This volume takes on both issues and examines the relationship between organisms and artifacts from the perspective of functionality.

This paper summarizes (in German) recent tendencies in the philosophy of the life sciences.

In clinical ethics, there remains a great deal of uncertainty regarding the appropriateness of attempting cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR) for certain patients. Although the issue continues to receive ample attention and various frameworks have been proposed for navigating such cases, most discussions draw heavily on the notion of harm as a central consideration. In the following, I use emerging philosophical literature on the notion of harm to argue that the ambiguities and disagreement about harm create important and oft-overlooked challenges for the (...) ethics of CPR. I begin by elucidating the standard account of harm, called the Counterfactual Comparative Account (CCA). I then show that three challenges to the CCA—preemptive harms, the harm of death, and non-experiential harms—are particularly salient when assessing potential harms for candidates of CPR and likely impact-related decision-making and communication. I extend this argument to explore how the ambiguities of harm might extend to other realms of clinical decision-making, such as the use and limitations of life-sustaining treatments. To address these challenges, I propose two strategies for identifying and minimizing the impact of such uncertainty: first, clinicians and ethicists ought to promote pluralistic conversations that account for different understandings of harm; second, they ought to invoke harm-independent considerations when discussing the ethics of CPR in order to reflect the nuances of such conversations. These strategies, coupled with a richer philosophical understanding of harm, promise to help clinicians and ethicists navigate the prevalent and difficult cases involving patient resuscitation and many other harm-based decisions in the clinical setting. (shrink)

A sceptical response to the idea that wisdom may be turned into a new academic subject or science, and to the idea that to do so would be in any way be wise. .

Leadership and ethics are habitually treated as related to separate spheres. It would be better, perhaps, if leadership and ethics were treated as belonging to a single domain. Ethics is an aspect of leadership and not a separate approach that exists alongside other approaches to leadership such as the trait approach, the situational approach, etc. This holds especially true for the military, one of the few organizations that can legitimately use violence. Today, most militaries opt for a character-based approach for (...) the ethics education of their leaders and espouse leadership theories that want leaders to be strong and visionary. Both the role of character and leadership are increasingly questioned, however, on the basis that situational factors are more influential than leadership and character. A closer look suggests that an interactionist perspective, with leadership, character, and the situation interplaying, is more accurate. It is still good leadership that keeps soldiers from crossing the line between the lawful use of force and excessive violence. (shrink)

Many technology ethicists hold that the time has come to articulate _neurorights_: our normative claims vis-à-vis our brains and minds. One such claim is the right to _mental integrity_ (‘MI’). I begin by considering some paradigmatic threats to MI (§1) and how the dominant autonomy-based conception (‘ABC’) of MI attempts to make sense of them (§2). I next consider the objection that the ABC is _overbroad_ in its understanding of what threatens MI and suggest a friendly revision to the ABC (...) that addresses the objection (§3). I then consider a second objection: that the ABC cannot make sense of the MI of the _non-autonomous_. This objection appears fatal even to the revised ABC (§4). On that basis, I develop an alternative conception on which MI is grounded in a plurality of simpler capacities, namely, those for _affect_, _cognition_, and _volition_. Each of these more basic capacities grounds a set of fundamental interests, and they are for that reason worthy of protection even when they do not rise to the level of complexity necessary for autonomy (§5). This yields a fully general theory of MI that accounts for its manifestations in both the autonomous and the non-autonomous. (shrink)

In this article, we sketch how theoretical neuroethics can clarify the concept of autonomy. We hope that this can both serve as a model for the conceptual clarification of other components of PIAAAS and contribute to the development of the empirical measures that Gilbert and colleagues [1] propose.

This book presents the first integrated treatment of the philosophy of Robert Boyle, one of the leading English natural philosophers of the Scientific Revolution.

In this entertaining work, Peter Grdenfors embarks on an evolutionary detective story to try and solve one of the big mysteries surrounding human existence - how has the modern human being's way of thinking come into existence. Immensely readable and full of humorous insights, the book will be valuable for students in psychology and biology, and accessible to readers of popular science.

An examination of difficulties in three standard accounts of functions leads to the suggestion that sentences of the form "the function of x is to do y" are used to make a variety of different claims, all of which involve a means-end relationship and the idea of design, or use, or benefit. The analysis proposed enables us to see what is right and also wrong with accounts that analyze the meaning of function statements in terms of good consequences, goals, and (...) etiological explanation. It also enables us to show that function sentences can be used in providing various types of explanations, including, in certain cases, noncausal explanations of the presence of the item with the function. (shrink)

Avicenna's notorious claim that God knows particulars only 'in a universal way' is argued to have its roots in Aristotelian epistemology, and especially in the "Posterior Analytics". According to Avicenna and Aristotle as understood by Avicenna, there is in fact no such thing as 'knowledge' of particulars, at least not as such. Rather, a particular can only be known by subsuming it under a universal. Thus Avicenna turns out to be committed to a much more surprising epistemological thesis: even humans (...) know particulars only in a universal way. (shrink)

A history of science text imagining how evolutionary theory and biology would have been understood if Darwin had never published his "Origin of Species" and other works.--publisher summary.

Avicenna is the greatest philosopher of the Islamic world. His immense impact on Christian and Jewish medieval thought, as well as on the subsequent Islamic tradition, is charted in this volume alongside studies which provide a comprehensive introduction to and analysis of his philosophy. Contributions from leading scholars address a wide range of topics including Avicenna's life and works, conception of philosophy and achievement in logic and medicine. His ideas in the main areas of philosophy, such as epistemology, philosophy of (...) religion and physics, are also analyzed. While serving as a general introduction to Avicenna's thought, this collection of critical essays also represents the cutting edge of scholarship on this most influential philosopher of the medieval era. (shrink)

As the title of this book was meant to suggest, its subject is the way we talk about (and write about) works of art: or, rather, one of the ways, namely, the way we describe works of art for critical purposes. Be cause I wished to restrict my subject matter in this way, I have made a sharp, and no doubt largely artificial distinction between describing and evaluating. And I must, at the outset, guard against a misreading of this distinction (...) to which I have left myself open. In distinguishing between evaluative and descriptive aesthetic judgments, I am not saying that when I assert "X is p," where p is a "descriptive" term like "unified," or "delicate," or "garish," I may not at the same time be evaluating X too; and I am not saying that when I make the obviously "evaluative" assertion "X is good," I may not be describing X. Clearly, if I say "X is unified" I am evaluating X in that unity is a good-making feature of works of art; and as it is correct in English at least to call an evaluation a description, I do not want to suggest that if an assertion is evaluative, it cannot be de scriptive (although there have been many philosophers who have thought this indeed to be the case). (shrink)

Shows that the dialogue in Plato's Phaedo is primarily devoted to presenting Socrates' final defense of the philosophical life against the theoretical and political challenge of religion.

This paper examines the points of disagreement between Neo-Darwinian and recent Neo-Aristotelian discussions of the status of purposive language in biology. I discuss recent Neo-Darwinian “evolutionary” treatments and distinguish three ways to deal with the philosophical status of teleological language of purpose: teleological error theory, methodological teleology, and Darwinian teleological realism. I then show how “non-evolutionary” Neo-Aristotelian approaches in the work of Michael Thompson and Philippa Foot differ from these by offering a view of purposiveness grounded in life-cycle patterns, rather (...) than in long-term evolutionary processes or natural selection. Finally, I argue that the crucial difference between Neo-Darwinian and Neo-Aristotelian approaches regards the question of whether or not reproduction deserves the status of an “ultimate” aim of organisms. I offer reasons to reject the concept of an “ultimate” aim in evolutionary biology and to reject the notion that reproduction serves a purpose. I argue that evolutionary biology is not in the position to determine what the “ultimate” explanation of natural purpose is. (shrink)

SENSATIONALISM 1 1. Introductory 1 2. Mach's Sensationalism 4 3. Developments of Sensationalism 22 II. THE INHERENT WEAKNESS OF SEN- SATIONALISM 25 1. The Point of Sensationalism 25 2. The Ambiguity of 'Sensation' 27 3. The Fundamental Conflict 35 4. Mistakes, Incorrigibility and Simplicity 40 III. DESCRIPTION 51 1. Describing and Descriptions 51 2. Describing in Terms of Sensations 67 IV. THE POSSIBILITY OF 'PURE' DES- CRIPTIONS 79 V. SCIENTIFIC PROBLEMS 99 VI. DESCRIPTIONS AND EXPLANATIONS 111 BIBLIOGRAPHY 142 INDEX 145 (...) -/- -v- . (shrink)

Emotion Review, Volume 14, Issue 1, Page 3-14, January 2022. Advocates for the psychological construction of emotion view themselves as articulating a non-essentialist alternative to basic emotion theory's essentialist notion of affect programs. Psychological constructionists have also argued that holding essentialist assumptions about emotions engenders misconceptions about the psychological constructionist viewpoint. If so, it is important to understand what psychological constructionists mean by “essentialism” and “non-essentialism.” To advance the debate, I take a deeper dive into non-essentialism, comparing the non-essentialist views (...) of the early empiricists with those of the psychological constructionists, focusing on the theories of James Russell and Lisa Barrett. Using Lakatos’ notion of scientific research programs, I also describe how Russell's and Barrett's views have evolved into different and potentially competing research programs under the psychological constructionist banner. (shrink)

By reference to Maxwell's kinetic theory, one feature of hypothetico-deductivism is defended. A scientist need make no inference to a hypothesis when he first proposes it. He may have no reason at all for thinking it is true. Yet it may be worth considering. In developing his kinetic theory there were central assumptions Maxwell made (for example, that molecules are spherical, that they exert contact forces, and that their motion is linear) that he had no reason to believe true. In (...) this paper I develop a position that explains why they were worth considering, and that rejects the retroductive position that a hypothesis is worth considering when, if true, it would explain the observed data. (shrink)

I consider and reject William Whewell's attack on the inductivism of Isaac Newton and John Stuart Mill, as well as John Norton's attack on any universal system of inductive rules. I also explain how a system of inductive rules of the sort proposed by Newton and Mill should be understood.

Cramer et al.'s critique of latent variables implicitly advocates a type of scientific anti-realism which can be extended to many dispositional constructs in scientific psychology. However, generalizing Cramer et al.'s network model in this way raises concerns about its applicability to psychopathology. The model could be improved by articulating why a given cluster of symptoms should be considered disordered.

The twelfth century philosopher-theologian Fakhr al-Dīn al-Rāzī is well known for his critique of Avicennan metaphysics. In this paper, I examine his critique of Avicenna's physics, and in particular his rejection of the Avicennan and Aristotelian theory of place as the inner boundary of a containing body. Instead, Fakhr al-Dīn defends a definition of place as self-subsisting extension, an idea explicitly rejected by Aristotle and Avicenna after him. Especially in his late work, theMaṭālib, Fakhr al-Dīn explores a number of important (...) philosophical issues with reference to this theory of place, including the principle that two indiscernible things must be identical and the idea that motion and rest are always relative.RésuméLe philosophe-théologien du XIIesiècle Fakhr al-Dīn al-Rāzī est bien connu pour sa critique de la métaphysique avicennienne. Nous examinons, dans cet article, sa critique de la physique d'Avicenne, et en particulier son rejet de la théorie avicennienne et aristotélicienne du lieu – lieu comme limite interne du corps englobant. Alternativement, Fakhr al-Dīn défend une théorie du lieu comme extension auto-subsistante, doctrine explicitement révoquée par Aristote et Avicenne à sa suite. En particulier dans son œuvre tardive, lesMaṭālib, Fakhr al-Dīn explore plusieurs questions philosophiques importantes en rapport avec cette théorie du lieu, dont: le principe voulant que deux choses indiscernables soient identiques, et l'idée selon laquelle mouvement et repos sont toujours relatifs. (shrink)

Providing an overview of the intellectual roots of the worldwide environmental movement - from ancient religions and philosophies to modern science and ethics - this book synthesises them into a new philosophy of nature in which to ground ...

Virtue ethics is often proposed as a third way in health‐care ethics, that while consequentialism and deontology focus on action guidelines, virtue focuses on character; all three aim to help agents discern morally right action although virtue seems to have least to contribute to political issues, such as austerity. I claim: This is a bad way to characterize virtue ethics. The 20th century renaissance of virtue ethics was first proposed as a response to the difficulty of making sense of ‘moral (...) rightness’ outside a religious context. For Aristotle the right action is that which is practically best; that means best for the agent in order to live a flourishing life. There are no moral considerations besides this. Properly characterized, virtue ethics can contribute to discussion of austerity. A criticism of virtue ethics is that fixed characteristics seem a bad idea in ever‐changing environments; perhaps we should be generous in prosperity, selfish in austerity. Furthermore, empirical evidence suggests that people indeed do change with their environment. However, I argue that virtues concern fixed values not fixed behaviour; the values underlying virtue allow for different behaviour in different circumstances: in austerity, virtues still give the agent the best chance of flourishing. Two questions arise. In austere environments might not injustice help an individual flourish by, say, obtaining material goods? No, because unjust acts undermine the type of society the agent needs for flourishing. What good is virtue to those lacking the other means to flourish? The notion of degrees of flourishing shows that most people would benefit somewhat from virtue. However, in extreme circumstances virtue might harm rather than benefit the agent: such circumstances are to be avoided; virtue ethics thus has a political agenda to enable flourishing. This requires justice, a fortiori when in austerity. (shrink)

This article offers an analysis of the argumentative method of two treatises by Alexander of Aphrodisias, On Fate and On Providence, the latter of which is preserved only in Arabic translation. It is argued that both texts use techniques from Aristotelian dialectic, albeit in different ways, with On Fate adhering to methods outlined in Aristotle's Topics whereas On Providence uses the ‘aporetic’ method familiar from texts such as MetaphysicsΒ‎. This represents a revision of a previous study of Alexander's method in (...) On Fate by Jaap Mansfeld, which emphasized parallels between that method and the techniques of ancient scepticism. It is, however, suggested that Alexander does reflect developments in epistemology during the Hellenistic period, especially in so far as he ‘upgrades’ the status of endoxa to play something like the role of common conceptions in the dogmatic Hellenistic schools. (shrink)

The place of moral innocence in politics is the central theme of Peter Johnson's subtle and original book.

The fifth volume of essays in medical ethics and law produced by the King's College Centre of Medical Law and Ethics. Issues addressed include a discussion of the ethics and epistemology of clinical research, the validation of therapies and topical concern.