Superheroes always do their chores...or do they? When Molly dons her clever crown and Ben ties on his courageous cape, this duo can accomplish anything. However, even superheroes must sometimes be reminded to fulfill their family responsibilities. Readers follow Molly through a daring adventure in becoming a responsible family member.

Reasoning may be defined as a deliberate effort to coordinate inferences so as to reach justifiable conclusions. Thus defined, reasoning includes collaborative as well as individual forms of cognitive action. The purpose of the present study was to demonstrate a circumstance in which collaborative reasoning is qualitatively superior to individual reasoning. The selection task, a well known logical hypothesis-testing problem, was presented to 143 college undergraduates-32 individuals and 20 groups of 5 or 6 interacting peers. The correct (falsification) response pattern (...) was selected by only 9% of the individuals but by 75% of the groups. The superior performance of the groups was due to collaborative reasoning rather than to imitation or peer pressure. Groups typically co-constructed a structure of arguments qualitatively more sophisticated than that generated by most individuals. The results support Piagetian and Habermasian views of peer interaction as a locus of rational social processes. (shrink)

At no time in recent decades has more attention been paid to ethical issues in pregnancy. Particularly riveting—and alarming, to many—was the passage of Senate Bill 8, a Texas law banning abortion...

Interpreters of Kant’s Refutation of Idealism face a dilemma: it seems to either beg the question against the Cartesian sceptic or else offer a disappointingly Berkeleyan conclusion. In this article I offer an interpretation of the Refutation on which it does not beg the question against the Cartesian sceptic. After defending a principle about question-begging, I identify four premises concerning our representations that there are textual reasons to think Kant might be implicitly assuming. Using those assumptions, I offer a reconstruction (...) of Kant’s Refutation that avoids the interpretative dilemma, though difficult questions about the argument remain. (shrink)

This article presents Schelling’s claim that nature has an evolutionary process and Hegel’s response that nature is the development of the concept. It then examines whether evolution is progressive. While many evolutionary biologists explicitly repudiate the suggestion that there is progress in evolution, they often implicitly presuppose this. Moreover, such a notion seems required insofar as the shape of life’s history consists in a directional trend. This article argues that, insofar as a notion of progress is indeed conceptually ineliminatable from (...) evolutionary biology or needed to articulate the shape of life’s history, progress should be viewed as constitutive. The section on “Why Schelling and .. (shrink)

: Two common ways of explaining akrasia will be presented, one which focuses on strength of desire and the other which focuses on action issuing from practical judgment. Though each is intuitive in a certain way, they both fail as explanations of the most interesting cases of akrasia. Spinoza 's own thoughts on bondage and the affects follow, from which a Spinozist explanation of akrasia is constructed. This account is based in Spinoza 's mechanistic psychology of cognitive affects. Because Spinoza (...) 's account explains action asissuing from modes of mind that are both cognitive and affective, it captures the intuitions that motivate the two traditional views while avoiding the pitfalls that result from their one‐sided approaches. This project will allow us a fuller understanding of Spinozist moral psychology. In addition to this historical value, the Spinozist theory may offer a satisfactory explanation of certain hard cases of akrasia while avoiding the problems be set by other theories. For this reason, the Spinozist account could also be seen as a useful contribution to our philosophical understanding of the phenomenon of akrasia. (shrink)

I argue that Spinoza is more of a moral realist than an anti-realist. More specifically, I argue that Spinoza is more of a realist than Kant, and that his view has deep similarities with Plato's metaethics. Along the way, I identify three approaches to the moral realism/anti-realism distinction. Classifying Spinoza as a moral realist brings out a number of important complexities that have been overlooked by many of Spinoza's readers and by many contemporary metaethicists.

There has long been interest in why languages are shaped the way they are, and in the relationship between sign language and gesture. In sign languages, entity classifiers are handshapes that encode how objects move, how they are located relative to one another, and how multiple objects of the same type are distributed in space. Previous studies have shown that hearing adults who are asked to use only manual gestures to describe how objects move in space will use gestures that (...) bear some similarities to classifiers. We investigated how accurately hearing adults, who had been learning British Sign Language for 1–3 years, produce and comprehend classifiers in locative and distributive constructions. In a production task, learners of BSL knew that they could use their hands to represent objects, but they had difficulty choosing the same, conventionalized, handshapes as native signers. They were, however, highly accurate at encoding location and orientation information. Learners therefore show the same pattern found in sign-naïve gesturers. In contrast, handshape, orientation, and location were comprehended with equal accuracy, and testing a group of sign-naïve adults showed that they too were able to understand classifiers with higher than chance accuracy. We conclude that adult learners of BSL bring their visuo-spatial knowledge and gestural abilities to the tasks of understanding and producing constructions that contain entity classifiers. We speculate that investigating the time course of adult sign language acquisition might shed light on how gesture became conventionalized during the genesis of sign languages. (shrink)

Kant makes a striking reference to Spinoza in the 1788 Critique of Practical Reason. This chapter begins by investigating whether Kant directly concerned himself with Spinoza, focusing on Omri Boehm's recent affirmative argument. Kant thinks the objective principle yields radical metaphysical conclusions only in conjunction with further claims about specific conditioning relations. Kant's privileging of Spinozism among realist views seems generally detached from Spinoza's actual thought. The chapter deals with points of convergence or near‐convergence between Kant and Spinoza. It identifies (...) two philosophically interesting points on which Spinoza's and Kant's views come surprisingly close: their arguments for the limitations of our sensory knowledge and their arguments for the timelessness of the mind. Spinoza's official argument for the timelessness of the mind appeals to his doctrines of the body's eternal essence, the parallel between bodies and ideas, and the identity of the human mind with God's idea of the human body. (shrink)

Jean Baudrillard _Fatal Strategies_ Translated by Philip Beitchman and W. G. J. Niesluchowski Edited by Jim Fleming London: Pluto Press, 1999 ISBN 0-7453-1453-8 191 pp.

It is often held that identity properties like the property of being identical to Paris are intrinsic. It is also often held that, while some logically uninstantiable properties are intrinsic, some logically uninstantiable properties are non-intrinsic. The combination of these views, however, raises a problem, since virtually every existing account of intrinsicality fails to analyse a notion of intrinsicality on which both these views are true. In this paper, I argue that, given the orthodox theory of counterlogicals, there is no (...) notion of intrinsicality on which both these views are true. If this argument is sucessful, then, at least given orthodoxy about counterlogicals, we face no challenge in analysing a notion of intrinsicality on which both these views are true, since there is no such notion. In addition, if we are also convinced that there is a notion of intrinsicality on which one of these views is true and a notion of intrinsicality on which the other of these views is true, we should hold that there is more than one notion of intrinsicality. (shrink)

Introduction.-God in the Copernician world.-God in the Newtonian world.-God in the Kanthian world.-God in the Darwinian world.-Science and theism today.-Epologue: The future of theism.

Critical thinking, considered as a version of informallogic, must consider emotions and personal attitudesin assessing assertions and conclusions in anyanalysis of discourse. It must therefore presupposesome notion of the self. Critical theory may be seenas providing a substantive and non-neutral positionfor the exercise of critical thinking. It thereforemust presuppose some notion of the self. This paperargues for a Foucauldean position on the self toextend critical theory and provide a particularposition on the self for critical thinking. Thisposition on the self is (...) developed from moretraditional accounts of the self from Descartes toSchopenhauer, Nietzsche and Wittgenstein. (shrink)

In this chapter, Colin Marshall argues that Schopenhauer’s views about the foundations of morality pose important challenges for five tenets of contemporary metaethics. After presenting these challenges, Marshall explores the potential viability of contemporary Schopenhauerian approaches to metaethics that would leave aside his radical metaphysical monism.

Increasingly, data scientists are training machine-learning models for diagnosis, treatment selection, and resource allocation. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration has given regulatory appro...

The US FDA currently encourages the addition of vitamin D to milk and cereals, with the aim of reducing rickets in children and osteoporosis in adults. However, vitamin D not only regulates the expression of genes associated with calcium homeostasis, but also genes associated with cancers, autoimmune disease, and infection. It does this by controlling the activation of the vitamin D receptor (VDR), a type 1 nuclear receptor and DNA transcription factor. Molecular biology is rapidly coming to an understanding of (...) the multiplicity of roles played by the VDR, but clinical medicine is having difficulty keeping up with the pace of change. For example, the FDA recently proposed a rule change that will encourage high levels of vitamin D to be added to even more foods, so that the manufacturers can claim those foods “reduce the risk of osteoporosis”. The FDA docket does not review one single paper detailing the transcriptional activity of vitamin D, even though, on average, one new paper a day is being published on that topic. Nor do they review whether widespread supplementation with vitamin D, an immunomodulatory secosteroid, might predispose the population to immune dysfunction. This BioEssay explores how lifelong supplementation of the food chain with vitamin D might well be contributing to the current epidemics of obesity and chronic disease. BioEssays 30:173–182, 2008. © 2008 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. (shrink)

This essay, published shortly before the 2020 U.S. presidential election (mired in controversy over a potential judicial appointment to the Supreme Court), celebrates Daniel Callahan's prescient book Abortion: Law, Choice and Morality. Nothing could be timelier. Callahan's central question was the “moral and social” struggle requisite for coherent policies and laws regulating abortion. He rejected “one‐value” positions and strove to develop an expansive middle ground. He decried emotion untutored by reason, crude polemics, and bludgeoning: his recipe for a “noxious brew.” (...) Callahan's way of thinking preceded the development of a critical health humanities, the advent of moral foundations theory in psychology, and the philosophical concept of a moral imagination. Each of these inheres in his rigorous approach to the abortion problem. His honesty and humility led to a sea change in his position on abortion. Fifty years later, much can still be learned from Callahan's arguments—about abortion and other bioethics issues—most importantly, in how we address wider social issues in these polarized times. (shrink)

This article analyses the constitutional crisis that was triggered in Chile by the events of 18 October 2019. The purpose is to explain the link between the constitution and social unrest and to explore whether a constituent process, such as the one designed in Chile, has the potential to address the unrest that produced it. The failed experience of Bachelet’s constituent process and the Latin American reform processes of the last thirty years show the threats and challenges of the future (...) Chilean constitution. (shrink)

David Wootton’s latest book is an attempt to show how “Power, Pleasure and Profit” – each related in turn to Machiavelli, Hobbes and Smith’s works – have shaped our modern world because they are “three goods which can be pursued without limits”. Based on a series of six Carlyle Lectures entitled “Power and Pleasure, 1513-1776”, given at the University of Oxford in 2014, the book attempts a major reinterpretation of the ideas of the thinkers of the period from 1500 to (...) 1800. David Woot... (shrink)

For decades, myxobacteria have been spotlighted as exemplars of social “wolf‐pack” predation, communally secreting antimicrobial substances into the shared public milieu. This behavior has been described as cooperative, becoming more efficient if performed by more cells. However, laboratory evidence for cooperativity is limited and of little relevance to predation in a natural setting. In contrast, there is accumulating evidence for predatory mechanisms promoting “selfish” behavior during predation, which together with conflicting definitions of cooperativity, casts doubt on whether microbial “wolf‐pack” predation (...) really is cooperative. Here, it is hypothesized that public‐goods‐mediated predation is not cooperative, and it is argued that a holistic model of microbial predation is needed, accounting for predator and prey relatedness, social phenotypes, spatial organization, activity/specificity/transport of secreted toxins, and prey resistance mechanisms. Filling such gaps in our knowledge is vital if the evolutionary benefits of potentially costly microbial behaviors mediated by public goods are to be properly understood. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:BOOK REVIEWS God and Creation in Christian Theology: Tyranny or Empowerment? By KATHRYN TANNER. Oxford and New York: Basil Blackwell, 1988. Pp. viii + 196. $39.95 (hardbound). In describing the role of the human will in salvation, Thomas Aquinas remarks that justification indeed requires an act of human free choice, namely one which takes place when God "infuses the gift of justifying grace in such a way that he (...) simultaneously moves the free will (liberum arbitrium) to accept the gift of grace" (Summa theologiae I-II, 113, 3, c). When they encounter this sort of remark in Aquinas-and parallel remarks can he found across the whole ecumenical tradition of Christian theology-contemporary theologians may well be puzzled by two thirig~..One is Aquinas's evident conviction that an utterly robust view of God's power and sovereignty (such that whatever God wills to happen, happens) is fully compatible with the ascription of genuine and ineradicable freedom to human beings. But perhaps even more striking is the fact that Aquinas apparently takes this compatibility, so problematic for much of modern theology, to be obvious: it occasions no visible perplexity, appeal to mystery, or lengthy explanation, but is simply invoked in passing to help deal with the theological issue under discussion. In this powerfully argued and provocative book, Kathryn Tanner undertakes to clear up both of these perplexities. She develops an original and richly textured account of how Christian thinkers could and can maintain uncompromising accounts of both divine sovereignty and creaturely independence and freedom without falling into incoherence, and she also explains how what was once obvious now so easily seems bafHing. Tanner begins by arguing that the coherence of Christian claims about God and creatures can best be displayed by an explicitly secondorder analysis which aims to lay bare the rules governing well-formed Christian discourse, rather than by constructing a first-order ontological and metaphysical account of the relationship between God and the world. The book explicitly concentrates, " not on what theologians are talking about, but on.the way they are saying it " (p. 11). Tanner undertakes this " semantic ascent," which. she articulates with considerable nuance, partly in order to proceed in a way congruent with powerful recent developments in philosophy (European as well as Anglo8 ~1 BOOK REVIEWS American) and theology, but more basically because she thinks the issue itself demands this kind of treatment. However available in their own right, accounts of the relations between God and creatures cast in first-order metaphysical language are, theologians of quite different conviction have often maintained, veiled in a certain inevitable obscurity which limits their explanatory value; one cannot " reconcile God's agency with the creature's active powers through any material explanation of the actual mechanism found in some ' causal joint ' between the two" (p. 26; Thomas's way of putting this point, as Tanner is aware, is to say that we have no modus significandi for descriptions in divinis [see p. 12]). By contrast, the rules for coherent Christian discourse about God and creatures, if we can find any, can be stated with comparative clarity and precision: they will be straightforward directives to speak in certain ways and not in others. Moreover, the problems in speaking coherently about divine power and the contingent independence of creatures are not confined to a particular scheme of firstorder theological concepts and judgments but recur across a wide range of differing schemes; correlatively, if we can isolate second-order rules for Christian discourse about God and creatures those rules " may structure very different theological schemes, schemes distinguished by their first-order claims by vocabulary, philosophical frames of reference etc." (p. 29). Tanner's project, then, is a certain kind of transcendental argument: she wants to show "how it is possible for Christians to affirm certain statements while holding on to others that seem to conflict with them" (p. 20). If rules which govern apparently conflicting statements about God and creatures in Christian discourse can in fact be isolated, and it can be shown how they are followed by Christian theologians, then, Tanner argues, the project will have succeeded; the coherence of Christian discourse about God and creatures will have been displayed... (shrink)

Waterman's clinical anecdote highlights several important concepts related to aging, as his own journey with chronic pain leads him to explore an "unconventional" craniosacral therapy. He draws important connections between epistemic humility and wisdom, and he touches on related topics of cognitive neuroscience and ageism. In particular, his comment that, "Perhaps one hallmark of successful aging is when the growth of wisdom outpaces the depletion of mental plasticity" is ripe for further discussion.Waterman asks the question of whether epistemic humility results (...) from wisdom. While I surmise that the answer is yes, these concepts present interesting questions related to the nature of wisdom in the context of... (shrink)