict with the results he and others proved in the 1840s and 50s on the conservation of force. The battleground of the debate was the interpretation of Johannes Müller’s ‘law of specific nerve energies’, which Hering interpreted in terms of vital forces, and Helmholtz interpreted using a naturalized neo-Kantian approach. In the end, the debate revealed deep fissures in nineteenth century accounts of scientific explanation, as well as in the conception of how physiology, psychology, physics, and philosophy are related. (shrink)

European Journal of Philosophy, EarlyView.

Is it epistemically vicious to be attached to a specific scientific paradigm? Such attachment clearly violates a norm of impartiality that is associated with the value-free ideal of science. I will argue that what Samuel Scheffler (2022) calls ‘evaluative attachment’ is not always epistemically vicious. In section 1, I will present Kuhn’s account of paradigms as embodying not just theoretical positions but also a ‘constellation of group commitments’ that Kuhn came to call a ‘disciplinary matrix’ (2012/1962, postscript). Section 2 evaluates (...) Popper’s and Davidson’s criticisms of Kuhn, drawing on the work of Pablo Melogno (2020). Section 3 evaluates the claim that impartiality is a significant source of the value we accord to science. Section 4 appeals to Samuel Scheffler’s (2022) concept of evaluative attachment to argue that partiality to a specific framework or paradigm is not an epistemic vice. I conclude with brief observations, to be elaborated in future work, on how this argument applies to science in particular. (shrink)

Hermann von Helmholtz (1821-1894) participated in two of the most significant developments in physics and in the philosophy of science in the 19th century: the proof that Euclidean geometry does not describe the only possible visualizable and physical space, and the shift from physics based on actions between particles at a distance to the field theory. Helmholtz achieved a staggering number of scientific results, including the formulation of energy conservation, the vortex equations for fluid dynamics, the notion of free energy (...) in thermodynamics, and the invention of the ophthalmoscope. His constant interest in the epistemology of science guarantees his enduring significance for philosophy. (shrink)

This systematic review synthesises the available evidence regarding the European understanding of workplace spirituality (definitions), the importance of spirituality and religion (evidence) as well as spiritual leadership (meaning and practice) in for-profitorganizations. The search for eligible studies was conducted in OPAC Plus, SCOPUS, Science Direct, JSTOR, EBSCO, and Google Scholar from 2007/01 to 2017/07. Three independent scholars extracted the data. Twenty studies were included (two mixed-methods, eight quantitative, ten qualitative) for the final quality assessment. A study quality assessment and thematic (...) analysis was conducted. This review gives suggestions for study quality improvement and reporting. Thematically, two different approaches to religion and spirituality (R/S) were detected: a) work has a spiritual dimension and b) religious and spiritual orientation as “spiritual capital”. Studies demonstrated positive effect on job satisfaction, health, commitment, company productivity and sustainability; Christian leadership does not address personal religious orientation; the spiritual dimension may lead to a change of perspective; workplace spirituality may exploit people for profit-oriented business goals; non-white Muslims experience discrimination. This systematic review provides robust evidence and findings for evidence-informed policymaking and encourages a more rigorous research in this field of study. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Diacritics 29.4 (1999) 150-177 [Access article in PDF] The Desire for the Sovereign and the Logic of Reciprocity in the Family of Nations Lydia H. Liu It may sound like a truism that the modern nation cannot imagine itself except in sovereign terms. But what is this truism saying or, rather, withholding from us? When Benedict Anderson wrote his influential study of nationalism in 1983, he circumscribed the (...) imagining of the nation as "both inherently limited and sovereign" and relied on this basic understanding to explain the global transformation of dynastic empires into nation-states [Imagined Communities 6]. That insight, however, has not drawn to itself as much attention or scrutiny as some of his other concepts, like "print capitalism" or "creole nationalisms." If one were to name a few of the blind spots in the contemporary discussions of nationalism, cosmopolitanism, and diaspora, one of them would be the place and placing of sovereignty and sovereign right. To those of us whose initial purpose has been to historicize the nation and nationalism, this blind spot cannot but raise some serious methodological and interpretive questions. Insofar as sovereignty articulates a major mode of exchange between nation and empire in recent history and moreover figures prominently in the realm of what Anderson calls "quotidian universals" [Spectre of Comparisons 33], the truism of its truth needs to be unpacked carefully.Hence, I would like to raise some tentative questions about desire and sovereignty, not in terms of legal studies, but in light of what we have learned about colonial exchange and its production of difference, fetishism, identity, and the logic of reciprocity. I am going to show that these intellectual and material developments have had significant bearings on the making of international law such that our inquiry into the latter can no longer be confined to the self-explanatory evolution of legal discourse. For sovereign thinking is one of those areas that must be reexamined, to borrow Edward Said's words, "according to a detailed logic governed not simply by empirical reality but by a battery of desires, repressions, investments, and projections" [18].In this essay, I begin with a critical analysis of Benedict Anderson's work, focusing on the interplay of the historical and the universal in his study of the nation. I am particularly interested in examining what Anderson chose to do, or not to do, with sovereignty in his theory of nationalism, and I raise some questions about his idea of the "modular," whereby the universal takes on the role of a migrant figure making histories [End Page 150] here and there. Section two introduces the subject of fetishism and desire into the discussion by linking the display of the thrones of the Emperor Qianlong in British museums to significant moments of sovereign thinking in the reign of Queen Victoria and the Empress Dowager of China at the turn of the century. In section three, I attempt a detailed discussion of the sovereignty complex of Ku Hung-ming, a diasporic subject who grew up in colonial Malaysia, was educated in Europe, and ended up serving China as his adopted sovereign country. My analysis centers on Ku's well-known defense of the Empress Dowager during the popular nationalist uprising of 1900 and his work as a translator and publicist in Anglo-Chinese military confrontations. Finally, I turn to the theories of international law itself and ask how nineteenth-century jurists revised the notion of sovereignty to arrive at a new constitutive theory of recognition in the heyday of imperialist expansion. I argue that any attempt to explain the rise of the modern nation-state must take full account of this significant revision in the early nineteenth century, because the revision signaled a paradigmatic shift from natural law to positivist jurisprudence to the effect that a constitutive understanding of sovereign right would eventually overcome and displace the natural law notion of universal sovereignty. Sovereign Thinking in Migrant Nationalisms In Imagined Communities, Anderson pointed to sovereignty as a necessary condition in thinking about the nation when, for example, he... (shrink)

Because the demand for health services outstrips the available resources, priority setting is one of the most difficult issues faced by health policy makers, particularly those in developing countries. Priority setting in developing countries is fraught with uncertainty due to lack of credible information, weak priority setting institutions, and unclear priority setting processes. Efforts to improve priority setting in these contexts have focused on providing information and tools. In this paper we argue that priority setting is a value laden and (...) political process, and although important, the available information and tools are not sufficient to address the priority setting challenges in developing countries. Additional complementary efforts are required. Hence, a strategy to improve priority setting in developing countries should also include: (i) capturing current priority setting practices, (ii) improving the legitimacy and capacity of institutions that set priorities, and (iii) developing fair priority setting processes. (shrink)

In Hegel on Political Identity, Lydia Moland provocatively draws on Hegel's political philosophy to engage sometimes contentious contemporary issues such as patriotism, national identity, and cosmopolitanism. Moland argues that patriotism for Hegel indicates an attitude toward the state, whereas national identity is a response to culture. The two combine, Hegel claims, to enable citizens to develop concrete freedom. Moland argues that Hegel's account of political identity extends to his notorious theory of world history; she also proposes that his resistance (...) to cosmopolitanism be reassessed in response to our globalized world. By focusing on Hegel's depiction of political identity as a central part of modern life, Moland shows the potential of Hegel's philosophy to address issues that lie at the heart of ethical and political philosophy. (shrink)

With reference to imagery from Matthias Grünewald’s masterpiece, the _Isenheim Altarpiece_, this essay considers how health-care practitioners especially— but all of us in practice—can learn to wonder in a way that does not objectify the differently abled but instead honors them. Wondering at the images in Grünewald’s work requires humility, curiosity, patience, compassion, and grit—virtues that all health-care professionals would do well to cultivate.

Consideration of social cognition—how an individual’s decision-making is influenced by her/his social environment—is key to understanding the behaviour of socially living nonhuman primates. In this chapter we discuss primate social cognition by focusing on primates’ behavioural responses to the presence and actions of others, how they adjust their behaviour to maximize their own gains, and possibly also the rewards received by a partner. Individuals can observe and replicate the actions of others, or the outcomes of their actions, to accelerate behavioural (...) acquisition of techniques to obtain rewards. Beyond passively observing others, primates can also work with group mates to obtain rewards more easily or to get rewards that would otherwise be unattainable by a single individual. Although not universally seen among primates, one individual may also help another to acquire resources. Prosocial and collaborative interactions may result in an imbalance of benefits received, and certain primate species respond negatively when receiving less than a social partner, a response which may protect individuals against cheating. Such behaviours demonstrate how the interplay between an individual’s desires and those of others can modify behavioural outcomes and the importance of considering cognition from a social perspective in order to understand the decision-making of individuals. However, there is variation both within and between species in their sensitivity to the actions of others and their responses to them. Thus, a comparative framework is needed when studying what is meant by ‘primate social cognition’. (shrink)

The most influential physicist of the 20th century considered his scientific activity to be a contribution to ,,cosmic religion". Starting from his own writings, the article presents Einstein's religious views and questions the extent to which his pantheistic convictions can provide the necessary foundations for human knowledge and action. German Der bedeutendste Physiker des 20. Jahrhunderts fasste seine wissenschaftliche Tätigkeit als Beitrag zur ,,kosmischen Religion auf. Der Artikel zeichnet die Religionsauffassung Einsteins an Hand von Originaltexten nach und fragt, inwieweit seine (...) weitgehend pantheistisch geprägten Überzeugungen menschliches Wissen und Handeln begründen können. (shrink)

According to Thomas Pogge’s theory of human rights, those of us in the developed world have a negative duty to the global poor. In other words, our responsibility to them is not merely to help them but to stop harming them by hoarding natural resources and imposing unfair institutional structures. I argue that Hegel would agree that we have a responsibility to the global poor and that he would also agree with some of Pogge’s institutional diagnosis. Hegel thought that civil (...) society, as a new institution in his time, generated new responsibilities; he would, I argue, have thought the same about a globalized civil society. I discuss recognition as a possible foundation for this obligation and emphasize Hegel’s preference for a representative structure based on economics rather than geography as part of a possible solution. (shrink)

A subject’s ethical agency is closely tied up with her particular commitments: her ethnic group, her family, her beliefs, her occupation. The question of how these specific commitments relate to the subject’s actions is therefore pivotal to describing moral agency. Christine Korsgaard has proposed a theory whereby a subject’s commitments are an essential part of her moral agency, namely her practical identity. According to this theory, having commitments is normative, a necessary component of an agent’s respect for her own humanity. (...) Obligation to other humans is an essential part of our practical identity, and our unavoidable responsiveness to the call of other humans assures that we will feel our obligation to them. I argue that explaining practical identity as necessary to ethical agency begins to describe the role of commitments in our agency, but that this description must go further to address the real import of commitments in ethical life. (shrink)

David Lewis has proposed an analysis of lawhood in terms of membership of a system of regularities optimizing simplicity and strength in information content. This article studies his proposal against the broader background of the project of Humean supervenience. In particular, I claim that, in Lewis's account of lawhood, his intuition about small deviations from a given law in nearby worlds (in order to avoid backtracking and epiphenomena) leads to the conclusion that laws do not support (certain) counterfactuals and do (...) not bestow nomic necessity on (certain) facts induced by these laws. Support of counterfactuals and nomic necessity, however, are widely held to be important aspects of the concept of lawhood. In my view, therefore, it is not possible to abandon these criteria in any satisfactory analysis of the notion of laws of nature. In a final section, I suggest that the whole project of Humean supervenience is misleading. It does not sufficiently take notice of the important role that reasoning about contrary-to-fact situations plays in modern scientific practice. (shrink)

A profoundly original philosophical detective story tracing the surprising history of an anecdote ranging across centuries of traditions, disciplines, and ideas Red Sea-Red Square-Red Thread is a work of passages taken, written, painted, and sung. It offers a genealogy of liberty through a micrology of wit. It follows the long history of a short anecdote. Commissioned to depict the biblical passage through the Red Sea, a painter covered over a surface with red paint, explaining thereafter that the Israelites had already (...) crossed over and that the Egyptians were drowned. Clearly, not all you see is all you get. Who was the painter and who the first teller of the tale? Designed as a philosophical detective story, Red Sea-Red Square-Red Thread follows the extraordinary number of thinkers and artists who have used the Red Sea anecdote to make so much more than a merely anecdotal point. Leading the large cast are the philosophers, Arthur Danto and Søren Kierkegaard, the poet and playwright, Henri Murger, the opera composer, Giacomo Puccini, and the painter and print-maker, William Hogarth. Strange companions perhaps, until their use of the anecdote is shown as working its extraordinary passage through so many cosmopolitan cities of art and capital. What about the anecdote brings Danto's philosophy of art into conversation with Kierkegaard's stages on life's way, with Murger and Puccini's la vie de bohème, and with Hogarth's modern moral pictures? Lydia Goehr explores these narratives of emancipation in philosophy, theology, politics, and the arts. What has the passage of the Israelites to do with the Egyptians who, by many gypsy names, came to be branded as bohemians when arriving in France from the German lands of Bohemia? What have Moses and monotheism to do with the history of monism and the monochrome? And what sort of thread connects a sea to a square when each is so purposefully named red? (shrink)

Concentrating on the music, politics, and philosophy of Richard Wagner, Lydia Goehr addresses some fundamental questions of German Romanticism: Is all music musical? Is music made less musical by the presence of words? What is musical autonomy? How do composers avoid censorship? How are composers affected by exile? Can music articulate a 'politics for the future'? What is the relation between music and philosophy?

In my dissertation, I present Hermann Cohen's foundation for the history and philosophy of science. My investigation begins with Cohen's formulation of a neo-Kantian epistemology. I analyze Cohen's early work, especially his contributions to 19th century debates about the theory of knowledge. I conclude by examining Cohen's mature theory of science in two works, The Principle of the Infinitesimal Method and its History of 1883, and Cohen's extensive 1914 Introduction to Friedrich Lange's History of Materialism. In the former, Cohen gives (...) an historical and philosophical analysis of the foundations of the infinitesimal method in mathematics. In the latter, Cohen presents a detailed account of Heinrich Hertz's Principles of Mechanics of 1894. Hertz considers a series of possible foundations for mechanics, in the interest of finding a secure conceptual basis for mechanical theories. Cohen argues that Hertz's analysis can be completed, and his goal achieved, by means of a philosophical examination of the role of mathematical principles and fundamental concepts in scientific theories. (shrink)

How should human beings and robots interact with one another? Nyholm’s answer to this question is given below in the form of a conditional: If a robot looks or behaves like an animal or a human being then we should treat them with a degree of moral consideration (p. 201). Although this is not a novel claim in the literature on ai ethics, what is new is the reason Nyholm gives to support this claim; we should treat robots that look (...) like human or non-human animals with a certain degree of moral restraint out of respect for human beings or other beings with moral status. Although Danaher or Coeckelbergh also claim that we should treat robots with a degree of moral consideration, the reasons they give for making this claim focus on duties or rights attaching to the robot themselves (see J. Danaher, “Welcoming Robots into the Moral Circle: A Defence of Ethical Behaviourism,” Science and Engineering Ethics, (2019): 1–27 or M. Coeckelbergh, “Moral Appearances: Emotions, Robots and Human Morality,” Ethics and Information Technology, 12(3) (2010): 235–241.). Nyholm disagrees with this type of reasoning and claims that until robots develop a human or animal like inner life, we have no direct duties to the robots themselves. Rather, it is out of respect for human beings or other beings with moral status that we should treat some robots with moral restraint. Gerdes, similarly inspired by Kant, focuses on the human agent to argue that we should avoid treating robots in cruel ways because this may corrupt the human agent’s character (see A. Gerdes, “The Issue of Moral Consideration in Robot Ethics,” siggas Computers and Society, 45(3) (2015): 274–279.). Nyholm’s contribution here is to extend this view such that the corruption or harm being done is against the humanity in all of us. (shrink)

Examining changing role models for masculine identity--from cowboy in the 1950s to Terminator in the 1990s, from flesh-and-blood man to machine--this book suggests that men need new role models and that sufficient room needs to be left for the expression of male vulnerability, a psychic space that would accept attitudes and behaviors traditionally labeled as "feminine." This new model, Badinter argues, may reduce the profound effects of homophobia and misogyny.

In this paper we position ourselves against idealist presuppositions so frequent in the humanities and social sciences, and, particularly, in communication theory. We argue that a realist approach to the study of communication avoiding such implausible assumptions is not only possible, but has already been exemplified in proposals that take communication to be a phenomenon with a biological origin. We argue that this sort of perspective can account for the variety of communicative functions we encounter in human experience, including the (...) ones involving senses. (shrink)

Background: Advocacy and activism are dynamic terms representing a spectrum of political action, aiming to achieve social or political change. The extent to which nursing advocacy and activism are legitimate nursing roles has been debated for around 50 years. Nursing regulatory documents, such as codes of conduct and professional standards, may provide direction to nurses on how they should act in the context of advocacy and activism. Aim: To explore what regulatory documents say about advocacy and activism, either explicitly or (...) implicitly, and how they shape advocacy and activism. Research design: We used a Reflexive Qualitative Document Analysis approach with a Critical Feminist lens to analyse contemporary nursing regulatory documents from the USA, UK and Australia. Ethical considerations: This article has no human participants, and informed consent was not required. Findings: We identified eight nursing regulatory documents from the American Nurses Association, Nursing and Midwifery Council and Nursing and Midwifery Board of Australia. We constructed two major themes that reveal how nursing advocacy and activism are conceived and shaped in regulatory documents. Theme 1, Ideological arena describes the gendered and neoliberal subtexts influencing advocacy and activism. Theme 2, A five-pointed star, describes the shape of advocacy and activism in the regulatory documents. Conclusions: Regulatory documents from the USA, UK and Australia support diplomatic nursing advocacy and activism for people, equity, ourselves (nurses), the profession and systems change. However, more oppositional and disruptive advocacy and activism are potentially constrained by gendered and neoliberal subtexts that depoliticise nurses’ roles. (shrink)

Two different types of objections to the historical investigation of miracles imply that such investigation is inappropriate or can never lead to rational belief that a historical miracle has occurred. The first objection concerns the alleged chasm between the rational realm of history and the realm of faith. The second objection alleges that God is, or would be if he existed, too much unlike ourselves for us reasonably to use Divine action as an explanatory hypothesis. Both objections involve a tacit (...) question-begging move against the traditional theistic hypothesis that a God exists who is capable of revealing himself to man by public signs. The theist should be free to test the hypothesis of a God who speaks rather than a God who is necessarily separated from his creatures. (shrink)

A partial listing of researchers in the history and philosophy of science who passed away in 2015-2018.