“Tell me," Wittgenstein once asked a friend, "why do people always say, it was natural for man to assume that the sun went round the earth rather than that the earth was rotating?" His friend replied, "Well, obviously because it just looks as though the Sun is going round the Earth." Wittgenstein replied, "Well, what would it have looked like if it had looked as though the Earth was rotating?” What would it have looked like if we looked at all (...) sciences from the viewpoint of Wittgenstein’s philosophy? Wittgenstein is undoubtedly one of the most influential philosophers of the twentieth century. His complex body of work has been analysed by numerous scholars, from mathematicians and physicists, to philosophers, linguists, and beyond. This volume brings together some of his central perspectives as applied to the modern sciences and studies the influence they may have on the thought processes underlying science and on the world view it engenders. The contributions stem from leading scholars in philosophy, mathematics, physics, economics, psychology and human sciences; all of them have written in an accessible style that demands little specialist knowledge, whilst clearly portraying and discussing the deep issues at hand. (shrink)

Plato's Timaeus contains a powerful and influential myth, of the construction of the universe by a divine craftsman. A god imposes reason on necessity, to bring order from a primeval 'receptacle' of disordered matter. There results the 'child' that is the cosmos - a copy of an eternally-existing perfect model. Here eight new essays from a distinguished international cast, explore aspects of this challenging work: the principles of the mythical narrative, how the world soul and human body are formed, implications (...) for illness - mental and physical, the importance of music and harmonious proportion. Later developments are also treated: Aristotle's theory of generation, the commentary of Proclus and elements of modern evolutionary theory. (shrink)

Central to the particularist project, one that has become the consensus in the philosophy of conspiracy theory theory, is the claim that a general dismissal of these things called `conspiracy theories' is unsustainable. That is, if we want to say a conspiracy theory is suspicious such that we should not believe it, then we have to engage in at least some investigation of it. Particularists have detailed just why a general attitude of skepticism towards conspiracy theories is implausible; they have, (...) in effect, created the case against generalism. The case for particularism, then, has largely been about challenging and rebutting generalist arguments. But what of the bigger picture? If particularists argue that we should not assume conspiracy theories are mad, bad, or dangerous but, rather, investigate them, then how should we go about that investigation? In this paper I describe (some) of the preliminary concerns the particularist (and the generalist) needs to account for when developing an ethics of investigation into these things called `conspiracy theories.' Whilst this paper does not provide a framework for the investigation of conspiracy theories, it provides the framework for such a framework. (shrink)

This volume offers the first-ever complete English translation of Leibniz’s Dissertatio De Arte Combinatoria together with a critical edition of the original Latin text on fa...

Research on conspiracy theories has proliferated since 2016, in part due to the US election of President Trump, the COVID-19 pandemic, and increasingly threatening environmental conditions. In the rush to publication given these concerning social consequences, researchers have increasingly treated as definitive a 2016 paper by Michael Wood (Political Psychology, 37(5), 695–705, 2016) that concludes that the phrase “conspiracy theory” has no negative effect upon people’s willingness to endorse a claim. We revisit Wood’s findings and its (re)uptake in the recent (...) literature. Is the label “conspiracy theory” a pejorative? If so, does it sway or affect people’s belief in specific claims of conspiracy (i.e. particular conspiracy theories), or is the effect one that concerns claims of conspiracy more generally (i.e. all conspiracy theories)? Through an examination of the conceptual and methodological scope of Wood’s work and the results of our similar quasi-experimental design, we argue that it is premature to suggest the label “conspiracy theory” has no impact on the believability of a claim, or that it has no rhetorical power. (shrink)

This collection of essays on themes in the work of John Locke , George Berkeley , and David Hume , provides a deepened understanding of major issues raised in the Empiricist tradition. In exploring their shared belief in the experiential nature of mental constructs, The Empiricists illuminates the different methodologies of these great Enlightenment philosophers and introduces students to important metaphysical and epistemological issues including the theory of ideas, personal identity, and skepticism. It will be especially useful in courses devoted (...) to the history of modern philosophy. (shrink)

Few residency training programmes explicitly require substantive exposure to issues in medical ethics and fewer still have a formal curriculum in this area. Traditional undergraduate medical ethics courses teach preclinical students to identify ethical issues and analyse them at a theoretical level. Residency training, however, is the ideal time to establish the critical behavioural link which makes ethics truly useful in clinical medicine. The General Internal Medicine Residency Training Program at Rhode Island Hospital has developed an integrated, three-year curriculum with (...) the goals of helping residents to perceive ethical issues in clinical practice, to utilise basic philosophical principles in resolving ethical dilemmas and to communicate these issues clearly and sensitively to patients. The curriculum has been well received by residents and has had a hospital-wide impact. We believe that training residents in medical ethics and communication skills is an effective approach to developing physicians' humane qualities. (shrink)

Looking at set of 76 representative articles published by social psychologists between 2017 and 2023 (reviewed between December 2022 and February 2023), I examine the role of motivating examples---a kind of illustrative example, typically used by researchers at the beginning of their work to motivate the issue or problem they want to resolve or address in that work---in the social psychological work on conspiracy theory. Through an examination of the language around how motivating examples are introduced and used in the (...) social psychological literature, I argue that the abstract and vague way that social psychologists employ such examples ends up relying on what Joseph Uscinski and Adam Enders deem as an unviable and easily abused `I-know-it-when-I-see-it' standard. As will be demonstrated, much of the recent work in the social psychology of conspiracy theory assumes and thus fails to establish what is supposedly problematic about belief in the conspiracy theories used as motivating examples. As a consequence the surveyed work typically fails to adequately capture belief in actual conspiracy theories, let alone establish a case for a general suspicion of such beliefs. This work, then, adds to and extends upon existing critiques of the social psychology of conspiracy theory by members of the wider community of scholars studying conspiracy theories. The upshot of this research is that if social psychologists want their work to be of use to the broader scholarly community studying these things called `conspiracy theories', then they need to connect their work on the problems of conspiracy beliefs or mindsets to concrete examples of belief in unwarranted conspiracy theories. (shrink)

Recently, Bohr’s complementarity principle was assessed in setups involving delayed choices. These works argued in favor of a reformulation of the aforementioned principle so as to account for situations in which a quantum system would simultaneously behave as wave and particle. Here we defend a framework that, supported by well-known experimental results and consistent with the decoherence paradigm, allows us to interpret complementarity in terms of correlations between the system and an informer. Our proposal offers formal definition and operational interpretation (...) for the dual behavior in terms of both nonlocal resources and the couple work-information. Most importantly, our results provide a generalized information-based trade-off for the wave–particle duality and a causal interpretation for delayed-choice experiments. (shrink)

This book presents state of the art philosophical work on conspiracy theory research that brings in sharp focus on central and important insights concerning the supposed irrationality of conspiracy theory and conspiracy theory belief, while also proposing several novel solutions to long standing issues in the broader academic debate on these things called ‘conspiracy theories’. -/- It features a critical history of conspiracy theory theory, emphasising the role of the ‘first generation’ of philosophers in conspiracy theory research. This book also (...) includes discussions of a range of key issues such as: -/- What counts as conspiracy theory? Who counts as a conspiracy theorist? How are these terms variously understood by academics and the wider public, and Are conspiracy theories automatically suspect, and is it ever reasonable to be a conspiracy theorist? The book then builds upon that work by looking at how people’s political views affect both the conspiracy theories they believe and their beliefs about conspiracy theories; how we might defend conspiracy theorising without endorsing mad, bad or dangerous conspiracy theories; and contains several proposals for unifying conspiracy theory research under one theoretical framework: particularism. -/- This volume will be a key resource for philosophers and social scientists interested in recent work on the philosophy of conspiracy theory theory and its implications for conspiracy theory research. It will also appeal to members of the public, who want to know what, if anything, is wrong with these things called “conspiracy theories”. It was originally published as a special issue of Social Epistemology. (shrink)

Ülkemizde 6 Şubat 2023 tarihinde 11 il ve ilçelerini kapsayan büyük bir deprem yaşanmıştır. Bu depremde bütün kamu kurumları ve Sivil Toplum Kuruluşları (STK) bölgeye destek olmak için seferber olmuştur. Bazı kamu kurum ve kuruluşları enkaz kaldırma, yaralılara tıbbi müdahale, çadır temini, kurulması, iaşe ve ibate vb. ihtiyaçların karşılanması için görev yaparken, bazıları da yaşanan depremin travmatik etkilerini azaltmaya yönelik manevi destek hizmetleri yürütmüşlerdir. Bir kamu kurumu olan Diyanet İşleri Başkanlığı’na (DİB) bağlı İl ve İlçe Müftülükleri personeli, merkez teşkilatı ve (...) Diyanet Vakfı çalışanları da sahada görev yapmıştır. DİB personelinin deprem bölgesinde manevi danışman olarak hizmet vermesi, o tarihlerde, bazı kesimler tarafından eleştirilmiştir. DİB personelinin alanda yaptıklarının incelenmesi bu çalışmanın konusunudur. Çalışmanın amacı manevi danışman olarak hizmet veren DİB personelinin alanda neler yaptıklarını detaylarıyla belirlemek ve yapılanların manevi danışmanlık mesleğinin ilkelerine uygunluğunu literatür esas alınarak değerlendirmektir. Araştırma nitel araştırma desenlerinden, durum çalışmasıyla (Case Study) yapılmıştır. Araştırmanın çalışma grubunu Kırşehir il ve ilçe müftülüklerinde çalışan din görevlileri oluşturmaktadır. Bu çalışma grubunun seçiminde amaçlı örneklem yöntemi kullanılarak ölçüt örneklem tekniği ile veri toplanmıştır. Burada tercih edilen ölçüt, Kırşehir İl ve İlçe Müftülüklerinde görev yapmak ve depremde manevi danışman olarak, alanda çalışmış olmak şeklinde belirlenmiştir. Katılımcılarla yarı yapılandırılmış görüşmeler yoluyla sorulan sorulardan elde edilen verilere, betimsel analiz uygulanmıştır. Mülakat soruları araştırma amacına uygun olarak ve literatür taraması esas alınarak araştırmacı tarafından oluşturulmuştur. Bu araştırma sonucunda elde edilen bulgular, DİB tarafından manevi danışmanlara düzenlenecek eğitim programlarının düzenlenmesinde veri oluşturması yönüyle önemlidir. Araştırma sonunda bulgular şöyle sınıflandırılmıştır: Psikolojik/manevi danışmanlık: Ziyaretlerde depremzedelerin ellerinin tutulması, kucaklama, duygusal refakat, çocukların başlarının okşanması vs. yakınlık hissi verilerek depremzedelerin rahatça konuşmalarına imkân oluşturmuşlardır. Bölgenin yapısından dolayı mezhepsel ayırım yapmadan bütün köylere gidip “Siz bizim kardeşimizsiniz, sizin için geldik, yalnız değilsiniz, acınızı paylaşıyoruz, geçmiş olsun” ifadeleri ile duygudaşlık hissi verilmiş ve yardım götürülmüştür. Dinî/manevi danışmanlık: Cenaze yıkamak, kefenlemek, cenaze namazı kıldırmak, çadır mescidinde vakit ve Cuma namazı kıldırmak, Kur’an okumak, dua ve sohbet etmek gibi faaliyetler yapılmıştır. Depremzedelerin yaşadıkları evler, çadır kentler, konteynerler ve köyler düzenli ziyaret edilerek hal ve hatırlarının sorulup, vatandaşın isteği üzerine dini törenler yapılmıştır. Destek hizmeti: Özellikle ilk giden görevliler yemek/su dağıtma, çadır kurma ve AFAD çalışmalarında kurtarma işlemine katılmışlardır. Diğer hizmetler: Depremzede esnafın kalkınması ve ekonomik destek için, esnaftan alış-veriş yapmışlar, nişanlı kızlara çeyiz ve üniversite öğrencilerine kitap yardımında bulunmuşlardır. (shrink)

Ethics is a field in which the gap between words and actions looms large. Game theory and the empirical methods it inspires look at behavior instead of the lip service people sometimes pay to norms. We believe that this special issue comprises several illustrations of the fruitful application of this approach to ethics.

Publicity for (and laterly increased economic stringency which makes more likely), failures of care in the NHS engender concern for care quality while its assurance remains the subject of a fragmented and unhelpful literature. A selective attempt is made to examine some underlying principles by posing and answering three questions. What is the quality of care? What basic principles must be followed in defining `standards'? How then may quality be assured? Any definition of care must be multi-faceted and in common (...) use pervaded with the patients' pre-occupation with a search for cures. Nevertheless, it is argued that there are gains in restricting the technical use of the term `care' to those systematic processes of health services and their culture which impinge on the personal experience of patients and which fashion their response. In contemporary society care ought to be designed to restore and enhance the independence, dignity and choice of the patient. Although there is a contrary tendency to abandon problems of care to the professionals, standards for care should be judged ultimately not from the specialised professional but from the viewpoint of lay people whose behaviour in the outside world fashions those norms by which independence, dignity and choice are judged. A number of difficulties in identifying and securing improvements in care are discussed. In particular, it is argued that such is the interdependence of the style of management of an institution and the style of care it provides that enforcement of high quality care is likley to be a contradiction in terms. Only trained and sensitive staff can act intuitively and pre-emptively to prevent even incipient deterioration in care. They cannot carefully foster at all times the independence and dignity of their patients unless they are treated in a similar way as professional employees. As an initial step in improving the quality of care a simple start is urged upon implementing an inventory of checks. These are designed to establish the identification and operation of health care policies and practices which give appropriate recognition to the characteristics of care that patients and public expect, coming as they do from a lay rather than professional world. The article concludes with an appropriate inventory of questions to be put to professionals by those laymen who are increasingly imported into health care management through community representation (in CHCs) and staff participation (in joint consultation) and whose interest and concern should be harnessed appropriately. (shrink)

Translations, whether in the form of text, illustration, or interpretive analysis, served knowledge-making in multiple ways. It offered a refuge, severed contexts, and concealed the various workers that created it. Over the course of the seventeenth century, European naturalists in Istanbul, such as Luigi Ferdinando Marsigli (1658–1730), procured illustrations of Ottoman nature as fundamental resources to identify, collect, and compare indigenous plants and newly bred varieties. Despite maintaining an actual mediation for cross-cultural interactions, these sources of virtual communication remain largely (...) forgotten in modern scholarship. This article argues that this curious yet invisible corpus was not a nonagentive medium in an alienated leisure of a gentleman-scholar; instead, these illustrations were designed to call upon the viewer’s constant attention in self-motivated scientific labor. Such handy tools responded and contributed to early modern scholars’ modes of working, and in exchange they determined these sources’ own function, position, and visibility – either as a by-product or as a derivative. It is therefore only when integrated into the labor history of science that the degrees of invisibility pertaining to both Ottoman nature studies and self-directed labor can come into a granular view. (shrink)