However, the relation of the novels to ancient philosophy remains under-studied. This volume is intended to open up some of the issues involved.

The predicate-argument approach, focused on perception, is compared with the ease-of-predication (or predicability) approach, focused on encyclopedic knowledge. The latter offers functional prediction and implementation in connectionist models. However, the two approaches characterise predicates in different ways. They thus resemble predicational cantilevers built out from opposite sides of cognition, with a gap that is yet to be bridged.

Not at all self-evident, the so-called isomorphisms between the phenomenology and physiology of dreams have been interpreted by Hobson et al. in an arbitrary manner to state that dreams are stimulated by chaotic brainstem stimulation (an assumption also adopted by Vertes & Eastman). I argue that this stimulation is not chaotic at all; nor does it occur in the absence of control from the cerebral cortex, which contributes complexity to brainstem activity as well as meaningful information worth consolidating in the (...) brain during sleep. [Hobson et al.; Vertes & Eastman]. (shrink)

Utilitarian and deontological moral theories are often accused of failing to develop a convincing account of an agent's moral psychology, and so failing to provide an adequate theory of moral motivation that sustains their conception of morality as involving generally overriding moral duties. As a result of this apparent conflict between an agent's psychology and the demands of morality, many suggest making dramatic revisions to our conception of morality. I argue here that a more promising response is to examine where (...) it is that morality fits into human psychology, and then build a theory of moral motivation that sustains ordinary conceptions of morality from this foundation. To do this, I start by looking at Hume's account of moral motivation, which is grounded in a rich and full moral psychology. In an attempt to show that his theory provides a promising foundation for a contemporary theory of moral motivation, I explore his account of acting from duty and develop a new interpretation of his theory of moral motivation that fits most consistently with both his criticism of other accounts and his more general claims about the virtue of justice. I argue that Hume offers an account of justice as being always valuable in virtue of being a necessary condition to the enjoyment of one's good character. I go on to suggest that pride in one's character, what we might now call personal integrity, commits each agent to acting with a sense of duty, and enables her to attain a level of social interaction that is necessary for her psychological development, yet not possible without a commitment to justice. After defending this interpretation of Hume, I extend this basic notion of personal integrity and demonstrate how this idea, combined with the workings of empathy and the psychological need for positive social interaction, generates a viable theory of moral motivation that maintains the common conception of morality as involving generally overriding moral duties while avoiding threats of alienation. (shrink)

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One prominent argument in international law and religious thought for abolishing capital punishment is that it violates individuals’ right to life. Notably, this _right-to-life argument_ emerged from normative and legal frameworks that recognize deadly force against aggressors as justified when necessary to stop their unjust threat of grave harm. Can capital punishment be necessary in this sense—and thus justified defensive killing? If so, the right-to-life argument would have to admit certain exceptions where executions are justified. Drawing on work by Hugo (...) Bedau, I identify a thought experiment where executions are justified defensive killing but explain why they cannot be in our world. A state’s obligations to its prisoners include the _obligation to use nonlethal incapacitation_ (ONI), which applies as long as prisoners pose no imminent threat. ONI precludes executions for reasons of future dangerousness. By subjecting the right-to-life argument to closer scrutiny, this article ultimately places it on firmer ground. (shrink)

In many jurisdictions in the United States and elsewhere, the law governing deadly force by police and civilians contains a notable asymmetry. Often civilians but not police are bound by the imminence requirement—that is, a necessary condition for justifying deadly force is reasonable belief that oneself or another innocent person faces imminent threat of grave harm. In U.S. law enforcement, however, there has been some shift toward the imminence requirement, most evident in the use-of-force policy adopted by the Department of (...) Justice in 2022. This article defends that shift and argues that the ethical case for the imminence requirement in policing is stronger than Shannon Brandt Ford suggests in a recent article. Though the imminence requirement’s impacts on policing and public safety require ongoing study, the principle of equality before the law and the Doctrine of Doing and Allowing both provide moral grounds for this requirement, especially given the lack of evidence that the status quo helps protect life. (shrink)

This paper articulates what it would take to defend representationalism in the case of emotions – i.e. the claim that emotions attribute evaluative properties to target objects or events. We argue that representationalism faces a significant explanatory challenge that has not yet been adequately recognized. Proponents must establish that a representation relation linking emotions and value is explanatorily necessary. We use the case of perception to bring out the difficulties in meeting this explanatory challenge.

Background Nurses in acute care are frequently involved in ethical decision making and experience a higher prevalence of ethical conflicts and dilemmas. Nurses in underresourced rural acute care settings also are likely to face unique ethical challenges. However, rarely have the particular contexts of these experiences in rural acute care settings been researched. A culture of silence and fear in small towns has made exploring these issues difficult. Objectives To explore registered nurses’ experiences of ethical issues and ethical decision making (...) in rural acute care hospitals in northern Ontario, Canada. Research design Guided by an interpretive descriptive approach, data were collected by two nurse researchers using in-depth, individual, and semistructured telephone interviews. Data were managed with NVivo v.11 and analyzed using inductive, comparative, thematic analyses. Participants and research context The participants were eight registered nurses working in two acute care hospitals in northern Ontario. Ethical considerations Ethical protocols were followed in accordance with ethics approval from the researchers’ university and the hospitals. Findings Results identified four themes that culminated in the development of a quadruple helix ethical decision-making framework of power, trust, care, and fear. Discussion and conclusion The participants described complex ethical conflicts and dilemmas in acute care settings that were influenced by the context of working and living in small rural communities in northern Ontario. Nurses described navigating ethics in practice using a tension-based approach to ethical decision making, needing to carry these issues silently and often having no resolution to ethical challenges. These findings have important implications for nursing education, research, and practice. Nurses need safe spaces, formal ethics support, and improved access to resources. Additional ethics education and training specific to the unique contexts of rural settings are needed. (shrink)

This chapter discusses ontological commitment to properties, understood as ontological correlates of predicates. We examine the issue in four metaontological settings, beginning with an influential Quinean paradigm on which ontology concerns what there is. We argue that this naturally but not inevitably avoids ontological commitment to properties. Our remaining three settings correspond to the most prominent departures from the Quinean paradigm. Firstly, we enrich the Quinean paradigm with a primitive, non-quantificational notion of existence. Ontology then concerns what exists. We argue (...) that this strengthens the Quinean case against ontological commitment to properties while also newly distinguishing between stronger and weaker forms of nominalism. Secondly, we enrich the Quinean paradigm with the ideology of fundamentality. Ontology then centrally concerns what’s fundamental. We argue that this leaves ontological commitment to properties wide open although Bradleyan regress threatens. Thirdly, we enrich the Quinean paradigm with primitive higher-order quantifiers. Ontology then expands to concern what there higher-order is and what there first-order is. We argue that this naturally but not inevitably incurs ontological commitment to properties. (shrink)

In this paper I respond to the central claims presented in Samuel Moyn’s influential book, Not Enough: Human Rights in an Unequal World. Moyn argues that human rights have the following features: they are powerless to combat growing material inequality; they share key characteristics with neoliberalism; they make only minimalist or sufficientarian demands and therefore are not enough to achieve the equality demanded by justice. He suggests, in particular, that Henry Shue’s Basic Rights exemplifies these features. My response argues that (...) Moyn does not accurately present the core conceptual and normative characteristics of human rights, nor does he succeed in implicating Shue’s conception in his critique. I suggest that Moyn’s own ideas about global justice are incompletely developed, including his views about the scope, content, and distributive principles that should guide an account of global justice. Finally, I argue that, even though human rights are only part of an account of global justice, nonetheless they do provide reasons to limit socioeconomic inequality. This point is exemplified by the claim that a human right to democracy requires limits on material inequality in order to prevent power hierarchy. In short, I agree with Moyn that human rights are not enough by themselves to achieve global justice, but I reject his multi-pronged critique of human rights, specifically his claim that they imply no constraints on socioeconomic inequality. (shrink)

There are conceptual and ethical challenges to defining adolescents’ autonomy to access health care, and these can lead to health care norms and practices that could be maladjusted to the needs and preferences of adolescents. Particularly sensitive is access to sexual and reproductive health care services (SRHS). Yet, while there has been substantial conceptual work to conceptualize autonomy (e.g., as independence), there is a lack of empirical research that documents the perceptions of adolescents regarding on how they access or wish (...) to access health care services. The main objectives of this research were to (a) understand how adolescents in Colombia interpret the concept of “autonomy,” (b) describe how these adolescents articulate their autonomy (i.e., preferences) in accessing SRHS, and (c) analyze the ethical issues emerging from these data. Forty-five semi-structured interviews were conducted with participants aged 14 to 23 years old in the Departments of Antioquia and Valle del Cauca in Colombia. Our study showed that participants’ understanding of autonomy was context-based and highly dependent on personal experiences, and these influenced their choice in how to access SRHS. Seen through the ethical lens of a reproductive justice framework, our results highlight the unequal opportunities for adolescents in terms of autonomy to access SRHS. (shrink)

During Aang's intermingling with Fire Lord Ozai, the voice of a Lion Turtle hints at the reason why Aang prevails. “In the era before the Avatar, we bent not the elements but the energy within ourselves. To bend another's energy, your own spirit must be unbendable or you will be corrupted and destroyed.” -/- We use ideas from Buddhist philosophy to answer four questions about the world of Avatar: (1) What is it for a spirit to be unbendable? (2) What (...) is it to bend another's energy? (3) Does Aang's ability to bend Ozai's spirit refute Ozai's accusation that Aang is weak? (4) What does Aang's ability indicate about what it means to be powerful? (shrink)

One of the most focused research programs in the science-religion dialogue that has taken place up to the present is the series of volumes published jointly by the Vatican Observatory and the Center for Theology and the Natural Sciences. Originating with the encouragement of Pope John Paul II, this series has produced seven volumes focusing on how divine action can be understood in light of contemporary science. A retrospective volume published in 2008, Scientific Perspectives on Divine Action: Twenty Years of (...) Challenge and Progress, contains articles reviewing the series as a whole. In this article I analyze the series as a whole as well as some of the pivotal problems discussed throughout the series, such as the zero-sum game, scientific “traction,” falsifiability in theories of divine action, and locating special divine action in the physical world. (shrink)

Computationalism treats minds as computations. It hasn't explained how our quite similar sensory circuits encode our quite different qualia, nor how these circuits encode the binding of the different qualia into unifi ed perceptions. But there is growing evidence that qualia and binding come from neural electrochemical substances such as sensory detectors and the strong continuous electromagnetic field they create. Qualia may thus be neural substances, not neural computations (though computations may still help modulate qualia). This neuroelectrical view not only (...) avoids computationalism's empirical issues but also its problematic metaphysics. (shrink)

This article investigates the original meaning of dependent arising in the Buddha’s teaching, by focussing on the imasmi" sati formula. Modern scholars such as the Rhys Davidses, K.N. Jayatilleke and Paul Williams have interpreted it as a princi- ple of causation, comparable to a scientific conception of causation. I argue instead that this formula implies that the Buddha held that causation is nothing more than the correlation of causes and effects, and that it commits the Buddha to a Humean regularity (...) thesis about causation. I draw a distinction between the Buddhist and scientific concepts of causation, and then summarise an alternative approach made by more recent scholars such as Sue Hamilton, Noa Ronkin and Eviatar Shulman, who present dependent arising in terms of conditionality in the causal structure of subjective experience. I conclude by presenting the argument that the imasmi" sati formula does not express a principle of causation but is rather a formula for the method of discovering and presenting causation as conditionality in experience. (shrink)

Volume 24, Issue 12, December 2024, Page 59-62.

Military physicians are often perceived to be in a position of ‘dual loyalty’ because they have responsibilities towards their patients but also towards their employer, the military institution. Further, they have to ascribe to and are bound by two distinct codes of ethics, each with its own set of values and duties, that could at first glance be considered to be very different or even incompatible. How, then, can military physicians reconcile these two codes of ethics and their distinct professional/institutional (...) values, and assume their responsibilities towards both their patients and the military institution? To clarify this situation, and to show how such a reconciliation might be possible, we compared the history and content of two national professional codes of ethics: the Defence Ethics of the Canadian Armed Forces and the Code of Ethics of the Canadian Medical Association. Interestingly, even if the medical code is more focused on duties and responsibility while the military code is more focused on core values and is supported by a comprehensive ethical training program, they also have many elements in common. Further, both are based on the same core values of loyalty and integrity, and they are broad in scope but are relatively flexible in application. While there are still important sources of tension between and limits within these two codes of ethics, there are fewer differences than may appear at first glance because the core values and principles of military and medical ethics are not so different. (shrink)

Dans notre société de plus en plus digitalisée, avons-nous vraiment le choix d’adopter ou non les technologies? Comment cette digitalisation impacte-t-elle les personnes âgées en particulier et son écosystème? Quels sont les enjeux éthiques soulevés par cette digitalisation? Ce texte vise à amener des éléments de réflexions en lien avec ces enjeux selon le point de vue de divers experts des domaines de la technologie, du vieillissement et de la bioéthique. Ces experts se sont rencontrés lors d’un symposium ayant eu (...) lieu à Angers, France, en octobre 2019. Le texte est un compte-rendu des échanges et points de vue de ces experts, ainsi que des discussions ouvertes qu’ils ont eues avec l’assistance, portant sur les principaux enjeux soulevés par cette digitalisation selon la perspective des personnes âgées, des proches-aidants, des soignants, de la société et de la recherche. (shrink)

L’érosion actuelle de la confiance du public envers les campagnes de vaccination et les décisions de politiques publiques qui y sont associées, aggravée par des scandales comme ceux relatifs à la pandémie H1N1 et l’utilisation du Tamiflu™, risque de diminuer de façon significative l’efficacité de ces interventions importantes pour la santé publique. Un manque de confiance de la population envers les acteurs de santé publique peut conduire à une méfiance accrue face aux interventions, pouvant ainsi compromettre l’atteinte des objectifs recherchés (...) par une intervention spécifique et, conséquemment, avoir un impact important sur les bénéfices attendus pour la population visée par cette intervention. Dans la production des avis d’experts, les membres des comités consultatifs d’experts en immunisation (CCEI) peuvent avoir une influence importante sur la prise de décision publique, notamment, sur la sélection par les décideurs de santé publique de vaccins en particulier et la façon dont les campagnes de vaccination seront déployées. En contrepartie de cette influence sur les décisions publiques, une indépendance et une transparence sont attendues de leur part puisque des mécanismes de divulgation et de gestion de conflits d’intérêts (CI) imparfaits peuvent affecter négativement la confiance du public à l’égard de telles décisions. Il apparaît donc important de s’assurer que des mécanismes de gestion des CI, transparents et robustes, existent pour ces comités. Dans cette étude, les avis ou rapports d’évaluation de la pertinence de la vaccination préparés par un CCEI au Québec ont été examinés pour quatre types de maladies évitables par la vaccination (infections invasives à méningocoques et à pneumocoques, coqueluche et virus du papillome humain). Le but était de : 1) identifier les CI divulgués par les membres du CCEI dans leurs rapports comparativement à ceux déclarés dans leurs publications scientifiques pour ces mêmes infections ; 2) analyser la nature des CI (réel, potentiel, apparent, personnel, financier, institutionnel, etc.) et l’impact potentiel (risque) sur la prise de décision impartiale et sur la confiance du public ; et 3) évaluer les mécanismes de gestion de CI actuellement utilisés par ce CCEI. Les résultats de cette étude montrent que très peu de rapports du CCEI contiennent une section sur les CI par rapport à la pléthore divulguée dans les publications scientifiques publiées par les membres du CCEI. De plus, les CI divulgués dans les rapports fréquemment ne correspondent pas à ceux décrits dans les publications scientifiques. Il serait donc important d’introduire des mesures visant à accroître la transparence des experts en immunisation et d’améliorer les mécanismes de divulgation et de gestion des CI afin de veiller à ce que la confiance du public envers les décideurs en santé publique soit maintenue et améliorée. (shrink)

This is an introduction to the book Fiinta istorica (The Historical Being), written by the 20th century Romanian philosopher Lucian Blaga. Blaga was an important thinker, authoring over 30 books of philosophy and a great many articles. Unfortunatly very little of his work is translated into English. This book is the very last that he wrote. It was published posthumously.

The Morality of Happiness By Julia Annas, Oxford University Press, 1993. Pp. x + 502. ISBN 0–19–507999‐X. £45.00 (hbk), £13.99 (pbk).Dimensions of Creativity By Margaret A. Boden (ed.) MIT Press, 1994. Pp. 242. ISBN 0–262–02368–7. £24.95.Thomas Hobbes and the Science of Moral Virtue By David Boonin‐Vail, Cambridge University Press, 1994. Pp. 219. ISBN 0–521–46209–6. £37.50.Reason and Rhetoric in the Philosophy of Hobbes By Quentin Skinner, Cambridge University Press, 1996. Pp. 477. ISBN 0–521–55436–5. £35.00.Being and the Between By William Desmond, State (...) University of New York Press, 1995. Pp. 557. ISBN 0–7914–2271–2. $19.95.Perplexity and Ultimacy By William Desmond, State University of New York Press, 1995. Pp. 263. ISBN 0–7914–2387–5. $19.95.Evidence and Inquiry: Towards Reconstruction in Epistemology By Susan Haack, Blackwell Publishers, 1994. Pp. x + 259. ISBN 0–631–19679‐X/£14.99 (pbk).Kant's Intuitionalism: A Commentary on the Transcendental Aesthetic By Lorne Falkenstein, University of Toronto Press, 1996. Pp. xvii + 465. ISBN 0–8020–2973–6. $70.00.The Metaphysics of Free Will By John Martin Fischer, Blackwell, 1995. Pp. ix + 273. ISBN 1–55786–8573. £14.99.Identification Papers By Diana Fuss, Routledge, 1995. Pp. 179. ISBN 0–415–90886–8. $16.95.Rorty and Pragmatism: The Philosopher Responds to his Critics Edited by Herman J. Saatkamp, Jr., Vanderbilt University Press, 1995. ISBN 0–8265–1263–1 $24.95.Nietzsche's French Legacy: a Genealogy of Poststructuralism By Alan D. Schrift, Routledge, 1995. Pp. xviii + 198. ISBN 0–415–91146‐X. £40.00.Causal Cognition ‐ A Multidisciplinary Debate Edited by Dan Sperber, David Premack, and Ann James Premack, Clarendon Press, 1995. Pp. 670. ISBN 0–19–852314–9. £00.00. (shrink)

Cognitive Science, Volume 46, Issue 6, June 2022.

A central theme in the scholarly literature on Enlightenment Europe concerns the increased focus on the role of reason in the development of European thought, especially in the development of the new science by the natural philosophers. As a consequence, there is a tendency in both philosophical scholarship and teaching to bind philosophy and science tightly together. While there is certainly much that is correct in this approach, one motivation for pluralizing philosophy’s past is that this story leaves out a (...) great deal that is important in Enlightenment views of reason. We argue, using as an example the work of figures like Margaret Cavendish, that reason was significantly broader in scope—and that developments in science were paralleled by equally important advances in music, art, literature, medicine, philosophy, and other areas. In recognizing the lack of a sharp boundary between these areas, an inclusive canon of Enlightenment philosophy gives us this richer notion of reason. Integrating figures such as Cavendish into the canon helps us to see that the narrow focus on the scientific version of reason within Enlightenment scholarship creates a false distinction between science and the humanities and misses out on the humanistic ends for which we engage in philosophy. (shrink)

This is a memorial essay on how the life and work of Charles W. Mills influenced my development as a Black philosopher. Employing Mills’s use of the Jamaican creole term smadditizin’—meaning “becoming recognized as somebody in a world where, primarily because of race, it is denied”—I trace how Mills helped me become a human self myself. Inspired by using his books as texts in courses I taught, and working with him in the Radical Philosophy Association, I learned what it means (...) to be an engaged philosopher. This essay also explores the controversy surrounding radical Black liberalism as a means for attaining personhood. Finally, I defend Mills as a canonical radical philosopher who never wavered from his fierce anti-colonialist, anti-white supremacist, and anti-capitalist stances. (shrink)

Although parental choice of secondary schools is a subject of considerable public and academic interest, there has been relatively little research on the extent to which choice is undermining the traditional role of geographically defined school catchments. This paper, therefore, uses data provided by a case-study local education authority to examine the nature and scale of pupil flows across catchment boundaries. It does so by adopting a form of Geographic Information System as the principal research tool. The results show over (...) a third of Year 7 pupils moving to schools other than their catchment comprehensive. Interestingly, the inner-city catchments were the most permeable: by contrast, children in middle class and rural areas were the least likely to enter a school outside their local area. (shrink)

A central theme in the scholarly literature on Enlightenment Europe concerns the increased focus on the role of reason in the development of European thought, especially in the development of the new science by the natural philosophers. As a consequence, there is a tendency in both philosophical scholarship and teaching to bind philosophy and science tightly together. While there is certainly much that is correct in this approach, one motivation for pluralizing philosophy’s past is that this story leaves out a (...) great deal that is important in Enlightenment views of reason. We argue, using as an example the work of figures like Margaret Cavendish, that reason was significantly broader in scope—developments in science were paralleled by equally important advances in music, art, literature, medicine, philosophy, and so on. In recognizing the lack of a sharp boundary between these areas, an inclusive canon of Enlightenment philosophy gives us this richer notion of reason. Integrating figures such as Cavendish into the canon helps us to see that the narrow focus on the scientific version of reason within Enlightenment scholarship creates a false distinction between science and the humanities and misses out on the humanistic ends for which we engage in philosophy. (shrink)

In recent years, the popularity of the inimitable Slavoj Žižek has perhaps cast a shadow over the collective influence exerted by Slovenian intellectuals on modern day philosophy. Yet despite his image as an isolated genius, this timely book relocates Žižek as a thinker whose ideas are born of a specifically Slovenian context. Although only coming to international notice in the early 1990s, the Slovenian school needs to be understood as the culmination of a series of intellectual, artistic and political movements (...) inextricably connected to the quest for the succession of Slovenia from Yugoslavia. These developments in thought must also be seen in the light of one of the giants of Continental philosophy: Jacques Lacan.Featuring brand new interviews with three of its forerunners - Slavoj Žižek, Mladen Dolar and Alenka Zupancic - this fascinating account details each philosopher's individual concerns, whilst shedding light on the complex genealogy and continuing development of the Slovenian Neo-Lacanian school. Rarely are we afforded such an opportunity to study the birth of a philosophy from a seminal moment in modern history. (shrink)

Over the fourteen years that we have been publishing Comparative and Continental Philosophy, we have shared five Special Issues with our readers. The first was published in our seventh year and was...

When confronting the unexplained, it is helpful to consider it from many different points of view. In an essay published in 2004, entitled "Sensors, Filters, and the Source of Reality," Robert Jahn and Brenda Dunne of Princeton University's PEAR laboratory proposed that consciousness constructs its reality by ordering the information it derives from the external world through an array of physiological, psychological, and cultural filters. This thesis has now been considered by nineteen distinguished scholars who here present their commentaries from (...) a broad spectrum of professional and personal perspectives. Drawn from such diverse backgrounds as art, Buddhism, evolutionary biology, fantasy, out-of-body experiences, philosophy, physics, psychology, semiotics, and systems engineering, among others, these contributions offer an assortment of unique and fascinating glimpses of how our experiences and their styles of representation are reflected through these filters of consciousness. (shrink)

The book reflects academically on important and relevant ethical fields from a multidimensional South African context. The book challenges conventional borders from different ethical, theological, philosophical, economic and cultural perspectives with insight and expertise and seeks to add academic-ethical value, locally and globally, with its different points of departure deeply embedded in justice. From a mainly qualitative methodological perspective, this scholarly book demonstrates that ethics requires analytical thinking and critical people who, in an existentially and emancipatory way, can help make (...) the world a more just, decent and humane place in which to live. The authors, who represent different academic and cultural backgrounds, present in their respective chapters their research systematically, intersectionally and constructivistically, based on profound theoretical analysis and reasoning. This epistemology results in an act of knowing that actively gives meaning and order to the reality to which it is responding. By doing this, they point out that people are in an ongoing process of becoming more human – allowing ourselves and our fellow human beings to flourish and to reach fuller potential through justice-based ethical reflection and action. (shrink)

This chapter is an overview and explanation of Lucian Blaga's book Fiinta Istorica (The Historical Being). It is written in Romanian.