SummaryThe incidence of family breakdown and stress has been examined in an unselected group of 92 South Wales families, each containing a patient suffering from Huntington's chorea, and related to the onset and duration of the disease, age of the patient, and behavioural symptoms shown. The frequency of actual and attempted suicide is analysed and the effects of the disorder on the primary care agent for the patient discussed. Some of the effects on children and the needs of the families (...) for support and practical help are outlined. It is concluded that family support is an essential factor in any programme aimed at the long-term alleviation and prevention of Huntington's chorea. (shrink)

As van Fraassen pointed out in his opening remarks, Henry Kyburg's lottery paradox has long been known to raise difficulties in attempts to represent full belief as a probability greater than or equal to p, where p is some number less than 1. Recently, Patrick Maher has pointed out that to identify full belief with probability equal to 1 presents similar difficulties. In his paper, van Fraassen investigates ways of representing full belief by personal probability which avoid the difficulties raised (...) by Maher's measure-theoretic version of the lottery paradox. Van Fraassen's more subtle representation dissolves the simple identification of full belief with maximal personal probability. His investigation exploits the richer resources for representing opinion provided by taking conditional, rather than unconditional, personal probability as fundamental. It has interesting implications for equivalent alternative approaches based on non-Archimedean probability, as well as for equivalent approaches in which assumption contexts representing full belief relative to suppositions are taken as fundamental. (shrink)

In 1960, E. P. Wigner, a joint winner of the 1963 Nobel Prize for Physics, published a paper titled On the Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences [61]. This paper can be construed as an examination and affirmation of Galileo's tenet that “The book of nature is written in the language of mathematics”. To this effect, Wigner presented a large number of examples that demonstrate the effectiveness of mathematics in accurately describing physical phenomena. Wigner viewed these examples as (...) illustrations of what he called the empirical law of epistemology, which asserts that the mathematical formulation of the laws of nature is both appropriate and accurate, and that mathematics is actually the correct language for formulating the laws of nature. At the same time, Wigner pointed out that the reasons for the success of mathematics in the natural sciences are not completely understood; in fact, he went as far as asserting that “… the enormous usefulness of mathematics in the natural sciences is something bordering on the mysterious and there is no rational explanation for it.”. (shrink)

MENDENHALL TJ, BERGE JM, HARPER P, GREENCROW B, LITTLEWALKER N, WHITEEAGLE S and BROWNOWL S. Nursing Inquiry 2010; 17: 359–372 The Family Education Diabetes Series (FEDS): community‐based participatory research with a midwestern American Indian communityIndigenous people around the globe tend to struggle with poorer health and well‐being than their non‐indigenous counterparts. One area that this is especially evident is in the epidemic of diabetes in North America’s American Indians (AIs) – who evidence higher prevalence rates and concomitant disease‐related complications (...) than any other racial/ethnic group. As researchers and AI communities work together to transcend conventional top‐down, service‐delivery approaches to care, community‐based participatory research is beginning to show promise as a way to partner contemporary biomedical knowledge with the lived‐experience, wisdom, and customs of Indigenous people. This study describes the Family Education Diabetes Series (FEDS) as an example of such effort, and highlights pilot findings assessing its value and impact across key diabetes‐relevant variables. Following 36 intervention participants across baseline, 3‐month, and 6‐month time periods, data show significant improvements in weight, blood pressure, and metabolic control (A1c). Strengths and limitations of this investigation are presented, along with suggestions about how to further advance and empirically test the work across other Indigenous communities. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Strangers in the Land: Blacks, Jews, Post-Holocaust AmericaKeith P. Feldman (bio)Eric J. Sundquist. Strangers in the Land: Blacks, Jews, Post-Holocaust America. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 2005. 662 pp.Strangers in the Land: Blacks, Jews, Post-Holocaust America provides a wide-ranging, rich, and nuanced cultural history of what Eric J. Sundquist terms the "black-Jewish question" (2). In doing so, the book serves as both culmination and corrective to an already-expansive scholarly (...) literature on blacks and Jews generated since the late 1960s. Much of this scholarship has operated within a U.S.-centered paradigm to chart interethnic relations, laboring as it does to unpack, complicate, theorize, and otherwise come to understand the changing texture of black-Jewish relations and, in Sundquist's wods, its "intermixture of empathy, anxiety, and Hostility' (3)." Strangers in the Land stretches this paradigm to its limit, even as the diasporic imaginaries treated therein persistently escape a U.S. national imaginary and signal other possibilities for conceptualizing this tense and tender history.In its five hundred–plus pages of text, one hundred–plus pages of endnotes, and countless detailed footnotes (that are themselves illustrative and evocative), Sundquist has assembled a voluminous archive of textual material to show how works of the imagination by blacks and Jews have been "produced in a dynamic, multilayered historical matrix" that reveals the paradoxes of American liberalism (9). From the well-known and well-trodden (novels by Bellow, Roth, Malamud, and Morrison all play key roles) to the newly discovered and underappreciated (John A. Williams's Sons of Darkness, Sons of Light; Paule Marshall's The Chosen Place, the Timeless People; Gloria Naylor's Bailey's Café; William Melvin Kelley's A Different Drummer; Jon Michael Spencer's Tribes of Benjamin; Lore Segal's Her First American), Sundquist's careful historicism reveals how works of the imagination can serve as both microscopic and telescopic lenses through which to examine the vicissitudes of what he calls black and Jewish "interdependent self-conceptions" in the United States (5).Along with addressing a thick textual archive with subtlety and patience, Sundquist's major analytical innovation is that, unlike many of his predecessors, which frequently [End Page 63] positioned their analyses within the scarred domestic terrain of post–civil rights polarization, Sundquist's voracious curiosity dwells in the archive's heterogeneous details, allowing him to linger in examples that routinely exceed the simple polarization of blacks and Jews. The complex racial geography of New York boroughs and greater Chicagoland, for instance, is overlaid by Auschwitz and Egypt and Jerusalem, Ghana and Kenya and the Caribbean. In these settings, Sundquist spends time with figures only glimpsed in passing in other works: Arab Jews, Afro-Zionists, and anti-Zionists; Jews and Black Jews; Black Panthers, Israeli Black Panthers, Holocaust survivors, Holocaust deniers, Black Power advocates, and their Jewish Power doppelgangers. In a lengthy meditation on Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird, Sundquist charts the novel's refractions of the problem of American racial equality in the wake of the Holocaust. Similarly, the careful readings of novels by Naylor, Williams, Spencer, and Kelley exemplify the rich results of Sundquist's method.This deeply historicist and intertextual project echoes Sundquist's 1993 epic work To Wake the Nations: Race in the Making of American Literature, which strenuously and quite effectively demonstrated how African American literature is constitutive of American literature, and not merely a minor subset of it. If this earlier work revealed the continued paradox of racial slavery in American conceptions of democracy, Strangers in the Land serves as something of a sequel. The book places another massive racial project, the systematic genocide of Europe's Jews, at the heart of twentieth-century American life. "The Holocaust," writes Sundquist, "became the benchmark against which at least one other case, African American slavery and its aftermath, has been judged" (6). By placing Jewish genocide at the center of his analysis, Sundquist importantly reminds us of the conclusion reached almost simultaneously by both Hannah Arendt and Aimé Césaire, that the Nazi racial project had its ideological origins in nineteenth-century European imperialism, and that this legacy bears indelibly on the present... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:THE MARVELOUS EXCHANGE: RAYMUND SCHWAGER'S INTERPRETATION OF THE ffiSTORY OF SOTERIOLOGY JOHNP. GALVIN The Oath-Olia University of America Washington, D.O. IN A WIDE-RANGING series of studies of disparate material, the French ethnologist and literary critic Rene Girard has proposed 'a remarkably comprehensive anthropological theory. Girard identifies imitation, which inevita.bly issues in rivalry and violence, as the decisive force in human conduct. In primitive societies,,Jacking centralized civil authority and confronted (...) with recurrent threats to survival, a fragile social order is preserved solely by discharging violence upon an arbitrarily chosen victim. According to Girard's analyses, periodic ritual reenactment of this primal event is the source of all great social institutions; the "scapegoat mechanism " thus lies at the root of human culture.1 While Girard has devoted increasing attention to examining the Judeo-Christian tradition from the perspective of his anthropology,2 more thorough application of his thought to Christian theological themes has been undertaken by Raymund Schwager, a Swiss Jesuit professor of dogmatics at the University of Innsbruck. In a book published in 1978, Schwager argued that Girard's theory offers a useful framework for addressing various biblical issues (the pervasiveness 1 Cf. especially Violence and the Sacred (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, 1977) ; Des choses cachees depuis la fondation du monde (Paris: Grasset & Fasquelle, 1978); The Scapegoat (Baltimore: John Hopkins, 1986). For discussion of the bearing of Girard's thought on biblical issues cf. Robert North, "Violence and the Bible: The Girard Connection," OBQ 47 (1985), 1-27. 2 Cf. esp. Des choses cachees depuis la fondation du monde, pp. 163-304. 675 676 JOHN P. GALVIN of violence in the Old Testament; the diversity of Old Testament depictions of God; the prophetic critique of sacrifice; and the salvific significance of Jesus' public life and death) which have pvoven intractable from other perspectives.3 Since the appearance of that work, he has extended his testing of the theological value of Girard's thought, chiefly through publication of a series of ten articles in the Zeitschrift fur katholische Theologie on major figures and themes from the history of soteriology. These essays, always conceived as an integral whole, have now been gathered in a single volume; as a unit, they form a significant account of the history of Christian thinking on a central theological topic.4 Sohwa;ger devotes his first six studies to the patristic period. His historical survey begins with an examination of the contrasting soteriologies of Marcion and Irenaeus, under the title " The God of the Old Testament and the God of the Crucified " (pp. 7-31). Marcion's questioning of the inner unity of the Old Testament 1 and the apostolic writings led him to reject the Old Testament as the revelation of a creator God of rigorous justice, far inferior to the God of love manifest in Jesus Christ. Corruption of Christ's teachings by his disciples led to the calling of Paul, who alone preached the gospel in pure form. Marcion 1 therefore assembled a canon of Pauline writings (minus alleged regressive intevpolations) rand reconstructed f:vom Lu~e what he judged to he the sole authentic written gospel, one communicated directly to Paul hy Christ. In opposition to such Gnostic thought, Irenaeus rejected any dualism in the understanding of creation and :vedemption and a Brauahen wir einen Siindenbook?: Gewalt und ErlOsung in den biblisohen Sohriften (Munich: Kosel, 1978); an English translation has recently been published: Must There Be Scapegoats?: Violenoe and Redemption in the Bible (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1987). For presentation and discussion of this stage of Schwager's work cf. John P. Galvin, "Jesus as Scapegoat?: Violence and the Sacred in the Theology of Raymund Schwager," Thomist 46 (1982), 173-194. 4 Der wunderbare Tausoh: Zur Gesohichte und Deutung der ErlOsungslehre (Munich: Kosel, 1986). Pp. 327. DM 34.00. RAYMUND SCHWAGEll AND SOTERlOLOGY 677 consequently defended the unity of the two testaments. Their distinct economies of salvation result from a wise divine pedagogy, ev;er attentive to different stages in the gradual maturation of the human raee. The Old Testament is a preparation for the recapitulation of all things in Christ; it should be understood typologically, iby reference to its... (shrink)

This article describes and defends the interdisciplinary model of the Liberal Arts degree,1 set up at the Crichton Campus of the University of Glasgow in 1998.2 It describes the structure of this Scottish undergraduate MA, placing it within the wider context of contemporary debates concerning education, but does so in order to clarify and promote a particular view of interdisciplinarity: namely integrated interdisciplinarity.3 In doing so this paper aims to show both the role of philosophy in constituting a significant element (...) of the content of the courses and, more importantly, its role in framing the structure that allows fruitful interaction between the disciplines. Overtly philosophical issues provide a set of themes and questions by which to structure potentially disparate courses from separate disciplines and assist them in interacting. Philosophy thus plays a vital role in integrating interdisciplinary study, especially within a contemporary liberal arts degree, yet this is a function that is often overlooked when documenting the merits of this academic specialism. (shrink)

Modernism is both a contested aesthetic category and a powerful political statement. Modernist music was condemned as degenerate by the Nazis and forcibly replaced by socialist realism under the Soviets. Sympathetic philosophers and critics have interpreted it as a vital intellectual defence against totalitarianism, yet some American critics consider it elitist, undemocratic, and even unnatural. Drawing extensively on the philosophy of Heidegger and Badiou, Quilting Points proposes a new dialectical theory of faithful, reactive, and obscure subjective responses to musical modernism, (...) which embraces all the music of Western modernity. (shrink)

This article examines the difference between two concepts of critical importance to the philosophical frameworks of Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze–pleasure and desire–through the troubling and troubled figure of suicide. My contention is that, in the work of both thinkers, suicide makes legible an affirmative impulsion and a mode or tekhnē (in both senses of the term: practice and art) of encountering an unforeseeable virtuality (the Outside). Of aesthetic and ethical significance, this mode is experimental and dangerous, a frequency of (...) passion, situated between pleasure and desire. Souci de soi (the care of the self) and a line of flight, I suggest, coincide in suicide, “an art that it takes a lifetime to learn.”. (shrink)

Isaac Newton's Scientific Method examines Newton's argument for universal gravity and his application of it to resolve the problem of deciding between geocentric and heliocentric world systems by measuring masses of the sun and planets. William L. Harper suggests that Newton's inferences from phenomena realize an ideal of empirical success that is richer than prediction. Any theory that can achieve this rich sort of empirical success must not only be able to predict the phenomena it purports to explain, but (...) also have those phenomena accurately measure the parameters which explain them. Harper explores the ways in which Newton's method aims to turn theoretical questions into ones which can be answered empirically by measurement from phenomena, and to establish that propositions inferred from phenomena are provisionally accepted as guides to further research. This methodology, guided by its rich ideal of empirical success, supports a conception of scientific progress that does not require construing it as progress toward Laplace's ideal limit of a final theory of everything, and is not threatened by the classic argument against convergent realism. Newton's method endorses the radical theoretical transformation from his theory to Einstein's. Harper argues that it is strikingly realized in the development and application of testing frameworks for relativistic theories of gravity, and very much at work in cosmology today. (shrink)

This is a very important book. It has already become required reading for researchers on the relation between the exact sciences and Kant’s philosophy. The main theme is that Kant’s continuing program to find a metaphysics that could provide a foundation for the science of his day is of crucial importance to understanding the development of his philosophical thought from its earliest precritical beginnings in the thesis of 1747, right through the highwater years of the critical philosophy, to his last (...) unpublished writings in the Opus postumum. In the course of articulating this theme, Friedman has made extensive use of detailed historical information about their scientific and mathematical background to illuminate Kant’s texts. Over and over again, such information is used to suggest interesting and quite subtle interpretations for texts that may have seemed puzzling or just wrong-headed. (shrink)

This paper uses Popper's treatment of probability and an epistemic constraint on probability assignments to conditionals to extend the Bayesian representation of rational belief so that revision of previously accepted evidence is allowed for. Results of this extension include an epistemic semantics for Lewis' theory of counterfactual conditionals and a representation for one kind of conceptual change.

Recent advances in philosophy, artificial intelligence, mathematical psychology, and the decision sciences have brought a renewed focus to the role and interpretation of probability in theories of uncertain reasoning. Henry E. Kyburg, Jr. has long resisted the now dominate Bayesian approach to the role of probability in scientific inference and practical decision. The sharp contrasts between the Bayesian approach and Kyburg's program offer a uniquely powerful framework within which to study several issues at the heart of scientific inference, decision, and (...) reasoning under uncertainty. The commissioned essays for this volume take measure of the scope and impact of Kyburg's views on probability and scientific inference, and include several new and important contributions to the field. Contributors: Gert de Cooman, Clark Glymour, William Harper, Isaac Levi, Ron Loui, Enrique Miranda, John Pollock, Teddy Seidenfeld, Choh Man Teng, Mariam Thalos, Gregory Wheeler, Jon Williamson, and Henry E. Kyburg, Jr. (shrink)

The Reverend Ralph Harper, a philosopher and theologian, has been credited with introducing existentialism to North America in 1948 with his work Existentialism: A Theory of Man. Forty years later, Harper delved deeper into the interior life of the human imagination in On Presence: Variations and Reflections. Winner of the 1992 Grawemeyer Award in Religion, On Presence is an insightful articulation of mankind's experience of presence. Drawing from philosophers like Kierkegaard, Heidegger, and Marcel, theologians like Augustine, Aquinas, and (...) Tillich, mystics like Meister Eckhart and John of the Cross, and novelists like Dostoevsky and Proust, this compelling work considers the transcendent and religious dimensions of the ordinary mysteries in everyday life. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy, Psychiatry, & Psychology 11.1 (2004) 55-64 [Access article in PDF] Delusions and Discourse:Moving beyond the Constraints of the Modernist Paradigm David J. Harper This special issue provides a good opportunity to reflect on the range of views about delusions,1 and it is good to see all the authors taking the issue of how to approach this topic seriously. Here I wish to argue that the traditional psychiatric (...) view of delusions is problematic. In the first half of this article I will group my comments on the issues raised by the papers by Klee and Bayne and Pacherie together as I think that, for their differences, they share modernist philosophical assumptions. I will argue that the modernist paradigm runs into considerable problems in considering beliefs felt by some to be unusual and I will go on to argue that we need to move beyond this paradigm and embrace different approaches, of which the work by Georgaca is an exemplar. The Trouble with (traditional Views of) Delusions The traditional psychiatric view of delusion has come under increasing attack over recent years. As Georgaca has noted, a number of problems with the assumptions in definitions of delusion can be identified when they are viewed from a social constructionist perspective (Georgaca 2000, 2004; Harper 1992, 1996; Heise 1988). For convenience I will group these under four main headings. They Are Based on a Naively Realist View of the World The criterion of inaccuracy or falsity implies that deciding on the veracity of a belief is a relatively unproblematic matter. However, the reality of claims does not always seem so important in judgments about whether a belief is delusional or not. For example, there is little evidence that mental health professionals systematically investigate the basis for people's beliefs; rather, they decide whether a belief is plausible. Thus Maher has argued that the assessment of the plausibility of beliefs is "typically made by a clinician on the basis of "common sense," and not on the basis of a systematic evaluation of empirical data" (1992, 261). He notes that it is not "customary to present counterevidence to the patient; it is not even common to present vigorous counterargument" (1992, 261) and there appears to be some empirical evidence of this (McCabe et al. 2002). Here then, we begin to see [End Page 55] how psychiatry, while claiming to have the power to judge the truth of beliefs on the basis of its status as an empirical scientific discipline, can be seen to make judgments on the basis of common sense and taken-for-granted social and cultural assumptions.Some commentators have suggested that delusions should be identified less by whether they seem to accord with reality but more by whether a person gives evidence for their belief (Gillett 1995; Spitzer 1990). However, this seems to be based on an idealized view of how people manage their beliefs in everyday life. For example, I would question how many of us have evidence for many of the beliefs (e.g., political, ethical, religious, etc.) we hold dear; indeed it would be hard to think of what evidence we could have for some of them (e.g., religious and ethical beliefs). Some recent work has suggested that the diagnosis of delusion is made on the basis of how people with delusions talk and interact; for example, some have argued that they do not appear to appreciate the hearer's point of view (Palmer 2000). However, here and in previous work, Georgaca (2000, 2004) has shown that people with delusions are able to talk about and negotiate disagreements about their beliefs and that many disputes of fact cannot be settled in conversation. People Said to Have Delusions Are Seen to Vary in the Conviction With Which Those Beliefs Are Held There is evidence that people considered to be deluded vary in the conviction with which they hold beliefs (Garety 1985) and can also be persuaded to modify their beliefs if this is conducted in a sensitive and collaborative manner (e.g., Chadwick, Birchwood, and Trower 1996). This... (shrink)

Outside of Italy, the country’s culture and its food appear to be essentially synonymous. And indeed, as The Italian Way makes clear, preparing, cooking, and eating food play a central role in the daily activities of Italians from all walks of life. In this beautifully illustrated book, Douglas Harper and Patrizia Faccioli present a fascinating and colorful look at the Italian table. The Italian Way focuses on two dozen families in the city of Bologna, elegantly weaving together Harper’s (...) outsider perspective with Faccioli’s intimate knowledge of the local customs. The authors interview and observe these families as they go shopping for ingredients, cook together, and argue over who has to wash the dishes. Throughout, the authors elucidate the guiding principle of the Italian table—a delicate balance between the structure of tradition and the joy of improvisation. With its bite-sized history of food in Italy, including the five-hundred-year-old story of the country’s cookbooks, and Harper’s mouth-watering photographs, The Italian Way is a rich repast—insightful, informative, and inviting. (shrink)

ABSTRACT Much has been made of the apparent tensions in Nietzsche's ethical and metaethical views. In this essay I examine a kind of value standard available to Nietzsche that is present in his work. I offer an interpretation of honesty as both a Nietzschean virtue and a means of ethical assessment. Despite Nietzsche's well-known criticisms of truth, he upholds honesty as the only remaining virtue of his free spirits. Honesty has been treated in the literature primarily in the contexts of (...) truth or life affirmation, but I argue that we should instead recognize honesty as a virtue within the context of valuing. I defend honesty as a distinct kind of truthfulness and sincerity involving what I call confrontation. The seeds of Nietzsche's mature view are first evident in his work on tragedy, then developed further in Zarathustra, ultimately revealing a constraint on valuing that is essential to Nietzsche's broader normative projects. (shrink)

In this paper, I consider the thesis advanced by Lawrence J. Schneiderman and Nancy S. Jecker that physicians should be forbidden from offering futile treatments to patients. I distinguish between a version of this thesis that is trivially true and Schneiderman and Jecker's more substantive version of the thesis. I find that their positive arguments for their thesis are unsuccessful, and sometimes quite misleading. I advance an argument against their thesis, and find that, on balance, their thesis should be rejected. (...) I briefly argue that a resolution of the debate about medical futility will require addressing deeper issues about value. (shrink)

I take Newton's arguments to inverse square centripetal forces from Kepler's harmonic and areal laws to be classic deductions from phenomena. I argue that the theorems backing up these inferences establish systematic dependencies that make the phenomena carry the objective information that the propositions inferred from them hold. A review of the data supporting Kepler's laws indicates that these phenomena are Whewellian colligations-generalizations corresponding to the selection of a best fitting curve for an open-ended body of data. I argue that (...) the information theoretic features of Newton's corrections of the Keplerian phenomena to account for perturbations introduced by universal gravitation show that these corrections do not undercut the inferences from the Keplerian phenomena. Finally, I suggest that all of Newton's impressive applications of Universal gravitation to account for motion phenomena show an attempt to deliver explanations that share these salient features of his classic deductions from phenomena. (shrink)

Recent work has explored the extent to which intercollegiate athletics even belong at the university or meet the university’s mission. Just as play seems evident in athletics, it is also present in music, art, and theater. While these programs are popular targets when discussing possible cuts, few question their legitimacy at the university. In this article I argue that the justification for retaining the extracurricular status of intercollegiate sports should be based on their being especially playful. Indeed, on the basis (...) of this argument, I suggest that universities offer even greater and wider access to sport through club and intramural sports. However, while athletics might appear to be more playful, I hold that there is substantially more play present in university music, art, and theater programs than there is in intercollegiate sports. (shrink)

Newton's methodology is significantly richer than the hypothetico-deductive model. It is informed by a richer ideal of empirical success that requires not just accurate prediction but also accurate measurement of parameters by the predicted phenomena. It accepts theory-mediated measurements and theoretical propositions as guides to research. All of these enrichments are exemplified in the classical response to Mercury's perihelion problem. Contrary to Kuhn, Newton's method endorses the radical transition from his theory to Einstein's. The richer themes of Newton's method are (...) strikingly realized in a challenge to general relativity from a new problem posed by Mercury's perihelion. †To contact the author, please write to: Talbot College, University of Western Ontario, London, Ontario, Canada N6A 3K7; e-mail: [email protected]. (shrink)

Play is typically associated with carefree or frivolous activity, yet Nietzsche makes surprising claims about the nature of play. He insists that playfulness is the appropriate attitude for addressing the challenges of human life, and he describes maturity as the ability to play seriously like children. To understand Nietzsche’s serious play, some have emphasized the affinity between play and fiction. Notably, Nadeem Hussain has offered a fictionalist interpretation, according to which nothing has value in itself and valuing resembles make-believe. I (...) hold that illusions and fictions misconstrue Nietzsche’s play and values. In this paper I argue that Nietzsche embraces play in the context of nihilism, which he considers the fundamental problem of modernity. Play ultimately proves central to Nietzsche’s strategy to avert nihilism. I explicate his comments on play, and I use the features of play to illuminate Nietzsche’s response to nihilism found in his enigmatic project of value creation. (shrink)

In 2013 I wrote a paper entitled “A Deistic Discussion of Murphy and Tracy’s Accounts of God’s Limited Activity in the Natural World,” in which I criticized the views of Nancey Murphy and Thomas Tracy, labeling their views as something that I called “epistemic deism.” Since the publication of that paper another, similar, view by Bradley Monton was brought to my attention, one called “noninterventionist special divine action theory.” I take this paper as an opportunity to accomplish several goals. First, (...) I take it as an opportunity to clarify and correct some of my previous claims. Secondly, I present and analyze Monton’s view. And, finally, I discuss the similarities that Monton’s view holds with those of Murphy’s and Tracy’s and discuss how they all can be reduced to being part of the same family of ontological views which are, ultimately, implausible. (shrink)

Newton's methodology emphasized propositions "inferred from phenomena." These rest on systematic dependencies that make phenomena measure theoretical parameters. We consider the inferences supporting Newton's inductive argument that gravitation is proportional to inertial mass. We argue that the support provided by these systematic dependencies is much stronger than that provided by bootstrap confirmation; this kind of support thus avoids some of the major objections against bootstrapping. Finally we examine how contemporary testing of equivalence principles exemplifies this Newtonian methodological theme.

Although histories of cognitive behaviour therapy have begun to appear, their use with people with psychosis diagnoses has received relatively little attention. In this article, we elucidate the conditions of possibility for the emergence of cognitive behaviour therapy for psychosis (CBTp) in England between 1982 and 2002. We present an analysis of policy documents, research publications and books, participant observation, and interviews with a group of leading researchers and senior policy actors. Informed by Derksen and Beaulieu’s articulation of social technologies, (...) we show how CBTp was developed and stabilised through the work of a variety of overlapping informal, academic, clinical, professional, and policy networks. The profession of clinical psychology played a key role in this development, successfully challenging the traditional ‘division of labour’ where psychologists focused on ‘neurosis’ and left ‘psychosis’ to psychiatry. Following Abbott's systems approach to professions, we identify a number of historical factors that created a jurisdictional vulnerability for psychiatry while strengthening the jurisdictional legitimacy of clinical psychology in providing psychological therapies to service users with psychosis diagnoses. The National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence played a significant role in adjudicating jurisdictional legitimacy, and its 2002 schizophrenia guidelines, recommending the use of psychological therapies, marked a radical departure from the psychiatric consensus. Our analysis may be of wider interest in its focus on social technologies in a context of jurisdictional contestation. We discuss the implications of our study for the field of mental health and for the relationship between clinical psychology and psychiatry. (shrink)

Summary Meteorology, a scientific discipline almost exclusively associated with weather forecasting in the first half of the twentieth century in the USA, was viewed with disdain by more mathematically based scientific communities. A descriptive science lacking in physical and mathematical rigor, meteorology was typically without an academic home in US colleges and universities. This stood in sharp contrast to the meteorological communities across the Atlantic which were supported by dedicated geophysical institutes. Four factors kept US meteorologists, unlike their European colleagues, (...) on the fringes of the scientific mainstream: a lack of ?rigor?, a lack of academic presence, a lack of patronage (governmental or private), and a pervasive public view that meteorological information was ?free? and yet should be tailored to a variety of users. The symbiotic relationship of these factors created an almost insurmountable hurdle to disciplinary advancement. That hurdle was effectively overcome in mid-century when the military demands of the Second World War presented meteorology with the opportunity to leave behind its legacy as a ?guessing science? and assume its place as a mathematically and physically based theoretical scientific discipline. (shrink)

From the mid 1990s to the early 2000s there has been a debate between Jerome Gellman and Evan Fales regarding the epistemic status of mystical religious experience. Gellman argues that mystical religious experiences provide some justification for the belief that God exists when taken in conjunction with a variety of other experiential evidence. Fales takes a naturalistic approach and argues that instances of mystical theistic experiences are only tools by which the mystic attempts to gain greater social status. In this (...) article I summarize the debate and go on to raise three objections to Fales’ naturalistic account: that any naturalistic explanation would fail to account for the richness and variety of all mystical religious experiences; that if there were a naturalistic account for each and every mystical religious experience across time then the list of naturalistic explanations would be so exhaustive that it would seem arbitrary that no theistic explanation is included; and that the brand of reductionism put forth by Fales only shows that, at best, it would not be reasonable for external observers to take my mystical religious experience as evidence for God’s existence, but that this should make absolutely no difference to the experiencer. (shrink)

This paper explores how the Bayesian program benefits from allowing for objective chance as well as subjective degree of belief. It applies David Lewis’s Principal Principle and David Christensen’s principle of informed preference to defend Howard Raiffa’s appeal to preferences between reference lotteries and scaling lotteries to represent degrees of belief. It goes on to outline the role of objective lotteries in an application of rationality axioms equivalent to the existence of a utility assignment to represent preferences in Savage’s famous (...) omelet example of a rational choice problem. An example motivating causal decision theory illustrates the need for representing subjunctive dependencies to do justice to intuitive examples where epistemic and causal independence come apart. We argue to extend Lewis’s account of chance as a guide to epistemic probability to include De Finetti’s convergence results. We explore Diachronic Dutch book arguments as illustrating commitments for treating transitions as learning experiences. Finally, we explore implications for Martingale convergence results for motivating commitment to objective chances. (shrink)

Classic examples of ostensive geometrical constructions are used to clarify Kant’s account of how they provide knowledge of claims about rigid bodies we can observe and manipulate. It is argued that on Kant’s account claims warranted by ostensive constructions must be limited to scales and tolerances corresponding to our perceptual competencies. This limitation opens the way to view Riemann’s work as contributing valuable conceptual resources for extending geometrical knowledge beyond the bounds of observation. It is argued that neither Reichenbach’s descriptions (...) of non-Euclidean visualization nor his arguments for conventionalism about geometry undercut this view of Kant’s account of geometrical knowledge. (shrink)

My dissertation examines the significance of value creation in the work of Friedrich Nietzsche. In working out Nietzsche’s view, my strategy is twofold. I begin by reconstructing Nietzsche’s metaethical commitments, offering an interpretation of Nietzsche’s conception of values that shows it to be consistent, and then I explore the nature and importance of value creation to Nietzsche’s project. I argue that value creation provides the core of Nietzsche’s response to his two most significant concerns: the failures of traditional morality and (...) the loss of meaning in the modern world. In Chapter 1 I examine the current literature concerning Nietzsche’s metaethics. Recently, scholars have engaged in debates over whether Nietzsche offers a version of moral realism or anti-realism. I argue that neither side of this debate adequately captures Nietzsche’s understanding of value. Moreover, by starting from these contemporary categories we cannot make sense of the importance Nietzsche places on value creation. In Chapter 2 I defend my account of Nietzsche’s conception of value by examining two features of his view: the nature of valuing and the connection between values and reasons. I argue that Nietzsche presents standards of value that are internal to the activity of valuing, and I explore the standards of health and honesty. Nietzsche’s strategy becomes clearer when we examine the connection he makes between values and tastes, and my view has the added interpretive benefit of revealing a motivation for Nietzsche’s untraditional philosophical methodology. In Chapters 3-4 I examine the processes and functions of value creation. I begin with the historical examples of value creation Nietzsche presents, and from these I elucidate the task of value creation. I argue that Nietzsche’s aim through value creation is the development of richer, shared sensibilities or forms of concern, which provide the foundation for a new approach to ethical reasoning and justification. Furthermore, value creation comprises Nietzsche’s principal strategy to avert nihilism. My development of value creation as both a new ethical ideal and a source of meaning results in a surprising conclusion about Nietzsche’s view of social relations. Many read Nietzsche as a radical individualist, believing his ideal of value creation must require solitude or the life of a hermit. Yet, value creation is best understood as a social activity. Despite Nietzsche’s reliance on the solitary individual, I suggest that Nietzsche’s commitments to value creation are best captured by a model of competitive collaboration, which he calls friendship. The contribution of my project extends beyond mere Nietzsche interpretation. In Chapter 5 I argue that Nietzsche offers compelling arguments that address contemporary ethical debates. I offer a Nietzschean critique of a recent call for value creation by J. David Velleman. I conclude by suggesting that Nietzsche offers an intriguing twist on Bernard Williams’ conception of ethical confidence; creating values creates the normative concepts that provide the basis for meaningful action. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Review Article:Knowledge, Ideology, and Skepticism in Ancient Slave StudiesKyle HarperNiall McKeown. The Invention of Ancient Slavery? Duckworth Classical Essays. London: Duckworth, 2007. 174 pp. Paper, $24.Ulrike Roth. Thinking Tools: Agricultural Slavery between Evidence and Models. BICS Supplement 92. London: Institute of Classical Studies, 2007. x + 171 pp. 10 figs. Paper, £28.Enrico Dal Lago and Constantina Katsari, eds. Slave Systems: Ancient and Modern. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008. xiv (...) + 375 pp. Cloth, $99.Page DuBois. Slavery: Antiquity and Its Legacy. Ancients and Moderns. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009. xi + 154 pp. Paper, $24.95.This recent harvest of books on ancient slavery shows that, thirty years after Moses Finley's Ancient Slavery and Modern Ideology, the central themes of that seminal study remain lively topics in classical studies. The nature of slavery and the long-term dynamics of ancient slave systems are still vigorously contested. Above all, these newer works reflect an abiding and shared sense of epistemological limits: even as our understanding of ancient slavery grows (and it does), the extent of our ignorance and the decisive role of our starting assumptions come into clearer focus.Niall McKeown's The Invention of Ancient Slavery? most clearly exemplifies this tone of pervasive skepticism. Published in the Duckworth Classical Essays series, it is a short and insightful survey of the historiography of ancient slavery. Each of the book's seven chapters is a case study of a historian or historical school. McKeown writes "in the shadow of the postmodern challenge" (8), and his project throughout is principally deconstructive. Chapter 1 begins by exposing the contemporary preoccupations which underwrote the view of slavery proposed by Tenney Frank, for instance, in his notorious 1916 account of "race mixture" in the Roman empire. The chapter juxtaposes more recent studies based on epigraphic evidence, especially Joshel's important study on labor and identity. The virtue of [End Page 160] The Invention of Ancient Slavery? is its constant skepticism, but consequently all arguments about ancient slavery are presented as the result of prior convictions: "The way we choose to interpret ancient slavery has much to do with the way we want to interpret it" (28-29).The second chapter considers the Mainz Academy's Forschungen zur antiken Sklaverei and the French tradition of research centered in Besançon. McKeown describes the deep division between Anglophone scholars and their German counterparts, inspired not least by Finley's blistering critique of Joseph Vogt. McKeown identifies the genesis of his own book in the surprise he experienced upon discovering that his "liberal Anglophone" outlook was simply the "reverse image" of the Mainz Academy's broadly shared assumptions (31). McKeown is trying to unsettle the "lazy orthodoxies" (41) of the British/American tradition, but the problem with any basically empiricist model (such as the study of Kudlien which McKeown highlights) is precisely that it fails to overcome the blind spots of ancient and modern ideology alike. McKeown contrasts Kudlien's study with the work of Garrido-Hory; she reaches more pessimistic conclusions about ancient slavery, so McKeown argues, not because the evidence demands it, but because she is prepared by her starting premises to find such conclusions.Chapter 3 examines Marxist approaches to ancient slavery. As McKeown notes, Marxism can mean many different things. Shtaerman and Trofimova, for instance, described the long-term history of slavery in rather orthodox terms of continuous class struggle. McKeown suggests that Shtaerman and Trofimova's work is "perhaps the most sophisticated and wide-ranging argument ever produced on ancient slavery" (54-55), but this view will not be shared by all. Their work is by far the best of a large body of Soviet scholarship on ancient slavery, and it was produced under considerable analytical constraints, but McKeown's chapter is a devastating critique. In the space of about sixteen inspired pages, McKeown manages to undermine the foundations of the orthodox Marxist metanarrative of ancient slavery. One wishes, however, for some consideration of the Italian neo-Marxist scholarship emanating from the Istituto Gramsci; this is easily the most important tradition not submitted to McKeown's acute critical gaze.Keith Bradley, whose work is placed in its context as a polemic... (shrink)

In “On Calling God ‘Mother’” (this journal), I argued that the practice of referring to God exclusively in male terms is morally acceptable. Isham claims that I have argued that “God should be referred to exclusively in male terms.” He claims that the Bible refers to God in female terms. He hints that I may have engaged in “gender devaluation.” He claims that there is a “need for a deity with which women can both relate and identify.” The first of (...) Isham’s claims is simply false. I address the remaining criticisms at greater length. (shrink)

This article critiques the theological and moral foundations that undergird the approach of the document For the Life of the World: Toward a Social Ethos of the Orthodox Church to the question of the Church's role in the public sphere. The article's focus is essentially two-fold. First, it strives to clarify For the Life of the World's hermeneutical method through a consideration of its frequent appeals to the authority of the Orthodox tradition. Second, the article seeks to understand the document's (...) tacit reliance upon a Eucharistic model of ecclesiology and its connection to the recurring theme of the ‘transfiguring of the world’. (shrink)

The business ethics field contains a number of explanations for the imagination’s influence on decision-making. This has benefited moral theorizing because approaches that utilize the imagination tend to acknowledge important biological and psychological forces that influence the way we understand situations, develop strategies for problem-solving, and choose courses of action. But, I argue, the broad range of approaches has also served as an obstacle to theory development in the field. Given the variety of theoretical and disciplinary approaches, coupled with the (...) diversity of applications, it would be fair to judge the current state of theory as fractured. To bring focus to theory development, this conceptual study of the moral imagination is grounded in the work of one discipline, one theorist, one text: Plato’s Republic. The primary outcome of this study is the demonstration of the conditions under which the imagination serves to augment and support rationality rather than serving as an impediment. The systematic nature of Plato’s theory aids in the formation of more coherent conceptual grounding than currently available in the field. A final contribution of this study is the positioning of Plato as a proper beginning or foundation to any further theory development in the moral imagination. (shrink)