Widely acclaimed as the most authoritative and accessible one-volume dictionary available in English this second edition offers an even richer, more comprehensive, and more up-to-date survey of ideas and thinkers written by an international team of 436 contributors. Includes the most comprehensive entries on major philosophers, 400 new entries including over 50 on preeminent contemporary philosophers, extensive coverage of rapidly developing fields such as the philosophy of mind and applied ethics, more entries on non-Western philosophy than any comparable volume, and (...) increased coverage of Continental philosophy. (shrink)

How much does ethics demand of us? On what authority does it demand it? How does what ethics demand relate to other requirements, such as those of prudence, law, and social convention? Does ethics really demand anything at all? Questions of this sort lie at the heart of the work of the Danish philosopher and theologian K. E. Logstrup, and in particular his key text The Ethical Demand. In The Radical Demand in Logstrup's Ethics, Robert Stern offers a full (...) account of that text, and situates Logstrup's distinctive position in relation to Kant, Kierkegaard, Levinas, Darwall and Luther. For Logstrup, the ethical situation is primarily one in which the fate of the other person is placed in your hands, where it is then your responsibility to do what is best for them. The demand therefore does not come from the other person as such, as what they ask you to do may be different from what you should do. It is also not laid down by social rules, nor by God or by any formal principle of practical reason, such as Kant's principle of universalizability. Rather, it comes from what is required to care for the other, and the directive power of their needs in the situation. Logstrup therefore rejects accounts of ethical obligation based on the commands of God, or on abstract principles governing practical reason, or on social norms; instead he develops a different picture, at the basis of which is our interdependence, which he argues gives his ethics a grounding in the nature of life itself. (shrink)

DO WE CHOOSE OUR EMOTIONS? Can we be held responsible for our anger? for feeling jealousy? for falling in love or succumbing to resentment or hatred? The suggestion sounds odd because emotions are typically considered occurrences that happen to us: emotions are taken to be the hallmark of the irrational and the disruptive. Controlling one’s emotion is supposed to be like the caging and taming of a wild beast, the suppression and sublimation of a Freudian "it.".

The first history of American medical ethics published in more than a half century, Before Bioethics tracks the evolution of American medical ethics from colonial midwives and physicians' oaths to current bioethical controversies over abortion, AIDS, animal rights, and physician-assisted suicide.

Democracy is not only a form of government. It is also the moral aspiration for a society of self-governing political equals who disagree about politics. Citizens are called on to be active democratic participants, but they must also acknowledge one another's political equality. Democracy thus involves an ethic of civility among opposed citizens. Upholding this ethic is more difficult than it may look. When the political stakes are high, the opposition seems to us tobe advocating injustice. Sustaining Democracy poses the (...) question: why should we uphold democratic relations with those whose politics we despise? (shrink)

Autonomy -- Hydrodynamics -- Brownian motion -- From Brownian motion to bending beams -- An engineering approach -- The right variables and natural kinds.

The Covid-19 pandemic has led to severe shortages of many essential goods and services, from hand sanitizers and N-95 masks to ICU beds and ventilators. Although rationing is not unprecedented, never before has the American public been faced with the prospect of having to ration medical goods and services on this scale.

For a good part of the 20th century, the classic Pragmatists--Charles Sanders Peirce, William James, and John Dewey--and pragmatism in general were largely ignored by analytic philosophers. They were said to hold such untenable views as whatever best satisfies our needs is true and that the end justifies the means. Despite a recent revival of interest in these figures, spurred largely by the work of Richard Rorty, it is not uncommon to continue to hear claims that pragmatism is a subjectivist, (...) anti-realist position that denies that there is a mind-independent world, and fails to place objective constraints on inquiry. In this book, Robert Schwartz dispels these traditional views by examining the empiricist and constructivist orientation of the classic pragmatists. Based on updated and expanded versions of his influential papers, as well as a number of previously unpublished essays, in this book Schwartz demonstrates the relevance of pragmatic thought to a wide range of issues beyond concerns over truth and realism that currently dominate discussions. The individual essays elaborate and defend pragmatic, instrumentalist, and constructivist conceptions of truth and inquiry, moral discourse and ethical statements, perception, art, and worldmaking. Pragmatic Perspectives will appeal to scholars interested in the history of American philosophy and pragmatic approaches to contemporary issues in analytic philosophy. (shrink)

Cross-national studies of business-related ethicality frequently have concluded that Americans possess higher ethical standards than non-Americans. These conclusions have generally been based on survey responses of relatively small convenience samples of individuals in a very limited number of countries. This article reports a study of the relationship between nationality and business-related ethicality based on survey responses from more than 6300 business students attending 120 colleges and universities in 36 countries. Two well-documented determinants of business ethics (gender and religiosity) were investigated (...) as moderators of the nationality–business ethicality relationship. The major research finding is that, while statistically significant differences were found between the business-related ethicality of American survey participants and the business-related ethicality of the non-American survey participants, the magnitudes of the differences were not substantial. The results of the study suggest that (i) more empirical cross-cultural/national research is required on business-related ethicality and (ii) previous explanations for cross-cultural/national differences in ethics need to be reconsidered before further generalizations are warranted. (shrink)

In this article I reflect upon the problem of the aesthetic intelligibility of the world in connection with an aesthetic approach to religious naturalism. Taking the work of R.W. Hepburn as conversation partner, I bring it into relation to the work of Charles Peirce and Michael Polanyi. Admitting the ambiguous nature of their own religious commitments, I try to sketch, with no claim to completeness, how they help to illuminate just what would be entailed in beginning the process of translating (...) religious forms of attending into aesthetic forms and what would be gained and what would be lost in doing so. (shrink)

Presenting the most comprehensive and lucid account of the topic currently available, Robert Audi's "Practical Reasoning and Ethical Decision" is essential reading for anyone interested in the role of reason in ethics or the nature of human action. The first part of the book is a detailed critical overview of the influential theories of practical reasoning found in Aristotle, Hume and Kant, whilst the second part examines practical reasoning in the light of important topics in moral psychology - weakness (...) of will, self-deception, rationalization and others. In the third part, Audi describes the role of moral principles in practical reasoning and clarifies the way practical reasoning underlies ethical decisions. He formulates a comprehensive set of concrete ethical principles, explains how they apply to reasoning about what to do, and shows how practical reasoning guides moral conduct. (shrink)

Ottobah Cugoano’s Thoughts and Sentiments on the Evil of Slavery is perhaps the most powerful attack on slavery of the late eighteenth century. It is also remarkably relevant still today for its account of responsibility, its attack on gradualism, and its understanding that any judgment about the means appropriate to ending slavery should be proportionate to the evil of slavery itself, which was considerable. Cugoano’s significance is established by contrasting his arguments with those of other philosophers from Francis Hutcheson to (...) William Paley and Thomas Gisborne. Seen in this light, the neglect by historians of philosophy of Cugoano in particular and of the debate around slavery in particular is a blot on the discipline. (shrink)

This long-awaited book by one of the world's leading philosophers offers a systematic account of kinds of being, ways in which things can be or can fail to be.

The idea that a world in which everyone was born “perfect” would be a world in which something valuable was missing often comes up in debates about the ethics of technologies of prenatal testing and preimplantation genetic diagnosis . This thought plays an important role in the “disability critique” of prenatal testing. However, the idea that human genetic variation is an important good with significant benefits for society at large is also embraced by a wide range of figures writing in (...) the bioethics literature, including some who are notoriously hostile to the idea that we should not select against disability. By developing a number of thought experiments wherein we are to contemplate increasing genetic diversity from a lower baseline in order to secure this value, I argue that this powerful intuition is more problematic than is generally recognized, especially where the price of diversity is the well-being of particular individuals. (shrink)

Robert Pippin presents here the first detailed interpretation of J.M. Coetzee's "Jesus" trilogy as a whole. Pippin treats the three fictions as a philosophical fable. Everyone in the mythical land explored by Coetzee is an exile, removed from their homeland and transported to a strange new place. While discussing the social and psychological dimensions of the fable, Pippin also treats the literary aspects of the fictions as philosophical explorations of theimplications of a deeper kind of homelessness--a version that characterizes (...) late modern life itself--and he treats the theme of forgetting as a figure for modern historical amnesia and indifference to reflection and self-knowledge. (shrink)

Argues that later developments in Leibniz's thinking about the relation between perfection and existence provide a more promising basis for a version of his ontological argument for theism – a version that is substantively metaphysical rather than purely logical in nature. These developments involve viewing existence not as one of the qualities into which an essence may be analyzed, but as entailing a higher‐order property or status that an essence may have. The revised argument rests on a strong form of (...) the principle of sufficient reason and on the thesis that a bias in favor of existence is built into the foundations of ontology. (shrink)

Many interpreters have supposed that the root of contingency in Leibniz's thought is that it is contingent rather than necessary that God chooses to create the best possible world. It is far from clear, however, that Leibniz believed this. This chapter argues that Leibniz did believe two theories of contingency: one based on the notion of a thing's being possible in itself whether or not a perfectly wise and good God could choose it, and one based on an identification of (...) necessity with provability, where an infinite analysis does not count as a proof. It emerges that Leibniz's conception of possible worlds is not exactly the same as that now used in possible worlds semantics. (shrink)

Leibniz held that even if we had no proof of the possibility premise of the ontological argument, a presumption would justify accepting it. He had an extensive theory of presumptions, as a part of practical philosophy, originating in his jurisprudence. He even proposed a formal proof that presumption favors possibility. This chapter examines ways of trying to overcome the difficulty that in the case of a necessary being, where possibility of existence and possibility of nonexistence exclude each other, presumptions of (...) possibility seem to cancel each other out, but concludes that prospects of escape from the problem are not promising. (shrink)

Argues that Leibniz's denial of counterfactual or transworld identity is grounded in metaphysical considerations – specifically in his belief in a coalescence of conceptual connections and causal connections, which is marked by his revival and adaptation of the Scholastic Aristotelian notion of substantial form. Exploration of Leibniz's views about miracles and about perceptual relations leads to the conclusion that his denial of counterfactual identity does not claim intrinsic metaphysical necessity, but appeals to considerations of God's wisdom and goodness; and that (...) he can deny transworld identity only on the assumption that only aggregates of mutually harmonious substances count as worlds. (shrink)

This review essay addresses the question, "What, properly speaking, is a pragmatic impairment?" Drawing on work from two recent books, it presents three possible answers, and evaluates them.

Dialog Kościoła i kultury Karol Wojtyła podjął w sposób znaczący jako biskup w Krakowie i później jako papież – m.in. wtedy, kiedy powołał do życia w 1982 roku Papieską Radę ds. Kultury. Nie tylko identyfikował się z artystami, ale wręcz stał się ich duchowym przywódcą. W artykule ukazany jest ów dialog prowadzony przez biskupa Karola Wojtyłę, a następnie papieża Jana Pawła II. Czynił to podczas papieskich pielgrzymek w Polsce, spotkań z ludźmi kultury w Rzymie i świecie, na czele z jego (...) programowym wystąpieniem w UNESCO, aż po _List do artystów_. Dzisiaj wydaje się, że ten dialog pomiędzy Kościołem a kulturą jest bardzo ważny, a wręcz stanowi potrzebę chwili w życiu Kościoła. (shrink)

The fifteen essays collected here set out to demonstrate why the critical philosophy of race needs to take a historical turn. Genealogies of the concepts of both race and racism are deployed to clarify why some of the dominant strategies for combatting racism tend either miss the target altogether or give it only a glancing blow. For example, relying on biology to reject the concept of race as a way of disarming racism misses the fact that racism precedes the biology (...) of race. It also ignores the prevalence of forms of racism, such as cultural racism that do not take their starting point in biology. Drawing on the work of Frantz Fanon, the late Sartre, and Michel Foucault, Robert Bernasconi argues for a holistic approach that integrates the concrete experience of racism faced by individuals into the study of institutional, structural, and systemic racism. Studying the interventions of such Black philosophers as Ottobah Cugoano, Anténor Firmin, and W. E. B. Du Bois, shows the value of allowing them to set the terms of the debate, instead of trying to fit them into debates shaped by other areas of philosophy. If race is indeed a social construct, then it is necessary to uncover the different forces, material as well as intellectual, that at different times shaped the various forms the concept of race has taken and the value then placed on preserving racial purity. Critical philosophy of race has a role to play in rendering both the material and psychological effects of slavery and segregation more intelligible as forms of systemic racism. When critical philosophers of race ignore the history of racism, they are in danger of being complicit with that part of society that seeks to erase that history. (shrink)

The puzzling case of the broken arm -- Hernias, diets, and drugs -- Why physicians cannot know what will benefit patients -- Sacrificing patient benefit to protect patient rights -- Societal interests and duties to others -- The new, limited, twenty-first-century role for physicians as patient assistants -- Abandoning modern medical concepts: doctor's "orders" and hospital "discharge" -- Medicine can't "indicate": so why do we talk that way? --"Treatments of choice" and "medical necessity": who is fooling whom? -- Abandoning informed (...) consent -- Why physicians get it wrong and the alternatives to consent: patient choice and deep value pairing -- The end of prescribing: why prescription writing is irrational -- The alternatives to prescribing -- Are fat people overweight? -- Beyond prettiness: death, disease, and being fat -- Universal but varied health insurance: only separate is equal -- Health insurance: the case for multiple lists -- Why hospice care should not be a part of ideal health care I: the history of the hospice -- Why hospice care should not be a part of ideal health care II: hospice in a postmodern era -- Randomized human experimentation: the modern dilemma -- Randomized human experimentation: a proposal for the new medicine -- Clinical practice guidelines and why they are wrong -- Outcomes research and how values sneak into finding of fact -- The consensus of medical experts and why it is wrong so often. (shrink)

The paper by Salloch and Eriksen (2024) offers an insightful contribution to the ethical debate on Machine Learning-driven Clinical Decision Support Systems (ML_CDSS) and provides much-needed conce...

No other book in the entire history of the world has exerted a greater influence on a larger number of people over a longer period of time than this slim volume. The spiritual cornerstone of the most populous and oldest living civilization on Earth, the Analects has inspired the Chinese and all the peoples of East Asia with its affirmation of a humanist ethics. As the Gospels are to Jesus, the Analects is the only place where we can encounter the (...) real, living Confucius. In this gem-like translation by Simon Leys, Confucius speaks with clarity and brilliance. He emerges as a man of great passion and many enthusiasms, a man of bold action whose true vocation is politics. Confucius (551-479 B.C.) lived in an age of acute cultural and political crisis. Many of his observations mark a world sinking into violence and barbarity. Unable to obtain the leading political role he sought, he endeavored to reform society and salvage civilization through ethical debate, defining for ages to come the public mission of the intellectual. (shrink)

Studie over de filosofie van de in Oostenrijk geboren Engelse wijsgeer.

In this paper, we present an informal introduction to Logical English and illustrate its use to standardise the legal wording of the Automatic Early Termination clauses of International Swaps and Derivatives Association Agreements. LE can be viewed both as an alternative to conventional legal English for expressing legal documents, and as an alternative to conventional computer languages for automating legal documents. LE is a controlled natural language, which is designed both to be computer-executable and to be readable by English speakers (...) without special training. The basic form of LE is syntactic sugar for logic programs, in which all sentences have the same standard form, either as rules of the form conclusion if conditions or as unconditional sentences of the form conclusion. However, LE extends normal logic programming by introducing features that are present in other computer languages and other logics. These features include typed variables signalled by common nouns, and existentially quantified variables in the conclusions of sentences signalled by indefinite articles. Although LE translates naturally into a logic programming language such as Prolog or ASP, it can also serve as a neutral standard, which can be compiled into other lower-level computer languages. (shrink)

This essay develops the thesis that the essence of psychoanalysis lies in emotional phenomenology.

This essay assesses the rationale for regulating research administrators as carefully as they regulate researchers. The reasons for such regulation are identical: protecting scientific integrity, ensuring responsible use of public funds, addressing the lack of effective recourse for victims, creating negative consequences for misbehaving actors, and addressing high incentives for misconduct. Whereas the reasons compelling us to regulate research administrators are obvious, counterarguments to administrative oversight are based on suggestions that the incidence and prevalence of cases of administrative misconduct are (...) too low to warrant formal regulation. I briefly describe examples of the phenomenon drawn from publicly available records. My analysis suggests that the misconduct of research administrators is both serious and worthy of better oversight. Improved oversight of research administration will help steward tax dollars appropriately and enhance the overall integrity of the scientific record and of the free pursuit of knowledge more generally. (shrink)

February is Black History Month and so healthcare practitioners will soon rummage history books for information about famous African Americans, like Onesimus, the African slave who...