Two distinguished philosophers present opposing views on the questions of howthe objects of consciousness are perceived. (Philosophy).

Healthcare (including public health) is special because it protects normal functioning, which in turn protects the range of opportunities open to individuals. I extend this account in two ways. First, since the distribution of goods other than healthcare affect population health and its distribution, I claim that Rawls's principles of justice describe a fair distribution of the social determinants of health, giving a partial account of when health inequalities are unjust. Second, I supplement a principled account of justice for health (...) and healthcare with an account of fair process for setting limits or rationing care. This account is provided by three conditions that comprise "accountability for reasonableness.". (shrink)

We argue performance in the serial reaction time task is associated with gradations of awareness that provide examples of fringe consciousness [Mangan, B. . Taking phenomenology seriously: the “fringe” and its implications for cognitive research. Consciousness and Cognition, 2, 89–108, Mangan, B. . The conscious “fringe”: Bringing William James up to date. In B. J. Baars, W. P. Banks & J. B. Newman , Essential sources in the scientific study of consciousness . Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.], and address limitations (...) of the traditional SRT procedure, including criticism of exclusion generation tasks. Two experiments are conducted with a modified SRT procedure where irrelevant stimulus attributes obscure the sequence rule. Our modified paradigm, which includes a novel exclusion task, makes it easier to demonstrate a previously controversial influence of response stimulus interval on awareness. It also allows identification of participants showing fringe consciousness rather than explicit sequence knowledge, as reflected by dissociations between different awareness measures. The NEO-PI-R variable Openness to Feelings influenced the diversity of subjective feelings reported during two awareness measures, but not the degree of learning and awareness as previously found with traditional SRT tasks [Norman, E., Price, M. C., & Duff, S. C. . Fringe consciousness in sequence learning: the influence of individual differences. Consciousness and Cognition, 15, 723–760.]. This suggests possible distinctions between two components of fringe consciousness. (shrink)

Independently of any eighteenth century work on the geometry of parallels, Thomas Reid discovered the non-euclidean "geometry of visibles" in 1764. Reid's construction uses an idealized eye, incapable of making distance discriminations, to specify operationally a two dimensional visible space and a set of objects, the visibles. Reid offers sample theorems for his doubly elliptical geometry and proposes a natural model, the surface of the sphere. His construction draws on eighteenth century theory of vision for some of its technical features (...) and is motivated by Reid's desire to defend realism against Berkeley's idealist treatment of visual space. (shrink)

Following an earlier paper (Wetherick, 1989), the analysis of syllogistic reasoning via the medieval doctrine of “distribution of terms” is pursued and completed. The doctrine was not originally presented as an explanation of syllogistic reasoning but turns out to furnish one. It is shown that: It is impossible to assert two propositions having a distributed middle term in common without, at the same time, tacitly asserting the valid conclusion, if any. When the middle term is distributed but no valid conclusion (...) follows, this is a consequence of the distributional status of the subject and predicate terms. When the middle term is not distributed the propositions have nothing but a name in common. The logic of Spencer Brown (1969) is employed to show that logic is implicit in the behaviour of any organism that survives by making distinctions (e.g. between prey/non-prey; predator/non-predator). It is suggested that animal organisms answer this description by definition. Cognitive structures have evolved in the human organism so as to permit the conversion of habitual associations into universal propositions thus allowing formal logic and mathematics. This view appears to require a reversion to psychologism in logic, the consequences are considered and judged acceptable. (shrink)

Democratic theorists, especially since the advent of the deliberative democracy paradigm in the 1980s, have focused primarily on relationships involving citizens and their political representatives, and have thus paid scant attention to the bureaucratic agencies within the modern state that are presumed merely to “flesh out,” implement, and enforce the decisions made by elected officials. This undertheorized space between markets and democratic decision making, in brief, is where corporations and other interested parties inter- act with regulatory agencies, their bureaucrats, and (...) the elected officials who are accountable for what governments do on their watch. How and why ought democratic governments to facilitate, regulate, or get out of the way of, markets and corporations in a so-called market democracy? We cannot possibly provide or defend a detailed answer to this question here. What we will attempt to do, however, is to make the case for why the question is too normatively and conceptually rich for political philosophers to continue to outsource it almost entirely to scholars in law and the social sciences. Although the tensions between lawmaking by bureaucrats and the ideals of representative democracy rarely merit more than a few sentences of abstract reflection by democratic theorists, we have tried to reconstruct the implicit assumptions that might explain this neglect. (shrink)

The definitive study of the natural theology of Thomas Aquinas, the greatest medieval philosopher, written by one of the world's most eminent scholars of medieval thought.

We address some concerns related to the use of post-trial attribution judgments, originally developed for artificial grammar learning , during the version of the serial reaction time task used by Fu, Dienes, and Fu . In particular, intuition attributions, which are central to Fu et al.’s arguments, seem problematic: This attribution is likely to be made when stimuli contain several competing sources of information to which subjective feelings could be attributed. The interpretation of intuition attributions in Fu et al.’s SRT (...) generation task is problematic because the procedure involved a 2-element sequence where items varied only in position. In our view, responses categorised as intuitions might have been a variety of guess response where neither judgement knowledge nor structural knowledge were conscious. The results would then be compatible with previous findings showing that people can control the use of unconscious structural knowledge even when judgement knowledge is unconscious. (shrink)

Socratic philosophy represents a long-standing tradition within philosophy that understands the journey to truth in terms of the traveler's innate capacity. Anamnesis, maieutics, and elenchus each confirm that truth is not utterly foreign but is instead always within my possession or grasp. Other people, to the extent that they participate in my philosophical exploration, serve only to enable my capabilities or potential. They are not teachers to me. Nor would I need them, since I am always already in the neighborhood (...) of truth. ;Emmanuel Levinas's description of the "face to face" encounter between people challenges the adequacy of this model. Another person is not simply a midwife who leads me to a recovery of truth that was always within me or within my domain. Rather, the Other comes to me from a dimension of height or transcendence and teaches me. By this teaching Levinas means that I, as one who might claim truth for myself, find myself put into question. Before the Other I discover that my claims to knowledge are inadequate, even unjust, insofar as the Other exceeds, and thereby resists, my comprehensive claim on the world. The Other, in other words, reveals the naivete and the dogmatism characteristic of my familiar world, and puts me on a new and unforseen path to truth. ;This dissertation, by way of an explication of the category of transcendence, examines how the autonomous world of Socratic maieutics is transformed by the teaching encounter with another person into a heteronomous world. Heteronomy suggests my answerability to an order beyond the resources of anamnesis. This answerability, which Levinas describes as my responsibility to the Other, demands that we re-examine language not in terms of its systematicity or thematic capability but as the condition for all speaking whatsoever, i.e., my being called into communication. The word of the Other signifies a transcendent domain, a domain beyond my familiar world. It also makes possible a sincere life lived to the Other. (shrink)

Such a serious historical journey into the country of ideas as is demanded by the present topic should give one initial pause for salutary reflection. That this should be the case is due in no small way to the fact that one must be prepared, equivalently, to pay court, woo and win not one—task enough in itself—but two ladies–in–waiting. They are no less than Clio, the Muse of History and the fair Lady Philosophy. In the spirit of monogamy, one may (...) well wish to speak of Cliophil, the Muse of the History of Philosophy. (shrink)