Individual differences in the mere willingness to think analytically has been shown to predict religious disbelief. Recently, however, it has been argued that analytic thinkers are not actually less religious; rather, the putative association may be a result of religiosity typically being measured after analytic thinking (an order effect). In light of this possibility, we report four studies in which a negative correlation between religious belief and performance on analytic thinking measures is found when religious belief is measured in a (...) separate session. We also performed a meta-analysis on all previously published studies on the topic along with our four new studies (N = 15,078, k = 31), focusing specifically on the association between performance on the Cognitive Reflection Test (the most widely used individual difference measure of analytic thinking) and religious belief. This meta-analysis revealed an overall negative correlation (r) of -.18, 95% CI [-.21, -.16]. Although this correlation is modest, self-identified atheists (N = 133) scored 18.7% higher than religiously affiliated individuals (N = 597) on a composite measure of analytic thinking administered across our four new studies (d = .72). Our results indicate that the association between analytic thinking and religious disbelief is not caused by a simple order effect. There is good evidence that atheists and agnostics are more reflective than religious believers. (shrink)

BLWith new text and full apparatus criticus The Eudemian Ethics was one of two ethical treatises which Aristotle wrote on the subject of ethica or `matters to do with character'. Although the two works cover much the same ground, the Nicomachean Ethics is better known; the poor manuscript tradition of the Eudemian Ethics has made correct translation and interpretation of the text extremely difficult. The subject of the work is the choice of a certain means of conduct, made by a (...) `man of practical wisdom', between two extremes of behaviour: asceticism and yielding to uncontrolled impulses. Aristotle also stresses the notion of moral intention and the importance of virtue of character. This new Oxford Classical Text of the Eudemian Ethics is the result of many years of work. After Sir David Ross's death, his original text was substantially reworked and revised by his friend and colleague R. R. Walzer, who was aided in the revision by his former pupil Mrs Jean Mingay, who continued his work after his death in 1974. Mrs Mingay was fortunate in being able to make use of previously unpublished contributions from D. J. Allan after his death in the late seventies, and more recently has been helped in her work by the suggestions of Professor D. A. Russell, David Robinson, and Christopher Rowe. (shrink)

Objectives: Recent legislative changes within the United Kingdom have stimulated professional debate about access to patient data within research. However, there is currently little awareness of public views about such research. The authors sought to explore attitudes of the public, and their lay representatives, towards the use of primary care medical record data for research when patient consent was not being sought.Methods: 49 members of the public and four non-medical members of local community health councils in South Wales, UK gave (...) their views on the value and acceptability of three current research scenarios, each describing access to data without patient consent.Results: Among focus group participants, awareness of research in primary care was low, and the appropriateness of general practitioners as researchers was questioned. There was general support for research but also concerns expressed about data collection without consent. These included lack of respect and patient control over the process. Unauthorised access to data by external agencies was a common fear. Current data collection practices, including population based disease registers elicited much anxiety. The key informants were equally critical of the scenarios and generally less accepting.Conclusions: This exploratory study has highlighted a number of areas of public concern when medical records are accessed for research without patient consent. Public acceptability regarding the use of medical records in research cannot simply be assumed. Further work is required to determine how widespread such views are and to inform those advising on confidentiality issues. (shrink)

Recent solutions to the curve-fitting problem, described in Forster and Sober ([1995]), trade off the simplicity and fit of hypotheses by defining simplicity as the paucity of adjustable parameters. Scott De Vito ([1997]) charges that these solutions are 'conventional' because he thinks that the number of adjustable parameters may change when the hypotheses are described differently. This he believes is exactly what is illustrated in Goodman's new riddle of induction, otherwise known as the grue problem. However, the 'number of adjustable (...) parameters' is actually a loose way of referring to a quantity that is not language dependent. The quantity arises out of Akaike's theorem in a way that ensures its language invariance. (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)

A collection of critical essays by English and American scholars, including such controversial academic political theorists as Gutmann, Barry and Nussbaum, that raises questions about the current theoretical reassessment of political liberalism.

Clinical biobanks processing data of participants in the European Union fall under the scope of the General Data Protection Regulation, which among others includes requirements for consent. These requirements are further specified by the Article 29 Working Party —an EU advisory body currently known as the European Data Protection Board. Unfortunately, their guidance is cause for some confusion. While the GDPR allows participants to give broad consent for research when specific research purposes are still unknown, the WP29 guidelines suggest that (...) additional consent for specific uses should be obtained in addition to broad consent when this becomes applicable. This discrepancy elicits the question whether clinical biobanks can fail the requirement of consent if they obtain broad consent, but not a specific consent for each biomedical study. We analysed this discrepancy within the framework of contextual integrity, in order to describe the context-relative informational norms that govern information flows in clinical biobanks. However, our analysis demonstrates that there is no uniform set of norms that can be applied to all clinical biobanks. As such, neither the GDPR nor the WP29 guidance can act as a “one size fits all” approach to all clinical biobanks. Rather, differences between clinical biobanks—especially regarding the scientific aims and patient populations—make the case for context-relative norms that determine the appropriate type of consent. (shrink)

First Edition 1995, Second Edition 2012.

The premise behind this paper is that "we" have a very serious Fear Problem. As a stream of inquiry in the larger In Search of Fearlessness Movement, the author pursues a long lingering question and concern about how the West has near neglected the call to examine "fearlessness" in contradistinction to the East. With the purpose to build a better understanding of fearlessness, theories about it, and how it fits into the author's most recent turn to co-developing a philosophy of (...) fearism.... (shrink)

Conspiracy theories and conspiracy theorists have been accused of a great many sins, but are the conspiracy theories conspiracy theorists believe epistemically problematic? Well, according to some recent work, yes, they are. Yet a number of other philosophers like Brian L. Keeley, Charles Pigden, Kurtis Hagen, Lee Basham, and the like have argued ‘No!’ I will argue that there are features of certain conspiracy theories which license suspicion of such theories. I will also argue that these features only license a (...) limited suspicion of these conspiracy theories, and thus we need to be careful about generalising from such suspicions to a view of the warrant of conspiracy theories more generally. To understand why, we need to get to the bottom of what exactly makes us suspicious of certain conspiracy theories, and how being suspicious of a conspiracy theory does not always tell us anything about how likely the theory in question is to be false. (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)

Impairment of the Self has been described in frontal–temporal dementia but little research has been carried out in patients with Alzheimer’s disease. Objective. The aim of this study was to explore changes in the self in patients with AD. Method. Forty-seven patients with mild to moderate AD were examined using a semi-structured scale designed to assess the self-concept along three dimensions, namely, the Material Self, the Social Self and the Spiritual Self. Results. The majority of patients presented impairment of at (...) least one dimension of the Self. When only one dimension was affected, it was always the Social Self. The severity of impairment of the Self was correlated to the impairment of the semantic autobiographical memory and apathy. The Self is impaired in AD and the Social Self dimension appears to be more vulnerable in AD than other dimensions. (shrink)

Theoretical and empirical research in bioethics frequently focuses on ethical dilemmas or problems. This paper draws on anthropological and phenomenological sources to develop an alternative framework for bioethical enquiry that allows examination of a broader range of how the moral is experienced in the everyday lives of individuals and groups. Our account of moral experience is subjective and hermeneutic. We define moral experience as “Encompassing a person's sense that values that he or she deem important are being realised or thwarted (...) in everyday life. This includes a person's interpretations of a lived encounter, or a set of lived encounters, that fall on spectrums of right-wrong, good-bad or just-unjust”. In our conceptualisation, moral experience is not limited to situations that are heavily freighted with ethically-troubling ramifications or are sources of debate and disagreement. Important aspects of moral experience are played out in mundane and everyday settings. Moral experience provides a research framework, the scope of which extends beyond the evaluation of ethical dilemmas, processes of moral justification and decision-making, and moral distress. This broad research focus is consistent with views expressed by commentators within and beyond bioethics who have called for deeper and more sustained attention in bioethics scholarship to a wider set of concerns, experiences and issues that better captures what is ethically at stake for individuals and communities. In this paper we present our conceptualisation of moral experience, articulate its epistemological and ontological foundations and discuss opportunities for empirical bioethics research using this 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...

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)

Resumo: No texto A necessidade metafísica do homem, Schopenhauer elabora considerações fundamentais sobre sua metafísica imanente e, na ânsia de explicar por que o homem filosofa, alia-se a uma longa tradição de pensadores que viram na admiração o impulso metafísico do homem. Ele reinterpreta as duas mais famosas sentenças sobre o tema consoante o tom de sua filosofia. A origem da filosofia torna-se o resultado de fatores como a separação entre vontade e intelecto e a constatação de que o mundo, (...) tal como agora é, possui caráter contingente e poderia deixar de ser. A isso se unem a contemplação dos males do mundo e a consciência da finitude humana. No fim, desse conjunto emergem os sistemas metafísicos e religiosos. Este artigo comenta detidamente essas ideias, mostra sua relação com os filósofos antigos através de cinco tópoi e, ao fim, tenta localizar a originalidade da concepção schopenhaueriana, a qual se baseia na reinterpretação do primeiro tópos.: In the text entitled On man’s need of metaphysics, Schopenhauer makes important remarks on his immanent metaphysics and, trying to explain why men philosophize, joins a long tradition of thinkers who see in admiration man’s real metaphysical impulse. He reinterprets then the two most famous statements on this subject in accordance with the tone of his philosophy. The origin of philosophy becomes the result of phenomena such as the separation between will and intellect and the perception that this world, which currently is, could just as well not be. The contemplation of the world’s misfortunes and the consciousness of human finitude is also dealt with. Metaphysical and religious systems emerge from these factors. This paper discusses in detail these ideas and analyzes their relationship with the ancient philosophers and the five tópoi. It also seeks to discover the originality of Schopenhauer’s conception, which is based on the reinterpretation of the first topos. (shrink)

A reply to “Why ‘Healthy Conspiracy Theories’ Are (Oxy)morons” by Pascal Wagner-Egger, Gérald Bronner, Sylvain Delouvée, Sebastian Dieguez and Nicolas Gauvrit.